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 1st 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 16th 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 17th and 18th centuries.
The concept was developed in Britain in the early 18th 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”.
