The History of British Art and the Burkean Sublime (original) (raw)
In 1757, London philosopher Edmund Burke proposed the concept of "the sublime" in his text, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origins of the Sublime and Beautiful. This idea of the sublime describes the feeling one experiences when they observe something in the world around them that is so great in size and terror that it makes them feel extremely small and insignificant in comparison, but in the best and most awe-inspiring way possible, rather than a solely negative sensation. 1 For example, when a subject views a gigantic range of mountains, and has an entirely encompassing feeling of being dwarfed by them, in admiration of creation. Or if one stared at the night sky and is overwhelmed by the sheer number of stars above our heads, dizzied by that unimaginable sum. The idea of the sublime has not been something solely isolated to philosophy, as it has spread into several other avenues of thought, specifically within art. Burke's concept was very quickly adopted into the aesthetics tradition as artists grappled with the question of "… how can an artist paint the sensation that we experience when words fail or when we find ourselves beyond the limits of reason?". 2 This concept was particularly well received by British artists, spanning from the Baroque period onwards, leaving an indelible impression on art history and philosophy. Burke's concept of the sublime evolved from being a philosophical construct to an aesthetic theme etched into the British history of art, exemplified in the works of Enlightenment artists like Philip James de Loutherbourg to contemporary scholars like Eugenie Shinkle. The definition of the sublime has been interpreted in several different iterations over the centuries, and often times gets easily confused with beauty, but in Burke's original text he
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An essay concerning Burke's idea of the Sublime
The second best known theoretical work of the Irish politician and philosopher Edmund Burke, 'A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of ou Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful' (1957), is overshadowed by Burke's political work. But although the 'Enquiry' is not Burke's magnum opus, it still is a very important work that deserves more attention than it gets these days, for several reasons. In the first part of this paper we will examine Burke's Enquiry, focusing on his concept of the Sublime. In the second part I hope to point out some of the similarities between Burke's theory and William Turner's practical application of those rules, by studying some of his famous paintings.
The Sublime in Romantic Painting
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Hardly any aesthetic has become more synonymous with Romantic painting than the sublime. There is a certain irony to this historical condition, for while the sublime experienced a theoretical revival during the eighteenth century that gave the concept new meaning relative to its literary origins with Longinus, that revival did not for the most part include the visual arts. In his Critique of the Power of Judgment (), Immanuel Kant notably described the sublime as a feeling that exists not in the object but in the mind, and that while large and powerful facets of nature might occasion the experience of the sublime, nature is not the origin of that experience. Kant distanced art from the feeling of the sublime even further, on the grounds that in art "a human end determines the form as well as the magnitude" while "a pure judgment on the sublime. .. must have no end of the object as its determining ground if it is to be aesthetic and not mixed up with any judgement of the understanding or of reason" (COPJ § -). Kant, in other words, determined that our responses to art are rational, in that apprehending a work of art in full is generally not beyond the scope of the imagination, whereas the feeling of the sublime reflects an aesthetic response that exceeds reason. Kant did use some artistic works as potential sources of the sublime, namely, the Egyptian pyramids and St. Peter's in Rome, but these are exceptions and he qualifies his observations about them immediately after they are mentioned, redirecting the reader's attention to "raw nature" (COPJ § ). Earlier in the eighteenth century, Burke's Enquiry () similarly questioned the power of visual art to evoke the sublime, albeit for different reasons. Burke suggested that painting falls short of exciting ideas of the sublime, because it brings things into clarity and undermines the close relationship between the sublime and obscurity: It is one thing to make an idea clear, and another to make it affecting to the imagination. If I make a drawing of a palace, or a temple, or a landscape,
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Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) is of one of the most well-known texts of eighteenth-century British art and aesthetics alongside with Hogarth’s Analysis of Beauty (1753) and Reynolds’s Discourses at the Royal Academy (1769 – 1790). But The Challenge of the Sublime by Helene Ibata sheds new and fresh light on the Enquiry as it tackles Burke’s reception and legacy among nineteenth-century British artist. Ibata contends that...
Burke's Sensory Sublime and his Astonishing Infinity
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Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful drew on diverse strands of the period’s discourse on sentiment and sensibility and registered its masculinising turn. In his distinction between the sublime and the beautiful, Burke recast the new emphasis on the positive benefits to be derived from firm nerves and fibres which countered the earlier emphasis on delicacy and extreme sensitivity. While it is true that Burke conceived the sublime as salutary exercise of the “finer parts of the (body’s) system,” this article argues that it is an error to draw from this physiological exercise a teleology attributing moral value to the experience of the sublime. A close reading of the text reveals that the “principle of infinity” and the “artificial infinite” constituted the lynchpin of Burke’s theory. While the beautiful communicates a sense of being at home in the world, the sublime conveys a terrifying reminder of our fragile and powerless finitude and, in a world of which our knowledge is restricted to nominal essences, our ultimate homelessness. Burke’s religious convictions precluded attributing religious significance to the sublime: the teleology of the sublime remained tied to its provision of a this-worldly experience replicating via the senses and the imagination what it would feel like to access infinity. In the experience of the sublime of terror and astonishment the individual is transported to the bounds of reason.
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