Sublime

Sublime. An aesthetic concept that originated in ancient Greece and played a particularly important part in 18th-century writings about art. It denoted a category of aesthetic experience, associated with ideas of awe and vastness, that was held to be distinct from (although often discussed in conjunction with) the ‘Beautiful’ and the Picturesque. The outstanding work on the concept of the Sublime in English is Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). This book was one of the first to realize (in contrast with the emphasis on clarity and precision during the Age of Enlightenment) the power of suggestiveness to stimulate the imagination. Speaking of painting, Burke says that ‘a judicious obscurity in some things contributes to the effect of the picture’, because in art as in nature ‘dark, confused, uncertain images have a greater power on the fancy to form the grander passions than those which are more clear and determinate’. The cult of the Sublime had varied expressions in the visual arts, notably the taste for the ‘savage’ landscapes of Salvator Rosa and the popularity among painters of subjects from Homer, Milton, and Ossian (the legendary Gaelic warrior and bard, whose verses—actually fabrications—were published in the 1760s to great acclaim). In literature, the ‘Gothic novel’, in which mystery and horror were the essential ingredients, appealed to the same sentiments. The first Gothic novel was Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764), and when crossing the Alps in 1739 Walpole expressed the essence of the imaginative appeal of the Sublime in his memorable exclamation: ‘Precipices, mountains, torrents, wolves, rumblings—Salvator Rosa.’ The vogue for the Sublime, with that for the Picturesque, helped shape the attitudes that led to Romanticism.