Back in 2016 when I intro­duced this blog (here) and the sense of the “sub­lime” as some­thing of excel­lence “occa­sion­al­ly glimpsed” here­in, I men­tioned that the con­cept of the sub­lime was one with a long his­to­ry of being debat­ed by artists and writ­ers over the cen­turies. I can pad that idea out a bit now, since it has a direct con­nec­tion to the sub­ject of this week’s blog, and so for fun and edi­fi­ca­tion, here’s a lit­tle pot­ted his­to­ry or mini-essay on the con­cept of the sub­lime.

The first known study of the con­cept was the 1^st cen­tu­ry AD trea­tise On The Sub­lime, ascribed to Long­i­nus and which talks about the use of great or lofty lan­guage, intend­ed to inspire awe or ven­er­a­tion, in the field of rhetoric. This trea­tise was redis­cov­ered in the 16^th cen­tu­ry and trans­lat­ed into Eng­lish and French in the fol­low­ing decades, and it had a sig­nif­i­cant influ­ence on lit­er­ary crit­i­cism and the phi­los­o­phy of aes­thet­ics in the 17^th and 18^th cen­turies.

The con­cept was devel­oped in Britain in the ear­ly 18^th cen­tu­ry and came to describe an aes­thet­ic qual­i­ty in nature dis­tinct from beau­ty, brought into promi­nence by the writ­ings of John Den­nis (1693), Joseph Addi­son (1705) and Antho­ny Ash­ley-Coop­er (1709). All three of these authors had under­tak­en a cross­ing of the Alps, as part of that famil­iar Enlight­en­ment pas­time the “Grand Tour”, and all three inde­pen­dent­ly expressed their con­trast­ing feel­ings of fear and plea­sure at the awe­some­ness of nature and derived, as Addi­son described it, “an agree­able kind of hor­ror”.

Edmund Burke more for­mal­ly devel­oped this con­cep­tion of sub­lim­i­ty in A Philo­soph­i­cal Enquiry into the Ori­gin of Our Ideas of the Sub­lime and Beau­ti­ful in 1756, and Ger­man philoso­phers Kant, Schopen­hauer, Hegel and Rudolf Otto each added their aca­d­e­m­ic heft to the sub­ject. Soon, the con­cept would be realised in the art move­ment known as Roman­ti­cism and we would see the por­tray­al of land­scape in an entire­ly new man­ner: not just a visu­al­i­sa­tion of the sim­ple enjoy­ment of a beau­ti­ful view, as in the clas­sic con­cep­tion, but rather an exam­i­na­tion of a reunion with the spir­i­tu­al self through the con­tem­pla­tion of nature and its majes­tic pow­er.

Ger­man artist Cas­par David Friedrich (1774–1840) was instru­men­tal in cre­at­ing this notion of a land­scape full of roman­tic feel­ing: die roman­tis­che Stim­mungs­land­schaft. Friedrich’s paint­ings com­mon­ly employed the Rück­en­fig­ur, a per­son seen from behind, con­tem­plat­ing the land­scape and invit­ing the view­er to sim­i­lar­ly place him­self in that medi­um and expe­ri­ence the sub­lime poten­tial of nature. The Friedrich paint­ing that is above all used to char­ac­terise this con­cept is his 1818 oil on can­vas, Wan­der­er above the Sea of Fog.

It depicts a man stand­ing upon a rocky precipice and gaz­ing out across a land­scape cov­ered in a thick sea of fog through which oth­er ridges, trees, and moun­tains pierce. It is con­sid­ered one of the mas­ter­pieces of the Roman­ti­cism move­ment and to suc­cess­ful­ly evoke the sub­lime or Addis­on’s “agree­able hor­ror”.