Visual Art and the Sublime

Visual Art and the Sublime
Summarized from www.tate.org.uk
By LucylleBC

Outline
• What is the sublime?
• Periods
• Baroque Sublime
• Romantic Sublime
• Victorian Sublime
• Modern sublime

What is the sublime?
• a judgement, a feeling, a state of mind and a kind of response to art or
nature.
• is the quality of greatness, whether physical, moral, intellectual,
metaphysical, aesthetic, spiritual, or artistic. The term especially refers to a
greatness beyond all possibility of calculation, measurement, or imitation.
• is an enigmatic experience that involves our taking pleasure in being
overwhelmed by sights, sounds, sensations or ideas that are larger, greater
or more powerful than us, or otherwise threatening to us
• relevant to literature, painting, music and architecture.
• Beauty charms the viewer, but the sublime moves the viewer because it
both pleases and terrifies them, leaving a lasting impression that beauty
cannot achieve.
• Pain + Pleasure = Astonishment/Awe
• Cannot be reasoned

• By about 1700 an additional theme started to develop, which was
that the sublime in writing, nature, art or human conduct was
regarded as of such exalted status that it was beyond normal
experience, perhaps even beyond the reach of human understanding.
In its greatness or intensity and whether physical, metaphysical,
moral, aesthetic or spiritual, by the time of the Enlightenment, the
sublime was generally regarded as beyond comprehension and
beyond measurement.
• It was at this point in the history of the word sublime that visual
artists became deeply intrigued by the challenge of representing it,
asking how can an artist paint the sensation that we experience when
words fail or when we find ourselves beyond the limits of reason? The
works of art that will be discussed in this introductory essay were
conceived and executed in response to the challenge of painting the
unpaintable.

Origins
• Longinus, 1st century AD
• For Longinus, the sublime is an adjective that describes great,
elevated, or lofty thought or language, particularly in the context
of rhetoric. As such, the sublime inspires awe and veneration, with
greater persuasive powers.
• Then, Edmund Burke, whose ideas were mostly influential

7 Aspects of the Sublime
• Darkness – which constrains the sense of sight (primary among the
five senses)
• Obscurity – which confuses judgement
• Privation (or deprivation) – since pain is more powerful than pleasure
• Vastness – which is beyond comprehension
• Magnificence – in the face of which we are in awe
• Loudness – which overwhelms us
• Suddenness – which shocks our sensibilities to the point of
disablement

5 Sources of the Sublime
1. the ability to form grand conceptions (first and most important)
2. the stimulus of powerful and inspired emotion
3. the proper formation of figures of thought and figures of speech
4. the creation of a noble diction (the choice of words, the use of
imagery, and the elaboration of the style)
5. The fifth source of grandeur is the total effect resulting from
dignity and elevation
(Pseudo-Longinus, ed cit 108).
innate

William Hogarth
Satan, Sin and Death (A Scene from
Milton's 'Paradise Lost')c.1735–40
Tate T00790
• ‘horrific-sublime’
• the requirement for the artist to employ
powerful and inspired emotion.
• the work should have the dignity and
elevation to support the grandeur of its
theme.
• Hogarth’s characteristic and exploratory
mixture of the ‘grotesque’ and the
‘elevated’.
• often levelled at works of ‘historical’ art
in the eighteenth century

• the tense exchange between Lady
Macbeth and her husband,
• posing awkwardly and almost
comically overwrought but still
clutching the bloodied daggers
with which he has murdered
Duncan,
• smacks of the ‘darkness’,
‘obscurity’ and ‘privation’
recommended by Burke and
• reminds us of the Burkean precept
that terror is the strongest of the
passions and therefore the passion
best suited to produce a sublime
effect.
Henry Fuseli
Lady Macbeth Seizing the Daggers ?exhibited 1812
Tate T00733

Jonathan Richardson (1665–1745) in his book An
Essay on the Theory of Painting (1715)
• first English publication to encourage artists to aspire to the sublime
• the idea that sublime art could not be achieved by slavishly following
rules, but rather was an experience that existed above and beyond rules
in the realm of artistic imagination,
• that the sublime is not only desirable but is indeed the highest level of
artistic attainment.
• ‘the Sublime, where-ever ’tis found, though in Company with a
thousand Imperfections, transports and captivates the Soul; the Mind is
filled, and satisf’d’
• Example, Michelangelo =divine/ history painter

William Blake
Satan Smiting Job with Sore Boils c.1826
Tate N03340
• William Blake (1757–1827) was, by
contrast, unhesitating in his praise for
Michelangelo, hailing him for his selfless,
spiritual dedication to art and for showing
a level of commitment that paralleled his
own.
• Blake produced hundreds of drawings,
watercolours and paintings on biblical
themes, some of which were indebted to
Michelangelo, in particular the much
admired Last Judgement 1537–41 in the
Sistine Chapel.
• In Satan Smiting Job with Sore Boils 1826
(fig.4, Tate N03340), an extraordinary
scene of Burkean ‘privation’ or suffering,
Blake explores his own idiosyncratic
interpretation of what he called ‘the
sublime of the Bible’.

Frederic, Lord Leighton
And the Sea Gave Up the Dead Which Were in It exhibited 1892
Tate N01511
is just such a
Michelangelesque work on
a subject – the Last
Judgement – that by very
definition, has never been
witnessed and which,
therefore, defies the
imagination.

James Ward
Gordale Scar (A View of Gordale, in the Manor of East
Malham in Craven, Yorkshire, the Property of Lord
Ribblesdale) ?1812–14, exhibited 1815
Tate N01043
• the material scale or size of the work was, in
itself, the distinguishing factor.
• is on a scale – over three metres high by over
four metres wide – which is colossal and
unprecedented at that date in British
landscape painting.
• It was looked upon ‘with Awe and a kind of
Reverential Expectation’ by visitors to the Royal
Academy when it was exhibited there in 1815.
Ward manipulates the scale of the cattle and
also uses contrasts of light and shade to
emphasise the primordial bank of limestone
cliffs.
• Because of the crowded walls, with paintings
hung frame-to-frame, artists had to vie with
one another for the visitors’ attention and the
exploitation of scale and the manipulation of
sublime effects became essential means of
securing notice. Within visual culture more
broadly, these questions of scale and effect
were not restricted to the high art of painting.

using modern subjects from national literature and history
George Stubbs
Horse Frightened by a Lion ?exhibited 1763
Tate T06869
George Stubbs
Horse Attacked by a Lion 1769
Tate T01192
the theme of ‘Frightening Nature’ and offered a thrilling visual experience aimed at appealing to a
broad, less ‘high-minded’ public, able to sympathise with the terror of the scene without having to
know classical languages or any particular highbrow literary source.

with reference to the awe-inspiring power of nature or to the terror induced
by nature’s emptiness, beyond measurement and comprehension.
Joseph Wright of Derby
Vesuvius in Eruption, with a View over the
Islands in the Bay of Naples c.1776–80
Tate T05846
Richard Wilson
Llyn-y-Cau, Cader Idris ?exhibited 1774
Tate N05596

with which artists manipulated the relationship between the painting and the spectator
Joseph Mallord William Turner
The Shipwreck exhibited 1805
Tate N00476
Fishermen at Sea exhibited 1796
Tate T01585

Sublime effect achieved a high point of theatricality
• by the 1840s, the pictorial language of the sublime in British landscape painting was moving towards the formulaic and clichéd
• the new vision of a dynamic, prehistoric earth, constantly shifting and evolving, was a spur to the artistic imagination and re-energised
claims that landscape painting was the equal of history painting.
John Martin
The Great Day of His Wrath 1851–3
Tate N05613
John Martin
The Last Judgement 1853
Tate T01927

Rather than smother a composition in theatrical effects, however, artists from the mid-nineteenth century,
under the influence of Pre-Raphaelitism, sought to explore ideas of the ancient and the infinite in an
almost scientific manner, for example, through the acute observation of rock formations and strata
William Dyce
Pegwell Bay, Kent - a Recollection of
October 5th 1858 ?1858–60
Tate N01407
John Brett
Glacier of Rosenlaui 1856
Tate N05643

The dramatic life cycles of the species that
inhabited that world could also be presented to
elicit sublime effects.
• is concerned with portraying the struggle for
existence
• seen to embody the paradox of ‘man as nature’s
chief aggressor’ and ‘man as anguished spectator
of nature’s sufferings’
• qualities that Burke found in the sublime –
vastness or privation (with pain more powerful
than pleasure) or the suddenness that shocks the
sensibilities.
Sir Edwin Henry Landseer
Deer and Deer Hounds in a Mountain Torrent
('The Hunted Stag') ?1832, exhibited 1833
Tate N00412

challenging of such boundaries and the
potential for abomination and hubristic
outcomes from scientific enquiry
• which begins and ends in the locus classicus of sublime
landscapes, the remote and inhospitable Arctic region.
• its symbolising of humankind in extremis, mind and body, was
experienced in Burkean terms of pleasurable dread: the viewer
staring into the abyss from a position of comfort and safety.
The Hon. John Collier
The Last Voyage of Henry Hudson exhibited 1881
Tate N01616

with connotations of futility, ruin and waste
• twentieth-century historical subjects – World Wars, revolution and famine
• sublime theme of indescribability: the devastation is ‘unspeakable, utterly indescribable’, he writes, alluding to a
‘Godless’, ‘blasphemous’, ‘nightmare’ of a landscape ‘more conceived by Dante or [Edgar Allan] Poe than by nature’.
Sir William Orpen
Zonnebeke 1918
Tate T07694
Death on a Pale Horse (?) c.1825–30
Tate N05504

Baroque Sublime
• The Baroque is a highly ornate and often
extravagant style of architecture, music, painting, sculpture and other arts that flourished in
Europe from the early 17th until the mid-18th century.
• It was encouraged by the Catholic Church as a means to counter the simplicity and austerity
of Protestant architecture, art and music, though Lutheran Baroque art developed in parts of
Europe as well.
• The Baroque style used contrast, movement, exuberant detail, deep colour, grandeur and
surprise to achieve a sense of awe. The style began at the start of the 17th century in Rome,
then spread rapidly to France, northern Italy, Spain and Portugal, then to Austria and southern
Germany. By the 1730s, it had evolved into an even more flamboyant style,
called rocaille or Rococo, which appeared in France and central Europe until the mid to late 18th
century.

Baroque Art and the Sublime
• Baroque art and sublime rhetoric shared not only the same goal but also the methods by
which to achieve it.
• Both assumed an intense relationship between the composer, their art and the audience
• Pseudo-Longinus saw excellence as a quality that went beyond ideal proportion and
harmony and was judged on subjective effect rather than empirical rationale
• The key to Longinian sublimity lay in the relationship between the maker and the one
who experienced the work
• visual counterpart to the literature and rhetoric of the Catholic Counter Reformation,
most often associated with the Jesuits
• instrument of rhetoric in that it had the same purpose: to persuade the audience
• could be achieved through the communication of vivid emotions, the manipulation of
perspective or through colour including chiaroscuro
• should aim not merely to please but also to surprise.

After Federico Zuccaro
The Annunciation with Prophets and music-making angels1572
© The Trustees of the British Museum
• engraving of a fresco by Zuccaro that formed part of
a large-scale artistic scheme in the Jesuit church of
Santa Maria Annunziata in Rome (the church was
destroyed in 1626)
• marvels at the vastness of the heavens and the
innumerable rejoicing angels that convey the subject
• struck by the awe-inspiring effects of the whole, with its
hints at eternity and infinitude, and it is this that causes
him to pronounce the picture ‘sublime’
• the heavenly vision above, through the brilliant handling
of light and shade, gives the most spectacular effect of
infinite space’

James Thornhill
Greenwich Painted Hall ceiling
The Greenwich Foundation for the Old Royal Naval College
• to persuade us of the power and glory of the Protestant monarchy
• single-point perspective: to maximise the viewing experience as well as to
uplift the spectator
• he whole raises in the Spectator the most lively Images of Glory and
Victory, and cannot be beheld without much Passion and Emotion’

Visual representations of apotheosis and the classical gods
• became major themes of decorative history painting, employed by almost every regal and aristocratic authority in Europe for both private and public commissions.
• represent the patron’s own aspirations to greatness and even to immortal recognition.
(Left)
Louis Chéron
Boughton House State Bedroom Ceilingc.1695
Collection of The Trustees of the 9th Duke of Buccleuch's Chattels Fund
(Right)
Francesco Sleter
Grimsthorpe Castle Dining Room Ceiling
Grimsthorpe & Drummond Castle Trust
Photo © Ray Biggs

Romantic Sublime
usually designated as 1780 to 1830

Romantic Sublime
• insensate nature’ came to be seen as a vehicle for the expression of
human thoughts and emotions, that ‘the connection between
perception and inner being’ was explored, as was the idea that ‘the
forms of nature could in themselves have deep significance’, and that
nature was a primary site of the sublime and sublime experience.
• the eighteenth century notion of the sublime, the aesthetic
celebration of grandeur and horror for its stimulation effects
• with experiences of awe, terror and danger.
• Burke saw nature as the most sublime object, capable of generating
the strongest sensations in its beholders.

Romantic Sublime
• Edmund Burke’s emphasis in the Philosophical Enquiry on ‘pain’,
‘anguish’, ‘torment’ and ‘death’ as ‘productive of the sublime’,
exciting in the spectator the ‘passion’ of ‘self-preservation’.
• ‘the object’ and ‘the subject’, and that the sublime was ultimately a
‘spectator sport’
• Sympathy and Passion: we enter into the concerns of others; that we
are moved as they are moved, and are never suffered to be
indifferent spectators of almost any thing which men can do to suffer’

James Egan, after Theodore Gericault
The Raft of the Medusa 1837
© National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London
• notorious shipwreck event, that of the
French frigate Medusa in 1816.
• shipwreck of the Medusa was well
known in Britain and France through
press reports and the publication of
shipwreck narratives, such accounts
being by 1816 an established and
popular sub-genre of voyage and travel
literature
• the ocean is an object of no small
terror. Indeed terror is in all cases
whatsoever, either openly or latently
the ruling principle of the sublime.
• Nature had its limits when confronted
by the unmodified power of God

Claude Joseph Vernet
A Shipwreck in Stormy Sea 1773
National Gallery, London
Photo © The National Gallery, London/Scala,
Florence 2012
• ‘sublime’ images, such as sharp
contrasts in light and dark,
battering winds, turbulent seas,
buffeted ships, and struggling
human beings.
• What is the effect of the
proximity of the rocky coastline
(that is dry land as the sign of
safety) to the viewing plane
have on the spectators of the
painting?

The Shipwreck exhibited 1805
Tate N00476
• conscious of the spectacle-spectator
dynamic,
• sought to confuse, even problematise,
this divide by ‘extending’ the edge of
the raft out of the confines of the
framed canvas and into the viewer’s
plane.
• abandoned seamen are represented
turning towards or facing the ‘horizon’
(that is, looking in the same direction
as the viewer of the painting)
• the artist is clearly attempting to
manipulate us into experiencing, if
only temporarily, what they are
experiencing.
• Have we now become participants on
the raft?

Thomas Gaugain, after James Northcote
The Wreck of the Centaur 1796
Photo © National Maritime Museum,
Greenwich, London
• ominous presence of the ship, just visible in
the top left corner, and the steep, upward tilt of
the boat, when viewed from below (as
Burney’s watercolour demonstrates) was
surely calculated to exaggerate the sensation
of being in the line of impact, from the path of
the ship, the boat and the crashing waves.

• Géricault’s posthumous reputation, developed
in the nineteenth century and which still has
currency today, is a work of fact and fiction: a
powerful, independent, revolutionary spirit,
railing against the art establishment, and a
man beset with self-doubt, who was both
drawn to, and haunted by, suffering and
death.
• Géricault died after an agonising and
protracted illness at the age of thirty three, a
significant factor in his subsequent
appropriation as a paradigm of ‘the Romantic
Artist’.
• Furthermore, Géricault’s reputation and
legend, both as an artist and a man, was
clearly constructed with the Byronic hero in
mind.
• Legend has it that as the winter of 1818 was
advancing Théodore Géricault closeted
himself in a vast studio, cut his hair, and with
an ascetic’s zeal commenced a huge canvas
of men adrift on a ‘funeste radeau’ [sinister
raft] ... a raft known to generations for its lurid
tales, its mayhem, its loss of life.
Theodore Géricault
The Severed Heads about 1818
The National Museum of Fine Arts, Stockholm

The artist ... must exercise a complete indifference for all that emanates from
newspapers and journalists. The passionate lover of true glory must sincerely seek it
in the beautiful and the sublime, and remain deaf to the clamour of [those who
cannot be trusted]
Géricault

James Barry
King Lear Weeping over the Dead Body of Cordelia 1786–8
Tate T00556
representation of two
distinct but overlapping
tragedies, the ‘tragedy
of evil’, and ‘the tragedy
of dying’

Victorian Sublime
After the Romantic era Victorian artists took a step away from the vastness of the
sublime and developed a keener interest in the pursuit of beauty in the second half
of the nineteenth century.

• beauty as the most compelling aesthetic ideal.
• being something that can be evoked but not achieved
• language that avoids precise definition, instead using paint to hint at
the terrifying and awesome but on a relatively modest scale when
compared to the bombastic productions
• juxtapositions of dark and light, obtrusive facture and subtle blending
effects, combined with energetic centrifugal and vortex configurations
and exaggerated distortions of scale, Turner’s works have been seen
to both elevate and inspire perception in the beholder

J.M.W. Turner
Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the
Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On) 1840
© 2012 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
• Ruskin: the perception of
beauty was a moral, even a
religious act,
• the sublime was concerned
with greatness, that it was a
matter of emotion and that it
related to religion or the idea
of the holy.

• apocalyptic imagery continued to
dominate throughout the Victorian
period
• the material conditions of the Industrial
Revolution helped bring about a crisis
in the sublime by degrading the natural
world and proposing that it could be
manipulated for utilitarian purpose and
gain.
• The influence of the natural sciences,
particularly geology, on painting and the
concomitant idea that landscape as a
genre should aspire to objectivity, as
nature was measurable and capable of
being defined in precise analytic terms,
further problematised the sublime,
undermining academic idealist theory
and disavowing the possibility of
overwhelming aesthetic experience.
J.M.W. Turner
Rain, Steam and Speed 1844
The National Gallery, London
Photo © The National Gallery 2011

• The challenges presented by science, religious doubt and positivist
philosophy which accompanied the shift to an urban secular society
• to valorise the familiar and everyday in a spirit of reaction to the artificiality
and elitism of the Romantic sublime, which they felt had descended into
pictorial cliché in the work of contemporary academic painters.
(left) Sir John Everett Millais, Bt
The Order of Release 1746 1852–3
Tate N01657
(Right) John Constable
Branch Hill Pond, Hampstead Heath,
with a Boy Sitting on a Bank circa 1825
Tate N01813

William Dyce
Pegwell Bay, Kent - a Recollection of October 5th 1858 ?1858–60
Tate N01407
• interest in natural history
• panoptic scope and sense of
awe generated by the
infinitude and intricacy of the
natural world
• figures looking beyond the
frame at the infinite magnitude
of nature
• Mathematical Sublime- the
idea of the mind using the
power of reason to extend
beyond its boundaries to
think about what the
imagination cannot
comprehend, in this case,
time and space stretching
out to infinity.

• to show it was possible to
combine realism with
symbolism without
distorting the former by
falling back on redundant
allegorical modes
• Hunt uses geological
features to explore the
spiritual and moral
condition of the nation,
thus creating a highly
ambiguous image.
William Holman Hunt
Our English Coasts, 1852 ('Strayed Sheep') 1852
Tate N05665

Thomas Seddon
Jerusalem and the Valley of Jehoshaphat from
the Hill of Evil Counsel 1854–5
Tate N00563

• to understand how geological processes
are reflected in structure and shape: the
deformed rocks of variable colour and
the texture of the side of the valley reveal
the way it has been denuded by the
pressure of ice, while the terminal
moraine in the foreground is noticeably
different in colour and texture, indicating
that these rocks have been transported
from a different location and deposited by
the glacier.
John Brett
Glacier of Rosenlaui 1856
Tate N05643

to reconcile the demands
of science and art.
John Brett
The British Channel Seen from the Dorsetshire Cliffs 1871
Tate N01902

Sir John Everett Millais, Bt
Dew-Drenched Furze 1889–90
Tate T12865
• of a veil hiding the divine mystery of
nature, expressed elsewhere
• The lack of human presence within the
picture paradoxically heightens the role
of the spectator in beholding the scene.

• strove to place
natural phenomena
in a wider
eschatological
framework
• to join the real and
the visionary in his
work
William Holman Hunt
The Triumph of the Innocents 1883–4
Tate N03334

The Modern Sublime
In 1886 the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche declared the sublime out of date. A number of
artists of early and mid-twentieth century continued to engage with concepts of the
sublime, though often in ways that led ultimately to these ideas being questioned, mocked
or spurned. However, it remains possible to locate a distinctively modern sense of the
sublime in the works of such artists as Malevich, Rothko, Newman and Smithson.

James Abbott McNeill Whistler 1834–1903
Nocturne: Blue and Silver - Cremorne Lights 1872
Oil on canvas
support: 502 x 743 mm; frame: 810 x 1062 x 105 mm
Tate N03420
Bequeathed by Arthur Studd 1919

John Martin
The Plains of Heaven 1851–3
Tate T01928
• to reflect the ponderous,
grave and divinely
troubled values of the
aspirant middle classes
• he sublime ‘is on the side
of individuation, rivalry
and enterprise’. The
presentation of an infinite
and potentially
threatening vista is ‘a
danger we encounter
figuratively, vicariously, in
the pleasurable
knowledge that we
cannot actually be
harmed’

Gustave Courbet
The Source of the Loue 1864
Photo © National Gallery of Art, Washington
Neil Hertz’s influential reading of
the painting as an instance of the
‘dead-end’ of Romantic sublimity:
with nowhere to go, the viewer is
confronted with the brute, material
substratum of subjectivity, a realm
of dead matter resistant to
transcendental recuperation. In
this alternative sublime the subject
lured by the promise of
individuation is scuppered on the
rocks of its own impossibility

Paul Cézanne
The Grounds of the Château Noir circa 1900–6
Lent by the National Gallery 1997
On long-term loan to Tate L01891
• to convey a sense of the world in its raw
immediacy, enabling differences to emerge from
simple observation.
• In essence, what Cézanne’s art accomplishes is
a realisation of the otherness of nature and a
vision of the sublime freed from the fiction of self-
realisation.

Kazimir Malevich
Black Square 1915
• we discover ‘the matrix of sublimation at its
most elementary’, that is, as purely structural
opposition between the Real and the Symbolic.
• as a negative representation of the
supersensible. Still further, it can be seen as an
attempt to transcend the material restrictions of
representation, presenting a feeling or
impression of the divine.

Marcel Duchamp
Fountain 1917, replica 1964
Tate T07573
© Succession Marcel
Duchamp/ADAGP, Paris and DACS,
London 2002
• we may see it more bluntly as
‘an object which occupies the
place, replaces, fills out the
empty place of the Thing as
the void, as the pure Nothing
of absolute negativity’.
• to raise an idea of the divine
thus comes to signify the
fundamental nothingness, the
absence at the heart of the
Real, that a certain kind of art
endeavours to inform.
• desublimate the sublime

Lucio Fontana
Spatial Concept 'Waiting' 1960
Tate T00694
© Fondazione Lucio Fontana, Milan
• the aim being literally to break through the
surface of the work so that the viewer can
perceive the space that lies beyond.
• Fontana seems to have regarded this
gesture as a means of disclosing the
unlimited space of the sublime, announcing ‘I
have created an infinite dimension’

• with a sensation of time’
• to claim that anxiety in the face of privation
is converted by Newman into ‘joy obtained
by the intensification of being’.
• As Battersby summarises, ‘this joy is not
located in the “beyond” of the Romantic
sublime, but in the “here and now”’.
Barnett Newman
Eve 1950
Tate T03081
© ARS, NY and DACS, London 2002

Visual Art and the Sublime

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