The Sublime
The concept of the Sublime has been around since the 17th century. In 1674 Nicolas Boileau translated the Longinus’s Peri hypsous (On the Sublime) and this action is what brought the sublime to the modern public’s eye. But it was not until the Romantic period that the sublime took hold.
Edmund Burke in 1757 wrote A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful; this was the first major work on the sublime. In this, Burke proposed that the sublime was rooted in fear, particularly the terror brought on by the fear of death. Burke wrote, “The passions caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully is astonishment, and astonishment is that state of the soul in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror”. Not only horror but also the reminder of man's own fragility and mortality. These kinds of feelings can be triggered by extremes: vastness, extreme height, excessive light or darkness. But in the end the viewer can realize that they are not the ones in danger when looking at a sublime painting and can then appreciate the awe and wonder of it. This kind of sublimeness can be seen in the painting “The Much Resounding Sea” by Thomas Moran. In the painting the subject is the ocean and how they are crashing against the shore. There is a dark storm in the background. Both of these elements cause a sense of danger to the scene and invoke terror to a degree. After the sense of terror wears off there is something tranquil about the ocean being so destructive and powerful.
Immanuel Kant in Critique of Judgement (1790) characterized three types of sublimity: the awful, the lofty, and the splendid. Kant also argued that the sublime was about the negative experience of limits. It was a way of talking about something we have problems understanding or controlling. This trouble of understanding or controlling can be seen in nature’s independence. The sublime may be initiated when things such as terrifying aspects of nature occur. This is due to the fact that we cannot encompass it by thinking and so it remains unnameable, and unpresentable. Kant did not believe that nature can be sublime but rather, the ideas surrounding the natural environment were what were sublime. “The Toilers of the Sea” by Albert Pinkham Ryder is a perfect example of his ideas. The painting is dark and there is not much detail; the ocean is calm and nondestructive. It is as if the reason it is sublime is the fact that the sailor is all alone in the vast ocean with only the sea, the moon and his thoughts. Nothing makes this painting out of the ordinary or awe inspiring until the viewer uses their imagination to give it meaning.
During the Romantic period nature was one of the key motifs for the sublime. This included images such as: misty skies, vast gulfs and valleys, tempestuous seas, and dramatic mountain scenes. Many of these were painted on large-scale canvases to emphasize the grandeur of it and to take the viewer’s breath away. “Heart of the Andes” by Frederic Edwin Church is a gigantic painting of 66 ⅛ x 120 3/16 in. It is the quintessential idea of a sublime landscape painting. The mountains loom over the entire painting making the people look small and fragile. There is almost no distinction between the natural world and the human. The sublime and nature was a way of dealing with the growing industrial world. The sublime was not just about nature and the terror and awe it can instill on a person but it can also have horrific subjects such as: suicide and massacres. All of these subjects do cause a sense of fear, emptiness, and overwhelming emotion. The sublime is a way to get a viewer to deeply understand an image without the use of any words.