A walk over the Alps helped turn terror into an aesthetic idea
Around 1700, three English writers crossed the Alps and came back unsettled: the peaks thrilled them and frightened them at once. Their letters helped launch the modern idea of the sublime, a greatness beyond measuring. Edmund Burke then argued it was the opposite of beauty, and Turner tried to paint it.
The word comes from Latin for lifted up or lofty, and its first known treatment is On the Sublime, credited to Longinus and probably written in the 1st century AD, though its authorship is uncertain. For him the sublime belonged to rhetoric: elevated language that awes and persuades, illustrated from Homer and, unusually, from Genesis. The text resurfaced in the 16th century, and Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux's French translation of 1674 spread its influence.
In Britain the idea moved from speech to landscape. John Dennis published an account in 1693 of an Alpine crossing that mixed delight with something close to despair. The Earl of Shaftesbury had made the trip two years earlier but waited until 1709 to publish, treating sublimity and beauty as differing only in degree. Joseph Addison, on his Grand Tour from 1699, found that the mountains produced a pleasing horror, and he located the pleasures of imagination, greatness among them, in things seen rather than things said.
Edmund Burke's Enquiry of 1756 made the break sharp. He was the first philosopher to insist that the sublime and the beautiful exclude each other, as darkness excludes light. Obscurity and confusion stir awe; fear becomes enjoyable when we know we are safe, a sensation he called delight, the relief of pain removed, and considered stronger than ordinary pleasure. Later writers dismissed his bodily explanations, such as eye strain, but his habit of reporting his own reactions proved influential. Immanuel Kant took a different path: in 1764 he sorted the sublime into noble, splendid and terrifying, and his Critique of Judgment of 1790 split it into mathematical and dynamical forms, tied to boundlessness rather than form.
John Ruskin, in Modern Painters, published between 1843 and 1860, pushed the idea toward the moral and spiritual. Burke had assumed poetry beat painting at conveying the sublime; Ruskin pointed to J. M. W. Turner, whose hazy, colour-soaked canvases critics called artless, as proof otherwise. Turner's methods went on to shape the French Impressionists.
Source: Sublime (philosophy)
