The challenge of the sublime: From Burke’s <i>Philosophical Enquiry</i> to British Romantic art 9781526117403

Table of contents :
Front matter
Contents
List of plates
List of figures
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part I From the Enquiry to the Academy
The Philosophical Enquiry, theories of the sublime and the sister arts tradition
Presenting the unpresentable: the modernity of Burke’s Enquiry
Reynolds, the great style and the Burkean sublime
The sublime contained: academic compromises
Part II Beyond the ‘narrow limits of painting’
Immersive spectatorship at the panorama and the aesthetics of the sublime
Frames, edges and ‘unlimitation’
‘Sublime dreams’: ruin paintings and architectural fantasies
Part III Relocating the sublime: Blake, Turner and creative endeavour
Against and beyond Burke: Blake’s ‘sublime Labours’
Turner: from sublime association to sublime energy
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
Plates

Citation preview

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The challenge of the sublime

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SEVENTEENTH-​ AND EIGHTEENTH-​CENTURY STUDIES

General Editor Anne Dunan-​Page Seventeenth-​and Eighteenth-​Century Studies is a collection of the Société d’Études Anglo-​Américaines des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles promoting interdisciplinary work on the period c.1603–​1815, covering all aspects of the literature, culture and history of the British Isles, colonial and post-​colonial America, and other British colonies. The series welcomes academic monographs, as well as collective volumes of essays, that combine theoretical and methodological approaches from more than one discipline to further our understanding of the period and geographical areas. Previously published Radical voices, radical ways: Articulating and disseminating ­radicalism in seventeenth-​and eighteenth-​century Britain Edited by Laurent Curelly and Nigel Smith English Benedictine nuns in exile in the seventeenth ­century: Living spirituality Laurence Lux-​Sterritt

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The challenge of the sublime From Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry to British Romantic art Hélène Ibata

Manchester University Press

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Copyright © Hélène Ibata 2018 The right of Hélène Ibata to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 5261 1739 7 hardback First published 2018 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-​party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset by Out of House Publishing

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Contents

List of plates List of figures Acknowledgements

page vii viii xii

Introduction

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PART I  From the Enquiry to the Academy 1 The Philosophical Enquiry, theories of the sublime and the sister arts tradition 2 Presenting the unpresentable: the modernity of Burke’s Enquiry 3 Reynolds, the great style and the Burkean sublime 4 The sublime contained: academic compromises

29 61 85 109

PART II  Beyond the ‘narrow limits of painting’ 5 Immersive spectatorship at the panorama and the aesthetics of the sublime 6 Frames, edges and ‘unlimitation’ 7 ‘Sublime dreams’: ruin paintings and architectural fantasies

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147 169 203

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Contents

PART III Relocating the sublime: Blake, Turner and creative endeavour 8 Against and beyond Burke: Blake’s ‘sublime Labours’ 9 Turner: from sublime association to sublime energy

235 267

Conclusion

294

Bibliography Index

301 314

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Plates

1 James Barry, Portraits of Barry and Burke in the Characters of Ulysses and his Companion Fleeing from the Cave of Polyphemus, c. 1776. Oil on canvas, 127 cm × 102 cm. Collection Crawford Art Gallery, Cork. 2 Joseph Gandy, The Tomb of Merlin, 1815. Ink, pen and watercolour on paper, 76 cm × 132 cm. Royal Institute of British Architects, London (RIBA Collections). 3 Joseph Gandy, Bridge over Chaos, 1833. Pencil, pen, ink and watercolour on paper, 102.9 cm × 67.3 cm. Private collection. Photo © Christie’s images/ Bridgeman images. 4 J. M. W. Turner, Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps, 1812. Oil on canvas, 146 cm × 237.5 cm. Image © Tate, London. 5 J. M. W. Turner, Snow Storm –​Steam-​Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth Making Signals in Shallow Water, and Going by the Lead, 1842. Oil on canvas, 91.4 cm × 121.9 cm. Image © Tate, London.

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Figures

1 James Barry, Portraits of Barry and Burke in the Characters of Ulysses and his Companion Fleeing from the Cave of Polyphemus, c. 1776. Oil on canvas, 127 cm × 102 cm. Collection Crawford Art Gallery, Cork. page 110 2 James Barry, Satan and his Legions Hurling Defiance towards the Vault of Heaven, c. 1792–​95. Etching, 76.8 cm × 50.9 cm. © The Trustees of the British Museum. 124 3 Benjamin West, Destruction of the Beast and the False Prophet, 1804. Oil on panel, 99 × 143.5 cm. Minneapolis Institute of Art, The William Hood Dunwoody Fund 15.22. Photo: Minneapolis Institute of Art. 127 4 Henry Fuseli, Sin Pursued by Death, 1794–​96. Oil on canvas, 119 cm × 132 cm. Kunsthaus, Zurich. 135 5 Cross-​section of Robert Barker’s two-​level panorama at Leicester Square. Coloured aquatint (R. Mitchell), c. 1793, 32.2 cm × 46.7 cm. © The Trustees of the British Museum. 151 6 Henry Aston Barker, Description of a View of the North Coast of Spitzbergen, Painted from Drawings Taken by Lieut. Beechey, who Accompanied the Polar Expedition in 1818; which is Now Exhibiting in the

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List of figures

Large Rotunda of Henry Aston Barker’s Panorama, Leicester Square. London: Adlard, 1819.  7 Robert Burford, Description of a View of the Ruins of the City of Pompeii, Representing the Forum, with the Adjoining Edifice and Surrounding country, Now Exhibiting in the Panorama, Strand; Painted from Drawings Taken on the Spot by Mr. Burford. London: Adlard, 1824.  8 William Blake, Jerusalem, copy E, pl. 28, 1804–​c. 1820. Relief etching with hand colouring, 22.5 cm × 16.3 cm. Yale Center for British Art.  9 William Blake, America a Prophecy, copy M, object 10, c. 1807. Relief etching with hand colouring, 23.5 cm × 16.7 cm. Yale Center for British Art. 10 William Blake, America a Prophecy, copy M, pl. 12, c. 1807. Relief etching with hand colouring, 23.5 cm × 16.9 cm. Yale Center for British Art. 11 J. M. W. Turner, ‘A Tempest –​Voyage of Columbus’, for Rogers’s Poems, c. 1830–​32. Graphite and watercolour on paper. Support: 24.4 cm × 31.1 cm. Image © Tate, London. 12 J. M. W. Turner, ‘A Hurricane in the Desert (The Simoom)’, for Rogers’s Poems, c. 1830–​32. Watercolour and pen on paper. Support: 24.4 cm × 30.5 cm. Image © Tate, London. 13 Francis Towne, The Source of the Arveyron, 1781. Ink and watercolour on paper, 31 cm × 21.2 cm. Image © Tate, London. 14 John Robert Cozens, The Thames from Richmond Hill Looking Southwest, c. 1791. Graphite and watercolour on paper, 36.2 cm × 52.4 cm. Yale Center for British Art. 15 Thomas Girtin, The White House at Chelsea, 1800. Watercolour on paper, 29.8 cm × 51.4 cm. Image © Tate, London. 16 Alexander Cozens, The Cloud, c. 1770. Graphite and watercolour on paper, 23.3 cm × 31.3 cm. Image © Tate, London.

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List of figures

17 John Constable, Rainstorm over the sea, c. 1827. Oil on paper on canvas, 22.2 cm × 31.1 cm. © Royal Academy of Arts, London. Photo: RA/​John Hammond. 18 Giovanni Battista Piranesi, ‘Parte di ampio magnifico porto’, Opere varie di archiettura, prospettive, grotteschi, antichità; inventate, ed incise da Giambattista Piranesi architetto veneziano, c. 1749–​ 50; Opere Varie, 1750. Etching, engraving, drypoint, plate: 40 cm × 54.5 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art. Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1937. 19 Giovanni Battista Piranesi, ‘The Gothic Arch’, Carceri d’invenzione, plate XIV, 2nd edn, 1761. Etching, 41.5 cm × 54.8 cm. Princeton University Art Museum (artmuseum.princeton.edu). 20 Giovanni Battista Piranesi, ‘Dark Prison’, Prima parte di architetture e prospettive, plate II, c. 1743. 21 J. M. W. Turner, ‘Lecture Diagram 75: Interior of a Prison’, c. 1810. Pen and ink and watercolour on paper. Support: 71 cm × 51 cm. Image © Tate, London. 22 J. M. W. Turner, ‘Lecture Diagram 65: Interior of a Prison’, c. 1810. Gouache, graphite and watercolour on paper. Support: 48.7 cm × 68.7 cm. Image © Tate, London. 23 Joseph Michael Gandy, Architectural Visions of Early Fancy in the Gay Morning of Youth and Dreams in the Evening of Life, 1820. Pencil, ink, watercolour and bodycolour on paper, 74.4 cm × 132 cm. Sir John Soane’s Museum, London. 24 Joseph Gandy, The Tomb of Merlin, 1815. Ink, pen and watercolour on paper, 76 cm × 132 cm. Royal Institute of British Architects, London (RIBA Collections). 25 Joseph Gandy, Bridge over Chaos, 1833. Pencil, pen, ink and watercolour on paper, 102.9 cm × 67.3 cm. Private collection. Photo © Christie’s images/ Bridgeman images. 26 William Blake, Jerusalem, copy E, object 70, 1804– ​c. 1820. Relief etching with hand colouring, 22.2 cm × 16.1 cm. Yale Center for British Art. x

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List of figures

27 William Blake, Jerusalem, copy E, object 26, 1804– ​c. 1820. Relief etching with hand colouring, 16.4 cm × 22.5 cm. Yale Center for British Art. 28 William Blake, The First Book of Urizen, copy A, object 8, 1794. Colour print, 14.9 cm × 10.5 cm. Yale Center for British Art. 29 J. M. W. Turner, The Dogano, San Giorgio, Citella, from the Steps of the Europa, 1842. Oil on canvas, 61.6 cm × 92.7 cm. Image © Tate, London. 30 J. M. W. Turner, Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps, 1812. Oil on canvas, 146 cm × 237.5 cm. Image © Tate, London. 31 J. M. W. Turner, Snow Storm –​Steam-​Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth Making Signals in Shallow Water, and Going by the Lead, 1842. Oil on canvas, 91.4 cm × 121.9 cm. Image © Tate, London. 32 J. M. W. Turner, Regulus, 1828 (reworked 1837). Oil on canvas, 89.5 cm × 123.8 cm. Image © Tate, London. 33 J. M. W. Turner, Rain, Steam and Speed, 1844. Oil on canvas, 91 × 121.8 cm. The National Gallery. Turner Bequest, 1856. © The National Gallery, London.

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Acknowledgements

The idea for this book emerged tentatively many years ago, as I was reflecting on the fashion for tenebrism in late-​eighteenth-​century British painting and attempting to connect it with Edmund Burke’s reflections on obscurity in his Philosophical Enquiry. I was immediately intrigued by the contrast between Burke’s visually stimulating discussions of sublimity and his conviction that the sublime was beyond the reach of painters. Somehow, I felt that the treatise had not just contributed to a renewal of the artists’ repertoire of subjects and themes, but had actually led them to explore new representational paradigms and question traditional mimesis. This initial observation then gradually developed into an increasingly complex thesis as the themes of conferences and research projects led me to explore a growing diversity of Romantic artistic practices, and as my initial intuitions were both confirmed and nuanced by fruitful exchanges with colleagues. As my project matured, it benefited from influences that are too numerous to recall here. I  am indebted to many friends and colleagues who have discussed and read parts of this project, or provided moral, intellectual and practical support towards its completion. My thanks go first of all to Anne Bandry and Jean-​Jacques Chardin, who as heads of the SEARCH research team at the University of Strasbourg (Savoirs dans l’Espace Anglophone, Représentations, Culture, Histoire) have provided practical help as well as a stimulating intellectual environment without which this book would not have been possible. I am also very grateful to Isabelle Gadoin, Pierre xii

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Acknowledgements

Carboni, Laurent Châtel, Marie-​Madeleine Martinet, Marc Porée and Yann Tholoniat, for their valuable comments on the manuscript. Parts of this book were given as talks in conferences organised by the Société des Anglicistes de l’Enseignement Supérieur, by the Université de Toulouse –​Jean Jaurès, the University of Exeter and the Université de Lille 3. I would like to thank the organisers, especially Muriel Adrien, Melissa Percival, Thomas Constantinesco and Sophie Laniel-​Musitelli, for giving me the opportunity to share and discuss my research. Among friends and colleagues who have provided both encouragement and useful comments, I would particularly like to mention Ciaran Ross, Monica Manolescu, Fanny Moghaddassi, Caroline Lehni, Rémi Vuillemin, Pauline Collombier-​Lakeman and Brigitte Friant-​Kessler. Special thanks are due to two anonymous referees for Manchester University Press, who provided constructive criticism and suggestions on an early draft of the book, to Anne Dunan-​Page, the editor of the Seventeenth-​and Eighteenth-​Century Studies series, to my wonderful copy-editor Christopher Feeney, and to the editorial team at Manchester University Press, who have been so helpful in the completion of this project. I thank Taylor & Francis for permission to reproduce sections of my article ‘Beyond the “Narrow Limits of Painting”: Strategies for Visual Unlimitedness and the Burkean Challenge’, Word and Image 31:1 (2015), as well as most of my article ‘William Blake’s Visual Sublime: The “Eternal Labours” ’, European Romantic Review 21:1 (2010). I also acknowledge institutional support from the Faculté des Langues et des Cultures Etrangères at the University of Strasbourg and from the Société d’études Anglo-​ Américaines des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles. I warmly thank the staff of the Bibliothèque nationale et universitaire de Strasbourg, the British Library, the Cambridge University Library, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the British Museum, the Tate Gallery and Sir John Soane’s Museum for their precious assistance at several stages of my research. Last but definitely not least, I  cannot sufficiently express my gratitude to my family for their patience throughout the last few years. To my parents, I owe the determination that allowed me to go through this long process of research and writing. To Georgina, I  owe the few periods of serenity that allowed me to think some complex arguments through. I  thank Neil, Caela and Oliver for xiii

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reminding me on a daily basis that there is a life beyond academia, and for trying so kindly to help in the last few weeks of work. This book is dedicated to them, and of course to Rodrigo, who has always been so supportive of my endeavours, and whose uncompromising intellect has been my constant guidance throughout these years.

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Introduction

In the decades that followed the creation of the Royal Academy of Arts in 1768, the sister arts tradition appeared to be as alive as it had been at the beginning of the century. The literary aspirations of British visual artists were nurtured by academic precepts which claimed that by rivalling and adapting the best poetic work, painters would assert their art’s intellectual value and prove that it was a ‘liberal’ occupation, rather than a ‘mechanical’ trade. While the Royal Academy promoted ‘history painting’ and the emulation of epic poetry as the best demonstration of the mental skills employed in painting, a new generation of visual artists sought inspiration in the most exalting and tumultuous productions of the British literary genius, and found in Shakespeare, Milton or Macpherson’s Ossian a stimulating repertoire of dramatic scenes and themes. Besides academic exhibits, the period was fraught with ambitious pictorial ventures which revealed a genuine desire to fuse the arts or confirm their equal emotive power. This was the time of John Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery (1789–​1805), Thomas Macklin’s Gallery of Poets (1788–​97) and Henry Fuseli’s Milton Gallery (1799–​1800), all of which capitalised on the new literary interests, which were shared by a growing audience of non-​aristocratic spectators. It was also the time when illustrated literary editions began to be published on a large scale, to answer to the expectations of visual/​verbal interactions of this wider public. The flourishing of literary pictorial productions, however, was more a reflection of British visual artists’ new ambitions than a 1

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THE CHALLENGE OF THE SUBLIME

genuine cooperation between the arts. A closer look at the situation suggests that from the point of view of the literary elite, the ‘sisterly’ bonds had begun to fall apart. The practice of literary pictorialism in poetry, which had seen its heyday in Britain in the first half of the century,1 was on the decline. As M. H. Abrams writes, ‘the use of painting to illuminate the essential character of poetry –​ut pictura poesis –​so widespread in the eighteenth century, almost disappears in the major criticism of the romantic period’.2 More significantly, the painters’ attempts to transcribe the original and dynamic productions of favourite writers were met with much suspicion or even opposition from the critics of the day, who considered such verbal material to be incommensurable with visual representation, and followed Lessing in arguing that poetry could not be compressed ‘within the narrow limits of painting’.3 Quite strikingly, a number of reactions to the literary galleries insisted that the finite and mimetic nature of painting prevented it from conveying a poetic sublimity which exceeded its ‘limits’. According to John Knowles, Fuseli’s first biographer, the failure of the Milton Gallery within just one year of opening was largely due to this type of criticism: As soon as the intended exhibition was announced by the daily prints, but before the doors of the ‘Milton Gallery’ were opened, the public mind was attempted to be biassed very unfairly by paragraphs in the newspapers calumniating the subjects as well as the execution of the pictures. These critics considered that he had attempted to represent on canvas scenes adapted only to poetic imagery, and thus transgressed the limits of the imitative art.4

Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery was spared such harsh comments, and an initially positive reaction from the public allowed it to endure for sixteen years, until its sale by lottery in 1805. Nevertheless, here again some voices were raised to claim the superiority of the poet over the painter, and to assert that the intangible nature and suggestiveness of poetic images was irreducible to visual representation. In 1833, upon receiving an illustrated edition of Samuel Rogers’s Poems, Charles Lamb famously reflected back on his impressions of the gallery in unambiguous terms: But I  am jealous of the combination of the sister arts. Let them sparkle apart. What injury (short of the theatres) did not Boydell’s Shakspeare Gallery do me with Shakspeare? To have Opie’s Shakspeare, Northcote’s Shakspeare, light-​ headed Fuseli’s Shakspeare, heavy-​ headed Romney’s

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Introduction

Shakspeare, wooden-​headed West’s Shakspeare (though he did the best in Lear), deaf-​headed Reynolds’s Shakspeare, instead of my, and everybody’s Shakspeare; to be tied down to an authentic face of Juliet! to have Imogen’s portrait! to confine the illimitable!5

This opinion, even though it was expressed several decades after the event, seems to have reflected the intellectual context in which the gallery was inaugurated. Boydell himself was aware of a potentially hostile critical reception and anticipated it by conceding the superiority of the poetic model to its pictorial transcriptions in the preface to the gallery’s catalogue: Though I  believe it will be readily admitted, that no subjects seem so proper to form an English school of historical painting, as the scenes of the immortal Shakspeare; yet it must be always remembered that he possessed powers which no pencil can reach, &c. It must not then be expected, the art of the Painter can ever equal the sublimity of our Poet. The strength of Michael Angelo, united to the grace of Raphael, would here have laboured in vain. It is therefore hoped, that the spectator will view these pictures with this regard, and not allow his imagination, warmed by the magic powers of the poet, to expect from painting what painting cannot perform.6

Boydell’s precautionary concession very clearly reflects the hierarchy that still existed between the arts twenty years after the creation of the Royal Academy: poetry was to provide the material for the highest category of painting, ‘history’, but even the greatest pictorial qualities according to academic canons –​‘The strength of Michael Angelo, united to the grace of Raphael’  –​could not match the ‘magic powers’ of the best poetry. Like Knowles and Lamb, Boydell also suggests what the main source of discrepancy between the two arts was, according to the literary critics: a ‘sublimity’ or an ‘illimitable’, which were within the reach of poetry only, and could not be matched by an art which remained necessarily mimetic. As the two arts were compared, painting was perceived to be constrained by its finiteness or ‘limits’ and by the fact that it was an ‘imitative art’, which prevented it from reaching the sublime. One of the most efficient justifications of this incommensurability was given by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in an analysis of Romeo and Juliet: The grandest efforts of poetry are where the imagination is called forth, not to produce a distinct form, but a strong working of the mind, still offering what is still repelled, and again creating what is again rejected;

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THE CHALLENGE OF THE SUBLIME

the result being what the poet wishes to impress, namely, the substitution of a sublime feeling of the unimaginable for a mere image. I have sometimes thought that the passage just read might be quoted as exhibiting the narrow limits of painting, as compared with the boundless power of poetry: painting cannot go beyond a certain point; poetry rejects all control, all confinement.7

Coleridge’s comparison expresses a conviction that had become common among the literary elite of his day, which was that far from being sister arts, painting and poetry functioned very differently, because of the specificity of their respective media. The former was literal (‘a mere image’), and consequently constrained by ‘narrow limits’, as Lessing had put it, whereas the latter was characterised by its endless process and unlimitedness. The dynamic open-​endedness of poetry especially allowed it to convey the sublime, which resided in an energetic striving for presentation rather than in the representation of a sublime object. Poetry substituted ‘a sublime feeling of the unimaginable for a mere image’. The conviction that, contrary to poetry, visual images were incapable of conveying dynamic conceptions that exceeded finite representations, seems to have been central to British literary Romanticism. W. J. T. Mitchell and Gillen D’Arcy Wood describe the new suspicion of painting as ‘romantic antipictorialism’ or ‘Romantic iconophobia’,8 while William Galperin talks of the ‘imaginative iconoclasm’ which is ‘endemic to romantic poetics’.9 Naturally, this viewpoint should not be overestimated, and analogies between poetry and painting remained pervasive in Romantic criticism;10 but antipictorial opinions certainly seem to have crystallised around the notion of the sublime. As the reactions to the literary galleries suggest, the idea that pictorial representation necessarily fell short of poetic evocation hinged on the idea that the illimitable was ungraspable by images of sense. And as Coleridge’s analysis implies, grasping the sublime required a living and productive artistic medium, like poetic language, rather than a strictly mimetic one. The simultaneous development of heightened expressive and literary aspirations among visual artists and of antipictorialism among contemporary writers is one of the most interesting paradoxes of British cultural history at the turn of the nineteenth century. One way of understanding this contrast is to see it as the expression of a new paragone, a new rivalry between the arts which, as suggested above, was articulated by the notion of the sublime and the 4

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Introduction

respective abilities of poetry and painting to convey it. While writers claimed that painters were incapable of reaching the illimitable, visual artists, encouraged by academic theory, felt it necessary to demonstrate the sublimity and affective powers of their media. The emulation of poetry recommended by academic teaching and the superiority conferred on history painting revolved around this compelling necessity. As Paul Duro puts it, ‘from the point of view of eighteenth-​century art theory the sublime is exactly what serious painting aimed for’.11 In this book, I will argue that this rivalry and its effects on visual practices may to a great extent be traced to one of the most successful definitions of the sublime in British aesthetic thought, Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757–​59),12 to its challenging criticism of the mimetic limitations of painting, but also to artists who were prepared to embrace its radical aesthetic implications nevertheless, and often found in competing theories and resourceful invention the means to do so. The Anglo-​Irish thinker and statesman Edmund Burke is better known for his contribution to political theory, especially through his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), which has been seen as a founding text of modern conservatism, and also because of an active parliamentary and debating career which has inspired both conservative and liberal traditions. Even though the youthful Philosophical Enquiry is overshadowed by this more mature political reflection, and even though it was a relatively short treatise which never led to further investigations, its impact on aesthetic thought and artistic practices is no less significant. In the first collection of essays devoted exclusively to the Enquiry, Michael Funk Deckard and Koen Vermeir argue that the treatise ‘has never received the sustained attention of professional philosophers or historians of ideas’, and that ‘In the academic literature, the work is only treated superficially in general histories of aesthetics.’13 While the observation is correct, it does not mean that the Enquiry’s importance has been neglected. Most studies of Enlightenment aesthetic theory underline its leading position and groundbreaking role, as a radical sensualist account of aesthetic experience and of the sublime,14 as the forerunner of a new irrationalist aesthetic sensibility, or even as a precursor of Kant’s theory of the sublime.15 Its impact on pictorial practices, through its systematic definition of a new, irrationalist, aesthetics of terror, is also generally 5

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THE CHALLENGE OF THE SUBLIME

acknowledged, and is rightly seen as one of the sources of the shift towards a Romantic sensibility in British art. This filiation is actually so widely accepted that the process of transmission of ideas itself has usually been only superficially examined. In his authoritative introduction to the Enquiry, James T. Boulton goes some way towards outlining such a process, by providing a first appraisal of Burke’s direct and personal influence on the artists of his time, including Joshua Reynolds, James Barry, Henry Fuseli and J. H. Mortimer.16 A number of individual studies of these artists also investigate the precise manner in which Burke’s ideas were discovered and adapted by his immediate contemporaries. Both Marilyn Toerbruegge and Luisa Calè raise the question of this transmission in their studies of Henry Fuseli;17 Robert Wark devotes a long note to Barry’s reaction to the Enquiry, while William L. Pressly’s and Liam Lenihan’s accounts of Barry’s life and work highlight the important intellectual and personal role played by Burke in his compatriot’s career.18 Blake’s explicit hostility to the Enquiry has also prompted a number of inquiries into what his aesthetics owed to the Burkean sublime, negatively or not, but the emphasis has usually been placed on his writings.19 Some studies of his theory and practice of art, however, have demonstrated the connection between his assertive choice of linearism after 1800 and his rejection of the Burkean sublime and the stylistic indistinctness associated with it. Robert Essick, Morris Eaves and David Baulch provide useful analyses of these theoretical connections, and of Blake’s refutation of Burke.20 Vincent De Luca should also be mentioned, as he underlines the significance of the Burkean sublime for Blake’s imagination, arguing that it provides a rich imagery of undifferentiated, vast and chaotic natural scenes that recurs through Blake’s poems. He also maintains that Blake seeks a more fulfilling, anti-​Burkean form of sublime, based on ‘determinacy, concentration, and intellectual play’, without however exploring the possible visual applications of his analysis.21 In broader studies or when immediate connections are more difficult to establish, critics have emphasised the manifest intellectual correspondences between the arguments of the Enquiry and the thematic and stylistic innovations of British Romantic art. Studies of Turner especially highlight the clear correspondences between his sublimity and both the themes and the natural imagery of the Enquiry. John Dixon Hunt and Ronald Paulson explore the connections between the treatise and Turner’s conception of history, 6

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Introduction

his depiction of natural scenery and his fascination for the motif of the sun, while Andrew Wilton’s Turner and the Sublime demonstrates the extensive impact of the aesthetics of the sublime on his whole oeuvre.22 Even though Wilton rightly considers Burke as only one of many possible theoretical influences on Turner, he also suggests how some aspects of the latter’s landscapes, including his use of colour and light, or his manipulation of perspective, may have been inspired by an informed knowledge of the Enquiry.23 The most extensive study of Burke’s impact on British pictorial practices is Morton D.  Paley’s The Apocalyptic Sublime, which provides a landmark analysis of these developments. Paley sees Burke’s treatise as a starting point for the emergence of a specifically British pictorial mode, which he calls ‘the apocalyptic sublime’ and describes as ‘a type of art in which the terror of divine revelation becomes the object of a nouveau frisson’.24 Throughout his survey, Paley establishes convincing correspondences between the contents of the Philosophical Enquiry, especially the sources of ‘delightful terror’ and visual indications included in it, and the specific themes or compositional devices associated with this new mode. He especially examines the works of Benjamin West, Philippe de Loutherbourg, William Blake, J. M. W. Turner, John Martin, Samuel Colman and Francis Danby. In more recent essays, Baldine Saint-​Girons argues that Burke gave theoretical legitimacy to the painting of nocturnal chiaroscuro, by explaining the affective power of darkness in physiological and psychological terms; but she only allusively suggests how this may have influenced the flourishing of tenebrism in British painting at the end of the eighteenth century, even though the art of Joseph Wright of Derby or the work of Henry Fuseli call for precisely such an interpretation.25 Further repercussions of Burke’s theory have been observed in continental European art, in American landscape painting and in the Gothic revival in British architecture. One may mention Stephen Z.  Levine’s analysis of Burke’s impact on French landscape painting, through the mediation of Diderot’s Salons,26 Didier Laroque’s analysis of his possible influence on Piranesi,27 as well as Andrew Wilton and Tim Barringer’s American Sublime,28 which suggests that Thomas Cole mediated Burke’s ideas for nineteenth-​century American landscape painters. Many of the critics who consider Burke’s theory to have been a significant impulse for Romantic art take for granted the influence of his thematics and its direct application to visual practices, 7

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without always seeing  –​or conceding  –​how challenging the text of the Enquiry was for artists. A  significant exception is an essay by Paul Duro, which begins with an acknowledgement of ‘the fundamental and unbridgeable separation [Burke] establishes between verbal and visual communication’. This recognition allows Duro to start exploring the paradoxical connection between Burke’s conviction that visual media are too mimetic to impart the sublime and British painters’ compelling attempts to do just that.29 Duro examines examples of work by Barry and Fuseli which suggest how Burke’s criticism of the literalness of painting prompted stylistic innovations. Such an angle of study should be further explored. I  agree with Duro that recognising such a tension is a necessary preamble to understanding the fascination for the sublime which pervaded British pictorial practices from the 1770s. In the following pages, I argue that not only is there a link between the Enquiry’s insistence on the limitations of painting and the significant endeavours of British artists to convey the sublime, but such a connection is actually the crux of Burke’s influence on British pre-​Romantic and Romantic art. My contention is that the repercussions of the Enquiry on British visual practices were even more far-​reaching than is generally acknowledged, because of the dual challenge that the treatise presented for visual artists. On the one hand, by redefining the sublime as an aesthetics of terror, in which novelty and intense affect depended on this most powerful of passions, it was calling on artists to explore a new and exalting repertoire that had not yet been given visual shape. Vast, dramatic natural scenery, together with supernatural or apocalyptic subject matter, were given aesthetic legitimacy, inspiring new artistic endeavours. On the other hand, however, the treatise was casting doubt on painting’s ability to convey these new motifs, and claimed that only poetry, because of its suggestiveness, could impart the intensity of affect associated with them. According to Burke, the mimetic, ‘clear and determinate’ images of painting prevented the forming of ‘the grander passions’ and the communication of terror. He wrote: ‘When painters have attempted to give us clear representations of these very fanciful and terrible ideas, they have … almost always failed.’30 By tempting artists with the possibility of thematic and iconographic renewal, while denying that extreme intensity of affect was within the reach of their clear or literal representations, the Philosophical Enquiry was 8

9

Introduction

inciting them to go much further than a simple change of repertoire. More importantly, by asserting the emotive superiority of the poetic medium over its pictorial counterpart, Burke was reviving the long-​standing rivalry between the arts, and inciting painters to demonstrate that their medium was adequate to the new aesthetic sensibility. Addressing such a challenge implied a radical redefinition of representational paradigms and a re-​examination of the mimetic assumptions that had so far underpinned the visual arts. While the first part of the challenge and the immediate responses to it are generally acknowledged, the significant implications of Burke’s refusal to admit of a pictorial sublime tend to be overlooked. The Enquiry is often seen as the main theoretical inspiration behind the flourishing of Gothic thematics which pervaded both textual and visual practices in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.31 Burke’s direct influence on this type of art is in fact so much taken for granted that uncanny scenes and dramatic landscapes are often simply called ‘Burkean’, even though the taste for terror had emerged earlier. Already in 1704, the critic John Dennis had compiled a list of terrifying sources of the sublime which encompassed many of the motifs that were to become favourites at the end of the century:  ‘gods, daemons, hell, spirits and souls of men, miracles, prodigies, enchantments, witchcrafts, thunder, tempests, raging seas, inundations, torrents, earthquakes, volcanoes, monsters, serpents, lions, tigers, fire, war, pestilence, famine, &c.’.32 If Burke is often credited with having inspired this new taste, it is because he was the first to explain methodically how terror could be a source of aesthetic delight. As Samuel Monk argues: ‘It was Burke who converted the early taste for terror into an aesthetic system and who passed it on with great emphasis to the last decades of the century, during which it was used and enjoyed in literature, painting, and the appreciation of natural scenery.’33 Following this radical shift in sensibility, a first test for artists was to produce works in which delight was mixed with terror and enhanced by it. They responded to it mostly with unprecedented thematic inventiveness, as Paley thoroughly demonstrates. The other side of Burke’s challenge to artists, his scepticism about the possibility of a pictorial sublime and his reintroduction of an inequality between the arts, has not gone unnoticed.34 It has even been called ‘revolutionary’ by Jean Hagstrum, who sees it as the first direct ‘challenge’ to ‘the values of pictorialism’, and contributing, 9

10

THE CHALLENGE OF THE SUBLIME

with Lessing’s Laocoön, ‘to the virtual disappearance of ut pictura poesis in major romantic criticism’.35 Its significance for later theories of the separation of the arts, especially Lessing’s and Diderot’s, but also for the antipictorialism of some Romantic writers, has already been outlined.36 Nevertheless, its impact on visual practices has not yet been fully explored. Those critics who have taken into account Burke’s reservations about painting have tended to argue that the fascination exerted by the new thematics of terror was so compelling that artists simply overlooked Burke’s preference for poetry. Morton D. Paley thus begins his study of the ‘Apocalyptic sublime’ by dismissing the problem in the following terms: By putting forward a theory that essentially distinguished the sublime from the beautiful, Burke, without particularly wishing to do so, taught his contemporaries to snatch a fearful joy from the experience of art. It is not that Edmund Burke had painting particularly in mind in his Enquiry –​he did not; nor is it that artists read Burke and applied his theory to their own work –​though some of them certainly did. Rather, Burke’s notion of the sublime passed into the general intellectual currency of the age, and it turned out to be as applicable to the visual arts as it was to the literary texts that Burke had used as examples.37

This is an astute and correct analysis: Paley grants that Burke was not writing for painters, and explains his influence on them as an indirect process, following the pervasive success of the Enquiry’s themes and motifs. While this process clearly played an important part, however, it does not tell the whole story. Burke’s contrast between the affective suggestiveness of poetry and the ‘clear representations’ of painting was not simply an obstacle to be overlooked by painters, but a crucial reflection about the artistic medium which could not but have direct consequences on pictorial practices. His exclusion of painting from the sublime on such terms implied a radical reassessment of the notion of representation and of artistic media. His questioning of the literalness and finiteness of the pictorial medium was fundamental, and any artist who paid attention to the contemporary developments in aesthetic reflection, as many did in the early days of the Royal Academy, could not fail to feel the significance of Burke’s statements. For the most experimental artists of the time, this essential aspect of his thought necessarily prompted a reflection about the pictorial medium, about its processes and about the possibility of unlimiting it to match ‘the boundless power of poetry’. 10

11

Introduction

In this book, I  develop the thesis that the unprecedented visual inventiveness of the Romantic period in Britain may, to a great extent, directly or indirectly, be seen as a response to the challenge raised by the Burkean sublime. Even though Burke’s theory was far from being the only available treatise on the sublime at the time, I  will contend that it was the most influential for visual artists, because it crystallised the aesthetic evolutions of its time, but also because it questioned the basic premises of visual representation; at the same time as it introduced a new sensibility, it called for a reassessment of the pictorial medium and its processes. By reintroducing a rivalry between painting and poetry based on the mimetic limitations of painting, Burke was inciting visual artists not just to demonstrate the emotive powers of their art, but to explore new, non-​ mimetic or non-​ finite visual paradigms. For this reason, as I intend to argue, the ambitions of British artists in the decades that followed the creation of the Royal Academy were not limited to ‘history painting’, or depictions of the uncanny, but also took the shape of intense experiments with visual form. These include the invention of dramatic media of visual immersion, including Philippe-​Jacques de Loutherbourg’s Eidophusikon and Robert Barker’s panorama, experiments with the format and style of book illustrations, as well as radical transformations in the structures and techniques of landscape painting and sketching. They may be observed in the work of most major artists of the period, including notably William Blake and J.  M. W.  Turner. They occurred especially when artists attempted to reach beyond the bounds of mimetic representation and to introduce a new dynamism into their pictorial or graphic productions. Even though Burke’s influence is not often acknowledged by the Romantic artists who sought these novel visual paradigms, and even though by the time it reached artists like Turner it had undergone a number of theoretical and poetic inflections, I  contend that he provided a notable impetus. To begin with, his Enquiry initiated the antipictorialism which, I argue, stirred the ambitions of visual artists and incited them to compete with the productions of poetry. More significantly perhaps, his conception of the sublime as beyond the reach of certain forms of representations may be seen as the source of a compelling urge to ‘present the unpresentable’, which I  consider to be central to such experiments. By drawing attention to a gap between representation and what exceeds it, he was 11

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THE CHALLENGE OF THE SUBLIME

highlighting the importance of creative endeavour, and shifting the focus from the finished art work to the open-​ended processes of artistic production. This shift may be considered a groundbreaking moment in aesthetic reflection. The idea that the aesthetics of the sublime is about the presentation of the unpresentable has only recently become central to discussions of the concept. It was first expressed by Jean-​François Lyotard, who demonstrated the relevance of the sublime for what he called postmodern aesthetics in a series of essays beginning with La Condition postmoderne:  rapport sur le savoir, published in 1979. Lyotard famously claimed that postmodernism was ‘the presentation of the unpresentable in presentation itself’38 and connected this endeavour with the avant-​garde’s quest for the sublime, of which he saw striking illustrations in the work of painters like Barnett Newman. This statement has come to epitomise the contemporary reflection on the sublime, as it may be found in the writings of Lyotard and other poststructuralist philosophers, including Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze or Jean-​Luc Nancy. The starting point of their reflection is to be found in Kant’s ‘Analytic of the sublime’ in the Critique of the Power of Judgment, in which the sublime is related to supersensible ideas of reason which cannot be given sensible presentation, and to the failure of the imagination, which is a ‘sensible faculty’,39 to give an adequate presentation (Darstellung) of these ideas. While Kant considers the tension to be resolved by the fulfilling intervention of reason, the recent debate insists that the sublime hinges on the unresolved conflict between what cannot be presented (because it exceeds the grasp of the imagination or the senses) and the endeavour to present it nonetheless. According to David B. Johnson, who focuses on the work of Lyotard, Kristeva, Deleuze and Jameson, ‘in these thinkers’ view … the experience of the sublime involves a crisis for the faculty of presentation [the imagination] in the form of an irresolvable conflict between it and a set of objects that remain fundamentally inaccessible to it, but that it strives to present nonetheless’.40 For Lyotard, the experience is not necessarily negative, and can be a source of invention, as long as the emphasis is not placed ‘on the powerlessness of the faculty of presentation, on the nostalgia for presence felt by the human subject’. According to him, in avant-​ garde artworks, the emphasis is ‘placed on the increase of being and the jubilation which result from the invention of new rules of the 12

13

Introduction

game, be it pictorial, artistic, or any other’.41 In his study of Kant’s ‘Analytic of the sublime’, he describes the ‘sentiment of the sublime’ as a means for thought to break open boundaries and enjoy its own ‘démesure’, that is to say its excessiveness and boundlessness;42 it is the expression of thought ‘in the raw’, before it is captured by limitations, forms, schemata or conceptual rules.43 Steven Vine calls this ‘an affirmative sublime of signifying excess’.44 Another positive reading of this inadequacy between conception and presentation is provided by Jean-​Luc Nancy, who locates the sublime in the imaginative or creative process rather than its product, in ‘the play of presentation itself, without any represented object’, or ‘form forming itself, for itself, without object’.45 One should also mention Derrida’s interpretation, in which the tension at the core of presentation is also central to the experience of the sublime, but the necessity to present the unpresentable and the process of it is seen as a form of violence: The sublime cannot inhabit any sensible form. … It therefore refuses all adequate presentation. But how can this unpresentable thing present itself? … It inadequately presents the infinite in the finite and delimits it violently therein. Inadequation (Unangemessenheit), excessiveness, incommensurability are presented, let themselves be presented, be stood up, set upright in front of (darstellen) as that inadequation itself. Presentation is inadequate to the idea of reason but it is presented in its very inadequation, adequate to its inadequation. The inadequation of presentation is presented.46

Because Kant was the first to thoroughly explore this irresolvable tension, ‘the thinkers of the postmodern sublime’, according to Johnson, ‘focus almost exclusively on Kant’s interpretation’47 and show little interest in earlier definitions. One of the aims of this study is to contend that such an irresolvable tension was already contained in the Burkean challenge. While Burke’s description of the sublime as an experience combining delight and horror has already been understood to anticipate the conflict of faculties outlined by Kant,48 I would like to argue that his theory also implied a reflection about the inadequation of representation and the transformation of artistic processes as a consequence. As the Enquiry explicitly deterred painters from representing what was beyond their reach, it implicitly incited them to endeavour to present the unpresentable, even if that meant that they would mostly draw attention to the 13

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THE CHALLENGE OF THE SUBLIME

inconclusiveness or failure of such attempts. Painting was the site where ‘the presentation of the unpresentable in presentation itself’ could most obviously take place, because of its very inadequacy. Experiments with pictorial form or space could be seen as so many processes of presentation, of artistic endeavour towards an unlimited that exceeds representation. The visual arts thus became the locus where the sublime conflict between sensible presentation and the unlimited was enacted. As Burke denied these arts the realisation of the sublime in mimetic representation, they relocated sublimity within the struggle of artistic production itself. These important ramifications of Burke’s influence in British Romantic art will be the subject of this book. To fully demonstrate their significance, I first propose to assess the extent to which British artists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were aware of, and reacting to, the representational challenge raised by a theory which questioned not only the sister arts tradition, but also the mimetic foundation of the visual arts. This entails examining the text of the Enquiry, confronting it with competing theories of the sublime and tracing the processes through which Burke’s ideas were transmitted to visual artists and adapted to existing theories of painting. It also requires exploring visual strategies that may be seen to address the Enquiry’s criticism of painting, including attempts to unlimit the pictorial image, to demonstrate its suggestiveness or vie with the dynamic workings of poetry. A wide range of pictorial and graphic techniques and media, which are not all encompassed by academic painting, should be examined, as the diversification of visual practices which characterises the age could partly be seen as a response to such a challenge. To understand the complexity of these responses, it will be necessary to look at the Burkean sublime as an adaptable conception, which underwent a number of evolutions as it was simultaneously appropriated and rejected by the most innovative artists of the Romantic period. It will also be important to take into account the competing theories of the sublime which made it possible for artists like Reynolds, Fuseli, Blake or Turner to deal with the challenge to visual representation that had been raised by the Enquiry, or attenuated its message. Finally, it will be useful to examine the treatise’s implications from the point of view of contemporary aesthetic reflection. This perspective will make it possible in particular to explain how Burke’s theory eventually contributed to a quest 14

15

Introduction

for sublimity within processes of production themselves rather than in the represented object; or how his reflections on the superiority of the non-​mimetic poetic language may be seen to lead to visual practices in which medium reflexivity comes to the fore and supersedes the imitation of the natural object. As such displacements of the sublime towards non-​mimetic models of visual representation reach far beyond Burke, who could only conceive of painting as an imitative art, they will require new interpretative frameworks. For this reason, I will, when relevant, assess these artistic innovations in the light of more recent theories of the sublime, which are not based upon a mimetic conception of art –​including those of Jean-​François Lyotard, Jean-​Luc Nancy and Jacques Derrida. Because these theories understand the sublime as an immanent ‘event’ of artistic production, and actually show much interest in visual processes, they will prove useful to account for a number of Romantic visual strategies in which the sublime of the process of representation displaces that of the object represented. As my purpose in this book is to outline the significant repercussions of Burke’s theory on artistic practices, I will leave aside other important aspects of the Enquiry, notably its social and ideological implications, which have already received thorough scholarly attention, to focus mostly on strictly artistic considerations.49 For the same reason, I will not dwell on the Reflections on the Revolution in France, even though they reveal the persistence of Burke’s conception of the sublime until late in his career, and develop its original connection with fear and power.50 The scope of my survey is deliberately restrained, yet it is ambitious, since I consider the Enquiry to have had a profound impact on visual practices in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, both in the British Isles and beyond. In the first part of the book, I defend the claim that Burke is to be seen as a pivotal figure in the history of British art, by appraising both his aesthetic theory and his immediate influence on the artists of his generation. It is first of all necessary to determine what made Burke’s antipictorial definition of the sublime so significant for visual artists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when other theories that were more obviously compatible with painting were available. For this reason, I devote the first two chapters of the book to an assessment of the Philosophical Enquiry and its message for artists. I begin by outlining what Burke’s treatise 15

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THE CHALLENGE OF THE SUBLIME

owes to previous theories of the sublime, but also what its innovations are, insisting on its aesthetically stimulating irrationalism and sensualism. I  then focus on what I  consider to be the most outstanding feature of his reflection about the possibility of an artistic sublime:  his separation of visual and verbal representation, based on the rejection of the idea that they have a common mimetic basis, and his argument that only the non-​mimetic, suggestive medium of the verbal arts, language, may impart the sublime. In Chapter 1, I mostly argue that, at a time when parallels between the arts prevailed, this was an isolated point of view, which introduced a new paragone situation and a challenge to visual artists. In Chapter 2, I  suggest that this view may be seen as the source of a representational crisis for painters, who felt compelled to transform their medium so as to match the dynamic, affective and non-​mimetic processes of the poetic medium. I make the point that Burke’s original reflection about language as a vehicle of the sublime entails a broader reflection about artistic representation, which was eventually applicable to the visual arts, as the postmodern debate about the sublime has shown. Chapters 3 and 4 highlight the direct intellectual connections that contributed to the transmission of Burke’s ideas among painters, starting with his close friendship and sustained interaction with two important figures of British art of the time: the first president of the Royal Academy of Arts, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and the Irish painter and Royal Academy professor James Barry. Reynolds’s and Burke’s friendship and intellectual interactions of more than three decades are especially noteworthy, as they brought together an emphatic neoclassical conception of painting and one of the earliest expressions of a Romantic sensibility. The impact of Burke’s aesthetics on Reynolds’s own theory of painting is examined in Chapter 3, where I  suggest that, in spite of his conventional academic approach, Reynolds was receptive to his friend’s ideas. I examine Reynolds’s own conception of the sublime and its various theoretical origins, in order to determine whether the Enquiry’s irrationalism filtered into Reynolds’s own discourse on art and how Reynolds responded to Burke’s antipictorialism. The ultimate issue is to ascertain whether Reynolds mediated his friend’s aesthetics for the Royal Academy of Arts, or at least gave it a form of ‘academic’ legitimacy in his discourse, if not in his practice. I argue that Reynolds’s reconciliation of the neoclassical notion of the ‘grand style’ with a new emphasis 16

17

Introduction

on imagination and intensity of affect could be seen as the first stage in the development of ‘Burkean’ academic productions, which flourished from the mid-​1770s onwards with increasing emphasis on terror. Chapter 4 explores this academic predilection for dramatic or terrifying subject matter, and assesses the extent of Burke’s immediate influence on it. The correspondence between Burke and his protégé James Barry provides an eloquent starting point: it reveals the fascination exerted by the Enquiry on the painters of the pre-​Romantic generation and it suggests how keen they were to ­demonstrate –​to Burke himself –​that their art was capable of the same intensity of affect as poetry. It also implies that such a c­ onfidence was bolstered by the neoclassical principles that still prevailed in the theory of painting at the time. The rest of the chapter examines other examples of academic painters who addressed the challenge of the sublime from the perspective of neoclassical a­ esthetics, and successfully conflated existing pictorial formulae with the new taste for terror. The work of Henry Fuseli, in particular, is presented as a conscious and informed response to contemporary theories of the sublime, including Burke’s, which sought dynamism, irrationalism and affective power while remaining within the boundaries of academic aesthetics. The second part of the book links some of the most striking visual innovations of the Romantic period to artists’ awareness of Burke’s theory and of the attention it had drawn to the limitations of visual representation. I argue here that the diversification of these artistic practices especially addressed Burke’s contrast between the ‘clear representations’ of painting and the boundlessness associated with the sublime, by seeking ways of overcoming the physical limits imposed by frames, outlines and the conventional structuring of the pictorial space. I contend that the invention of the panorama, experiments in the medium of book illustration, new practices of landscape painting and sketching, as well as the flourishing of ruin paintings and drawings, may all be seen as explorations of forms that could be likely to unlimit the visual arts, by emancipating them from constraints of size, framing or internal structuring. Chapter 5 focuses on what appears to be one of the most conscious responses to Burke’s criticism of pictorial limitations:  the invention of the panorama by the Irish-​ Scottish painter Robert Barker in the late 1780s. By literally removing the edges of representation, and immersing its viewers within an uninterrupted circular 17

18

THE CHALLENGE OF THE SUBLIME

view, the panorama created a striking illusion of reality which, at least while the medium was still novel, caused unprecedented spectatorial thrills. Contemporary reviews called the experience ‘sublime’ and reports of powerful somatic responses of the type described by the Philosophical Enquiry were not uncommon. While the medium could be linked to a tradition of illusion and immersion51 which predated the Enlightenment reflection on the sublime, Barker clearly saw its relevance as a means to deny the limitations of painting and his description of his invention seems to confirm such intentions. Ostensibly addressing the objections to painting introduced by Burke, he called the panorama an ‘Improvement on Painting, Which relieves that sublime Art from a Restraint it has ever laboured under’52 and explained that he was ‘unlimiting the bounds of the Art of Painting’.53 As I will argue, this conception of the panorama as the most adequate pictorial vehicle of the sublime was to endure for several decades. Chapter 6 looks at attempts to unlimit visual representation at its edges in the ‘minor’ media of book illustrations and landscape sketches. I argue that Romantic artists showed unprecedented interest in these marginal forms of visual expression because they allowed them to work outside of the rigid quadrilateral frame of exhibition painting, on the edge of the pictorial or graphic image. They were thus able to explore the liminal space between representation and its absence, in which were articulated the essential tensions of the sublime: the encounter between images of sense and the supersensible that exceeds them, as well as the transition from the beautiful to the sublime. Postmodern theory, especially through Jacques Derrida’s notion of parergonality and Jean-​Luc Nancy’s definition of sublime ‘unlimitation’, allows me to see these transitional and unstable spaces as significant places of visual exploration, and to explain in what way they can be seen as a response to the Burkean challenge. The argument first focuses on the enthusiasm of Romantic artists for book illustrations, which they used as a means to structure the work of art from within rather than from pre-​given edges or limits. Blake’s illuminated poems and the Romantic vignette are analysed as attempts to unframe the visual composition in order to unlimit it, but also to increase the dynamism and suggestiveness of the visual medium, allowing it to rival the affective powers of the text it illustrates. Further examples of ‘unlimitation’ are then provided by changing compositional practices in landscape painting, 18

19

Introduction

in connection with plein-​air sketching and the use of watercolour. I consider these preliminary studies to reveal a heightened awareness of the fragmentary dimension of representations of nature. I also argue that the immediacy of the practice contributed to the unravelling of perspective space and internal framing devices within landscape compositions. In all cases, a yearning for what exceeds sensible representation is manifest. Unlimitation could also take the form of internal destructuring, a process which is perhaps most obvious in ruin paintings and imaginary architectural drawings or capricci, which flourished in Britain in the decades that followed the publication of the Enquiry. Chapter  7 contends that in this fashionable mode, the combined influences of Edmund Burke and Giovanni Battista Piranesi fostered a new approach to pictorial space, in which the fragment and the ruin can become fundamental (de)structuring components, rather than ornamental motifs in a pre-​given space. This new form of unlimitation will be shown to have been Burkean in more than one sense: as they simultaneously called for imaginary completion and plunged into a terrifying feeling of transience, the ruin paintings of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries seem to have sought the delightful horror which the Enquiry had made central to the sublime. In Part III, I explore Romantic visual praxis, by which I mean the artists’ concrete engagement with their materials and production, as the place where the Burkean sublime was not only addressed, but also redefined and supplanted. I focus on the work of two artists for whom medium reflexivity and reflection on processes of visual presentation become fundamental, William Blake and J. M. W. Turner. I argue that their formal explorations resolved the Burkean challenge by relocating the sublime within the tensions of artistic endeavour, or redefining it as immanent to the process of artistic production. By suggesting that instead of being a quality of the represented object, the sublime had to do with the artist’s exertions towards visual presentation, such approaches may be seen to have carried out the full implications of the Burkean sublime. At the same time, they implied that issues of mimetic limitations are irrelevant, and suggested a striking way to reassert the place of the visual arts within the aesthetics of the sublime. Chapter 8 contends that Blake’s theory and practice of art define, against Burke, an original conception of the sublime as a dynamic 19

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THE CHALLENGE OF THE SUBLIME

process located within creative activity itself rather than an empirical experience founded on passive psychological and physiological responses to external sources of terror. I argue that this shift allows Blake to give a new significance to visual production, which is no longer cut off from the sublime, but becomes a necessary process towards it. I read Blake’s prophetic cycle as a dramatisation of the incommensurability of Vision and sensible form, which articulates the predicament of the artist, caught between the necessity to present forms and the awareness that material representation is the first step toward a fall from Vision. The necessity of artistic production prevails because, according to Blake, it is the energetic endeavour to produce forms which demonstrates the imaginative power of the artist, which in fact is sublime in itself. This is made manifest by the artist’s emphasis on line, and the high degree of medium reflexivity in his illuminated books. Chapter  9 concludes the survey with another major figure of British art, Joseph Mallord William Turner. Even though in his case, theoretical influences coalesced in an indistinct manner, often indirectly as a result of the intellectual and artistic context at the Royal Academy, I  contend that his original practice may be understood as the culmination and synthesis of his predecessors’ conscious responses to the challenge introduced by Burke. I also explain that it could be seen as one the most adequate demonstrations of how painting could overcome the medium-​specific difficulties highlighted by Burke, and rival the affective powers of poetry. After outlining the convergence of theoretical and poetic influences through which Turner defined his own conception of the sublime, I explain that he addressed Burke’s criticism of the mimetic limitations of painting by displaying the sublime energy of pictorial production, but also the elusiveness of the finished form. This emphasis on endeavour, and on the presentation of the unpresentable, could be understood to take the aesthetics of the Enquiry to its radical conclusion, leading to a resolute change of paradigms in visual representation. It goes without saying that the impact of Burke’s theory on the practices I  examine became gradually indirect, and that painters like Reynolds or Barry, who were in actual contact with the man and his ideas, were more clearly conscious of addressing them than later generations. Paradoxically, however, the evolution I  retrace suggests increasingly adequate responses to the Enquiry’s reflections on the artistic medium and an increasing awareness of the 20

21

Introduction

necessity to emancipate painting, first from its conventional formats and then from its mimetic limitations. One of the reasons was that some of Burke’s intuitions were given more explicit formulations by later theoreticians. Most notably, Lessing, who had read the Enquiry and intended to translate it into German, explained the differences between the sister arts in ways which stated more clearly what the limitations of painting were, by insisting on its spatiality and impossible development in time. It was his notion of the ‘narrow limits of painting’ that was to be associated with the sublime by Romantic writers, and thus to render the aspiration for unlimitation more urgent among visual artists, even though he himself had not examined the question of the sublime. Another reason was that Burke’s association of the sublime with indistinctness and representational failure or inadequacy had become topoi of British aesthetic thought by the end of the eighteenth century. Thus, in 1791, William Gilpin was able to write with confidence that ‘[a]‌ll writers on sublime subjects deal in shadows and obscurity’, that ‘[m]any images owe much of their sublimity to their indistinctness’, and that the sublime is more within the grasp of the poet than of the painter because ‘[t]he business of the former is only to excite ideas; that of the latter, to represent them’.54 Some of the artistic innovations that are examined in this book responded to these topoi more than to the Enquiry itself. But as often as possible, I  attempt to trace the direct connections between this influential treatise and Romantic visual experiments, and I believe I show that they are numerous indeed. Notes 1 See Jean Hagstrum’s landmark study, The Sister Arts:  The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism and English Poetry from Dryden to Gray (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1958). 2 M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp:  Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 1953), p.  50. Among other accounts of the decline of pictorialism in eighteenth-​ century literature, one may mention John Dixon Hunt, The Figure in the Landscape:  Poetry, Painting and Gardening during the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976) and Laurent Châtel, ‘The Resistance of Words and the Challenge of Images: Visual Writing in Late Eighteenth-​Century Britain’, Interfaces 32 (2011–​12), 49–​64.

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3 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoön, trans. R. Phillimore (London: Routledge, 1874), p 56. 4 John Knowles, The Life and Writings of Henry Fuseli, 3 vols (London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1831), vol. I, pp. 197–​8. 5 Percy Fitzgerald, The Life, Letters, and Writings of Charles Lamb, 6 vols (New York: Case Press, 2008), vol. III, p. 62. 6 Preface to the Catalogue of the Shakespeare Gallery (1789), quoted in M. Merchant, Shakespeare and the Artist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 67. 7 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lectures 1808–​19:  On Literature, 2 vols, ed. R. A. Foakes. The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge 5 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), vol. II, p. 496. 8 W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 115; Gillen d’Arcy Wood, The Shock of the Real: Romanticism and Visual Culture, 1760–​ 1860 (Basingstoke:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), p. 175. 9 William Galperin, The Return of the Visible in British Romanticism (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), p. 19. 10 See, for example, Roy Park, ‘“Ut Pictura Poesis”:  The Nineteenth-​ Century Aftermath’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 28:2 (Winter 1969), 155–​64. 11 Paul Duro, ‘Observations on the Burkean Sublime’, Word and Image 29:1 (2013), 40–​58, here 48. 12 The Philosophical Enquiry went through two editions, in 1757 and 1759. The second included extensive new material, notably the introduction ‘On Taste’ and the section on ‘Power’ in the second part, partly as a response to reviews of the first edition. It has been proven, however, that Burke wrote much of the Enquiry at an earlier stage, while a student at Trinity College, Dublin. See especially James T. Boulton, ‘Editor’s Introduction’, in Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, ed. James T. Boulton (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), pp. xi–​xvi. 13 Koen Vermeir and Michael Funk Deckard, eds, The Science of Sensibility:  Reading Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry (Dordrecht, Heidelberg, London and New York: Springer, 2012), p. v. 14 See, for example, Vanessa Ryan, ‘The Physiological Sublime:  Burke’s Critique of Reason’, Journal of the History of Ideas 62:2 (2001), 265–​ 79. See also Boulton, ‘Editor’s Introduction’, especially p.  xxxiii, and Rodolphe Gasché, ‘… And the Beautiful? Revisiting Edmund Burke’s “Double Aesthetics”’, in Timothy M. Costelloe (ed.), The Sublime: From Antiquity to the Present (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 24.

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15 Among the most noteworthy studies of Burke’s Enquiry and of its aesthetic significance, one should consider Samuel Monk’s The Sublime:  A Study of Critical Theories in XVIII-​ Century England (New  York:  Modern Language Association of America, 1935); Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime:  Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence (Baltimore and London:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), especially pp. 83–​ 106; Frances Ferguson, Solitude and the Sublime:  Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Individuation (New York: Routledge, 1992); Baldine Saint-​Girons, Fiat lux: une philosophie du sublime (Paris: Quai Voltaire, 1993); James Kirwan, Sublimity: The Non-​Rational and the Irrational in the History of Aesthetics (New York and London: Routledge, 2005); Philip Shaw, The Sublime (London and New York: Routledge, 2006); Emily Brady, The Sublime in Modern Philosophy:  Aesthetics, Ethics and Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); David Bromwich, The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke:  From the Sublime and Beautiful to American Independence (Cambridge, MA:  Belknap Press, 2014); and Robert Doran, The Theory of the Sublime from Longinus to Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 16 Boulton, ‘Editor’s Introduction’, pp. cviii–​cxviii. 17 Marilyn Klein Torbruegge, ‘Bodmer and Füssli, “Das Wunderbare” and the Sublime’ (PhD thesis, University of Wisconsin, 1968). Luisa Calè, Fuseli’s Milton Gallery:  ‘Turning Readers into Spectators’ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006). 18 Robert Wark, ‘A Note on James Barry and Edmund Burke’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 17:3 (1954), 382–​4; William L. Pressly, The Life and Art of James Barry (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981); William L. Pressly, James Barry: The Artist as Hero (London: Tate Gallery Publications, 1983). 19 Some of the most thorough analyses of the Blakean sublime include Vincent A. De Luca, Words of Eternity:  Blake and the Poetics of the Sublime (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1991); Peter Otto, Blake’s Critique of Transcendence: Love, Jealousy, and the Sublime in The Four Zoas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); and Stephen Vine, ‘Blake’s Material Sublime’, Studies in Romanticism 41:2 (2002), 237–​57. 20 Morris Eaves, William Blake’s Theory of Art (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1982). Robert N. Essick, William Blake, Printmaker (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1980). David M. Baulch, ‘“To rise from generation”: The Sublime Body in Blake’s Illuminated Books’, Word and Image 13 (1997), 340–​64. 21 De Luca, Words of Eternity, p. 5.

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22 Ronald Paulson, Literary Landscape:  Turner and Constable (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1982), especially pp. 80–​90; John Dixon Hunt, ‘Wondrous Deep and Dark: Turner and the Sublime’, Georgia Review 30 (1976), 139–​64. 23 Andrew Wilton, Turner and the Sublime (London:  British Museum Publications, 1980), especially pp. 66–​7, 79, 101. 24 Morton D. Paley, The Apocalyptic Sublime (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986), p. 1. 25 Saint-​Girons, Fiat lux, pp.  157–​8; also, Baldine Saint-​Girons, ‘Burke, the Revenge of Obscurity and the Foundation of the Aesthetic’, in Vermeir and Funk Deckard, The Science of Sensibility, pp. 305–​19 and Baldine Saint-​Girons, Les marges de la nuit: pour une autre histoire de la peinture (Paris: Éditions de l’Amateur, 2006), pp. 40–​2. 26 Stephen Z. Levine, ‘Seascapes of the Sublime:  Vernet, Monet, and the Oceanic Feeling’, New Literary History 12:2 (Winter 1985), pp. 377–​400. 27 Didier Laroque, Le Discours de Piranèse: l’ornement sublime et le suspens de l’architecture (Paris: Éditions de la Passion, 1999), pp. 18–​23. 28 Andrew Wilton and Tim Barringer, American Sublime:  Landscape Painting in the United States, 1820–​1880 (London:  Tate Publishing, 2002), p. 22. 29 Paul Duro, ‘Observations on the Burkean Sublime’, Word and Image 29:1 (2013), 40–​58. 30 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, ed. Adam Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), II, iv, p. 58. 31 As Vijay Mishra points out, ‘Burke has been used by most theorists of the Gothic as an important precursor of the literary Gothic insofar as his insistence on the sublime as a quality of the object (which in turn made our senses excitable) is seen to be a key determinant of the sublime discourses of the Gothic.’ Vijay Mishra, ‘The Gothic Sublime’, in David Punter (ed.), A New Companion to the Gothic (Oxford: Wiley-​ Blackwell, 2012), pp. 288–​306, here pp. 290–​1. 32 John Dennis, The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry (1704), in Andrew Ashfield and Peter de Bolla (eds), The Sublime:  A Reader in British Eighteenth-​ Century Aesthetic Theory (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 38. 33 Monk, The Sublime, p. 87. 34 See especially W. J.  T. Mitchell, Iconology:  Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 116–​49. 35 Hagstrum, The Sister Arts, pp. 151–​3. 36 See, for example, Gita May, ‘Diderot and Burke: A Study in Aesthetic Affinity’, PMLA 75:5 (December 1960), 527–​39, especially 536–​8, or

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Calè, Fuseli’s Milton Gallery. Recently, Alan Richardson has connected Burke’s preference for obscurity with antipictorial Romantic practices. Alan Richardson, The Neural Sublime:  Cognitive Theories and Romantic Texts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010). 37 Paley, The Apocalyptic Sublime, p. 2. 38 Jean-​François Lyotard, ‘Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?’, in The Postmodern Condition:  A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), p. 81. 39 Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 141. 40 David B. Johnson, ‘The Postmodern Sublime:  Presentation and its Limits’, in Costelloe, The Sublime, pp. 118–​19. 41 Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, pp. 79–​80. 42 Jean-​François Lyotard, Leçons sur l’analytique du sublime (Paris: Galilée, 1991), p. 75. 43 Lyotard, Leçons, p. 152. 44 Stephen Vine, Reinventing the Sublime:  Post-​ Romantic Literature and Theory (Brighton, Chicago and Toronto:  Sussex Academic Press, 2013), p. 10. 45 Jean-​ Luc Nancy, ‘The Sublime Offering’, in Jean-​ François Courtine (ed.), Jeffrey S. Librett (trans.), Of the Sublime: Presence in Question (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), pp. 28–​9. 46 Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 131. 47 Johnson, ‘The Postmodern Sublime’, p. 119. 48 See, for example, Doran, The Theory of the Sublime, pp. 178–​82 and 212–​13. 49 Studies of the ideological implications of the Enquiry may in particular be found in Tom Furniss, Edmund Burke’s Aesthetic Ideology: Language, Gender, and Political Economy in Revolution (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1993); Stephen K. White, Edmund Burke:  Modernity, Politics, and Aesthetics (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1994); Terry Eagleton, “Aesthetics and Politics in Edmund Burke,” History Workshop 28 (1989): 53–​62. Essays by Daniel I. O’Neill, F. P. Lock, Katherine O’Donnell, Richard Bourke and Bart Vandenabeele deal with this dimension of the Enquiry in Vermeir and Funk Deckard, The Science of Sensibility. 50 This connection is examined, for example, in Ronald Paulson, Representations of Revolution, 1789–​ 1820 (New Haven:  Yale University Press, 1983) and Neal Wood, ‘The Aesthetic Dimension of Burke’s Political Thought’, Journal of British Studies 4:1 (November 1964), 41–​64.

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51 See Oliver Grau, Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002). 52 Edinburgh Evening Courant, 29 December 1787, I. 53 The Diary: or Woodfall’s Register, 9 April 1789. 54 William Gilpin, Remarks on Forest Scenery and other Woodland Views (1791), ed. T. D. Lauder (Edinburgh: Fraser & Co., 1834), vol. I, p. 335.

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PART I From the Enquiry to the Academy

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u The Philosophical Enquiry, theories of the sublime and the sister arts tradition

In his authoritative bicentenary edition of Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, James T. Boulton wrote these introductory words: Without exaggerating the wisdom of the Enquiry, one must rank it among the most important documents of its century. Besides painters, architects and a host of minor writers, such major figures as Johnson, Blake (despite his overt scorn for Burke’s ideas), Wordsworth, Hardy, Diderot, Lessing, and Kant felt its influence.1

Since then, many assessments of eighteenth-​century aesthetic theory have confirmed this appraisal, seeing in Burke’s treatise a crucial contribution to this emerging branch of philosophy. Most recently, Robert Doran, according to whom the Philosophical Enquiry ‘is one of the foundational texts of modern aesthetics’, has reasserted that Burke’s theory may be considered to ‘serve as a bridge between the empiricism of early eighteenth-​century British criticism (Addison, Shaftsbury, Hutcheson) and the development of philosophical aesthetics in Germany in the latter half of the eighteenth century (Mendelssohn, Lessing, Kant)’.2 The present study similarly underlines the fundamental intellectual significance of the Enquiry, by highlighting its impact beyond aesthetic theory, on artistic practices. I intend to show to what extent and in which respects Burke’s treatise, by denying painting the ability to convey the sublime, heralded a crisis of representation that was to affect visual practices much beyond the eighteenth-​century 29

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context. In order to understand the repercussions of the Enquiry on pictorial practices, however, it will be necessary to examine the theoretical context against which it stands. This requires assessing what it owed to the aesthetic discourse of its time, and in what ways it departed from previous theories of the sublime. It also means explaining why Burke’s theory, more than those of his predecessors or immediate contemporaries, challenged visual artists and called for a rethinking of visual representation. In this chapter, I  will scrutinise Burke’s views and their impact first of all by comparing his conception to that of thinkers he was especially indebted to, in particular Longinus and Joseph Addison, and to the prevailing discourse on art, which considered painting to be compatible with the sublime. This will allow me to underline the originality of Burke’s claims about the representational limitations of painting and to argue that his conception of the sublime undermined the sister arts tradition. The further artistic repercussions of the Enquiry will be the object of Chapter 2, which will foreground Burke’s original contribution to theories of representation, and the challenge that it raised by drawing attention to the tensions and inadequacies within artistic production itself. From Longinus to Burke While the Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful is often considered to be a groundbreaking work on aesthetics, it was far from being isolated within the context of Enlightenment aesthetic theory. As critics like Andrew Ashfield and Peter de Bolla have demonstrated, too much focus on Burke tends to obscure what was in fact a very complex and fertile debate: not only did aesthetic reflection come to the fore in the philosophical writings of the time, but many British Enlightenment thinkers included reflections on the sublime within their broader investigations of fields as diverse as human understanding, ethics, physiology or linguistics.3 What is more, it is important to acknowledge that Burke’s essay owed much to the work of predecessors, and especially to the Longinian tradition as it had developed in Britain since the beginning of the century. Longinus’ Peri Hupsous (On the Sublime), a Greek treatise of the first or third century AD, had become known in Britain through Boileau’s French translation of it, in 1674.4 Although the treatise 30

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focused on the powerful effects of rhetoric and style, some marginal comments suggested a potentially much broader application of the notion of the sublime. Thus, Longinus had anticipated the possibility of a form of aesthetic appreciation that was mingled with a sense of danger and terror. Chapter X of Peri Hupsous, in particular, had praised Homer for his ability to choose ‘the most terrific circumstances’ ‘in his descriptions of tempests’ and for seeking the effect of terror, instead of focusing on poetic ornament.5 Longinus had equally examined the possibility of a ‘natural’ sublime, derived from awe-​inspiring natural objects, of which he had suggested several examples: [N]‌ature prompts us to admire, not the clearness and usefulness of a little stream, but the Nile, the Danube, the Rhine, and far beyond all the Ocean; not to turn our wandering eyes from the heavenly fires, though often darkened, to the little flame kindled by human hands, however pure and steady its light; not to think that tiny lamp more wondrous than the caverns of Aetna, from whose raging depths are hurled up stones and whole masses of rock, and torrents sometimes come pouring from earth’s centre of pure and living fire.6

Both the conviction that terror could be a source of intense aesthetic appreciation and the quest for sources of transcendence in nature were to become central to eighteenth-​century British aesthetics, which gradually shifted away from a purely ‘rhetorical’ sublime to expand on these originally minor aspects. More generally, British critics and philosophers noted that Longinus conceived of the sublime not just as a rhetorical mode but as derived from a powerful natural ‘yearning for all that is great, all that is diviner than ourselves’.7 They consequently saw in it the basis for a broader aesthetic experience, a form of ecstatic elevation, in which the mind was carried beyond its limits when confronted with what exceeded it, for example the divine or the grand spectacles of nature.8 In other words, they conflated Longinus’ reflections on rhetoric with their own emerging attraction for wild nature and for powerful affects that exceeded, or at least preceded, the grasp of reason. In the process, they freed the concept of the sublime from a mainly rhetorical anchoring, and began to explore its causes and effects. Soon, the Lockean epistemological model of mental and emotional experiences that were originally derived from sense perceptions of the object world was to provide a method to connect the grandeur and 31

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power of nature to sublime affect, and to trace the mental mechanisms that led from one to the other. One of the first expressions of this new sensibility and of the interest in the ‘natural sublime’ could be found in Thomas Burnet’s Telluris Theoria Sacra, or Sacred Theory of the Earth (1680–​89). This theological-​geological history of the earth claimed that the originally smooth and beautiful forms of the globe had been marred by the Deluge, and that mountains, river beds and seas were great ‘Ruins’ of that original perfection. Even though it lamented the loss of original beauty and order, it elicited an intense, violent and yet not unpleasant experience from the contrast between the power and perfection of the divine on the one hand, and the limitations and deformities of fallen nature on the other. As Marjorie Hope Nicolson has shown, while Burnet saw mountains and the ocean as frightening expressions of a sinful nature, he could not help being impressed, ‘ “rapt” and “ravished” by the vast, the grand, the majestic’.9 This tension made him one of the first writers to suggest that a form of aesthetic pleasure could be derived from the apparently chaotic forms of nature, because of their intimation of an ungraspable vastness. Almost at the same time as Burnet criticised the ruined forms of mountains, he admitted that their immensity could be the source of an overwhelming form of aesthetic pleasure, in which the mind was no longer in control: The greatest objects of Nature are, methinks, the most pleasing to behold; and next to the Great Concave of the Heavens, and those boundless Regions where the Stars inhabit, there is nothing that I  look upon with more Pleasure than the wide Sea and the Mountains of the Earth. There is something august and stately in the Air of these things, that inspires the Mind with great Thoughts and Passions; we do naturally, upon such Occasions, think of God and his Greatness: And whatsoever hath but the Shadow and Appearance of INFINITE, as all Things have that are too big for our Comprehension, they fill and overbear the Mind with their Excess, and cast it into a pleasing kind of Stupor and Admiration.10

The encounter between Longinus and British criticism explicitly took place in the writings of John Dennis and Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third Earl of Shaftesbury. Dennis, who properly introduced the Longinian concept of the sublime into English literary criticism, also felt the need to explore the subjective responses connected to it,11 and to transpose this experience to the encounter 32

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with wild nature. His definition of a natural sublime and of its effect on individual emotions benefited from Burnet’s input, which among other things allowed him to outline the paradox of a delight mixed with terror.12 His descriptions of his encounter with the Alps were the first to delineate the psychological experience of conflicting emotions which was to become central to Burke’s theory. In the journal entry describing his arrival into Savoy, he alluded to ‘a delightful Horror, a terrible Joy’. And his discovery of Mont Cenis allowed him to argue for the aesthetic potential of powerful, disturbing feelings: I am delighted, ’tis true at the prospect of Hills and Valleys, of flowry Meads, and murmuring Streams, yet it is a delight that is consistent with Reason … But transporting Pleasures follow’d the sight of the Alpes, and what unusual Transports think you were those, that were mingled with horrours, and sometimes almost with despair?13

In these reflections, Dennis was distinguishing clearly between two types of aesthetic experience: the delight caused by beautiful nature, which was a rational form of experience, and the terrifying exaltation derived from wild and vast scenery, in other words the natural sublime, which suggested the possibility of an irrationalist aesthetics. This distinction was to have a lasting influence in British aesthetic thought. Dennis’s contemporary, Shaftesbury, found it more difficult to accept that the mind should lose control in the aesthetic experience. He developed a conception of the sublime as connected with beauty, both working together to raise the mind above the limitations of sensory perception to the awareness of cosmic order and harmony.14 This conception is developed in Part III of The Moralists, with Theocles’ rhapsodic invocation of the world’s beauty and of the Creator’s powerful ordering of it. The enthusiastic and yet controlled transport, which is presented as an experience of ‘the sublime’,15 leads the mind above ‘the disorders of the corporeal world’ to encounter the immensity and harmony of the cosmos. In other words, sublime affect –​allied with sublime rhetoric –​is conceived as the means to elevate the mind in order to discover the rational order of the universe. Theocles’ rapturous apostrophe to the Creator leads to the discovery of ideal beauty: O thou who art the author and modifier of these various motions! O sovereign and sole mover, by whose high art the rolling spheres are

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governed, and these stupendous bodies of our world hold their unrelenting courses! … How hast thou animated these moving worlds? What spirit or soul infused? … […] But thou alone composest the disorders of the corporeal world, and from the restless and fighting elements raisest that peaceful concord, and conspiring beauty of the ever-​flourishing creation.16

At the same time, the terror associated with wild nature is not excluded from Shaftesbury’s aesthetics. Theocles’ invocation of cosmic harmony is followed by his appreciation of the sublime of a mountainous landscape, and concludes with his reflections about the awe-​inspiring mystery of an Alpine forest: The faint and gloomy light looks horrid as the shade itself: and the profound stillness of these places imposes silence upon men, struck with the hoarse echoings of every sound within the spacious caverns of the wood. Here space astonishes. Silence itself seems pregnant; whilst an unknown force works on the mind, and dubious objects move the wakeful sense. Mysterious voices are either heard or fancied: and various forms of deity seem to present themselves, and appear more manifest in these sacred sylvan scenes; such as of old gave rise to temples, and favoured the religion of the ancient world.17

Such a connection between darkness, sensory privation, mystery and terror, as we will see, was to become a central component of the Burkean sublime, and the passage could even be seen as the main source for Burke’s reflections on ‘obscurity’ and ‘privation’ in Part II of the Enquiry. Longinus’s thoughts were further adapted by Joseph Addison in his Spectator essays, especially those on ‘The Pleasures of the Imagination’, which greatly contributed to the popularisation of Peri Hupsous in Britain.18 In these essays, Addison follows Longinus by reserving the term ‘sublime’ for rhetorical and critical issues.19 He uses the term abundantly in discussions of poetry, more particularly the epic genre and Milton’s work (especially in The Spectator, 315, 339, 357). But he does reflect on a broader conception of sublimity in the external world, by defining an aesthetic property which he calls ‘greatness’: in respect to this property, he describes an experience in which the mind is so entirely filled with a vast or terrifying object that the imagination is stretched beyond what it can contain and astonishment prevails.20 The experience is pleasurable because 34

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it powerfully affects the imagination and makes us aware of a greatness that exceeds our human limitations. Addison’s well-​known definition of ‘greatness’ in The Spectator (412) condenses most aspects of the new aesthetic experience: By Greatness, I do not only mean the Bulk of any single Object, but the Largeness of a whole View, considered as one entire Piece. Such are the Prospects of an open Champain Country, a vast uncultivated Desart, of huge Heaps of Mountains, high Rocks and Precipices, or a wide Expanse of Waters, where we are not struck with the Novelty or Beauty of the Sight, but with that rude kind of Magnificence which appears in many of these stupendous Works of Nature. Our Imagination loves to be filled with an Object, or to grasp at any thing that is too big for its Capacity. We are flung into a pleasing Astonishment at such unbounded Views, and feel a delightful Stillness and Amazement in the Soul at the Apprehension[s]‌of them.21

In this description, Addison applies Locke’s epistemological model to the aesthetic experience by deriving the intense pleasure of the imagination from sense perception, more precisely from the sight of natural spectacles. He first identifies a number of material properties of the natural sublime (vastness, height or emptiness), and of objects in which these properties may be found, and then provides an analysis of the mental mechanisms of the experience of the sublime. He thus shows that the experience is a subjective one, requiring the interplay of an external object and of the imagination: the imagination aims to grasp an object that exceeds its comprehension, is overwhelmed, and a sense of ‘amazement’ prevails. According to Samuel Monk, this pattern ‘is essentially the sublime experience from Addison to Kant’.22 The analysis is completed by Addison’s inclusion of the dynamic powers of nature in The Spectator (489), where he describes the effects of a stormy ocean on the imagination, and defines the ‘agreeable Horrour’ that derives from it as one of the highest aesthetic pleasures, in which terror and intimations of an ungraspable divine power are combined. Between Addison and Burke, reflections on the sublime were further developed in the writings of, among others, David Hume, Mark Akenside and John Baillie. With them, the recent studies in psychology began to be applied to discussions of sublime affect,23 and the shift from rhetorical considerations to the natural sublime became more apparent. This evolution is especially perceptible in 35

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John Baillie’s An Essay on the Sublime, published in 1747, ten years before the Enquiry. The essay reasserts and develops the pattern outlined by Addison of the imagination’s exaltation as it attempts to grasp what exceeds its capacity. It argues for example that when confronted with a vast and uniform object, ‘there is to the imagination no limits of its vastness, and the mind runs out into infinity, continually creating as it were from the pattern’.24 Perhaps more significantly, the essay gives precedence to the natural sublime and sees the rhetorical sublime as an imitation of the former. Baillie’s analysis begins with a clear statement of this new hierarchy: [A]‌s the sublime in writing is no more than a description of the sublime in nature, and as it were painting to the imagination what nature herself offers to the senses, I shall begin with an inquiry into the sublime of natural objects, which I shall afterwards apply to writing.25

The distinction does not necessarily mean that artistic representation diminishes the sublime affect. Baillie’s simple (but nevertheless innovative) psychology of the sublime explains first of all that the sublime is not so much a property of external objects as a subjective response of the individual. Then, by outlining the importance of association of ideas in aesthetic pleasure, it implies that representations can affect as powerfully as their originals: [O]‌bjects in general delight from two sources; either because naturally fitted to please, from a certain harmony and disposition of their parts, or because long associated with objects really agreeable … Hence we see the powerful force of connection … for by daily experience we know, when certain pleasures have been raised in the mind by certain objects, from an association of this kind, the very same pleasure shall be raised, although the objects themselves which first occasioned them are not so much as painted in the imagination.26

Before examining in which ways Burke departs from this tradition, one should acknowledge that in many respects, the Enquiry can also be seen as the culmination of this line of thinking.27 The seeds of many essential aspects of Burke’s aesthetic thought, his emphasis on terror, on the affective power of language, his sensualist viewpoint, his rich visual repertoire of natural sources of the sublime, as well as his exploration of the psychological processes that articulated the new aesthetic experience, are already contained in it. 36

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To Longinus himself, Burke owed his emphasis on passion as central to the aesthetic experience28 and his interest in the power of words to affect violently.29 Longinus’ conception of rhetorical energy as a means to heighten passions, his comparison of the power of the best orators to that of thunder or of a whirlwind, which strikes and confuses,30 may especially be linked to Burke’s reflections about the emotive power of language in Parts II and V of the Enquiry.31 In many other respects, Burke’s conception of the sublime owed much to the encounter between Longinus and a British school of thought that was keen not only to explore the processes of the mind and the effects of the external world on these processes, but also to accept, or even embrace, the various degrees of irrationalism and loss of control that they entailed. As I have underlined, this encounter had made possible the inclusion of the contemplation of nature within the aesthetics of the sublime; it had foregrounded the experience of terror which was still marginal in Peri Hupsous; perhaps more importantly, it had shifted attention away from the analysis of rhetorical devices, which prevails in Longinus, to the exploration of the psychological mechanisms associated with this experience. Burke’s Enquiry brought together several strands of this tradition and clarified what had sometimes only been roughly delineated. It first of all confirmed the uses of an empiricist methodology for aesthetic enquiry. To some extent, it furthered the reflections of his predecessors on the natural sublime, agreeing with them that vast and frightening natural scenery, including mountains, oceans, dark forests, deserts and precipices, were sources of powerful affects. Part II of the Enquiry, in particular, reads as a systematic –​almost taxonomic –​account of properties of natural objects which may fill the mind with ‘delightful horror’: obscurity, power, privation, infinity, succession, uniformity, light, colour, sound, suddenness, smell and taste, etc. At the same time, this empiricist approach allowed Burke to further locate the sublime in the passions, by presenting the material properties of external objects as ‘sources’ of the sublime and exploring the psychological and physiological mechanisms of the mind that led from the apprehension of these sources through sensation to the intense affect itself. In the conclusion to the first part of the Enquiry, he outlined his methodology in these terms: ‘In the following parts I shall inquire what things they are that cause in us the 37

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affections of the sublime and beautiful.’32 Even though he then proceeded to enumerate the properties of external objects that could cause the sublime and the beautiful (respectively in Parts II and III of the Enquiry), his emphasis was on the emotions produced, and the processes leading to them. As a number of recent critics have emphasised, his close attention to the neuro-​physiological origins of the sublime and the beautiful, which he called its ‘efficient causes’ or ‘natural mechanical causes’,33 and to which he devoted most of Part IV of the Enquiry, is unparalleled in aesthetic theory.34 Burke’s relocation of the sublime in the passions led him to give central pre-​eminence to ‘terror’, which he made ‘the ruling principle of the sublime’.35 He especially endeavoured to clarify the paradox of a complex aesthetic experience combining delight and terror, which had been foregrounded by Burnet, Dennis and Addison. To this end, he adapted Locke’s sensualist account of pleasure and pain, making these two ideas the foundation of our experiences of the beautiful and the sublime. While Locke had explained that pleasure and pain were incompatible opposites, he described the ‘delight’ associated with the sublime as a ‘relative’ pleasure, deriving from the removal of pain, thus highlighting the complex nature of the experience.36 He provided the psychological and physiological explanations for such a paradoxical pleasure (notably in Part I, sections ii–​v and Part IV, section vi), but he also offered a more aesthetic analysis, by demonstrating how the suggestion of pain through terror could be transformed by aesthetic distance into a heightened and consequently delightful emotion:37 Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling. … When danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible; but at certain distances, and with certain modifications, they may be, and they are delightful, as we every day experience.38

Burke’s empirical explanations partook of his ambition to give a scientific grounding to the taste for thrills and ‘horror’ which had been gradually developing since the end of the seventeenth century, and thus define a convincing aesthetics of terror.39 Dennis and Addison had both argued that in poetic representations, terror, by being mitigated by ‘reflection’ and mixed with our awareness of our own 38

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safety, could be a source of ‘pleasure’ or ‘joy’.40 Burke was attempting to explain which psychological and physiological mechanisms accounted for such a pleasure, in order to give aesthetic validity to it. Like his predecessors, Burke also described the experience of the sublime in terms of excess, as a psychological process whereby the mind is filled by an object which surpasses its capacities, and irresistibly carries it beyond what it can grasp. His description of such a process was a confident rephrasing of what had already been sketched by Shaftesbury, Addison and Baillie: The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is Astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. In this case the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that object which employs it. Hence arises the great power of the sublime, that far from being produced by them, it anticipates our reasonings, and hurries us on by an irresistible force.41

Burke’s description, more than his predecessors’ reflections, seems to outline an experience of utter passivity, as the mind’s capacities of comprehension are defeated, and as the object that overwhelms the mind is clearly connected with terror. Cressida Ryan writes of ‘a disabling astonishment of the soul’,42 and Vanessa L. Ryan of a ‘para­ lysis of our rational capacity by fear’ which destroys the remaining link with reason that Dennis, Addison and others had maintained.43 Yet, as in previous analyses, the excess encountered by the mind also seems to be liberating, and the imagination in particular appears to be unbounded by the experience. Thus, a few pages later, as he reflects on infinity and uniformity as sources of the sublime, Burke claims that ‘the imagination meets no check’ or ‘the imagination has no rest’.44 The phrasing is very close to Baillie’s observations on the mind’s encounter with vast and uniform objects, according to which, as mentioned earlier, ‘there is to the imagination no limits of its vastness, and the mind runs out into infinity, continually creating as it were from the pattern’.45 Burke’s subversion of classical aesthetics As this summary has pointed out, Burke’s theory could be seen as the culmination of evolutions which had taken place in British 39

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aesthetic thought since the end of the previous century. Yet, it carried this tradition to radical conclusions. As highlighted earlier, its empirical investigation into the causality of the aesthetic experience was unprecedented, and as such had major consequences. Thus, by emphasising the role of sense perceptions and emotional responses to physical properties in the material world, the Enquiry, to a certain extent, minimised the ethical or religious dimension of the aesthetic experience. Rodolphe Gasché summarises some of Burke’s most significant contributions when he writes: ‘Burke was the first to propose an uncompromising empiricist  –​that is, sensualist  –​ account of aesthetic experience, and to have radically uncoupled this experience from extrinsic considerations (particularly, moral and religious).’46 At the same time, Burke’s reflection was far from being just a sensualist aesthetic treatise, and offered significant reassessments of aesthetic categories, of the subjectivity of the aesthetic experience, of artistic representation and of the artistic medium, as we are going to see. To begin with, as several commentators have noted, one of Burke’s essential contributions consisted in the clear separation of the sublime from the beautiful. The distinction was already discernible in Burnet, Dennis or Addison, and corresponded to the conflict between a rationalist approach to aesthetics, and a more emotional one. Nevertheless, Burke may be said to have been the first thinker to have insisted that the sublime should not be considered as a higher form of the beautiful, but a radically distinct aesthetic category, connected with very different emotional responses in the individual.47 He highlighted the complexity of the sublime, with its mixture of delight and terror.48 He especially suggested that an essential difference between the two categories was that the beautiful had to do with finite forms, whereas the sublime was about limitlessness:  the former was found in small, graspable objects,49 while the latter could be found when the eye was not ‘able to perceive the bounds’ or ‘forms’ of things.50 This contrast between form and unlimitedness, which was to become central to later aesthetic thought, especially starting with Kant, suggested that the classical mode of visual representation, which was based on formal perfection and containment within clear outlines, was not applicable to the sublime. 40

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By giving the sublime a separate status, Burke also made it possible for the irrational to become part of the aesthetic realm in a more assertive manner than his predecessors.51 Whereas Shaftesbury and Addison had described the filling of the mind by a great object as a form of ravishing plenitude, his descriptions of mental rapture insisted on the subjugation of reason, as terror, the ‘ruling principle’ of the sublime, ‘rob[bed] the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning’.52 He argued that the delight of the sublime experience was ‘antecedent to any reasoning’;53 and he recurrently highlighted the extreme nature of an experience that verged on the violent and bordered on pain and terror, resulting from a simple ‘modification’ of the two: [I]‌f the pain and terror are so modified as not to be actually noxious; if the pain is not carried to violence, and the terror is not conversant about the present destruction of the person, as these emotions clear the parts, whether fine or gross, of a dangerous and troublesome incumbrance, they are capable of producing delight; not pleasure, but a sort of delightful horror, a sort of tranquillity tinged with terror; which, as it belongs to self-​ preservation, is one of the strongest of all the passions. Its object is the sublime.54

As he connected the aesthetic response directly to the most intense passions, Burke was making aesthetic appreciation distinct from sophisticated rational judgment. The immediacy of the aesthetic response prevailed over rational rules of taste or artistic production. According to Paddy Bullard: Burke thinks that our experiences of beauty and sublimity are simple, immediate apprehensions of sense. The nature of our capacity to form refined, complex judgments on those apprehensions is an entirely separate matter, and the moral sense theorists are wrong to confound the process of apprehension with the process of judgment.55

The connection between the sublime and the irrational went further. As Kirwan observes, it is Burke ‘who provides the clearest exposition of the potential incompatibility of reason and sublimity, even situating this incompatibility in that realm of the supernatural that might, for some, include any religious belief’.56 Burke’s willing acceptance of diverse forms of the supernatural and religious terror accounts for a noteworthy thematic evolution in his selection of sources of the sublime, an evolution which is first of all perceptible in his choice 41

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of literary examples.57 While Addison had criticised Milton’s use of figures like Sin and Death as epic actors in Paradise Lost, for the reason that they are highly improbable and should only be considered allegorical, Burke is especially appreciative of these moments, praising Milton’s description of Death for being ‘dark, uncertain, confused, terrible, and sublime to the last degree’.58 Similarly, he reflects on the powerful effect on the mind of the conjunction of darkness and supernatural tales or heathen beliefs, explaining how superstitious minds may be violently affected by notions associated with obscurity, such as ghosts, goblins or heathen idols.59 This new appreciation of supernatural or uncanny motifs not only contributed to the development of the Gothic in literature but, as we will see, also proved highly inspirational to visual artists. The irrationalism of Burke’s sublime went along with a new acceptance of anxiety, lack of control, lack of fulfilment or even failure as part of the aesthetic experience. After Shaftesbury and Addison, who had described the imagination’s pleasure at being filled with what it could not contain, Burke’s unprecedented emphasis on terror as the founding moment of the sublime, although ultimately leading to a form of delight, was certainly unsettling.60 What is more, as the Enquiry highlighted the limitations of reason, and described sublime delight as ‘antecedent to any reasoning’, it foregrounded a potential representational gap. In Burke’s conception, for artistic representations to convey what exceeded the mind’s grasp, and the terror connected with these ungraspable forces, they required indistinctness and obscurity. In other words, they had to be incomplete, or imperfect, in order to convey what was beyond comprehension. This representational gap is suggested whenever Burke contrasts clear ideas and representations on the one hand, and uncertain or obscure ones on the other, preferring the emotive power of the latter to the mimetic limitations of the former: 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, I present a very clear idea of those objects; but then (allowing for the effect of imitation which is something) my picture can at most affect only as the palace, temple, or landscape, would have affected in the reality. On the other hand, the most lively and spirited verbal description I can give raises a very obscure and imperfect idea of such objects; but then it is in my power to raise a stronger emotion by the description than I could do by the best painting.61

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By emphasising the affective power of imperfect forms and preferring it to the semantic clarity of imitation, Burke was embedding lack of control and the terror connected with it within artistic representation itself. The violent and overpowering mental processes involved in the sublime were replicated by the disjunction between imprecise artistic form and what exceeded it, in other words by artistic endeavour itself. Burke’s views on painting, in particular, make evident the tension between artistic striving and what is beyond the reach of representation. The passage just cited makes it clear that while he believes that poetry may rise to the representational challenge of the sublime, he considers that the determinate forms of painting only manifest the limitations of that art in this respect. This conviction is most clearly expounded in the two moments of Part II, section iv of the Enquiry, ‘Of the difference between clearness and obscurity with regard to the passions’ and ‘the same subject continued’. In this analysis, Burke explains that contrary to what theorists of the sister arts like the Abbé Du Bos claim, poetry is more capable of ‘moving the passions’ than painting, because its ‘images’ are ‘always of [an] obscure kind’, whereas those of painting are both literally mimetic of nature and ‘clear and determinate’. He focuses on two examples of poetic pictures or descriptions which hurry the mind ‘out of itself’ and ‘affect because they are crouded and confused’, or because of their ‘terrible uncertainty’:  Milton’s portrait of Satan in Paradise Lost and Eliphaz’s recounting of his visitation by an indiscernible spirit in the Book of Job. In contrast, he argues, the bounded and determinate forms of painting hold the mind back, and by containing what cannot be contained, transform the great into the little: [H]‌ardly anything can strike the mind with its greatness, which does not make some sort of approach towards infinity; which nothing can do whilst we are able to perceive its bounds; but to see an object distinctly, and to perceive its bounds, is one and the same thing. A clear idea is therefore another name for a little idea.62

Consequently, when painters attempt to present the ‘unpresentable’, contrary to poets, they fail: When painters have attempted to give us clear representations of these very fanciful and terrible ideas, they have, I  think, almost always failed; insomuch that I have been at a loss, in all the pictures I have seen of hell, to determine whether the painter did not intend something ludicrous.

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Several painters have handled a subject of this kind, with a view of assembling as many horrid phantoms as their imagination could suggest; but all the designs I have chanced to meet of the temptations of St. Anthony were rather a sort of odd, wild grotesques, than any thing capable of producing a serious passion. In all these subjects poetry is very happy. Its apparitions, its chimeras, its harpies, its allegorical figures, are grand and affecting; and though Virgil’s Fame and Homer’s Discord are obscure, they are magnificent figures. These figures in painting would be clear enough, but I  fear they might become ridiculous.63

In other words, the literal and bounded forms of paintings, by giving a finite representation to strongly affecting ideas, only make manifest their limitations, and the disjunction that exists between the visual arts and what they strive to capture. As they attempt the sublime, they fall into the bathetic. By thus underlining the inferior ability of painting to convey the sublime, Burke draws attention to the visual arts as the locus of a representational crisis, rather than the place where perfection of form may be attained. A first challenge for painting: Burke’s division of the sister arts Most of the specificities of Burke’s theory account for its significance for visual artists. The description of an extreme and complex experience that was clearly distinct from the plenitude of the beautiful, the inclusion within it of a wide range of awe-​inspiring natural objects, of divine powers, but also of the supernatural and the uncanny, are well known to have been a highly inspirational source of visual themes and motifs. The following chapters will acknowledge this development as one of the first responses to the Enquiry: in spite of Burke’s denigration of painting, his rich catalogue of sources of the sublime, which brought together the examples provided by his predecessors and expanded their range, was gladly applied by artists in order to renew their visual repertoire. My thesis, however, is that the profound impact of the Enquiry on British visual practices was mostly due to its introduction of a major representational challenge to painting. I  have already suggested that Burke’s conception of a sublime unlimitedness beyond visible bounds, which denied the possibility of formal containment, went against the ideal of beauty which prevailed in pictorial practices at the time. I have also mentioned his questioning of painting’s 44

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ability to convey objects or powers that were inaccessible to it, and the representational striving that this entailed. Before exploring the broader implications of such a conception for visual representation, I  would like to argue that this criticism of painting was part of an unequivocal challenge, which at the time was specific to Burke’s aesthetic theory. Essentially, as it reflected on the possibility of an artistic sublime, the Philosophical Enquiry implied a new rivalry between the arts, by making apparent a medium-​ related division between them. To sustain his claim that poetry was more capable of the sublime than painting, Burke focused on the specific functioning of verbal descriptions and strove to dissociate them from their association with visual images, which by that time had become entrenched through the tradition of the sister arts. Part V of the Enquiry in particular made apparent Burke’s deliberate departure from the discourse of literary pictorialism, which he still uses earlier in his praise of sublime poetry. While in the second part of the treatise he still admires the painterly qualities of Milton’s descriptions, Part V insists that the affective power of words is linked to the fact that they may not always be reduced to images of sense, let alone visual images, but have a dynamism and aural quality of their own. In section iv on ‘The effect of words’, Burke introduces a meaningful distinction between the aural and visual effects of words, and argues that the dynamism of the former prevents the full effect of the latter: If words have all their possible extent of power, three effects arise in the mind of the hearer. The first is, the sound; the second, the picture, or representation of the thing signified by the sound; the third is, the affection of the soul produced by one or by both of the foregoing. … Suppose we were to read a passage to this effect: ‘The river Danube rises in a moist and mountainous soil in the heart of Germany, where, winding to and fro, it waters several principalities, until, turning into Austria, and leaving the walls of Vienna, it passes into Hungary; there with a vast flood, augmented by the Saave and the Drave, it quits Christendom, and rolling through the barbarous countries which border on Tartary, it enters by many mouths in the Black Sea.’ In this description many things are mentioned, as mountains, rivers, cities, the sea, &c. But let anybody examine himself, and see whether he has had impressed on his imagination any pictures of a river, mountain, watery soil, Germany, &c. Indeed it is impossible, in the rapidity and quick succession of words in conversation, to have ideas both of the sound of the word, and of the thing represented.64

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This conception of language was meaningful in more than one respect. Not least of all, by arguing that the flow of language preceded its ‘translation’ into visual images, Burke was going against the specular bias of contemporary epistemology, especially the Lockean theory of ideas, according to which knowledge had a fundamentally visual basis. Just as significantly, he was undermining the correspondence between words and visual images which had underpinned a long tradition of emulation between poetry and painting that still prevailed in the aesthetic theory of his day. The idea that the two arts were ‘sisters’, or ut pictura poesis principle, which had been inherited from classical antiquity, depended on the notion that the poet should seek enargeia, which was the ability to forcefully reproduce the real world, in other words to give a vivid picture of it.65 In this quest, poets attempted to create verbal pictures that were as evocative of visible reality as paintings. The conception had been strengthened by the naturalistic achievements of painting during the Italian Renaissance; and in eighteenth-​century Britain, it had benefited from the recent assertion of the visual arts, as well as from the primacy given to images and visual experience in empiricist epistemology. As a consequence, literary pictorialism was common and pervaded the works of the leading poets of the age, including Pope, Thomson, Collins and Gray.66 And the art of painting could confidently rival poetry, since it could boast of a more immediate access to the vividness of the real world. Burke was going radically not just against this intellectual context, but against the whole tradition of the sister arts. While many of his contemporaries were still arguing that poetry and painting translated easily into one another because they were both mimetic of nature, and attempted to convey vividly the real world, he was suggesting that their medium-​ specificity made such translations very difficult. His description of a rapid succession of words which could not be captured by visual representations anticipated and possibly inspired Lessing’s contrast between the temporal unfolding of poetry and the spatial and stationary dimension of painting, in his Laocoön (1766).67 What is more, as Hagstrum points out, he was ascribing to words a form of affective energy which not only differed from the classical conception of enargeia as the ability to vividly reproduce visible reality, but was in fact diminished by visible transcription:68 46

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So little does poetry depend for its effect on the power of raising sensible images, that I am convinced it would lose a considerable part of its energy, if this were the necessary result of all description. Because that union of affecting words, which is the most powerful of all poetical instruments, would frequently lose its force, along with its propriety and consistency, if the sensible images were always excited.69

This disjunction of words and images, based as it was on the contrast between the affective power of the former and the literalness of the latter, was a significant attack against the sister arts tradition, and a challenge to painting, which since the Renaissance had been regarded as a model of vividness for poetry. At a time when British artists like Hogarth or Reynolds were both asserting their ability to convincingly represent the world of sense, and seeking the same intellectual recognition as poetry, Burke was denigrating the literalness of painting; he was claiming that painters’ ‘clear and determinate’ images, far from providing the evocative power that was necessary for the sublime, diminished it. Through such claims, his aesthetic theory was revisiting the old comparison, or paragone, between painting and poetry, giving a clear advantage to poetry, and consequently calling on painting to prove its worth once again. Eighteenth-​century theories and the possibility of a pictorial sublime The impact of this challenge was not immediately felt by British artists because Burke’s views on painting were isolated. Even though most of the discourse on the sublime until him had focused on rhetorical issues and on the natural sublime, there had been no exclusion of painting. What is more, the theory of painting had readily embraced the new aesthetic category and applied it to the visual arts. Which explains why many painters, far from being deterred by the Enquiry’s reservations about painting, found in it a means to renew their repertoire, directly or not, without feeling the need to address the deeper issues of artistic form and representation that it raised.70 To understand this initial response to Burke, it will be helpful to examine what were the other contemporary views on the possibility of a pictorial sublime and see to what extent they provided a ready response to the most problematic aspects of Burke’s theory. Once this context is assessed, I  will try to show why Burke’s departure from the pictorialist tradition had such far-​reaching implications. 47

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From the time of the rediscovery of Longinus’ Peri Hupsous in the seventeenth century until the publication of Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry in 1757, no writer on aesthetics had claimed that the sublime was incompatible with painting. Many had ignored the visual arts, or only incidentally mentioned them. And in many cases, the notion of the sister arts had suggested that what was true of poetry was also true of painting. Longinus’ essay itself mostly foregrounded poetic and rhetorical means to create the sublime, following which many early Enlightenment writers had considered the sublime primarily as a rhetorical mode. Nevertheless, Longinus’ five sources of sublimity included two which were in principle compatible with painting, and which were understood to be so by many writers on the visual arts in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries: ‘grandeur of thought’ and ‘a vigorous and spirited treatment of the passions’.71 In French academic discourse, in the writings of Félibien and De Piles for example, there was a readiness to apply these qualities to painters like Raphael, Poussin and –​although not unanimously –​ Michelangelo. De Piles showed how easily the category of the sublime could be applied to painting, by assimilating it to the notion of the grand manner of painting, or gran gusto:72 [I]‌ n Painting there must be something Great and Extraordinary to Surprize, Please and Instruct, which is what we call the grand Gusto, ’Tis by this that ordinary things are made Beautiful, and the Beautiful, Sublime and Wonderful; for in Painting, the grand Gusto, the sublime, and the Marvellous are one and the same thing.73

As suggested by the gradation from the ordinary to the sublime, together with the interchangeability of concepts, in this conception the sublime is mostly considered as a higher form of the beautiful, one which is animated by a higher degree of gusto, vigour or grandeur of thought. This adaptation of the Longinian sublime was to prevail in the theory of painting through much of the eighteenth century, even after the publication of the Enquiry, as my analysis of Reynolds’s Discourses on Art will underline. In Britain, it was first adopted by the painter Jonathan Richardson, in An Essay on the Theory of Painting (1715) and The Connoisseur. An essay on the Whole Art of Criticism as it relates to Painting (1719). Richardson, who was to have a great influence on Reynolds and the Royal Academy of Arts at the end of the century, believed his art to be capable of causing 48

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the exalting, overpowering and mind-​filling experience which his contemporaries were beginning to describe. He understood the sublime to mean excellence in painting, and to correspond to the highest categories of painting according to academic and neo​classical hierarchies: history and portrait. In The Connoisseur, he gave the following definition of the pictorial sublime: I take it to consist of some few of the highest degrees of excellence in those kinds, and parts of Painting which are excellent; the sublime therefore must be marvellous, and surprizing, it must strike vehemently upon the mind, and fill, and captivate it irresistibly. … I confine the sublime to history, and portrait Painting; and these must excel in grace, and greatness, invention, or expression … Michelangelo’s great style intitles him to the sublime, not his drawing; it is that greatness, and a competent degree of grace, and not his colouring that makes Titian capable of it: As Correggio’s grace, with a sufficient mixture of greatness gives this noble quality to his works.74

The conception combined the specific characteristics of the sublime as defined by Longinus with a rather loose use of the term in connection with particular manifestations of excellence. One should also note that Richardson’s claims were supported by the ut pictura poesis doctrine, whose influence may be observed, for instance, in the numerous pictorialist analyses of poetry which alternate with his reflections on painting. More generally, Burke’s British predecessors were able to combine the sister arts tradition and the sublime quite satisfactorily, which makes his theory stand out all the more. One of the most stimulating encounters between ut pictura poesis and the sublime takes place in Addison’s Spectator essays on ‘The Pleasures of the Imagination’. Given the influence of these essays on Burke’s theory, it will be especially instructive to see to what extent they make a place for a pictorial sublime, in order to enhance the originality of the Enquiry. From a purely terminological point of view, Addison does not write about a pictorial sublime. As mentioned earlier, he follows Longinus in applying the term ‘sublime’ almost exclusively to issues of style in the verbal arts. At the same time, his interest in wild nature leads him to the more encompassing notion of greatness, which applies to aesthetic properties of nature, but also to other 49

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art forms.75 Although he does not really investigate the kind of artworks that would match this ‘greatness’, and seems to observe it mostly in nature, in the ocean or in wide prospects, there is no exclusion of painting. What is more, if he prefers not to use the term ‘sublime’ in connection with painting, he is willing to find a pictorial equivalent. Writing on the right of artists of genius not to follow the rules of art, he draws the following parallel: Those who have surveyed the noblest Pieces of Architecture and Statuary both ancient and modern, know very well that there are frequent Deviations from Art in the Works of the greatest Masters, which have produced a much nobler Effect than a more accurate and exact way of Proceeding could have done. This often arises from what the Italians call the Gusto Grande in these Arts, which is what we call the Sublime in Writing.76

As the comment suggests, Addison, like Longinus, applies the notion of the sublime rather strictly to the verbal arts, but is prepared to see a corresponding notion in the visual arts, which is ‘what the Italians call the Gusto Grande’. Even though the observation hints at a separation of the visual and the verbal arts, it also implies that similar noble effects may be achieved by the painter and the poet, when they follow their genius rather than the rules of art. This parallel had much to do with the doctrine of ut pictura poesis. As Hagstrum points out, the ‘Pleasures of the Imagination’ essays were the ‘definitive statement in English of the doctrine of enargeia’.77 Following Locke, Addison argued that sight, the greatest of the five senses, was the source of primary pleasures of imagination when visible reality was directly perceived, and of secondary pleasures when this reality was reproduced by the visual arts or verbal descriptions: [B]‌y the Pleasures of the Imagination or Fancy (which I  shall use promiscuously) I here mean such as arise from visible Objects, either when we have them actually in our View, or when we call up their Ideas in our Minds by Paintings, Statues, Descriptions, or any the like Occasion.78

Besides implying that artistic representations can affect the imagination as much as the objects they are mimetic of, through enargeia, such a definition also takes it for granted that this is as valid for the visual arts as it is for the verbal arts –​for ‘paintings’, ‘statues’ or (verbal) ‘descriptions’. What is more, as visual vividness and the primacy of sight remain central to such a conception, the visual arts 50

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may even be seen as those that are closest to nature and should provide guidance to the verbal arts: Among the different Kinds of Representation, Statuary is the most natural, and shews us something likest the Object that is represented. To make use of a common Instance, let one who is born Blind take an Image in his Hands, and trace out with his Fingers the different Furrows and Impressions of the Chissel, and he will easily conceive how the Shape of a Man, or Beast, may be represented by it; but should he draw his Hand over a Picture, where all is smooth and uniform, he would never be able to imagine how the several Prominencies and Depressions of a human Body could be shewn on a plain Piece of Canvas, that has in it no Unevenness or Irregularity. Description runs yet further from the Things it represents than Painting; for a Picture bears a real Resemblance to its Original, which Letters and Syllables are wholly void of. Colours speak of Languages, but Words are understood only by such a People or Nation.79

What allows Addison to argue that artistic representations, verbal or visual, affect as intensely as their originals, is his mimetic conception of the arts, together with his conviction that the workings of the mind, through association of ideas, can increase aesthetic delight.80 A  similar combination of associationism and mimetic aesthetics was to lead several other critics to consider sublime affect as compatible with painting, as they argued that the visual imitation of striking objects, through association of ideas, could fill the mind of the viewer with the same emotions as the originals. Thus, Baillie, while focusing on the power of language to produce the sublime,81 also wrote of ‘the powerful force of connection’ which exalts the mind in its perception of architecture,82 and explained how the power of association contributes to ‘the sublime of painting’: The sublime of painting consists mostly in finely representing the sublime of the passions … Landscape painting may likewise partake of the sublime; such as representing mountains, &c. which shows how little objects by an apt connection may affect us with this passion: for the space of a yard of canvas, by only representing the figure and colour of a mountain, shall fill the mind with nearly as great an idea as the mountain itself.83

This associationist approach still prevailed at the time of the publication of the Enquiry. In 1759, Alexander Gerard claimed in An Essay on Taste that association, by preserving the intensity of sensation, made sublimity possible in painting through the skilful imitation of 51

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sublime natural objects or sublime passions, rather than through any compositional play with proportions or dimensions: But the fine arts present the most numerous examples of grandeur produced by association. In all of them, the sublime is attained, chiefly by the artist’s exciting ideas of sublime objects; and in such as are mimical, this quality is chiefly owing to our being led by the exactness of the imitation to form ideas and conceive images of sublime originals. Thought is a less intense energy than sense; yet ideas especially when lively, never fail to be contemplated with some degree of the same emotion, which attends their original sensation.… [S]‌o complete is the power of association, that a skilful painter can express any degree of sublimity in the smallest as well as in the largest compass.84

More significantly perhaps, later eighteenth-​century views on the sublime continued to insist on the possibility of a pictorial sublime, still through mimesis or association of ideas. Kames, in his Elements of Criticism (1763), did acknowledge the specificities of the visual arts, their mimetic nature and the fact that they only address emotions ‘produced by sight’.85 He also granted that the temporal limitations of painting prevented it from raising our passions ‘to such a height as can be done by words’.86 But the differ­ ence was mostly one of degree, and the Elements of Criticism’s chapter on ‘Grandeur and Sublimity’ included considerations on the two sister arts. Kames’s inclusion of painting among the arts that could convey the sublime largely had to do with the fact that, unlike Burke, he did not consider indistinctness or boundlessness to be a source of sublimity: the strongest emotion of grandeur is raised by an object that can be taken in at one view; an object so immense as not to be comprehended but in parts, tends rather to distract than to satisfy the mind: in like manner, the strongest emotion produced by elevation is where the object is seen distinctly … When the sublime is carried to its due height, and circumscribed within proper bounds, it enchants the mind, and raises the most delightful emotions…87

Even later in the century, James Beattie made it clear that a pictorial sublime was possible, mostly on mimetic and associationist grounds. In his Dissertations Moral and Critical (1783) and Elements of Moral Science (1790), he argued that painting may attain the sublime just as much as the arts of poetry, music and architecture, and 52

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explained that it may do so when displaying the greatest human qualities and passions, or imitating the natural sublime: Painting is sublime, when it exhibits men invested with great qualities, such as bodily strength; or actuated by sublime passions, as devotion or valour; or when it successfully imitates great visible objects, artificial or natural, as mountains, precipices, palaces, storms, cataracts, volcanoes, and the like.88

As this brief overview suggests, neoclassical theories of art and British empiricist discourse alike demonstrated the possibility of a pictorial sublime, the former by equating it with the notion of gusto grande and excellence in history painting, and the latter by moving away from a purely rhetorical sublime to one which could be observed in nature, as well as by giving primacy to the sense of sight in the mechanisms of the mind. Both approaches facilitated the transposition of the new aesthetic category to painting by embracing a mimetic conception of visual representation according to which the mediation of the artistic medium barely attenuated the intensity of emotion conveyed by the original. Thus, while empiricist criticism claimed that association of ideas could preserve the intensity of the unmediated confrontation with a sublime object or agent, the neoclassical discourse claimed that this was made possible by the artist’s genius, or enargeia. In these conceptions, the sublime remained a superlative form of the beautiful, which was ultimately elevating and fulfilling, even when terror was initially involved, and its pictorial transcription depended on formal perfection. Even though this is far from being an exhaustive presentation, I have thought it important to sketch this intellectual background for two reasons. First of all, one must be aware of the existence of a critical body which provided a ready response to Burke’s criticism of painting and allowed visual artists to aim confidently for the sublime in the decades that followed the publication of the Enquiry. As I will show in Chapters 3 and 4, these writings were to play a significant role in academic responses to Burke. Secondly, this contextualisation is necessary in order to underline the specificity of his approach, and what made it so challenging to painting, besides its reintroduction of a rivalry with poetry. It is by comparing his views with the critical and philosophical discourses in which they were steeped that one realises that in spite of the many similarities, Burke’s aesthetic theory departed from contemporary writings on art in some fundamental ways. Burke disagreed with the basic 53

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assumptions that according to his predecessors and immediate contemporaries made the sublime possible in painting: that a mimetic representation was able to affect as much as its original, that the artistic medium was most efficient when it effaced itself to give a literal transcription of this original, that artistic representation should aim for formal perfection and boundaries rather than reveal the process and striving for unlimitedness that underlay it, that it should be about fulfilment rather than endeavour. By questioning these widely accepted principles, the Enquiry outlined an innovative theory of representation which heralded a significant shift in pictorial practices. Notes 1 James T. Boulton, ‘Preface’, in Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, ed. James T. Boulton (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), p. vii. 2 Robert Doran, The Theory of the Sublime from Longinus to Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), p. 141. 3 Andrew Ashfield and Peter de Bolla (eds), The Sublime:  A Reader in British Eighteenth-​Century Aesthetic Theory (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press), 1996. 4 An English translation had been published in 1652, but Boileau had greatly contributed to the critical success of the notion. See Samuel Monk, The Sublime:  A Study of Critical Theories, in XVIII-​Century England (New  York:  Modern Language Association of America, 1935), p. 20. 5 Longinus, On the Sublime, trans. H.  L. Havell (London and New  York:  Macmillan, 1890), ch. X, p.  24. As Robert Doran notes, ‘Longinus’s discussion of fear/​terror in c­ hapter 10 … is overlooked by many commentators, who insist that this aspect is a wholly modern invention.’ Doran, The Theory of the Sublime, p. 74. 6 Longinus, On the Sublime, ch. XXXV, pp. 68–​9. 7 Longinus, On the Sublime, ch. XXXV, p. 68. 8 See Rodolphe Gasché, ‘… And the Beautiful? Revisiting Edmund Burke’s “Double Aesthetics”’, in Timothy M. Costelloe (ed.), The Sublime:  From Antiquity to the Present (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 26. 9 Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1997), pp. 213–​14.

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10 Thomas Burnet, The Sacred Theory of the Earth: Containing an Account of the Original of the Earth and of All the General Changes Which It Hath Already Undergone or Is to Undergo, till the Consummation of All Things (London, 1684), vol. I, pp. 188–​9. Quoted in Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory, p. 214. 11 See, for example, Monk, The Sublime, p.  45, and Philip Shaw, The Sublime (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), pp. 31–​2. 12 Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory, p. 278. 13 John Dennis, Critical Works, ed. Edward Niles Hooker (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1939–​43), vol. II, p. 380f. 14 Philip Shaw explains how Shaftesbury reconciled his rationalism with the new taste for excess and boundlessness. The Sublime, pp. 38–​41. 15 As Theocles leaves the rhapsodic mode, he looks more composed, and Philocles sees that ‘Theocles was now resolved to take his leave of the sublime.’ Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury, The Moralists:  Part III, in Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (London, 1714), vol. II, p. 391. Quoted in Ashfield and De Bolla, The Sublime, p. 77. 16 Shaftesbury, Characteristicks, vol. II, pp. 372–​4. Quoted in Ashfield and De Bolla, The Sublime, pp. 75–​6. 17 Shaftesbury, Characteristicks, vol. II, pp. 390–​1. Quoted in Ashfield and De Bolla, The Sublime, p. 77. 18 See, for example, Monk, The Sublime, p. 56. 19 See, for instance, Doran, The Theory of the Sublime, pp.  144–​5, Timothy Costelloe, ‘Imagination and Internal Sense:  The Sublime in Shaftesbury, Reid, Addison, and Reynolds’, in Costelloe, The Sublime, p. 58 or Monk, The Sublime, p. 57. 20 See, for example, Costelloe, ‘Imagination and the Internal Sense’, pp. 58–​9. 21 Joseph Addison, Spectator no. 412, in The Spectator, by Joseph Addison, Richard Steel, and Others, ed. Gregory Smith, 4 vols (London:  J. M. Dent & Sons, 1945), vol. III, p. 279. 22 Monk, The Sublime, p. 58. 23 Monk, The Sublime, p. 65. 24 John Baillie, An Essay on the Sublime (London, 1747), p. 9. 25 Baillie, Essay on the Sublime, p. 3. 26 Baillie, Essay on the Sublime, pp. 34–​5. 27 Frans De Bruyn, for example, claims that Burke ‘works within the empirical intellectual framework of his time without seeking to overthrow it’. ‘“Expressive Uncertainty”: Edmund Burke’s Theory of the Sublime and Eighteenth-​Century Conceptions of Metaphor’, in Koen Vermeir and Michael Funk Deckard (eds), The Science of Sensibility: Reading

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Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry (Dordrecht, Heidelberg, London and New York: Springer, 2012), p. 267. 28 On this point, and on Longinus’ influence on Burke, see Cressida Ryan, ‘Burke’s Classical Heritage: Playing Games with Longinus’, in Koen and Funk Deckard, The Science of Sensibility, pp. 225–​45, here pp. 231–​2. 29 Robert Doran argues that Burke’s description of the various forms of astonishment that strike the reader/​spectator reveals the continuity of his reflection with Longinus. Doran, The Theory of the Sublime, pp. 145–​6. 30 This comparison occurs for example in ch. XII of Peri Hupsous, where Longinus compares Demosthenes and Cicero in the following terms:  ‘Demosthenes is vehement, rapid, vigorous, terrible; he burns and sweeps away all before him; and hence we may liken him to a whirlwind or a thunderbolt: Cicero is like a widespread conflagration, which rolls over and feeds on all around it, whose fire is extensive and burns long, breaking out successively in different places, and finding its fuel now here, now there.’ Longinus, On the Sublime, p. 27. (See also ch. XXXIII of Peri Hupsous.) 31 See, for example, Part II, sections iii and iv. 32 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, ed. Adam Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p.  50. Further references to Burke’s Enquiry will be taken from this edition, unless otherwise indicated. 33 Part IV of the Enquiry opens with a section entitled ‘Of the efficient cause of the sublime and beautiful’. Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, p. 117. 34 Vanessa L. Ryan argues that ‘Burke’s unique contribution to the debate on the sublime is rooted in his largely ignored and belittled emphasis on a physiological explanation for our passions and his consequent limitation of the role of reason in the experience of the sublime. Burke’s practice throughout the Enquiry is to derive the mental reaction from the physical rather than the reverse.’ Vanessa L. Ryan, ‘The Physiological Sublime: Burke’s Critique of Reason’, Journal of the History of Ideas 62:2 (2001), 269.   A similar point is made by Koen Vermeir and Michael Funk Deckard, ‘Philosophical Enquiries into the Science of Sensibility: An Introductory Essay’, in Vermeir and Funk Deckard, The Science of Sensibility, pp. 3–​ 56, as well as by Aris Sarafianos, in ‘Hyporborean Meteorologies of Culture:  Art’s Progress and Medical Environmentalism in Arbuthnot, Burke and Barry’, in Vermeir and Funk Deckard, The Science of Sensibility, pp. 69–​90. David Dwan highlights the specificity of Burke’s ‘view of passions as essentially non-​reasoning impulses, which present themselves as simple mechanical movements, which take place in human

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bodies in accordance with physical laws’. David Dwan, ‘Edmund Burke and the Emotions’, Journal of the History of Ideas 72:4 (2011), 571–​93; here 578.   According to some critics, including Walter J. Hipple, Burke’s insistence on the physiology of the aesthetic experience is the weakest point of the Enquiry, and one that laid it open to ridicule from contemporary critics. Walter J. Hipple, The Beautiful, the Sublime and the Picturesque in Eighteenth-​Century British Aesthetic Theory (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1957), pp. 81–​98. 35 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, II, ii, p. 54. 36 A more detailed analysis of this account is given by Doran, The Theory of the Sublime, pp. 146–​8. 37 As Stephen K. White puts it: ‘A sublime experience is one evoked by something that confronts us with our vulnerability and is thus painful; however, the threat in this case remains at a distance. It is this distance that gives us the cognitive and emotional space necessary for sublimity.’ Stephen K. White, Edmund Burke: Modernity, Politics, and Aesthetics (Thousand Oaks, CA, London and New Delhi:  Sage Publications, 1994), p. 28. 38 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, I, vii, ‘Of the sublime’, pp. 36–​7. 39 As Philip Shaw argues, Burke’s Enquiry may be seen as a ‘secularised version of Burnet’s apocalypse’, in which terror and violence are mitigated by distance, and consequently become a source of aesthetic contemplation. Shaw, The Sublime, 6. 40 Addison observed that the pleasure provided by artistic representations, or ‘descriptions’, of terrifying objects ‘does not arise so properly from the Description of what is terrible, as from the Reflection we make on our selves at the time of reading it. When we look on such hideous Objects, we are not a little pleased to think we are in no Danger of them. We consider them at the same time, as Dreadful and Harmless; so that the more frightful Appearance they make, the greater is the Pleasure we receive from the Sense of our own Safety’ (Spectator no. 418, in Smith, The Spectator, vol. III, p. 298). Dennis argued that: ‘As Terror is perhaps the violentest of all the passions, it consequently makes an Impression which we cannot resist, and which is hardly to be defaced: and no passion is attended with greater Joy than Enthustiastik Terror, which proceeds from our reflecting that we are out of danger at the very time that we see it before us’ (Critical Works, vol. I, p. 361). 41 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, II, i, ‘Of the passion caused by the sublime’, p. 53. 42 Ryan, ‘Burke’s Classical Heritage’, p. 231. 43 Ryan, ‘The Physiological Sublime’, p. 271. 44 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, II, viii and ix, pp. 67–​8.

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5 Baillie, An Essay on the Sublime, p. 9. 4 46 Gasché, ‘… And the Beautiful?’, p. 24. See also Paddy Bullard, Edmund Burke and the Art of Rhetoric (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 90. According to Philip Shaw, ‘The argument of the treatise, in contrast to that of his predecessors, is … almost entirely secular; God is no longer required to guarantee the authenticity of our experience’ (Shaw, The Sublime, p. 49). 47 See, for example, Monk, The Sublime, p. 85, or Baldine Saint-​Girons, Fiat lux: une philosophie du sublime (Paris: Quai Voltaire, 1993), p. 32. See especially Paddy Bullard’s essay, ‘The Meaning of the “Sublime and Beautiful”:  Shaftesburian Contexts and Rhetorical Issues in Edmund Burke’s “Philosophical Enquiry”’, Review of English Studies (NS) 56:224 (April 2005), 169–​91. 48 According to Robert Doran, ‘the idea of complex pleasure … is the crux of Burke’s theory of sublimity’. Doran, The Theory of the Sublime, p. 146. 49 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, III, xiii, pp. 102–​3. 50 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry II, iv, p. 58 and II, viii, p. 67. 51 Vanessa L. Ryan explains that Burke’s anti-​rational stand is mostly due to his extreme physiologism, and consequent minimising of mental activity (Ryan, ‘The Physiological Sublime’, p. 270). I find this interpretation convincing, but I would add that from an aesthetic point of view, the separation of the category of the sublime from that of the beautiful was equally significant in the assertion of the irrational, and allowed its development in a manner which was far from a lessening of mental activity. 52 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, II, ii, pp. 53–​4. 53 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, I, xiv, p. 43. 54 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, IV, v, p. 123. 55 Bullard, Edmund Burke and the Art of Rhetoric, p. 91. 56 James Kirwan, Sublimity: The Non-​Rational and the Irrational in the History of Aesthetics (New York and London: Routledge, 2005), p. 21. 57 Burke was not the first to include supernatural elements among his sources of the sublime. Before him, as mentioned in the introduction, Dennis had drawn the following list: ‘Gods, Daemons, Hell, Spirits and Souls of Men, Miracles, Prodigies, Enchantments, Witchcraft, Volcanoes, Monsters, Serpents, Lions, Tigers, Fire, War, Pestilence, Famine, &c.’ Quoted in Ashfield and De Bolla, The Sublime, p. 32. Nevertheless, this tendency had been very much reversed by Addison and Shaftesbury. 58 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, II, iii, p. 55. 59 See, for example, Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, IV, xiv, and II, iii. 60 Monk sees this new emphasis as one of Burke’s essential contributions to the theory of the sublime: ‘It was Burke who converted the early

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taste for terror into an aesthetic system and who passed it on with great emphasis to the last decades of the century’ (Monk, The Sublime, p. 87). 61 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, II, iv, p. 55. 62 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, II, iv, p. 54–​9. 63 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, II, iv, pp. 58–​9. 64 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, V, iv, pp. 152–​3. 65 See Jean Hagstrum, The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism and English Poetry from Dryden to Gray (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1958), p. 11, pp. 62–​5, p. 155. 66 Hagstrum, The Sister Arts, pp. 173–​314. See also Malcolm Andrews, The Search for the Picturesque (Stanford, CA:  Stanford University Press, 1989), pp. 3–​23. 67 Lessing’s correspondence with Moses Mendelssohn reveals that Lessing almost completed a German translation of the Enquiry. See, for example, Paul Guyer, ‘Introduction’, in Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, ed. Paul Guyer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. xxxi. 68 Hagstrum, The Sister Arts, pp.  153–​ 4. See also W. J.  T. Mitchell, Iconology:  Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 116–​49. 69 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, V, v, p. 155. 70 As Morton D. Paley argues, in many cases, Burkean themes and motifs soon became a common ‘intellectual currency’, which artists used without necessarily having read the Enquiry. Morton D.  Paley, The Apocalyptic Sublime (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986), p. 2. 71 Longinus, On the Sublime, p. 13. 72 Samuel Monk devotes a few pages to this adaptation of the concept by French Academicians. The Sublime, pp. 164–​74. 73 Roger de Piles, Bainbrigg Buckeridge, The art of painting, and the lives of the painters: containing, a compleat treatise of painting, designing, and the use of prints:  with reflections on the works of the most celebrated painters, and of the several schools of Europe, as well ancient as modern: being the newest, and most perfect work of the kind extant, trans. John Savage (London: J. Nutt, 1706), p. 19. 74 The Works of Jonathan Richardson, containing I.  The Theory of Painting. II. Essay on the Art of Criticism (So far as it relates to Painting). III. The Science of a Connoisseur (London, 1792), p. 115. 75 See Theodore Gracyck, ‘The Sublime and the Fine Arts’, in Costelloe, The Sublime, p. 223. 76 Spectator no. 592, Friday, 10 September 1714, in Smith, The Spectator, vol. IV, p. 356. 77 Hagstrum, The Sister Arts, p. 136.

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78 Spectator no. 411, Saturday, 21 June 1712, in Smith, The Spectator, vol. III, p. 277. 79 Spectator no. 416, Friday, 27 June 1712, in Smith, The Spectator, vol. III, p. 291. 80 See Martin Kallich’s analysis in ‘The Association of Ideas and Critical Theory:  Hobbes, Locke, and Addison’, ELH 12:4 (December 1945), 290–​315, here 310–​11. 81 See especially Peter De Bolla, The Discourse of the Sublime: Readings in History, Aesthetics and the Subject (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), pp. 42–​3. 82 Quoted in Ashfield and De Bolla, The Sublime, p. 98. 83 Quoted in Ashfield and De Bolla, The Sublime, p. 99. 84 Alexander Gerard, An Essay on Taste, 2nd edn (Edinburgh: A. Millar, A. Kincaid and J. Bell), 1764, p. 22. 85 Henry Home, Lord Kames, Elements of Criticism, 3rd edn (Edinburgh: Millar and Kincaid, 1765), vol. II, p. 426. 86 Henry Home, Lord Kames, Elements of Criticism, 2nd edn (Edinburgh: Millar and Kincaid, 1763), vol. I, p. 122. 87 Kames, Elements of Criticism, 2nd edn, vol. I, pp. 293–​7. 88 James Beattie, Elements of Moral Science (Edinburgh: T. Cadell, 1790), vol. I, p. 135.

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u Presenting the unpresentable: the modernity of Burke’s Enquiry

Burke’s contribution to theories of artistic representation has often been overshadowed by the sensualism and physiologism of the Enquiry, and underestimated because of the treatise’s lack of abstract speculation. Nevertheless, a number of critics have noticed the originality of his reflection on language, on terror, on the complexity of the aesthetic experience or on the irrational, and consequently emphasised the relevance of the Enquiry for later aesthetic theories, especially those which consider the notion of artistic representation as problematic. Ashfield and De Bolla, for example, see Burke’s reflections on the superior affective abilities of language as ‘particularly interesting to contemporary discussions of the sublime in which the question of presentability takes center stage’.1 Many have also commented on his influence on Kant’s aesthetic theory, especially through his introduction of disjunction and tension in the aesthetic experience. Thus, Thomas Weiskel explains that ‘the role of anxiety in Kant’s “dynamical sublime” ’ is to be traced back to ‘the centrality of terror’ in the Enquiry.2 Steven Vine connects the conflict of passions in the Burkean sublime with that of faculties in Kant.3 Similarly, Robert Doran argues that Burke’s description of the sublime as a complex pleasure, associating terror and delight, or negative and positive moments, may be considered to have influenced one of the most crucial –​and famous –​aspects of the Kantian sublime: its combination of a negative moment, as the imagination fails in its attempt to grasp the infinitely vast or powerful, with an elevating one, as reason relieves the mind by providing the necessary 61

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comprehension.4 This disjunction between the faculties of the mind is crucial because it implies a disturbing representational gap. The defeat of the ‘greatest faculty of sense’ (the imagination),5 which can only be relieved by the ‘supersensible’ faculty of reason,6 suggests that the sublime undermines the possibility of sensible (re)presentation. According to Kant: [W]‌hat is properly sublime cannot be contained in any sensible form, but concerns only ideas of reason, which, though no presentation adequate to them is possible, are provoked and called to mind precisely by this inadequacy, which does allow of sensible presentation.7

This reflection is far-​reaching. As Kant argues that the sublime is unpresentable in sensible terms, he also implies that all that sensible presentation may hope to achieve is to present an inadequacy. Postmodern philosophers have seen in this the emergence of a reflection about ‘the presentation of the unpresentable’, a point which I will develop later on in this chapter. Even though Burke’s conception of a complex aesthetic pleasure does not lead directly to Kant’s reflections on the ‘inadequacy’ of sensible forms and ultimate questioning of the possibility of a presentation of the sublime, the Enquiry does reflect on such issues, in a less sophisticated manner. By stating that indeterminacy and confusion convey the sublime more efficiently than clear and determinate images, Burke does point to an incommensurability of sensible forms to the sublime. By arguing that the ‘clear representations’ of painting cannot convey the terror or vastness inherent to the sublime, he especially highlights the inadequacy of pictorial forms, and points to a possible representational crisis.8 In this chapter, I intend to argue that the Philosophical Enquiry is a foundational text not simply because of its study of aesthetic responses and their causality, but also because of its reflection about artistic representation, its tensions, its processes and its possible failure. I  would like to place Burke’s views on painting’s representational inadequacy within a broader reflection about the possibility of presenting what exceeds sensible boundaries, and what is essentially unpresentable. I begin by arguing that the Enquiry outlines a shift from a mimetic conception of art to one which emphasises the artistic medium and, ultimately, the process of production of the artwork. After viewing this shift within the aesthetic debate in Britain, I focus on sections of 62

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the Enquiry that are explicitly devoted to aesthetic issues, in which Burke leaves the empirical investigation to reflect about the possibility of an artistic sublime. Even though these reflections mostly focus on language, they are worth studying because of their broader representational implications. The rest of the chapter examines the relevance of the Enquiry to recent theories which put the unpresentable at the centre of artistic presentation. Postmodern theories and especially Jean-​François Lyotard’s writings shed an interesting light on Burke’s emphasis on terror and excess, allowing us to see in them early intimations of what could be called an aesthetics of endeavour. By reflecting on the question of artistic presentation in general, these writings also suggest that Burke’s conception of the artistic medium and production may be applicable to painting, and hint at ways in which painters may respond to Burke’s challenge to visual representation. The very inadequacy of painters’ ‘clear representations’ can be understood to become a source of endless endeavour and striving for what cannot be contained within sensible forms, which is in itself sublime. As a consequence, formal pictorial explorations and the striving for presentation itself become the locus of the sublime. The sublime of imaginative activity To understand the significance of Burke’s reflection on the artistic medium and the process of representation, it is useful to begin by viewing it once again in its context. It seems especially relevant to compare it with contemporary and subsequent British writings which also reflected on the transformative powers of art and imagination as a source of sublimity. As the aesthetic debate from the middle of the eighteenth century increasingly emphasised the activity of the mind in the production of the sublime, Burke’s reflections on such matters were not isolated. A number of Scottish thinkers especially, including Kames, Archibald Alison and Dugald Stewart, began to explain how the imagination could generate the sublime. This in turn allowed them to argue for the immediate sublimity of the productions of art, when most empirical analyses had tended to view the latter as attenuated representations of an ‘original’ natural sublime.9 By placing the emphasis on the processes of the i­ magination –​ creative or receptive  –​rather than on the properties of external objects, these Scottish thinkers made it possible to view artistic 63

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representation as susceptible to affect powerfully, independently of the objects represented. Kames, who followed Burke in exploring the psychological processes of the sublime, also considered that this aesthetic experience was not directly produced by qualities of external objects, ‘but by the accidents by which these [objects] may have been enabled to suggest or recall to us our own past sensations or sympathies’,10 in other words by association of ideas. This awareness of the transformational powers of imaginative association allowed him to contend that art could be as sublime as life, if not more. He explained that this was due to its ability to select and combine, ‘to present those parts or circumstances only which make the greatest figure, keeping out of view every thing low or trivial’.11 Such a conception, it is true, was closer to the neoclassical conception of the sublime as the selection of the noblest and most elevating narrative components or figures than it was to the Burkean aesthetics of terror. Kames warned against a ‘licence of the imagination’ which consisted in straining the capacity of the human mind beyond acceptable limits.12 What artistic production provided was not an uncontrolled tension toward ungraspable forms, but a calm elevation through the controlled processes of imagination, conceived as a faculty of combination rather than creation. Nevertheless, the artwork’s affective power could supersede that of natural objects. The imagination’s power to generate the sublime was further explored by Archibald Alison and Dugald Stewart, who explained the workings of imaginative association in the production of the sublime. Thus, in his Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste (1790), Alison explains that the sublime cannot be caused by sensible qualities alone, but requires their interplay with the free ‘exercise of imagination’ and rapid ‘trains of thought’ without which the aesthetic experience cannot take place.13 An important consequence of this realisation, as Rachel Zuckert points out, is that for Alison and Stewart, associative meaning becomes ‘a primary source of sublime experience’, allowing artistic sublimity to match or even surpass its natural original.14 As he reflects on ‘The landscapes of Claude Lorrain, the music of Handel, the poetry of Milton’, Alison explains how it is ‘the play of fancy’ which they awaken which arouses powerful emotions:  ‘we feel the sublimity or beauty of their productions, when our imaginations are kindled by their power, when we lose ourselves amid the number of images that pass before our 64

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minds, and when we waken at last from this play of fancy, as from the charm of a romantic dream’.15 More significantly perhaps, historical and cultural associations endow natural scenes with added sublimity, especially when a place is associated with heroic feats or a ‘celebrated battle’.16 In other words, as Zuckert puts it, ‘Alison and Stewart suggest that art (or other cultural meanings) may have transformative powers in rendering natural objects sublime, through investing those objects with meaning.’17 There are obvious similarities between such theories and Burke’s reflections on the possibility of an artistic sublime. There is, fundamentally, the realisation that the imitation of sublime qualities in natural objects does not in itself lead to an intense aesthetic experience, and that an artistic sublime is possible independently of such external references. It is the workings of the imagination which allow the productions of art to supersede those of nature. Something happens in the uncontrolled process of artistic production and reception which is elevating in itself and does not depend on external phenomena. Alison writes of the incomparable delight that occurs ‘when, in recalling our attention, we are unable to trace either the progress or the connexions of those thoughts, which have passed with so much rapidity through our imagination’,18 while Burke explains how in sublime poetic descriptions ‘[t]‌he mind is hurried out of itself, by a croud of great and confused images, which affect because they are crouded and confused’.19 In both cases, the mind is carried away and delighted by its own loss of control and its own combinatory powers. The differences, however, are significant. Perhaps most importantly, Kames, Alison and Stewart continue to consider the sublime in art as both attainable and fulfilling, while Burke emphasises the tension towards what exceeds conception and the terror connected with it. For the Scottish writers, to a great extent, the sublime remains a heightened form of the beautiful, and an emotion which does not necessarily involve terror or frustration. Even though they highlight the imagination’s confusing and restless play, there is, as far as the artistic process itself is concerned, no intimation of something that may be unpresentable and that art would strive for in vain. There is no representational impossibility, because the process of association is in itself sufficient to arouse heightened emotions. 65

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Burke’s conception, on the other hand, implies a more radical break with classical aesthetics. His emphasis on terror goes together with the intimation of the impossibility of artistic fulfilment, of a disjunction between conception and representation, but also of the resistance of the artistic medium to comprehension. When he describes the transports of the mind due to the poetic sublime, he adds that it is the obscurity of the poetic medium which causes such effects,20 whereas Kames or Alison underline no such opacity of representation. Kames even openly disapproves of descriptions in which ‘sentiments may be so strained, as to become obscure, or to exceed the capacity of the human mind’.21 This originality of Burke’s reflection, I  would like to argue, is largely due to the fact that he questioned the fundamentals of a representational tradition which his contemporaries still took for granted.22 He especially questioned the belief that the artistic medium, verbal or visual, is mimetic of the sensible world, of which it is possible to give a literal, accurate and finite transcription; and that the transparency of the artistic medium guarantees the possibility of an adequacy between conception and representation. From mimesis to process Burke’s reappraisal of artistic representation began by a reassessment of the principle of imitation which, halfway through the eighteenth century, was still generally considered as the founding principle of the arts. A decade before the publication of the Enquiry, Charles Batteux, in Les Beaux Arts réduits à un même principe (1746), had argued that central to the definition of the fine arts was the imitation of ideal nature or more precisely what he called ‘belle nature’. At the same time, as explained in the previous chapter, the pictorialist aesthetics praised the arts’ ability to provide a vivid and forceful reproduction of visible reality. Burke was clearly aware of this primacy of imitation and examined it under a variety of angles in the Enquiry, some of which reflected the empirical discourse of his time, while others were specific to him. He seems to have considered it important to appraise and question the emotive power of imitation. One of his preoccupations in the Enquiry is to distinguish between what the arts owe to imitation in their ability to affect, and what they owe to sympathy. Early on in the Enquiry, he defines ways of assessing ‘when we are to attribute 66

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the power of the arts, to imitation, or to our pleasure in the skill of the imitator merely, and when to sympathy, or some other cause in conjunction with it’.23 More importantly, in this assessment, Burke is led to argue that sympathy works more effectively than imitation. His reflections on tragedy, in which he argues that we are more fascinated by real tragedies, like executions, than by their fictional counterparts, because of the more intense sympathy they arouse in us, are a well-​known illustration of these views: But then I imagine we shall be much mistaken if we attribute any considerable part of our satisfaction in tragedy to the consideration that tragedy is a deceit, and its representations no realities. The nearer it approaches the reality, and the further it removes us from all idea of fiction, the more perfect is its power. But be its power of what kind it will, it never approaches to what it represents. Choose a day on which to represent the most sublime and affecting tragedy we have; appoint the most favorite actors; spare no cost upon the scenes and decorations; unite the greatest efforts of poetry, painting, and music; and when you have collected your audience, just at the moment when their minds are erect with expectation, let it be reported that a state criminal of high rank is on the point of being executed in the adjoining square; in a moment the emptiness of the theatre would demonstrate the comparative weakness of the imitative arts, and proclaim the triumph of the real sympathy.24

So far, Burke’s take on imitation was not isolated. As Doran argues, Burke’s interpretation had much in common with Jean-​Baptiste Du Bos’s aesthetic theory in his Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture, which considered the intensity of affect caused by artistic representation (poetry or painting) as a function of the affective power of the subject represented, and as derived from sympathy rather than imitation.25 In such a conception, the emotive intensity of mimetic art was correlated to that of the reality it represented, which could never be fully matched. These views on imitation seem to have been enhanced by Burke’s sensualism, which led him to see mimetic representations as less affecting forms of reality that could not match the more immediate psychological and physiological impact of the originals. But it was not simply a sensualist and empiricist bias that made Burke dismiss the ‘weakness of the imitative arts’. Even though the empiricist approach seems to prevail in the Enquiry, the treatise’s criticism of mimesis and literal representations suggests that Burke does not simply locate the sublime in an external reality to be weakly 67

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duplicated by art. Other developments in the Enquiry point to a new awareness that the transformational qualities of the artistic medium may themselves be a source of sublimity, which leads Burke beyond empirical psychology, but also beyond writers like Du Bos. I would like to argue that it is his awareness of the medium in its opacity and independent processes that leads him to his most serious attack against the mimetic assumption. The radical implications of Burke’s views on imitation and the artistic medium become apparent in his reflections on language in Parts II and V of the Enquiry. I tend to agree with W. J. T. Mitchell and David Bromwich that, although they have been overshadowed by the critics’ focus on Burke’s psychological and physiological investigations, these analyses are the cornerstone of Burke’s aesthetic reflection.26 Their significance is due to their demonstration that only a non-​mimetic art form is capable of causing the emotive intensity that characterises the sublime. In these reflections, Burke’s preference for poetry as a vehicle of sublimity is justified by the fact that it is ‘not strictly an imitative art’,27 and that its medium, language, far from being transparent, is endowed with a form of indistinctness that gives it affective power. As he compares it to painting in Part II of the Enquiry, he claims that ‘poetry, with all its obscurity, has a more general, as well as a more powerful dominion over the passions, than the other art’.28 The Miltonic descriptions that according to him show the affective superiority of the poetic medium are ‘dark, uncertain, confused, terrible’ and subjugate the mind ‘by a croud of great and confused images; which affect because they are crouded and confused’.29 In the last section of the treatise, Milton’s description of hell as a ‘universe of death’ is taken as an example of the power of poetry to raise ideas that are ‘not presentable but by language’, and to combine them in ways that are ‘great and amazing beyond conception’.30 In such passages, Burke argues that what makes poetry sublime is the ability of its medium, language, to affect without semantic clarity, through the sheer energy of combinations which function independently of clear mental images. He also suggests that this sublimity derives from an aptitude of language to present what exceeds conception, and therefore representation. The representational implications of these views are spelt out in Part V of the Enquiry, which concludes the treatise and thus confirms the argument’s shift from physiological and psychological 68

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considerations to an interest in the artistic medium itself. Significantly, Part V begins with a distinction between the physiological and artistic origins of the sublime: Natural objects affect us by the laws of that connection which Providence has established between certain motions and configurations of bodies, and certain consequent feelings in our mind. Painting affects in the same manner, but with the superadded pleasure of imitation. Architecture affects by the laws of nature and the law of reason; from which latter result the rules of proportion, which make a work to be praised or censured, in the whole or in some part, when the end for which it was designed is or is not properly answered. But as to words; they seem to me to affect us in a manner very different from that in which we are affected by natural objects, or by painting or architecture; yet words have as considerable a share in exciting ideas of beauty and of the sublime as many of those, and sometimes a much greater than any of them.31

As this passage makes clear, Burke’s reflection about an autonomous artistic medium will not include painting, which is a mimetic art and can only add the ‘pleasure of imitation’ to the affective power of natural objects: ‘painting, when we have allowed for the pleasure of imitation, can only affect simply by the images it presents’.32 The only artistic medium that according to him may be dissociated from the material world and the physiological sublime is language, which, as Ashfield and De Bolla summarise it, ‘can image things to us which cannot be literally seen’.33 However, by reflecting on language’s ability to affect independently of the objects described, Burke is raising questions about artistic representation that go beyond the verbal arts and have particular applicability for painting, as I will argue. He is especially reflecting about the possibility that the materiality of the artistic medium could prevail over its representational function.34 Thus, he builds upon Locke’s theory of language, which refutes the possibility of a natural connection between words and ideas,35 to highlight the opacity of language. He acknowledges that ‘words affect, not by original power, but by representation’,36 but he also hints at an autonomous functioning of language which gives it greater power than what it represents. For one thing, ‘there are many things of a very affecting nature, which can seldom occur in the reality, but the words that represent them often do; and thus they have an opportunity of making a deep impression and taking root in the mind, whilst the idea of the reality was transient’.37 More importantly perhaps, the sounds of words may affect the mind even 69

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when these words are disconnected from the notions they originally stood for. Burke argues that ‘compound abstract words’, which represent complex notions, cannot derive their power to affect ‘from any representation raised in the mind of the things for which they stand’,38 but may affect through sound only: The sounds being often used without reference to any particular occasion, and carrying still their first impressions, they at last utterly lose their connection with the particular occasions that gave rise to them; yet the sound, without any annexed notion, continues to operate as before.39

Whereas Locke saw in the disjunction between sounds and ideas an ‘imperfection’ and obstacle to communication,40 Burke obviously relishes this resistance of language. He is particularly interested in the ability of language to work independently of clear ideas, and to affect through processes and combinations that are beyond comprehension, as this defeat of the understanding is conducive to the sublime. As Frans De Bruyn explains, he prefers powerful language that appeals to the passions to clear and polished language that appeals to the understanding,41 claiming that clarity undermines the strength of a language: ‘It may be observed, that very polished languages, and such as are praised for their superior clearness and perspicuity, are generally deficient in strength.’42 This aesthetic stand is interesting first of all because it was going against the times’ preference for semantic preciseness and clarity.43 It also differentiates Burke’s conception of the poetic or rhetorical sublime from Longinus’, which implied ‘the concealment of language’.44 Finally, it signalled a new interest for the artistic medium as an independent source of affective power, through its opacity and intrinsic processes rather than as the mediation of something else. This appeal is manifest in Burke’s repeated approval of confusing ‘crowds’, ‘combinations’ and rapid ‘successions’ of words that affect by exceeding either rational or visual containment, by ‘hurrying’ the mind on or refusing to be reduced to clear ideas. The defeat of comprehension by verbal excess is a recurrent argument of both Part II and Part V of the Enquiry. The section on ‘Magnificence’ in Part II provides a striking formulation of the idea: There are … many descriptions in the poets and orators, which owe their sublimity to a richness and profusion of images, in which the mind is so dazzled as to make it impossible to attend to that exact coherence

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and agreement of the allusions, which we should require on every other occasion.45

Burke’s praise of verbal excess suggests that the processes of language may be sublime in themselves, by the very fact that they precede and defeat the understanding, but also by the fact that they are driven on by an inadequacy of form and content, which reflects the endless tension of creative activity. In other words, the emotive intensity which is characteristic of the sublime may be located within artistic processes themselves, and not just in the encounter with external objects. This emphasis on the artistic medium and its transformational powers coexists with the unprecedented sensualism of the Enquiry, and is even combined with it, as has been noted by a number of critics. Paddy Bullard, for example, observes that Burke tends to make his empirical inductions ‘through the medium of poetry’, ‘[using] scenes from Lucretius, Milton and the Bible as a curious sort of secondary object world, an imagined ground for observing virtual experiments on the passions’, and sees in this approach the remnants of a rhetorical perspective on the sublime.46 Philip Shaw, after De Bolla, deduces from such a conflation that Burke is very close to declaring the possibility ‘that sublimity is an effect of language’ or that ‘the origins of the sublime reside in words rather than ideas’.47 According to Shaw: ‘Words have a power, Burke argues, to raise the idea of the sublime, such that the distinction between the sublime object and its description no longer applies; it is language, in other words, that brings about the transformation of the world.’48 I would argue that such a confusion may signal not just Burke’s shift away from the empiricist account of aesthetic experience that is the starting point of the Enquiry, but also the beginning of a displacement from a conception of art as centred on the represented object to one which focuses on the medium, its materiality and its transformational abilities. The implications were radical. By focusing on the artistic medium and its dynamic process, rather than its mimetic or cognitive value, the Enquiry draws attention to the significance of representational endeavour and suggests that this striving is at least as constitutive of the artwork as the artist’s mastery or the subject matter. It also suggests ways in which the sublime could be embedded in the materiality of artistic production itself. By reflecting on the way poetic language produces an immediacy 71

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of response which precedes any cognitive distance, it also implies that in artistic production, expressive immediacy should prevail over rules of composition. Contrary to Longinus, Burke discusses no figure of style or rhetoric that could contribute to the production of the sublime, but evokes a mysterious immediacy of composition that cannot be broken down into conventions. The Enquiry also explores the possibility of excess and open-​endedness in the artistic medium itself, by insisting on the rich combinatory power of language,49 but also by considering its application to artistic production in general. Thus, in Part III, section xxvii, Burke makes the infinite variety of combination a principle of all natural and artistic production: ‘In the infinite variety of natural combinations, we must expect to find the qualities of things the most remote imaginable from each other united in the same object. We must expect also to find combinations of the same kind in the works of art.’50 Finally, the Enquiry hints at ways in which the art object may cause, through its own production and unfolding, the mental anguish, or even terror, that are associated with the sublime. By dismissing forms whose bounds can be perceived, because they correspond to ‘little idea[s]‌’ and ‘[do] not make some sort of approach towards infinity’,51 Burke is placing the sublime beyond the bounds of representation, as something the artwork strives for rather than contains. This realisation, I would say, places artistic endeavour and its immediacy, as a source of endless anxiety, ahead of the finished or perfect art work. Burke never explicitly states that the sublime may take place in unfulfilled artistic endeavour itself and in the material act of creating. As a matter of fact, his belief that the sublime is within the reach of poetic language prevents too much anxiety about the process of verbal creation. On the other hand, his dismissal of painting as too literal and mimetic draws attention to the pictorial medium as a place where unfulfilled artistic endeavour may be materialised, and where the tension towards what exceeds perceptible bounds may be enacted. In other words, his criticism places the possibility of a pictorial sublime within the act of pictorial production and the creative anguish connected with it, rather than in the imitation of a sublime object or action. Again, Burke does not make such a statement, and does not call on painters to transform their medium, which he can only conceive of as mimetic. Nevertheless, by highlighting the limitations of mimetic visual practices, he was calling 72

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for new explorations of visual media that would take into account the tension toward the unpresentable. In order to understand why his theory may have incited some artists to place this tension at the core of their visual production, and to invest the latter with sublime anxiety, it will be useful to examine more recent theories of the sublime, which allow us to reassess Burke’s impact on artistic practices. Burke’s sublime and the ‘avant-​garde’ The most recent aesthetic reflection on the sublime has tended to explain that the concept of the sublime caused a representational crisis by calling into question the finite and static aesthetics of the beautiful, and by substituting for it the endless quest for unlimitedness. Several thinkers associated with postmodernism have revisited Kant’s ‘Analytic of the sublime’ in the third Critique, and to a lesser extent Burke’s Enquiry, to argue that the opposition between the beautiful and the sublime mostly had to do with the possibility, or impossibility, of presentation of an object or idea. Central to this approach are a number of reformulations of Burke’s ideas by Kant, which suggest how the sublime may have some bearing on the question of representation. First of all, Kant makes explicit the opposition of the formal ‘limitation’ associated with the beautiful and of the formlessness or ‘limitlessness’ associated with the sublime.52 He then argues that when attempting to present what is sublime, the imagination or faculty of presentation (Darstellung) can only strive to present a limitlessness which ‘concerns only ideas of reason’, and of which no ‘adequate’ presentation is possible. It is consequently impossible to give ‘sensible form’ to ‘what is properly sublime’.53 Only the faculty of reason, which is ‘supersensible’,54 can grasp the sublime. As reason steps in to overcome the limitations of the imagination, aesthetic pleasure becomes possible, but it is a form of pleasure beyond sensible form or presentation, unlike that which is associated with the beautiful. Following Kant, postmodern philosophers have suggested that the categories of the beautiful and the sublime entail very different modes of (re)presentation. With the beautiful, the artistic form or contour is adequate to what the artist aims to present, and a finite figurative representation is possible; formal perfection may be aimed at; with the sublime, limitlessness prevents this adequacy, and the closure of representation is impossible. This impossible closure 73

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becomes the basis of an aesthetics of endeavour, of movement or invention, depending on the interpretation. According to Jean-​Luc Nancy, for example, Mere beauty, or beauty alone and isolated for itself, is form in its pure self-​ adequation, in its pure accord with the imagination, the faculty of presentation (or formation). … The beautiful is the figure that figures itself in accord with itself, the strict accord of its contour with its design. Form or contour is limitation, which is the concern of the beautiful: the unlimited, to the contrary, is the concern of the sublime. … The unlimited begins on the external border of the limit: and it does nothing but begin, never to finish … The sublime will always invoke –​that is, if it is anything at all and if it can constitute an aesthetics –​an aesthetics of movement as opposed to an aesthetics of the static or the state.55

These recent reflections have tended to summarise the aesthetics of the sublime as consequently centred on one essential issue: the presentation of the unpresentable, in other words the impossibility of containing the excess associated with the sublime in a finite form, and the constant and dynamic striving to give form to what is beyond formal containment. Derrida’s description of the sublime is typical of this approach: The sublime cannot inhabit any sensible form. … The true sublime, the sublime proper and properly speaking (das eigentliche Erhabene) relates only to the ideas of reason. It therefore refuses all adequate presentation. But how can this unpresentable thing present itself? How could the benefit of the violent calculation be announced in the finite? We must ask ourselves this: if the sublime is not contained in a finite natural or artificial object, no more is it the infinite idea itself. It inadequately presents the infinite in the finite and delimits it violently therein. Inadequation (Unangemessenheit), excessiveness, incommensurability are presented, let themselves be presented, be stood up, set upright in front of (darstellen) as that inadequation itself. Presentation is inadequate to the idea of reason but it is presented in its very inadequation, adequate to its inadequation. The inadequation of presentation is presented.56

Derrida’s reflection is not simply about representational tension, but about representational impossibility. The sublime seems to be beyond the reach of art, which can only contain it ‘violently’. If an art of the sublime is to exist, it can only take the form of a tension toward, a process of reaching beyond the limits of what art can (re) present, which makes figuration no longer possible. Nancy explains 74

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that in the sublime, the imagination reaches its limit, and is consequently driven to exceed it, to ‘overflow’ it.57 As the limit is reached and exceeded, ‘there is no longer either figure or figuration or form’, no (re)presentation.58 If any sublime presentation is to take place, ‘it takes place in effort and feeling’, in constantly pushing away the limit, in ‘the continuous displacement of a limit’.59 The ‘postmodern’ philosophers have generally traced back this crisis of representation no further than Kant’s theory of the sublime, seeing no similar conflict between presentation and the unpresentable in earlier thinkers.60 Nevertheless, as we have seen, Burke does reflect about the impossibility of containing excess in a finite form, and about formal incompleteness or obscurity as a means to present what can only strike by remaining unpresentable. His unprecedented separation of the sublime and the beautiful allows him to conceive of an aesthetics of incompleteness, unlimitedness and dynamic tension, as opposed to one of formal perfection and stasis. His role as a precursor has occasionally been acknowledged by postmodernist theory. Jean-​François Lyotard in particular finds his emphasis on terror especially compelling, perhaps more than discourses which insist on the elevation of the subject in the experience of the sublime. In his essay on ‘The Sublime and the Avant-​Garde’, he claims that ‘at the dawn of romanticism, Burke’s elaboration of the aesthetics of the sublime, and to a lesser degree Kant’s, outlined a world of possibilities for artistic experiments in which the avant-​ gardes would later trace out their paths’.61 In Lyotard’s interpretation, the sublime allows the development of ‘an art of invention rather than mimesis’.62 Burke’s role is central because he provides the basis for a conception of art as driven by terror, but also empowered and made more inventive by it. First of all, Lyotard sees the act of creating as itself prompted by the terrifying necessity to go on creating in order to stave off the possibility of absence, ‘the threat of nothing further happening’. He insists on the Enquiry’s connection between terror and privation in order to argue that a major source of aesthetic delight is the relief which follows the removal of privation. And he sees art, in his avant-​garde conception of it, as endowed with the ability to make things happen, and consequently lead to such delight: Here then is [Burke’s] account of the sublime feeling:  a very big, very powerful object threatens to deprive the soul of any ‘it happens’, strikes it

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with ‘astonishment’ (at lower intensities the soul is seized with admiration, veneration, respect). The soul is thus dumb, immobilized, as good as dead. Art, by distancing this menace, procures a pleasure of relief, of delight. Thanks to art, the soul is returned to the agitated zone between life and death, and this agitation is its health and its life.63

Lyotard’s interpretation arbitrarily brings together various sections of Part II of the Enquiry which are not connected so explicitly. To some extent, it appropriates the Burkean sublime and projects it beyond Romanticism by suggesting that it revolves around the potential annihilation of the self rather than its elevation. Nevertheless, it highlights an important implicit presupposition of the Enquiry, which is that art, even though it diminishes the immediate impact of the physical or material sublime, may also be driven by its own extreme impulses: the terrifying necessity to fill the void, and the delightful relief of production. This recognition confers on it a vital significance, which is manifest in Burke’s reflections on poetic language. His conception of poetic sublimity as the encounter between scenes of desolation or death and the ‘fire’ of the poet’s imagination is especially telling. The connection is made explicitly through the example of Virgil’s musings at the mouth of hell: All general privations are great, because they are all terrible; Vacuity, Darkness, Solitude and Silence. With what a fire of imagination, yet with what severity of judgment, has Virgil amassed all these circumstances, where he knows that all the images of a tremendous dignity ought to be united at the mouth of hell!64

Even though the ‘fire of imagination’ is used to convey physical properties of ‘vacuity, darkness, solitude and silence’, it also provides a specific form of artistic delight, a form of relief which is not the removal from danger of the physiological sublime. It fills the void with a complex combination of awe-​inspiring images (‘images of a tremendous dignity’), which Burke immediately quotes with obvious enjoyment. The same reflection about emptiness relieved by art could be found in his fascination for Milton’s description of Death in Paradise Lost, which he praises for its ‘significant and expressive uncertainty of strokes and colouring’. In spite of this important insight, Lyotard does not really reflect about the ways in which the artistic medium or processes materialise this urge to produce in order to keep the terror of emptiness at bay. 76

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He contents himself with interpreting Burke’s aesthetics as a call for novel combinations that strike sufficiently to prevent privation: The arts, whatever their materials, pressed forward by the aesthetics of the sublime in search of intense effects, can and must give up the imitation of models that are merely beautiful, and try out surprising, strange, shocking combinations. Shock is, par excellence, the evidence of (something) happening, rather than nothing, suspended privation.65

The idea that artistic production should be the recombination of pre-​given material in order to surprise is not new, and may for example be found in neoclassical and Romantic discourse alike. What is more interesting is Lyotard’s idea that artistic endeavour should call for constant renewal because of a deep-​seated fear of absence. The arts’ purpose, according to his interpretation of the Burkean sublime, would be to constantly ensure that something happens. Excess and shock in artistic production would be a means to make things happen. Another important insight which goes along with this interpretation is that art, by focusing on the necessity to produce rather than the finished product, the process of production rather than the imitation of an existing object, becomes the presentation of the ‘unpresentable’: ‘The art object no longer bends itself to models, but tries to present the fact that there is an unpresentable.’66 Once again, Lyotard does not explain clearly where Burke voices such an intuition. I would say that it is especially noticeable in his fascination for combinations of words that precede comprehension and that affect through sounds rather than clear images. Lyotard’s brief essay has the merit of suggesting, even hastily, that Burke contributed to the formulation of essential representational issues, which are still at the heart of aesthetic reflection today. While postmodernist criticism generally focuses on the role played by Kant, Lyotard suggests that Burke’s unparalleled emphasis on terror might have been even more crucial. Not only did it call for representational indeterminacy, and therefore emancipation from mimesis, as a source of terror in itself, but it implied the possibility of an endless process of invention, driven by the fear of emptiness. I would add that Burke’s conception of an artistic production in which the intensity of expression is not always translatable into clear ideas partakes of this aesthetics of anxiety. It is compounded by his emphasis on the immediacy of the aesthetic experience, in 77

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which emotional intensity precedes sophisticated judgment. The Enquiry describes no compositional principles that may lead to the sublime, and provides no principles of artistic judgment, as what matters is the ‘immediate apprehension of sense’.67 As the reassurance of pre-​given rules is denied, another source of anxiety emerges. What is of particular interest in Lyotard’s interpretation is that it considers the applicability of Burke’s theory to all the arts, not just to poetry. As a matter of fact, the starting point of his reflection about the avant-​garde and the constant need to invent, to fill the void by producing something new, is Barnett Newman’s own reflection on the sublime, in his painting Vir heroicus sublimis (1950–​51) and in his text entitled ‘The Sublime is Now’ (1948).68 Through the rest of the essay, and in some of Lyotard’s other writings, the urge to fill the void, to present the unpresentable, is seen as especially connected with the creative act as it is experienced by avant-​garde painters like Newman or Rothko, who refuse to imitate reality and focus on experimentation with their medium.69 The act of painting, the immanent occurrence of painting itself bears witness to the ‘inexpressible’, and is consequently sublime in itself. ‘In the determination of pictorial art, the indeterminate, the “it happens” is the paint, the picture. The paint, the picture as occurrence or event, is not expressible, and it is to this that it has to witness.’70 By connecting Burke’s aesthetics of terror with visual practices that focus on the immanence of artistic production and the materiality of the pictorial medium, Lyotard suggests what one of the main reasons for Burke’s appeal to painters may have been. He was not encouraging them to improve their mimetic skills or even their ability to visualise terrifying subject matter. Such attempts, he claimed, could only lead to bathos, because of the literal nature of the visual image. On the other hand, he was making visual artists reflect about ways of introducing terror within the process of artistic presentation itself. As he emphasised the disjunction between the poetic medium and ‘the thing represented’,71 Burke was not just outlining a new form of rivalry between the arts but actually drawing attention to the process of artistic presentation itself, and raising the question of how the pictorial medium too could present the unpresentable. The issue for painters was not simply a matter of affecting as powerfully as poetry, but of exploring ways through which their medium, 78

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like language, could present what overpowers or exceeds comprehension, without giving it a finite or comprehensible form. One of the first ways of visualising such a representational gap, as Baldine Saint-​Girons suggests, was to explore the images of dreams which, like words, were not directly connected to clear meanings.72 Henry Fuseli, as will be seen in Chapter 4, made the most of such a solution. But a new emphasis on artistic endeavour rather than the finished form was also necessary. In this reflection on representation may be seen to reside Burke’s main challenge for visual artists:  he was inciting them to forge a medium that would have the same dynamism and affective power as language, and to focus on the act of presentation itself, rather than the represented object, in order to convey the sublime. This shift in artistic practices has been said to have been instigated by Kant’s aesthetic writings, and their reflections about the inadequacy of sensible presentation in the sublime. Nevertheless, as I  have argued, Burke’s Enquiry already outlined the tensions that were later articulated by Kant. He was reflecting about the possibility of a failure of representation, as his observations on painting especially suggest. What is more, he was doing this in simple, concrete and often visual terms which made his thoughts more directly appealing to and applicable by artists. As we will see in the following chapters, there is much evidence that literary-​minded artists like Reynolds, Barry, Fuseli and Blake were well acquainted with the contents of the Enquiry. Consequently, even before the question of the ‘unpresentable’ was given its full philosophical articulation, one could say that, in Britain, in reaction to Burke, visual practices had already begun to explore its implications. In these first two chapters, I have attempted to convey the complexity and innovative characteristics of Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry, in order to better introduce the variety of pictorial responses to his conception of the sublime and its challenge to painting. I have insisted on the existence of other views on the pictorial sublime so as to better emphasise the specificity of his conception, and to make it clear that he was deliberately challenging an established representational tradition, but also in order to explain why artists did not initially feel threatened by his views. It was because the discourse on the sublime was so varied, and because the Longinian tradition endured through much of the eighteenth century, that painters did not immediately feel the implications of Burke’s theory. As we are 79

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going to see, they were actually able to reconcile it with aesthetic discourses which were more compatible with the visual arts. This rich context accounts for the wide range of responses to the Enquiry that I am going to examine, and for the fact that many artists pursued sublime subject matter instead of addressing the representational tensions implied by Burke’s theory. As I will outline in the next two chapters, the earliest responses came from artists whose solid neoclassical background allowed the conflation of a mostly Longinian conception of the sublime with Burkean themes and motifs, and the development of an aesthetics of terror within the conventions of academic painting. Nevertheless, closer to the end of the century, as Burke’s denigration of painting’s literalness began to be echoed by the literary and critical elite, a conscious need to address the representational challenge could be discerned. Whether the responses were antagonistic, as in the case of William Blake, or approving, artists began to realise that what was at stake with the new conception of the sublime was the question of artistic presentation itself, through the medium, its format and limits, but also through the dynamism of the creative process. Burke’s conviction that the literal forms of painting prevented it from reaching the sublime incited some painters to explore the possibility of unfinished, indistinct forms and to begin to emancipate themselves from the conventions that had governed mimetic practices since the Renaissance. Just as significantly, by suggesting that the sublime could be embedded in artistic production itself, Burke may have contributed to a growing interest in expressive and dynamic forms, and in the material processes of pictorial and graphic production as a means to reflect a new sense of representational inadequacy. These formal explorations, articulated by the sense of an unsurmountable gap in the presentation of the sublime, will be the object of my study from Chapter 4. Notes 1 Andrew Ashfield and Peter de Bolla (eds), The Sublime:  A Reader in British Eighteenth-​Century Aesthetic Theory (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 129. 2 Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime:  Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence (Baltimore and London:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), pp. 84–​5.

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3 Steven Vine, Reinventing the Sublime:  Post-​Romantic Literature and Theory (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2013), p. 4. 4 See, for example, Robert Doran, The Theory of the Sublime from Longinus to Kant (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 178–​82 and 212–​13. 5 Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), §27, pp. 140–​1. 6 Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, §25, p. 138. 7 Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, §23, p. 129. 8 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, ed. Adam Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), Part II, section iv, p. 58. Unless otherwise indicated, further references are to this edition. 9 See, for example, Emily Brady, The Sublime in Modern Philosophy: Aesthetics, Ethics and Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 119. 10 Henry Home, Lord Kames, Elements of criticism, revised, with omissions, additions, and a new analysis (1762) (New York and Chicago: A. S. Barnes & Company, 1863), Part II, §196, p. 121. 11 Henry Home, Lord Kames, Elements of Criticism, 2nd edn (Edinburgh: Millar and Kincaid, 1763), vol. I, p. 300. 12 Kames, Elements of Criticism, 2nd edn, vol. I, p. 293–​4. 13 Archibald Alison, Essays on the nature and principles of taste (1790) (Hartford, CT: Goodwin and Sons, 1821), I, i and ii, pp. 17–​19. 14 Rachel Zuckert, ‘The Associative Sublime: Gerard, Kames, Alison, and Stewart’, in Timothy M. Costelloe (ed.), The Sublime: From Antiquity to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 69. 15 Alison, Essays, I, i, pp. 18–​19. 16 Alison, Essays, I, iii, p. 30. 17 Zuckert, ‘The Associative Sublime’, p. 69. See also Brady, The Sublime in Modern Philosophy, p. 33. 18 Alison, Essays, I, i, p. 18. 19 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, II, iv, p. 57. 20 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, II, iv, p. 57. 21 Kames, Elements of Criticism, 2nd edn, p. 294. 22 Paul Guyer does not hesitate to say: ‘In his later political career, Burke was considered a conservative defender of tradition, above all the tradition of Britain’s ‘unwritten constitution’, but in his youthful work in aesthetics he argued vigorously against the entire tradition of Western thought.’ Paul Guyer, ‘Introduction’, in Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, ed. Paul Guyer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. ix.

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3 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, I, xvi, p. 45. 2 24 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, I, xv, p. 43–​4. 25 Doran, The Theory of the Sublime, pp. 156–​7. 26 While Bromwich claims that this part of the argument ‘may be understood to generate all the rest’, Mitchell sees it as its logical conclusion. David Bromwich, The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke: From the Sublime and Beautiful to American Independence (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2014), p. 85; W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 124. 27 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, V, vi, p.  157. In Book V, Burke also writes: ‘In reality, poetry and rhetoric do not succeed in exact description so well as painting does; their business is, to affect rather by sympathy than imitation; to display rather the effect of things on the mind of the speaker, or of others, than to present a clear idea of the things themselves.’ Philosophical Enquiry, V, v, p. 157. 28 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, II, iv, p. 57. 29 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, II, ii, iii and iv. 30 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, V, vii, p. 159. 31 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, V, i, p. 149. 32 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, II, iv, p. 58. 33 Ashfield and de Bolla, The Sublime, p. 129. 34 This change is observed by Vermeir and Funk Deckard, who explain that according to Burke, words may be dissociated from what they represent because through habit they ‘have become associated with certain effects of emotions’ and consequently affect mechanically. Koen Vermeir and Michael Funk Deckard, ‘Philosophical Enquiries into the Science of Sensibility’, in Koen Vermeir and Michael Funk Deckard (eds), The Science of Sensibility: Reading Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry (Dordrecht, Heidelberg, London and New York: Springer, 2012), p. 38. 35 According to Locke:  ‘The chief end of language in communication being to be understood, words serve not well for that end, neither in civil nor philosophical discourse, when any word does not excite in the hearer the same idea which it stands for in the mind of the speaker. Now, since sounds have no natural connexion with our ideas, but have all their signification from the arbitrary imposition of men, the doubtfulness and uncertainty of their signification, which is the imperfection we here are speaking of, has its cause more in the ideas they stand for than in any incapacity there is in one sound more than in another to signify any idea: for in that regard they are all equally perfect.’ John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), Book III, ch. ix, 4–​5, pp. 476–​7. 36 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, V, vii, p. 158.

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7 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, V, vii, p. 158. 3 38 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, V, ii, p. 150. 39 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, V, ii, p. 151. 40 Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book III, ch. ix, p. 477. 41 Frans De Bruyn, ‘ “Expressive Uncertainty”:  Edmund Burke’s Theory of the Sublime and Eighteenth-​Century Conceptions of Metaphor’, in Vermeir and Funk Deckard, The Science of Sensibility, p. 274. 42 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, V, vii, p. 160. 43 De Bruyn, ‘ “Expressive Uncertainty” ’, p. 274. 44 Philip Shaw, The Sublime (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 28. 45 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, II, xiii, p. 72. 46 Paddy Bullard, Edmund Burke and the Art of Rhetoric (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 81–​2. 47 Shaw, The Sublime, p.  49. De Bolla provides an inspiring analysis of this empowerment of language in Peter De Bolla, The Discourse of the Sublime: Readings in History, Aesthetics and the Subject (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), pp. 61–​72. 48 Shaw, The Sublime, p. 6. 49 Burke writes, for example: ‘by words we have it in our power to make such combinations as we cannot possibly do otherwise. By this power of combining we are able, by the addition of well-​chosen circumstances, to give a new life and force to the simple object.’ Philosophical Enquiry, V, vii, p. 158. 50 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, III, xxvii, p. 114. 51 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, II, iv, p. 58. 52 Kant, The Critique of the Power of Judgment, §23, p. 128. 53 Kant, The Critique of the Power of Judgment, §23, p. 129. 54 Kant, The Critique of the Power of Judgment, §25, p. 134. 55 Jean-​ Luc Nancy, ‘The Sublime Offering’, in Jean-​ François Courtine (ed.), Jeffrey S. Librett (trans.), Of the Sublime: Presence in Question (Albany:  State University of New  York Press, 1993), pp. 25–​ 53, here p. 35. 56 Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 131. 57 Nancy, ‘The Sublime Offering’, p. 40. 58 Nancy, ‘The Sublime Offering’, p. 41. 59 Nancy, ‘The Sublime Offering’, p. 45. 60 This point is made by David B.  Johnson, who analyses the writings of Jean-​François Lyotard, Julia Kristeva, Gilles Deleuze and Fredric Jameson, although he could also have mentioned similar observations in Jacques Derrida and Jean-​Luc Nancy. David B. Johnson, ‘The

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Postmodern Sublime:  Presentation and Its Limits’, in Costelloe, The Sublime, p. 119. 61 Jean-​ François Lyotard, ‘The Sublime and the Avant-​ Garde’, in The Lyotard Reader, ed. Andrew Benjamin (London:  Wiley-​ Blackwell, 1989), p. 206. 62 Bill Readings, Introducing Lyotard:  Art and Politics. Critics of the Twentieth Century (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), p. xxii. 63 Lyotard, ‘The Sublime and the Avant-​Garde’, p. 205. 64 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, II, vi, p. 65. 65 Lyotard, ‘The Sublime and the Avant-​Garde’, p. 205. 66 Lyotard, ‘The Sublime and the Avant-​Garde’, p. 206. 67 Bullard, Edmund Burke and the Art of Rhetoric, p. 91. 68 Barnett Newman, ‘The Sublime is Now’, Tiger’s Eye (December 1948), quoted in Barnett Newman, Barnett Newman:  Selected Writings and Interviews, ed. John Philip O’Neill (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), p. 170–​3. 69 Jean-​François Lyotard, L’inhumain: causeries sur le temps (Paris: Galilée, 1988), p. 142. 70 Lyotard, ‘The Sublime and the Avant-​Garde’, p. 198. 71 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, V, iv, p. 153. 72 Baldine Saint-​Girons, Fiat lux: une philosophie du sublime (Paris: Quai Voltaire, 1993), pp.  356–​7. Saint-​Girons is not specifically discussing pictorial issues.

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Given Burke’s doubts about the possibility of a pictorial sublime, his ideas spread with surprising success among the visual artists of his time. From the 1770s, his aesthetics of terror pervaded pictorial practices ranging from popular entertainment to academic exhibi­ tion paintings. While the growing taste for thrills easily accounts for the development of dramatic visual spectacles in the last two ­decades of the century, Burke’s influence on academic practices is more intriguing. Seeing that the newly created Academy, in the opening words of its president, promoted ‘elegance’, ‘refinement’ and ‘dignity’,1 Burke’s argument that visual representations of terrifying subject matter tended to be ‘ridiculous’, ‘grotesque’ or ‘ludicrous’ could have been seen as a precautionary warning. Yet, a long line of academic productions, from John Hamilton Mortimer’s Death on a Pale Horse (1775)2 to Turner’s late apocalyptic paintings, was devoted to precisely the kind of topics that he believed should be confined to poetry. To explain this paradox, Paley argues that by the 1770s, Burke’s ideas had ‘passed into the general intellectual currency of the age’ and become so ‘intellectually dominant’ that artists applied his theory without necessarily being fully acquainted with it.3 This was certainly true, but Paley’s interpretation suggests that Burke’s influence was mostly indirect, when in some cases, especially at the beginning, close intellectual contact was at work. Of the thinkers of his day, Burke was possibly the one who had 85

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the closest personal association with artists. He is known to have patronised young Irish painters like George Barret and James Barry,4 and to have been a remarkable collector, who purchased work by his friends and protégés, besides owning seven Poussins and a Titian.5 His prolonged friendship and correspondence with two academicians, Sir Joshua Reynolds and James Barry, was of particular significance. Not only does this important biographical detail mitigate the antipictorialism of the Enquiry, but it also suggests ways in which Burkean aesthetics might have permeated British academic theory and practice. In the case of Reynolds, who played such a significant role in shaping the aspirations of British artists at the end of the eighteenth century and even later, the question of influence is especially crucial. An analysis of his theoretical writings, in particular, should make it possible to assess the impact of Burkean aesthetics on a discourse which was solidly anchored in the neoclassical tradition, to determine whether Reynolds felt the implications of Burke’s challenge to painting and to see if and in what form he made it possible for Burke’s ideas to filter into academic teaching. In the case of both Reynolds and Barry, considering the combination of personal and aesthetic interactions will be a way to explain why the first academic responses to the Enquiry were both confident and conservative. Looking at Barry’s correspondence with Burke in particular will allow me to see how artists dealt with the conflict between the new aesthetics and the academic tradition, why they felt that a sublime of terror was compatible with the conventions of mimetic representation and how some even attempted to persuade Burke that this was the case. A lifelong friendship Sir Joshua Reynolds and Edmund Burke were close friends and intellectual companions. They became acquainted as young men a year or two after the publication of the Philosophical Enquiry, and their friendship remained unbroken until the death of Reynolds in 1792.6 From 1764, they met on a regular basis and in fact spent much of their leisure time together, not least of all as members of the very select Literary Club founded by Samuel Johnson and Reynolds himself.7 In his Memoirs of the life of Sir Joshua Reynolds, Joseph 86

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Farington gives an eloquent account of their friendship and of what it meant for Reynolds’s intellectual development: Having thus introduced the name of Mr. Burke, it may here be said, that of all the distinguished men with whom Sir Joshua was acquainted, that great man stood highest in his estimation of their mental powers. He thought Dr. Johnson possessed a wonderful strength of mind, but that Mr. Burke had a more comprehensive capacity, a more exact judgment, and also that his knowledge was more extensive; with the most profound respect for the talents of both, he therefore decided that Mr. Burke was the superior character. Sir Joshua and Mr. Burke were for a great length of time warmly attached to each other.8

Given the close friendship and intellectual connection, one would expect Burke to have had a significant influence both on Reynolds’s pictorial practice and on his own reflections, on art in general and on the sublime in particular. These reflections, which are largely contained in the ‘discourses’ he delivered on an almost yearly basis at the Royal Academy of Arts, as president of that school, are among the most sophisticated theoretical writings by a practising British painter of the time, which is not surprising given Reynolds’s solid intellectual background and interactions. Their theoretical quality was such that they were assumed by some contemporaries to have been partly or fully the work of the artist’s literary friends, with Burke’s assistance being ‘principally suspected’.9 It is more likely that the rich context of regular debate and exchange of ideas within (or without) the Literary Club accounts for the philosophical and literary depth that sets the ‘discourses’ apart from other artists’ writings. James Northcote’s testimony gives us an idea of what Burke’s contribution might have been in the preparation of the lectures: I remember one morning in particular, after Sir Joshua had been studying till very late the preceding night, that Burke paid him a morning visit; I was in the adjoining room, and could easily overhear their conversation. Sir Joshua read aloud to Burke [a]‌paragraph of his discourse of December 10, 1774 … Burke commended it in the highest terms, saying, ‘This is indeed excellent; nobody can mend it, no man could say it better.’ Yet I cannot but contemplate with wonder that a man whose time was almost wholly taken up in the practical acquirement of one art alone, and who, from education, was by no means to be ranked as a man of literature, should compose such prose as some good judges have pronounced to be among the highest examples in the English language.

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It is also certain that Sir Joshua was a man who at all times would assist himself by every laudable expedient. It is also very certain that Burke could, if required, have given him the greatest assistance in strength and elegance of language, together with a literary and professional appearance to his writings, although the thoughts might be wholly his own. Yet if Burke did assist him in his writings, it must have been managed with consummate art and secrecy on both sides. Miss Reynolds says she knows the discourses were always shown in the manuscript to Burke.10

Although Northcote supports the idea that Reynolds authored the discourses, his defence remains a little inconclusive, and he does not exclude the possibility that Burke’s help might have been given as a consequence of certain financial obligations he had towards Reynolds.11 Interestingly, he suggests that any contribution would have been stylistic, with the ideas being Reynolds’s own. The evidence provided by Frances Reynolds, Sir Joshua’s younger sister, who was his housekeeper until the late 1770s, seems to confirm that the discourses were written by Reynolds and then submitted to Burke for his opinion and possible stylistic changes.12 In the following analysis, I  would like to assess what Burke’s influence might have been by focusing on Reynolds’s conception of the sublime. I intend to determine to what extent the latter may be seen as a response to the Philosophical Enquiry, whether Reynolds felt challenged by its exclusion of painting from the new aesthetic category and whether Burke’s ideas on the sublime might have filtered into British academic discourse, and consequently academic practice, through his very close connection with Reynolds. The sublime in Reynolds’s theory of painting In view of the constant intellectual exchanges between Reynolds and Burke, a first reading of the lectures seems to disclose paradoxically little influence of the latter’s youthful attempt at aesthetic theory. While a conception of the sublime is developed in them, it initially seems to owe little to the Enquiry. The prevailing approach is academic and rationalist. Reynolds’s Discourses were given in the context of the recent creation of a British academy of arts, under royal patronage, by a group of prominent artists of the day, led by Reynolds himself. As the Academy’s first president, Reynolds enunciated the purposes of the new institution, which were to elevate 88

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the visual arts and encourage the development of a national school of art that would be able to compete with continental schools. As a consequence, the Discourses were much influenced by continental academic principles, which were themselves thoroughly anchored in the neoclassical tradition. This approach seems to have precluded Burke’s aesthetics of terror, whose irrationalist presuppositions went against the very foundations of classicism. At the same time, it seems to have made a definition of the pictorial sublime possible. The Discourses, which aimed to raise the status of visual artists, are pervaded with undeniable confidence in the painter’s powers to exalt and elevate on his own terms: Reynolds is keen to remind his listeners that ‘[t]‌he great end of the art is to strike the imagination’,13 that a painter ‘must endeavour to improve [mankind] by the grandeur of his ideas’14 or that he should ‘aspire to grandeur and sublimity’.15 In his conception, the constraints of visual representation are no obstacle to the sublime. In Discourse XI, as he compares the ‘Genius of a Poet’ to that of a painter, he admits implicitly that the latter is constrained by the determinacy and literalness of the pictorial medium, but claims that painterly genius consists in making the most of this medium to visualise the grandest conceptions: ‘Whatever sublime ideas may fill his mind, he is a Painter only as he can put in practice what he knows, and communicate those ideas by visible representation.’16 Through such assertions, Reynolds was essentially claiming that the sublime was within the reach of the painter of genius. But his sublime was not that of the Philosophical Enquiry. In many respects, it was a conception which was inherited from earlier Enlightenment thinkers, among them Addison and Richardson, as well as from their Longinian and French sources. More importantly, it was a conception which was compatible with neoclassical aesthetics. As Samuel Monk argues, Reynolds inherited from neoclassical theories of art, in particular from Roger De Piles and Jonathan Richardson, the notion that the sublime is found in an idealised form of nature, or a ‘beauty which transcends nature’,17 which finds its pictorial expression in the great style and in history painting. This conception is developed at length in his third discourse, which explains what ‘The Leading Principles of the Great Style’ are. According to Reynolds, once the artist has acquired mechanical dexterity, he must go beyond the mere copying of nature, observe and compare its particular forms, select the most beautiful ones, 89

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correct their imperfections and gradually reach what he calls the idea of the ‘general’ or ‘central form’.18 ‘For, though the painter is to overlook the accidental discriminations of nature, he is to exhibit distinctly and with precision the general form of things.’19 This combination of Platonic idealism and an inductive method inspired by Lockean empiricism is the foundation of Reynolds’s conception of the great style and, consequently, of the sublime. ‘This idea of the perfect state of nature, which the Artist calls the Ideal Beauty, is the great leading principle, by which works of genius are conducted.’20 Once the painter has reached this stage, he is able to powerfully affect his viewers: ‘When a man once possesses this idea in its perfection, there is no danger, but that he will be sufficiently warmed by it himself, and be able to warm and ravish every one else.’21 As these definitions make clear, Reynolds often sees the sublime as a higher form of the beautiful, which leads him to use the notions of the great and the sublime interchangeably. At times, he even speaks of ‘grandeur and sublimity’ together, or of ‘great and sublime ideas’.22 There is none of Burke’s emphasis on pain and terror –​as opposed to the pleasantness of the beautiful –​but instead, the exaltation and fulfilment given by ideas that transcend beauty by rising above particular circumstances and minute details:  ‘The sublime in Painting, as in Poetry, so overpowers, and takes such a possession of the whole mind, that no room is left for attention to minute criticism.’23 Even though Reynolds thinks of the sublime in terms of overwhelming fulfilment, the experience is one of pleasant expansion. As he explains elsewhere, the mind that is free from attention to minute details experiences a form of ‘repose; a word which perfectly expresses a relief of the mind from that state of hurry and anxiety which it suffers, when looking at a work of this character’ [that includes too many particular details].24 By defending this conception, Reynolds is closer to an earlier Enlightenment thinker like Addison than to his intellectual companion.25 As explained in Chapter  1, Addison’s reflections on the sublime had described a state in which the imagination is stretched beyond its own capacity, leading to an exultation or ‘astonishment’, which, far from plunging the mind into anxiety, is in fact characterised by ‘a delightful Stillness and Amazement’.26 Burke had introduced horror into this state of mind and described ‘astonishment’ as ‘that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of 90

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horror’, the mind being ‘so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other’.27 Reynolds, who insisted on the necessity to ‘captivate’ the imagination,28 or ‘strike’ it,29 without ever mentioning the affecting power of terror, seems to have sought the kind of overwhelming but pleasing exultation of the imagination which Addison had described. This conception, of course, also reveals the lasting influence of the Longinian sublime which Reynolds, like Jonathan Richardson before him, shows to be compatible with the theory of painting, even though it was initially mostly intended for the art of rhetoric. Like his neoclassical predecessors, Reynolds adapted to painting Longinus’s first two sources of sublimity, grandeur of conception (noêsis) and inspired emotion (pathos). These two sources may actually be seen as leading principles of the Discourses, which repeatedly incite young artists to ‘enlarge [their] conceptions, or warm the heart of the spectator’,30 refer to the ‘sublime’ as the ‘manly, noble and dignified manner’,31 and explain that the ‘great style’ is characterised by ‘intellectual dignity’.32 Reynolds’s Longinian inspiration is especially apparent in his belief that grand intellectual conceptions raise art above simple formal perfection: It must not, indeed, be forgotten that there is a nobleness of conception which goes beyond anything in the mere exhibition even of perfect form; there is an art of animating and dignifying the figures with intellectual grandeur, of impressing the appearance of philosophic wisdom, or heroic virtue. This can only be acquired by him that enlarges the sphere of his understanding by a variety of knowledge, and warms his imagination with the best productions of antient and modern poetry.33

In this statement are connected two essential, Longinian, aspects of Reynolds’s views on the sublime: the insistence on nobleness of conception, but also the belief that the painter may go through a form of intellectual training in order to attain it. This second point, which goes together with the idea that one may attain ‘genius’ through the acquisition of ‘rules of art’,34 has been seen as an expression of Reynolds’s academic conservatism. But it may also be connected, like the first, to the Longinian sublime. Longinus had indeed argued that grandeur of conception could be acquired, insisting that we should ‘train our souls to sublimity, and make them as it were ever big with noble thoughts’35 and suggesting that writers should emulate those who had already shown loftiness of thought. According to 91

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him, ‘by our fixing an eye of rivalry on those high examples they will become like beacons to guide us, and will perhaps lift up our souls to the fulness of the stature we conceive’.36 This principle is central to Reynolds’s teaching, according to which ‘the great examples of the art … are the materials on which genius is to work’, acting as ‘infallible guides’ through which ‘that idea of excellence which is the result of accumulated experience of past ages may at once be acquired’.37 As Reynolds’s lexicon suggests, what has been criticised as an anti-​imaginative stand and drew disapproval from artists like William Blake, may be seen as part of a coherent Longinian conception of the sublime. The Longinian tradition is equally present in Reynolds’s reflections about the aesthetic effects of the sublime and in particular about the central importance of immediacy for such effects. Longinus had written at the very beginning of his Peri Hupsous: Skill in invention, lucid arrangement and disposition of facts, are appreciated not by one passage, or by two, but gradually manifest themselves in the general structure of a work; but a sublime thought, if happily timed, illumines an entire subject with the vividness of a lightning-​flash, and exhibits the whole power of the orator in a moment of time, and seems to sustain his conception of genius, as a form of energy and comprehensive vision which can override lack of perfection in the details.38

Reynolds’s first explanation of what the sublime consists of, in his Discourses, is a fairly literal adaptation of that passage: [I]‌t is impossible for a picture composed of [too] many parts to have that effect so indispensably necessary to grandeur, that of one complete whole … The sublime impresses the mind at once with one great idea, –​it is a single blow; the Elegant indeed may be produced by repetition; by an accumulation of many minute circumstances.39

Reynolds’s interest in the idea that the sublime strikes ‘in a single blow’ is significant because his adaptation of the Longinian sublime to the art of painting hinges precisely on that point. In his own comparisons of the arts, Reynolds shows his awareness that painting and poetry are different artistic media, and that unlike poetry, painting cannot unfold in time. This awareness may have been inspired by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s theory of the separation of the arts, which itself seems to have been partly prompted by Burke’s own distinction in the Enquiry, as I  mentioned in Chapter  1. What is 92

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remarkable is that Reynolds makes the most of it to imply the compatibility of the sublime, as an aesthetics of immediacy, with the art of painting: Poetry operates by raising our curiosity, engaging the mind by degrees to take an interest in the event, keeping that event suspended, and surprising at last with an unexpected catastrophe. The painter’s art is more confined, and has nothing that corresponds with, or perhaps is equivalent to, this power and advantage of leading the mind on, till attention is totally engaged. What is done by painting must be done at one blow.40

In other words, the pictorial medium is constrained to aim for what Reynolds has described as the effect of the sublime:  an immediate, powerful impression, ‘at one blow’. This is according to him the main purpose of the grand style in painting, which he describes elsewhere as the ‘general effect’.41 In his eleventh discourse, after claiming that what makes a painter is the ability to give ‘visible representation’ to one’s ‘sublime ideas’,42 he explains what this ability consists of: This Genius consists, I  conceive, in the power of expressing that which employs your pencil, whatever it may be, as a whole; so that the general effect and power of the whole may take possession of the mind, and for a while suspend the consideration of the subordinate and particular beauties or defects.43

Both instances suggest that Reynolds was consciously adapting the Longinian conception of the sublime, because he saw it as compatible both with the specificity of the pictorial medium and with academic training as he conceived it. This Longinian influence is acknowledged explicitly in the fifth discourse, as Reynolds attempts to determine whether Raphael or Michelangelo would rank highest among artists. After admitting that Raphael ‘possessed a greater combination of the higher qualities of the art than any other man’, he argues: ‘But if, as Longinus thinks, the sublime, being the highest excellence that human composition can attain to, abundantly compensates the absence of every other beauty, and atones for all other deficiencies, then Michael Angelo demands the preference.’44 In spite of the reference to Longinus, Reynolds’s choice of Michelangelo (and preference for him to Raphael) as the painter of 93

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the sublime reflects a significant shift in taste and sensibility, and a personal evolution beyond the influences I have mentioned so far. As Samuel Monk argues, until the middle of the eighteenth century, classicist theories of painting favoured Raphael over Michelangelo as the painter of the sublime, inasmuch as his art was seen to convey idealised forms that transcended nature and somehow lay beyond rules, yet remained gracefully calm. Michelangelo’s genius was perceived as too individual and capricious to fit into this conception of the sublime. In this context, Reynolds’s definite preference for Michelangelo, which he first expressed in his letters to The Idler in 1759 and which culminates in his farewell discourse at the Royal Academy (1790), may be considered as the most audacious aspect of his teaching at the Royal Academy. It may also be seen as his most significant contribution to the definition of a pictorial sublime, as he consistently equates Michelangelo’s art with this aesthetic category. As early as in his second letter to The Idler (79), Reynolds expressed his interest in ‘the sublimest style, particularly that of Michelangelo, the Homer of painting’.45 In his final lecture, he wrote of ‘The sublimity of Michael Angelo’, ‘the divine energy of his own mind’, and his ‘poetical and sublime imagination’.46 To a great extent, the sublime identified by Reynolds in Michelangelo’s art remains anchored in the Longinian tradition and its neoclassical adaptations. It is especially striking that the main argument for Michelangelo’s sublimity is the ‘poetic’ dimension of his art, whose emotive power rivals the production of the best poets. Thus, in his fifth lecture, Reynolds claims that ‘[t]‌he effect of the capital works of Michael Angelo perfectly corresponds to what Bouchardon said he felt from reading Homer; his whole frame appeared to himself to be enlarged, and all nature which surrounded him, diminished to atoms’. And when comparing him to Raphael, he asserts that ‘Michael Angelo has more of the Poetical Inspiration; his ideas are vast and sublime’.47 In his final lecture, he argues that Michelangelo’s sublimity is a combination of painterly mastery and poetic invention: I will not say Michael Angelo was eminently poetical, only because he was greatly mechanical; but I am sure that mechanick excellence invigorated and emboldened his mind to carry painting into the regions of poetry, and to emulate that art in its most adventurous flights.48

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These comparisons with poetry are in continuity with the neoclassical theories which adapted the Longinian sublime to painting based on the ut pictura poesis principle. Michelangelo’s art demonstrates that a pictorial sublime is possible; but this sublime is conceived as an ‘emulation’ of poetry, which remains the superior art, because it is less mechanical and more intellectual. At the same time, Reynolds does reflect about a sublimity that would be inherent to the pictorial medium, as his comments about Michelangelo’s ‘mechanick excellence’ imply. In particular, Michelangelo’s art prompts a reflection about a stylistic energy which is specific to painting. According to Michael Duffy, Reynolds observes this dynamism especially in Michelangelo’s treatment of figures and bodies, rather than in ‘the style of design, chiaroscuro, and color’: Reynolds admired Michelangelo’s Hebrew and pagan seers who prophesied the fate of humankind and the coming of the Messiah, and he seemed to understand that the power and energy of their physical presence is communicated through rotational motion of the shifting parts of their body.49

Besides the dynamism of Michelangelesque figures, Reynolds also observed a form of stylistic energy, which he called ‘energy of character’,50 emanating from the artist’s expressive immediacy. One comment from the fifth discourse suggests what Reynolds would have conceived as characteristic of Michelangelo’s stylistic sublimity: If any man had a right to look down upon the lower accomplishments as beneath his attention, it was certainly Michael Angelo; nor can it be thought strange, that such a mind should have slighted or have been withheld from paying due attention to all those graces and embellishments of art, which have diffused such lustre over the works of other painters.51

Reynolds is once again expressing his conviction that Michelangelo’s pictorial style is comparable to that of the most sublime poets. In very similar accents, Longinus had condoned the faults in Homer as ‘oversights which were allowed to pass unregarded through that contempt of little things, that “brave disorder,” which is natural to an exalted genius’.52 At the same time, it is clear that Michelangelo provided Reynolds with an illustration of what a sublime style could consist of in the visual arts. The statement may be seen as a reflection about artistic production which is driven by energy rather than by the more time-​consuming production of ornamental 95

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beauty. Reynolds, who associated the ornamental parts of painting with mechanical rather than intellectual abilities, seems to imply that grandeur of conception is best expressed in its immediacy, without meticulous technical finishing touches. Michelangelo’s style even seems to prompt a reflection about the non finito and the uses of indeterminacy or indistinctness for visual sublimity. This stylistic possibility, however, remains implicit. For the time being, Reynolds makes it obvious that clarity should prevail, insisting that ‘correctness of form’ cannot be dissociated from Michelangelo’s ‘energy of character’.53 Nevertheless, in his last discourse, he distinguishes between ‘correctness of drawing’ and Michelangelo’s ‘grandeur of outline’,54 thereby implying that the gesture which stems directly from the artist’s energetic conception should prevail over mimetic accuracy. In other words, Reynolds’s reflection on the Michelangelesque sublime eventually leads to a conception which emphasises the energy of the artistic gesture rather than the vividness of imitation. Burke’s influence in the Discourses So far, I  have argued that Reynolds’s conception of the sublime may be encompassed by his reflections on the grand style, on idealised nature and on Michelangelo. While the first two approaches remain anchored in neoclassical academic theory, one may say that Reynolds’s admiration for Michelangelo takes him beyond neoclassicism, and allows him to introduce a proto-​Romantic emphasis on individual genius, expressive immediacy and stylistic spontaneity. This shift in sensibility, which becomes especially marked at the end of Reynolds’s life, naturally raises the question of Burke’s influence. What I have underlined so far highlights more dissimilarities than points of convergence between the two friends’ aesthetic theories. Reynolds’s conviction that the sublime was compatible with painting, supported by the neoclassical notion that it could be found in idealised forms of nature, produced by the best painters, was especially at odds with the Enquiry. What is more, Burke’s description of the sublime as a complex aesthetic experience involving both terror and delight is fundamentally absent from Reynolds’s Discourses. The presidential addresses firmly and repeatedly rejected the idea 96

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that stylistic violence or shock could elicit any form of aesthetic pleasure, as appears for example in the following reflections on novelty: [T]‌he mind can … bear with pleasure but a small portion of novelty at a time. The main part of the work must be in the mode to which we have been used.… [W]here all is novelty, the attention, the exercise of the mind is too violent. Contrast, in the same manner, when it exceeds certain limits, is as disagreeable as a violent and perpetual opposition; it gives to the senses, in their progress, a more sudden change than they can bear with pleasure.55

Quite significantly, the only explicit reference to Burke in the Discourses is an afterthought. It appears as a footnote to a statement made in the eighth lecture, calling for ‘[a]‌complete essay or enquiry into the connection between the rules of Art, and the eternal and immutable dispositions of our passions’. When revising his lecture notes, Reynolds corrected his statement, writing: ‘This was inadvertently said. I did not recollect the admirable treatise On the Sublime and Beautiful.’56 Such a clarification both invalidates the rumour according to which Burke wrote the Discourses,57 and even suggests that Reynolds considered the Enquiry to be too incompatible with his own views to be taken into account. It also suggests that Reynolds recognised the value of the Philosophical Enquiry only as a psychological explanation of aesthetic experience. This first impression, however, should be qualified. While it is not explicitly acknowledged, the repercussion of Burke’s ideas in the lectures is more pervasive than appears at first, and suggests that Reynolds not only was well acquainted with his friend’s essay but also understood that it raised a challenge for visual representation. Critics have noticed the influence of the Enquiry’s introduction ‘On Taste’, which was added to the treatise in its 1759 edition, and seems to have provided Reynolds with a definition of the concept, together with an explanation of the psychological mechanisms leading to judgments of taste. Donald Cross Bryant points out that the wording used by Reynolds in his seventh discourse (on taste), reveals his knowledge of the exact wording of the Enquiry on that subject, and consequently suggests a transmission of ideas through the text itself, rather than simply through conversation.58 The passages quoted by Bryant are worth 97

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repeating, as they make obvious such a transmission. Burke’s original text stated: But it must be observed that the power of the imagination is incapable of producing anything absolutely new; it can only vary the disposition of those ideas which it has received from the senses … Consequently there must be just as close an agreement in the imagination as in the senses of men.

Reynolds’s adaptation of the passage was surprisingly literal: It seems then to follow of course, that as the imagination is incapable of producing anything originally of itself, and can only vary and combine those ideas which it is furnished by means of the senses, there will be necessarily an agreement in the imagination as in the senses of men.

Such a close adaptation, naturally, implies a close reading of the Enquiry. As far as the sublime is concerned, Burke’s influence is less explicit, but may still be discerned. It may be found, for instance, in Reynolds’s preference for Michelangelo’s sublimity over Raphael’s, which reflects the change in aesthetic sensibility that is manifest in the Philosophical Enquiry. Choosing Michelangelo’s terribilità, genius and energy over the perfection of Raphael was a way to acknowledge the new conception of the sublime as something beyond the control of reason and rules, but also as characterised by tension and excess, or by a tension towards what exceeds formal containment. As Samuel Monk argues, Raphael epitomised the neoclassical conception of sublimity, whereas ‘Michelangelo could best illustrate the sublime that Burke made popular’.59 Nevertheless, Burke’s influence is not acknowledged in this context, nor did the Enquiry mention Michelangelo as an example of the sublime. Significantly, Reynolds seems to be most receptive to the Enquiry’s distinctions between artistic media and their specificities, as appears in his comparisons of the stylistic devices available to painters and poets, which acknowledge the greater suggestiveness of poetry. In his seventh discourse, Reynolds warns painters against the temptation of seeking inspiration without having yet acquired technical mastery, but admits that while an indistinct manner is to be avoided in the visual arts, it may produce the sublime in poetry:  ‘We will allow a poet to express his meaning, when his meaning is not well known to himself, with a certain degree of obscurity, as it is one source of the sublime.’60 98

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In the next discourse, he further compares the use of indeter­ minacy in the two arts. In painting, while it may be very pleasing to the imagination, an indeterminate style should not be used ‘in a complete and finished picture’, and can only be acceptable in sketches. On the other hand, the power of poetry is enhanced by ‘indistinct expressions’, as is made obvious in Milton’s Paradise Lost. The passage is worth quoting at length: From a slight, undetermined drawing, where the ideas of the composition and character are, as I may say, only just touched upon, the imagination supplies more than the painter himself, probably, could produce; and we accordingly often find that the finished work disappoints the expectation that was raised from the sketch; and this power of the imagination is one of the causes of the great pleasure we have in viewing a collection of drawings by great painters. These general ideas, which are expressed in sketches, correspond very well to the art often used in Poetry. A great part of the beauty of the celebrated description of Eve in Milton’s Paradise Lost, consists in using only general indistinct expressions, every reader making out the detail according to his own particular imagination, –​his own idea of beauty, grace, expression, dignity, or loveliness: but a painter, when he represents Eve on a canvas, is obliged to give a determined form, and his own idea of beauty distinctly expressed. We cannot on this occasion, nor indeed on any other, recommend an undeterminate manner, or vague ideas of any kind, in a complete and finished picture. This notion, therefore, of leaving any thing to the imagination, opposes a very fixed and indispensable rule in our art –​that everything shall be carefully and distinctly expressed.61

The whole argument is one of the most revealing illustrations of Burke’s influence on Reynolds’s theory of painting and of the tensions that emerged from the encounter. Reynolds’s interest in the ‘unfinished’ or non finito in sketches, an incompleteness which is seen as pleasurable because it gives some freedom to the imagination, suggests that he was looking for a pictorial or graphic equivalent of the indistinctness and indeterminacy which Burke had praised in poetic language. What is more, the analysis seems to be directly inspired by the Enquiry’s own reflection about artists’ sketches, which significantly hints at the possibility of indeterminacy in the visual arts: INFINITY, though of another kind, causes much of our pleasure in agreeable, as well as of our delight in sublime, images. The spring is the ple­asantest of the seasons; and the young of most animals, though far from

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being completely fashioned, afford a more agreeable sensation than the full-​grown; because the imagination is entertained with the promise of something more, and does not acquiesce in the present object of the sense. In unfinished sketches of drawing, I  have often seen something which pleased me beyond the best finishing; and this I believe proceeds from the cause I have just now assigned.62

As these similarities suggest, Reynolds’s response to the Enquiry’s challenge seems to be limited to suggestions made by Burke himself:  visual indeterminacy may be found in sketches, but not in finished paintings. Wendelin Guentner notes that ‘Reynolds immediately retreats from this more progressive view of the sketch when he continues by implying the superiority of paintings composed according to artistic conventions grounded in clarity and reason.’63 But the retreat could be seen as a ‘surrender’ to Burke’s views, and especially his denial of suggestiveness in most visual media. The admission that painting is constrained by the necessity to present a distinct and ‘determined form’ while poetry may address the imagination through indeterminacy may be read as Reynolds’s very literal adaptation of Burke’s own reflections on obscurity in poetry and painting. As explained earlier, the Enquiry had argued that images in painting, being ‘clear and determinate’, could not affect as much as the confused and obscure images of poetry, which had ‘a greater power on the fancy to form the grander passions’.64 Reynolds here seems to accept Burke’s idea that a painter’s finished representation leaves no choice to the viewer’s imagination, unlike a poet’s description. One more element in the analysis confirms Burke’s influence: like his friend, Reynolds sees in Milton’s Paradise Lost a perfect illustration of stylistic indeterminacy in poetry, although –​significantly –​his chosen passage is an example of the beautiful, rather than the sublime descriptions of Death and Satan discussed by Burke. Whereas the latter praises the ‘expressive uncertainty of strokes and colouring’ in ‘the portrait of the king of terrors’,65 Reynolds chooses to mention ‘the beauty of the celebrated description of Eve in Milton’s Paradise Lost’. The arguments used by Reynolds reveal an undeniable familiarity with the new aesthetic ideas introduced by the Enquiry, and suggest that he understood what was at stake in them, as far as representational issues were concerned. He clearly was aware of what Burke thought about the separate abilities of the arts, the limitations 100

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of painting, its literalness and determinacy, and accepted the criticism. Yet, the Enquiry also prompted in him a number of stylistic interrogations, about the determinacy and finiteness of the pictorial or graphic image, and the means to transcend these. His reflection about sketches highlights his interest in visual media that could prevent closure and provide as much suggestiveness as language. This, as I said, could be seen as a response to the Enquiry’s challenge to painting. It is, however, a minimal one, since it goes no further than what was suggested in the Enquiry itself. At other times, Reynolds is content to accept that painting will never convey what the imagination conceives, without seeing in this gap the need for new representational paradigms. The following remarks on extravagant critical praise may be seen as a sobering reminder to artists that they should only attempt to visualise what is within the reach of their art: [T]‌here are many writers on our art, who, not being of the profession, and consequently not knowing what can or what cannot be done, have been very liberal of absurd praises in their descriptions of favourite works. They always find in them what they are resolved to find. They praise excellences that can hardly exist together, and above all things are fond of describing with great exactness the expression of a mixed passion, which more particularly appears to me out of the reach of our art. Such are many disquisitions which I  have read on some of the cartoons and other pictures of Raffaelle, where the critics have described their own imagination; or indeed where the excellent master himself may have attempted this expression of passions above the powers of the art; and has, therefore, by an indistinct and imperfect marking, left room for every imagination, with equal probability to find a passion of his own. What has been, and what can be done in the art, is sufficiently difficult; we need not be mortified or discouraged for not being able to execute the conceptions of a romantic imagination. Art has its boundaries, though imagination has none.66

It is at such moments that the tensions within Reynolds’s theory of painting are most obvious. On the one hand, he reveals a new interest in the imagination as an exalting source of inspiration. On the other, he reasserts the neoclassical conviction that painting should stay within established ‘boundaries’. I would argue that such a tension, which reflects the aesthetic evolutions of the time, may also be partly attributed to Burke’s influence: the awareness that there is, in the visual arts, a gap between conception and execution, between 101

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imagination and representation, together with the acceptance that painting should not attempt to overcome such a gap, is in keeping with Burke’s reflections on the subject. Even though Burke’s aesthetics may have made Reynolds more aware of a representational gap which is specific to mimetic painting, this is not perceived as a source of anxiety or frustration. The neoclassical tradition provides a solid bulwark against the possibility of a failure of representation. It also makes a quest for new visual paradigms unnecessary. While he is aware that pictorial execution will not match imaginative conception, Reynolds is not asking for artists to attempt to present the unpresentable. Despite the fact that he begins his discourses by telling young artists that they may seek ‘to snatch a grace beyond the reach of art’ once they have mastered the rules of their art,67 he is not suggesting that they should devise new representational processes. He is only repeating Pope’s advice to poets in his Essay on Criticism and suggesting that artists may elevate themselves above artistic conventions once these are well assimilated. This ultimate quest for an ineffable quality that would lift painting above the rules of art is far from being a denial of existing representational norms and remains firmly anchored in the neoclassical critical tradition.68 A Burkean sensibility? To what extent was Reynolds’s conception of the sublime a response to Burke? The passages I  have discussed suggest that Reynolds was aware of the challenge raised by the Enquiry and accepted that painting’s determinacy prevented it from being as suggestive as poetry. But he did not see this as an obstacle to the expression of a properly pictorial sublime, which as we have seen he defined as the great style, an adaptation of the Longinian sublime which owed little to the Burkean aesthetics of terror. As mentioned earlier, Reynolds’s intentions as founder of the Royal Academy of Arts and as its first president were to elevate the status of British artists, to allow them to rival continental productions, but also to show that painting and poetry truly were sister arts of equal intellectual value. The rivalry reintroduced by Burke between the two arts gave a new urgency to the latter ambition, and to the need for painting to strike as powerfully as poetry. Reynolds seems to have reacted to the challenge by reasserting the power of painting, and transforming the 102

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medium specificity outlined by Burke into an asset. This is especially obvious in his claim that the instantaneousness of painting allows for more powerful effects than poetry’s linear development. In his third discourse, he notably asserts that painters may ‘produc[e]‌ those great effects in an instant, which eloquence and poetry, by slow and repeated efforts, are scarcely able to attain’.69 And the Discourses as a whole may be considered to argue that the clear and determinate forms of painting are able to powerfully affect, in spite of their determinacy. In other words, Reynolds was addressing the rivalry between the arts that Burke had outlined, but without contradicting him on two essential points: that painting could only represent finite forms, and that it was incapable of causing the kind of terror which was central to Burke’s own definition of the sublime. This attitude could be seen as a skilful compromise, which itself might have been facilitated by conversation between the two men, and some possible contributions by Burke to the writing of the Discourses. Thanks to this approach, Reynolds’s theory of art was neither incompatible with the Enquiry’s aesthetics nor undermined by it, and formal innovation was not felt to be necessary. Nevertheless, the evolution of the Discourses over time suggests that their compromise was less conservative than appears at first, thus eventually leading to more original responses from the students they addressed. Even though Reynolds never appears to have been tempted by the Burkean aesthetics of terror, the irrationalism of the Enquiry does not seem to have been without effects on his own theory. Most commentators of the Discourses have observed a gradual departure from their initial support for the rules of art, and a growing interest in expressive intensity or formal dynamism. And while the evolution may be explained by the fact that Reynolds addressed increasingly advanced students,70 Reynolds’s growing emphasis on imagination and individual genius in his lectures may also partly be seen as his gradual acceptance of a form of irrationalism, which may have been fostered by conversation with Burke. It eventually leads, in his final discourse, to a bold endorsement of original creation, uncontrolled by rational rules, which he identifies with ‘the sublimity of Michelangelo’,71 and which could be seen as his ultimate reflection on the sublime in painting: I have taken every opportunity of recommending a rational method of study, as of the last importance … But by this I would not wish to cramp

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and fetter the mind, or discourage those who follow (as most of us may at one time have followed) the suggestion of a strong inclination: something must be conceded to great and irresistible impulses: perhaps every Student must not be strictly bound to general methods, if they thwart the peculiar turn of his own mind.72

This concession is followed by an expression of unconditional admiration for what Reynolds calls the ‘capricious’ inventions of Michelangelo, which are according to him ‘the powerful impulses of a mind unused to subjection of any kind, and too high to be controled by cold criticism’. As these are Reynolds’s parting words to the Royal Academy, they reveal an ultimate desire to lead British painting beyond the neoclassical premises of the early Discourses, in which rational guidance by the ‘rules of art’ prevails, and a final confidence in the powers of painting to exalt through original creation. This endorsement of a certain degree of irrationalism does not mean that Reynolds eventually embraces the Burkean aesthetics of terror. Nevertheless, Reynolds’s mature aesthetic views express a pre-​Romantic sensibility which could have partly resulted from his regular intellectual exchanges with Burke. They may even be seen as a final consensus between the two approaches, reached by the two men together. Little is known of the evolution of Burke’s aesthetic ideas after the Enquiry, but his correspondence with Barry, which I will analyse in the next chapter, makes it clear that painting was a frequent topic of conversation with Reynolds, and that he respected the authority of his friend’s judgment on pictorial matters. It consequently implies that, through conversation, Reynolds was able to argue with, perhaps even reverse, his friend’s most antipictorialist ideas. Reynolds’s final discourse could consequently be seen as the result of these exchanges: a statement about sublimity which fuses his admiration for Michelangelo and bold confidence in the powers of painting with Burke’s conception of artistic production as an energetic and imaginative process rather than a rational one. The close friendship, by allowing Reynolds to accommodate Burke’s ideas and bend them to his own views of art, could be said to have paved the way for the development of Burkean aesthetics within British academic practices. Reynolds’s theory of art especially removed the Enquiry’s challenge to mimetic representation while making way for the new sensibility. For students of the Royal Academy, this proved to be quite liberating. They were told that they could powerfully affect, albeit with clear and determinate 104

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forms, at a time when the Philosophical Enquiry’s thematics of terror and selection of sublime literary scenes were becoming increasingly fashionable. For some, conflating the great style with this new repertoire became the most adequate response to the evolving aesthetics of the sublime, even though it meant going against Burke’s own recommendations. Naturally, it was difficult to ignore Burke’s assertion that ‘When painters have attempted to give us clear representations of these very fanciful and terrible ideas, they have … almost always failed.’73 But for the most ambitious painters, who could hope to fulfil Reynolds’s criteria of the great style, such a statement was an incitement to reach such a level of excellence that they would prove Burke wrong. The call was made all the more compelling because Burke had not entirely ruled out such a possibility, since according to him painters had only “almost always failed” (my emphasis) to produce convincing representations of such subject matter. For some, like James Barry, Benjamin West or Henry Fuseli, the challenge proved to be especially decisive.

Notes 1 Sir Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art (1769–​1790), ed. Robert R. Wark (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997), ‘Discourse I’, p. 13. 2 Paley considers this drawing to be the forerunner of what he calls the ‘apocalyptic sublime’. Morton D. Paley, The Apocalyptic Sublime (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986), p. 1. 3 Paley, The Apocalyptic Sublime, p. 2. 4 See Donald Cross Bryant, Edmund Burke and his Literary Friends (Saint Louis, MO: Washington University Studies, 1939), p. 3. 5 Bryant, Edmund Burke and his Literary Friends, p. 56. 6 See Bryant, Edmund Burke and his Literary Friends, p. 45. 7 Boswell’s Life of Johnson relates the circumstances of the creation of the Club, and its early functioning, as follows:  ‘Soon after his [Johnson’s] return to London, which was in February, was founded that CLUB which existed long without a name, but at Mr. Garrick’s funeral became distinguished by the title of THE LITERARY CLUB. Sir Joshua Reynolds had the merit of being the first proposer of it, to which Johnson acceded, and the original members were, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Dr. Johnson, Mr. Edmund Burke, Dr. Nugent, Mr. Beauclerk, Mr. Langton, Dr.  Goldsmith, Mr. Chamier, and Sir John Hawkins. They met at the Turk’s Head, in Gerrard-​street, Soho, one evening in

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every week, at seven, and generally continued their conversation till a pretty late hour.’ James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. Comprehending an account of his studies and numerous work …, 3rd edn (London: H. Baldwin and Son, 1799), pp. 552–​3. 8 Joseph Farington, Memoirs of the Life of Sir Joshua Reynolds; with some observations on his talents and character (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1819), pp. 82–​3. 9 Stephen Gwynn, Memorials of an Eighteenth Century Painter (James Northcote) (London:  T. Fisher Unwin, 1898), pp. 234–​5. As Donald Cross Bryant notes, Burke’s first biographer, Charles M’Cormick, claimed ‘that Burke wrote all the Discourses’. Bryant, Edmund Burke and his Literary Friends, pp. 50–​1. 10 Gwynn, Memorials, pp. 235–​6. 11 Gwynn, Memorials, p. 236. 12 Gwynn, Memorials, p. 236. 13 Reynolds, Discourses, ‘Discourse IV’, p. 59. 14 Reynolds, Discourses, ‘Discourse III’, p. 42. 15 Reynolds, Discourses, ‘Discourse IV’, p. 68. 16 My emphasis. Reynolds, Discourses, ‘Discourse XI’, pp. 191–​2. 17 Samuel Monk, The Sublime:  A Study of Critical Theories, in XVIII-​ Century England (New  York:  Modern Language Association of America, 1935), p. 185. 18 Reynolds, Discourses, ‘Discourse III’, pp. 44–​5. 19 Reynolds, Discourses, ‘Discourse III’, p. 52. 20 Reynolds, Discourses, ‘Discourse III’, pp. 44–​5. 21 Reynolds, Discourses, ‘Discourse III’, p. 45. 22 Reynolds, Discourses, ‘Discourse III’, pp. 68, 257, 241. 23 Reynolds, Discourses, ‘Discourse XV’, pp. 362–​4, 276. 24 Reynolds, Discourses, ‘Discourse VIII’, p. 147. 25 Timothy Costelloe, ‘Imagination and Internal Sense:  The Sublime in Shaftesbury, Reid, Addison, and Reynolds,’ in Timothy M. Costelloe (ed.), The Sublime:  From Antiquity to the Present (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 60. 26 Joseph Addison, Spectator no. 412, in The Spectator, by Joseph Addison, Richard Steel, and others, ed. G.  Gregory Smith, 4 vols (London:  J. M. Dent & Sons, 1945), vol. III, p. 279. 27 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, ed. Adam Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), II, i, p. 53. Unless otherwise indicated, further references are to this edition. 28 Reynolds, Discourses, ‘Discourse III’, p. 42. 29 Reynolds, Discourses, ‘Discourse IV’, p. 59. 30 Reynolds, Discourses, ‘Discourse III’, p. 41.

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1 Reynolds, Discourses, ‘Discourse VIII’, p. 153. 3 32 Reynolds, Discourses, ‘Discourse III’, p. 43. 33 Reynolds, Discourses, ‘Discourse III’, p. 50. 34 The idea is a recurrent one in the Discourses, but is especially developed in Discourses I and VI. 35 Longinus, On the Sublime, trans. H.  L. Havell (London:  Macmillan, 1890), p. 12. 36 Longinus, On the Sublime, p. 31. 37 Reynolds, Discourses, ‘Discourse I’, pp. 15–​17. 38 Longinus, On the Sublime, p. 3. 39 Reynolds, Discourses, ‘Discourse IV, p. 65. 40 Reynolds, Discourses, ‘Discourse VIII, p. 146. 41 See especially Reynolds, Discourses, ‘Discourse XI’, pp. 192–​6. 42 Reynolds, Discourses, ‘Discourse XI’, p. 192. 43 Reynolds, Discourses, ‘Discourse XI’, p. 192. 44 Reynolds, Discourses, ‘Discourse V’, p. 84. 45 Edmond Malone, The works of Sir Joshua Reynolds …: containing his Discourses, Idlers, A journey to Flanders and Holland, and his commentary on Du Fresnoy’s Art of painting: to which is prefixed An account of the life and writings of the author (Edinburgh:  William Forrester, 1867), p. 162. 46 Reynolds, Discourses, ‘Discourse XV’, pp. 271, 272, 273. 47 Reynolds, Discourses, ‘Discourse V’, p. 83. 48 Reynolds, Discourses, ‘Discourse XV’, pp. 272–​3; my emphasis. 49 Michael H. Duffy, ‘Michelangelo and the Sublime in Romantic Art Criticism’, Journal of the History of Ideas 56:2 (1995), 221. 50 Reynolds, Discourses, ‘Discourse V’, p. 82. 51 Reynolds, Discourses, ‘Discourse V’, p. 82. 52 Longinus, On the Sublime, p. 64. 53 Reynolds, Discourses, ‘Discourse V’, p. 82. 54 Reynolds, Discourses, ‘Discourse XV’, pp. 272–​3. 55 Reynolds, Discourses, ‘Discourse VIII’, pp. 146–​7. 56 Reynolds, Discourses, ‘Discourse VIII’, p. 162. 57 See Bryant, Edmund Burke and his Literary Friends, pp. 50–​1. 58 Bryant, Edmund Burke and his Literary Friends, pp. 54–​5. 59 Monk, The Sublime, pp. 188–​9. 60 Reynolds, Discourses, ‘Discourse VII’, p. 119. 61 Reynolds, Discourses, ‘Discourse VIII’, pp. 163–​4. 62 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, II, xi, ‘Infinity in pleasing objects’, p. 70. 63 Wendelin A. Guentner, ‘British Aesthetic Discourse, 1780–​1830:  The Sketch, the Non Finito, and the Imagination’, Art Journal 52:2 (Summer 1993), 40–​7, here 41. 64 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, II, iv, p. 58.

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5 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, II, iv, p. 55. 6 66 Reynolds, Discourses, ‘Discourse V’, pp. 78–​9; my emphasis. 67 Reynolds, Discourses, ‘Discourse I’, p. 17. 68 On that tradition, see Samuel H. Monk, ‘A Grace beyond the Reach of Art’, Journal of the History of Ideas 5:2 (1944), 131–​50. 69 Reynolds, Discourses, ‘Discourse III’, p. 43. 70 See, for example, Robert Wark, ‘Introduction’, in Reynolds, Discourses, p. xv. 71 Reynolds, Discourses, ‘Discourse XV’, p. 271. 72 Reynolds, Discourses, ‘Discourse XV’, pp. 270–​1. 73 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, II, iv, p. 58.

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u The sublime contained: academic compromises

In 1776, the Irish painter James Barry painted an intriguing double portrait, in which he represented himself and his friend and compatriot Edmund Burke enacting a famous epic scene from Homer’s Odyssey: Portraits of Barry and Burke in the Characters of Ulysses and a Companion Fleeing from the Cave of Polyphemus (Figure 1 and Plate 1). Burke plays the part of Ulysses and is characterised as a figure of wisdom and leadership, with one hand pointing upwards in a gesture of warning. Next to him, Barry, leaning forward in a position of flight, looks up expectantly at his companion, his earnest expression implying that he awaits advice and guidance. Between them is one of the sheep which have concealed their escape, while in the background, Polyphemus is shown sitting at the entrance of his cave, searching through his herd. The painting has been interpreted to contain two possible autobiographical messages. There is first of all a likely allusion to the two men’s dangerous anti-​government position at the beginning of the American war of independence.1 There also appears to be a reference to Burke’s role in Barry’s artistic career. According to William Pressly, ‘Burke is shown as a good shepherd, leading his flock from danger, and his cautioning gesture recalls his frequent admonishments to the artist to moderate his conduct.’2 What is more, a few iconographic conventions, notably Burke’s raised finger and Barry’s sweaty brow, suggest that Burke is to be seen as a John the Baptist figure, inspiring the Christlike Barry to take on the struggle to redeem a brutish humanity, figured in the distance by Polyphemus. As Pressly writes, ‘This is indeed a heroic 109

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Figure 1  James Barry, Portraits of Barry and Burke in the Characters of Ulysses and his Companion Fleeing from the Cave of Polyphemus, c. 1776. self-​projection, but one that also insists on enormous self-​sacrifice in keeping with the artist’s view of his role as an inspired prophet.’3 Liam Lenihan sees a more satirical dimension to the piece, arguing that it may be understood as a parody of Reynolds’s idealised 110

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historical portraits, with Barry’s undignified sweat ‘mocking the sycophantic nature of Reynolds’s work for his patrons and contrasting it with “true” history painting’.4 The value of this painting, I  would argue, is what it reveals about Burke’s influence on the artists of his time, and their most immediate responses to his theory. To begin with, it highlights the significant personal role he played in Barry’s career: in this portrait, he is celebrated as a patron, but also as a friend and, obviously, as an intellectual mentor. Although the friendship was soon to end, due to Barry’s irascible temper and jealousy of Reynolds, for more than ten years at the time Burke had supported the artist’s career, providing financial assistance during his prolonged stay on the continent, useful connections both in Rome and London and regular advice in his correspondence. The double portrait is a striking testimony to Barry’s consideration for and thankfulness towards him. More importantly perhaps, the painting also seems to bring together and articulate the competing conceptions of the sublime that academicians of the first generation had to deal with after the publication of the Enquiry. It contains the Burkean sublime of terror, the neoclassical sublime of the great style and attempts to reconcile the two. The fearful drama which is enacted is clearly an example of the first kind of sublime. The figure of the cyclops in the background is even to be seen as a conscious allusion to Burke, who had explicitly included Polyphemus among figures of sublimity in his Enquiry. In the section ‘Concerning smallness’ in Part IV, he had written: The large and gigantic, though very compatible with the sublime, is contrary to the beautiful. It is impossible to suppose a giant the object of love. When we let our imagination loose in romance, the ideas we naturally annex to that size are those of tyranny, cruelty, injustice, and everything horrid and abominable. We paint the giant ravaging the country, plundering the innocent traveller, and afterwards gorged with his half-​living flesh: such are Polyphemus, Cacus, and others, who make so great a figure in romances and heroic poems.5

One could say that Barry’s painting is, possibly playfully, placing the theorist within one of the thrilling situations he had described. At the same time, the abominable giant is kept in the distance, with the focus being placed on the dignified and exalted expressions of Burke and Barry. These belong to the register of the heroic sublime, 111

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and are more in keeping with the neoclassical great style and its Longinian inspiration. To some extent, the composition could be seen as a demonstration that the two kinds of sublimity are compatible and that painting can include elements of terror without falling into the bathetic. The painting masterfully articulates the terrifying scene in the background with heroic portraits. As others have commented, the realism of their features transforms the two men into convincing protagonists of the terrifying scene.6 The rivalry with literature is also apparent:  by giving his portrait an allegorical dimension, articulating complex messages and bringing together a whole range of powerful affects, Barry shows that the visual arts are not simply mimetic and may aspire to the same consideration as poetry. The painting may consequently be understood as an aesthetic manifesto, claiming two things in particular: that the Burkean sublime is compatible with the great style of painting, and that painting and poetry are truly sisters of equal abilities. If this is the case, the imaginary scene may have been a way for Barry to force Burke into granting these two important points, which contradict his own theory. As Pressly points out, Burke had not posed for this portrait, which is based on another one painted around 1771 (now at Trinity College Dublin), and there is no evidence that he approved of the message of the 1776 composition. The visual dialogue could then be Barry’s imaginary resolution of the representational crisis which Burke had introduced for painting, obtained with the imagined consent of the author of the Enquiry. Barry clearly hopes to reach this resolution through the masterful display of his ‘literary’ talents, and of his ability to include elements of terror within a ‘historical’ composition. Such a confident response was common among academically minded painters of the late eighteenth century. Inspired by neoclassical precepts, and by Reynolds’s teachings in particular, they believed that their art, like poetry, could go beyond the simple imitation of nature, address the imagination as powerfully as poetry and consequently encompass what Burke had said to be beyond its range. Barry’s painting articulates several components of these early academic reactions to the Burkean sublime:  a fascination for terrifying subject matter, an awareness of Burke’s warning to painters concerning their literal use of such motifs, together with a conviction that painting, like poetry, is more affective than 112

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mimetic and a determination to accommodate the Burkean sublime to their neoclassical practices. It is these attempts to reconcile the fascination for the Burkean sublime of terror with academic precepts that I explore in this chapter. My purpose is not to give a complete overview of these productions, as the range and variety of this academic sublime has already been made evident, notably by Morton D.  Paley. It is, rather, to try to determine why academic artists were especially responsive to the Burkean sublime, how conscious they were of the challenge it entailed for visual artists and the extent to which this awareness led them to shape original visual strategies. Barry’s debate with Burke Barry is a good starting point for such a study, because of his especially close connection with Burke and because of the striking duality of his aesthetic ambitions. While his neoclassical training made him aspire to rival the productions of literature by expressing affecting universal truths, his passionate nature made him a warm admirer of Burke’s theory, its irrationalism and its emphasis on terror.7 He is of especially great interest to this study not only because of his attempt to reconcile both sensibilities, but also because he is the only artist to have properly corresponded with Burke, during his five years’ stay in Italy. This correspondence is precious first of all because it makes obvious Burke’s direct influence over Barry’s artistic development, and more generally because it gives us a precise idea of artists’ immediate responses to the Philosophical Enquiry and of the extent to which they felt constrained by it. It is equally valuable because Burke’s contribution provides a complement to the Enquiry, a more detailed reflection on painting and more specifically an insight into his own views on the great style, which as argued in the previous chapter was Reynolds’s neoclassical version of a pictorial ‘sublime’. Barry and Burke were introduced by their mutual friend Dr Sleigh,8 sometime around 1760, in Dublin. Soon, the rela­tionship developed into friendship and patronage, Burke being esp­ecially keen to help a promising young fellow countryman. After a few years in London, Burke followed Reynolds’s advice and provided the necessary financial support to allow Barry to complete his training on the continent. From 1766 to 1771, Barry resided successively in Paris 113

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and Rome, mostly thanks to the generosity of his patron. During these long years of training, the two men frequently exchanged letters, even though Burke was increasingly busy with his parliamentary career and obligations. While Burke provided material support, he was also a major intellectual influence on his young protégé’s development. The artist’s biographer narrates a noteworthy anecdote about one of the first encounters between the two men: In some dispute on the subject of the arts, as grounded upon taste, Mr. Barry quoted an opinion, in direct opposition to Mr. Burke, from an able, though anonymous work, which had then but lately appeared. This work was the celebrated Essay on the Sublime and Beautiful, which Mr. Burke, who was playing with the subject and debating for victory, immediately condemned as a theoretical romance, of no sufficient merit to be quoted as an authority: Barry, who had been captivated (as every young man will be) with the style and language, the beautiful illustrations and plausible theory of this essay, and had been at the pains of transcribing it throughout; doubly incensed at the injustice done to the work, and the unintended slight on his own judgement, fell into a rage in its defence, which Mr. Burke thought necessary, and was ready enough, probably, to appease, by confessing himself the author. This ended in Barry’s running to embrace him, and shewing him the copy, which he had been at the pains to transcribe.9

Although the story seems to be based on hearsay, rather than an actual written source, it is certainly revealing. It suggests that, prior to his academic training, Barry was thoroughly acquainted with Burke’s theory, full of a youthful enthusiasm for it and, as an aspiring painter, undeterred by its implications for painting. This confident enthusiasm appears again in the correspondence, in which Barry attempts to provide the pictorial examples of the sublime that were missing from the Enquiry. He even seems to encounter continental painting partly through the filter of his friend’s theory. In a letter written to Burke from Paris, sometime in 1766, he describes Poussin’s Deluge in the Luxembourg in terms that are closely reminiscent of the Enquiry: The picture of the deluge is designed admirably; there are but few objects, two figures in a boat overset by a cataract, lifting up their hands to heaven, some heads and legs appearing above water, and all the rest such a wild dreary waste, as freezes one with horror; whilst it presents him with the truest picture of desolation.10

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One may wonder whether Barry intended to convince Burke that the best painters were capable of causing the horror and suspension of motions of the soul that the Enquiry presented as central to the experience of the sublime,11 or whether he knew that Burke was prepared to grant that such effects were within the grasp of exc­eptionally talented artists. In any case, the description suggests that, far from being deterred by Burke’s warnings to painters, Barry was ready to champion their ability to convey the same extremes of terror as poets. At other times, however, Barry seems to concede that painters fall short of the true sublime. Interestingly, these considerations are especially prompted by the encounter with the natural sublime, when Barry describes his journey across the Alps, ‘the most awful and horridly grand, romantic, and picturesque scenes, that it is possible to conceive’.12 His comments about Salvator Rosa’s failure to convey the terror of such scenery may be read as both an admission of painting’s limitations and a call for a better pictorial transcription: All this tract down to Grenoble, one sees the country Salvator Rosa formed himself upon:  nobody esteems Salvator more than I  do, yet I  must say he has not made half the use of it he might have done; the wild forms of his trees, rocks, &c. (for which he is condemned, as frantic, by some cold spirit­less artists, whose notions reach no further than the artificial regular productions of their own climes,) are infinitely short of the noble phrenzy in which nature wantons all over these mountains; great pines, of the most inconceivable diversity of forms, some straight as arrows, others crooked as a horn, some the roots uppermost, are hanging over frightful rocks and caves, and torrents of water rolling amongst them.13

This comparison of the natural sublime and its pictorial transcription seems to hint at painting’s inferiority, but it also suggests that new pictorial strategies may be necessary to convey the wildness, frenzy and frightfulness of nature. As Barry criticises ‘the artificial regular productions’ that fail to convey the excesses of nature, he implies that the art of painting has to renew itself by removing dull conventions and making possible the exp­ression of a more irrationalist sensibility. He seems to call for visual forms that would truly match the wild forms of nature and even exceed Salvator Rosa’s style, which at the time was often considered extravagant. 115

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As these early letters suggest, Barry’s youthful enthusiasm for the Enquiry enticed him away from the poise and universal forms of classicism towards an aesthetics of excess. At the same time, it is significant that he sought unconventional and dramatic visual forms in the works of the old masters and in nature itself rather than in completely original artistic productions. His fascination for Poussin’s Deluge is characteristic of this tension. On the one hand, it confirms his interest in disturbing visual motifs and hues that were apt to convey the extreme affects described by Burke. As Paley points out, Poussin’s painting stood out from conventional pictorial production because of its stony palette, jagged and tormented natural forms and suffering human figures.14 On the other hand, Barry was obviously seeking the legitimacy of classicist practices, and trying to find existing models that demonstrated that seeking the sublime of terror was a valid artistic quest. His identification of Poussin’s Deluge as one such model and his wish to make a case for it to his friend Burke are revealing. Barry seems to have been the first to identify the artwork as a ­pic­torial example of the Burkean sublime,15 in a context which suggests that he aimed to provide the missing pictorial examples that had been excluded from the Enquiry, and to convince Burke that such material existed. Barry’s ‘discovery’ is given added significance by the fact that, as Paley argues, The Deluge became a ‘prototype’ for the ‘apocalyptic’ sublime which flourished in Britain from the mid-​1770s to the 1840s, ‘in which the terror of divine revelation [was] the object of a nouveau frisson’.16 This new mode, which soon became the most explicit response to the Burkean challenge in British painting, often relied on terrifying biblical or super­natural subjects combined with natural catastrophes or natural settings invested with overpowering divine forces. Poussin’s Deluge showed how compounding natural and divine sources of terror could allow painters to make up for the determinacy of their art through the intensification of fear. The painting consequently inspired numerous deluge scenes, by such artists as James Jefferys, Mauritius Lowe, Jacob More, Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg and Benjamin West,17 as well as a long succession of apocalyptic landscapes. It is significant that this prototype should have been first identified in Barry’s letters to Burke, that is to say as part of an explicit debate with the author of the Philosophical Enquiry. In order to convince Burke that his conception of the sublime was compatible with the 116

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existing –​classicist –​conventions of pictorial representation, Barry was already pointing to a pictorial formula which was to become extremely successful with British artists: the combination of dark, stony-​coloured, chaotic, life-​threatening natural settings and terrifying narratives of divine revelation. In other words, the correspondence confirms the direct filiation of the British apocalyptic sublime and Burke’s theories. It also suggests that these pictorial responses were in no way encouraged by Burke. To begin with, the letters show no sign of Burke’s interest in a painting that matched his own descriptions of the sublime so closely. More importantly, the correspondence reveals that Burke repeatedly attempted to redirect Barry towards a classicist approach, often repeating Sir Joshua Reynolds’s principles, never expressing his own conception of the sublime. Several of his letters, in particular, insist on the necessity for Barry to learn to draw as accurately as possible and to keep indistinctness in check, before attempting the ‘great style’. On more than one occasion, Burke entreats Barry to ‘go through a full course of anatomy’ in order to master the ‘minutiae of the art’.18 The sublime is never mentioned. In one early letter, probably written in 1766, Burke explains quite vividly how he expects his protégé to employ his time on the continent: You must be an artist; and this you cannot be but by drawing with the last degree of noble correction. Until you can draw beauty with the last degree of truth and precision, you will not consider yourself possessed of that faculty. This power will not hinder you from passing to the great style when you please; if your character should, as I imagine it will, lead you to that style in preference to the other. But no man can draw perfectly that cannot draw beauty. My dear Barry, I repeat it again, leave off sketching. Whatever you do, finish it.19

Burke’s recommendations are strikingly similar to the advice Reynolds was soon to give to students of the Royal Academy, and highlights the reciprocal influence that existed between the two men. The passage makes it clear that they shared the same conception of the great style, which they both distinguished from the beautiful, and the same conviction that precision of drawing was the foundation of artistic perfection. Significantly, the letter continues with a reference to Reynolds’s high hopes for Barry and recommendation of ‘the continual study of the Capella Sistina, in which are the greatest works of Michael Angelo’.20 117

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Like Reynolds, Burke seems to believe that a painter can only strike powerfully through a form of genius that consists in the full mastery of the rules of art and consequent liberation from them, which allows the artist to energetically express an original conception without appearing absurd. He also believes that very few artists, especially in his own day, are capable of reaching such high standards. Trying to encourage Barry to become one of those distinguished few during his residence in Rome, he writes: [T]‌hat exquisite masterly drawing, which is the glory of the great school where you are, has fallen to the lot of very few, perhaps to none of the present age, in its highest perfection. If I were to indulge a conjecture, I should attribute all that is called greatness of style and manner of drawing, to this exact knowledge of the parts of the human body, of anatomy and perspective. For, by knowing exactly and habitually, without the labour of particular and occasional thinking, what was to be done in every figure they designed, they naturally attained a freedom and spirit of outline; because they could be daring without being absurd: whereas ignorance, if it be cautious, is poor and timid; if bold, it is only blindly presumptuous.21

Once again, such views bear striking similarities to Reynolds’s own views in his Discourses, notably the idea that painterly genius should aim for the great style, which occurs when the artist masters beauty so well that it becomes possible to transcend it. This classicist aesthetic discourse, which seems to have little in common with the irrationalist aesthetics of the Enquiry, is in fact compatible with it. Burke is advising Barry to aim for the great style, as it is defined by Reynolds and other academic theorists, not to aim for the sublime as he himself defined it. To some extent, he is only confirming that his own extreme conception of the sublime, which is radically opposed to the beautiful and exceeds all form of finite representation, is not for painters, whose most powerful mode can only be that of the great style. He remains convinced that painting is characterised by its determinacy and has to make the most of this specificity, rather than attempt to obtain the same effects as poetry through indeterminacy and obscurity. Which is why he insists that Barry should leave off sketching and finish his drawings. Such views on painting, coming from Burke himself, make it obvious why a classicist theory of art like Reynolds’s was still possible after the Philosophical Enquiry. As painting was excluded 118

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from the new irrationalist aesthetics of the Enquiry, its own ambition for powerful affect had to fall back on more conservative and confirmed practices. The ‘great style’ allowed it to transcend beauty within the limits of its own determinacy and finiteness. Although Barry’s letters highlight his eager acceptance of his patron’s advice, and a readiness to master drawing as perfectly as the Roman models he was sent to study, it is clear that he never gave up the conviction that painters could convey the sublime as the Enquiry had defined it, and should not content themselves with the great style. Even though his youthful admiration for the Enquiry had been succeeded and tempered by the prolonged study of classical continental art, it remained a significant influence throughout his career, so that his theory and practice of art were eventually characterised by the attempt to reconcile the two sensibilities. Academic compromises More than ten years after his stay in Rome, after he was appointed Professor of Painting at the Royal Academy in 1782, Barry’s lectures reveal his enduring confidence that the sublime is within the reach of artists of superior abilities, although it is clear that pedagogical requirements prevail over his predilection for the wild and frightful. Thus, in his second lecture, he argues that there is ‘an infinite variety of pursuit, admirably accommodated to all the different genius and dispositions of men; one class of artists and admirers of art pursuing the simple, others the serious, the pathetic, the great, the majestic, or the sublime’.22 The distinction between the great and the sublime suggests that he did not consider the great style as a satisfactory pictorial response to the need for powerful affect, and believed some artists could aim higher. He immediately gives the example of Poussin, whose sublimity he had already praised to Burke: There is no department of art which might not become interesting in the hands of a man of sensibility. Who does not feel this in the landscapes of N. Poussin, sometimes verging to sublimity, and always engaging from their characteristic unity, graceful simplicity, or ethical associations.23

The implication is that the very best artists can aim for the sublime, even though there is an interesting qualification: Poussin’s painting only ‘verges’ on sublimity, and in his painting, it is mixed with other modes. One could read this as an intimation that the pure sublime 119

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is beyond representation, or that visual artists may only reach for it, rather than grasp it. In most instances, Barry’s references to the sublime remain anchored in the classicist discourse of the Royal Academy, suggesting that his enthusiasm for Burke is toned down by what was expected of him as a professor. But they also give an idea of what made it possible for him to reconcile the themes and motifs of the Enquiry with academic principles. In a note to his second lecture, he writes: It has been very truly, as well as elegantly said by Ovid, that Venus would have for ever remained buried under the waters, if she had not been happily drawn out by the pencil of the ingenious Apelles:  and indeed every thing considered, it would be very difficult to divine in what state, and to what degree, the whole or any part of the sublime imagery of the Greek and Latin poets could be communicated to their readers, if these matters had not been thus realized to our eyes in the works of art which fortunately remain.24

As elsewhere in Barry’s lectures, the concept of the sublime, which so much enthused the younger artist, has been attenuated by academic discourse to mean mostly a higher form of the beautiful. More significantly, the explanation shows that, against Burke, Barry anchors his argument for a visual sublime in the sister arts tradition, which equates poetic imagery and material pictures. This connection, which had been denied by Burke, allows Barry to draw an almost exact correspondence between the poetic sublime and its pictorial transcription, and to bypass the main obstacle to a pictorial sublime in the Enquiry, namely its refutation of such translatability. At other times, the Academy’s emphasis on interartistic parallels allows Barry to think of painting in terms of rhetorical eloquence, and consequently challenge Burke’s belief that the ability to arouse powerful affects is the prerogative of poetry. Calling for ‘ingenious and eloquent composition’ in painting, he writes: This eloquence of the painter’s composition … is susceptible of the utmost conceivable force, extent, and variety … Nothing of verbal language can be more copious, beautifully diffusive, and magnificent, than the eloquence of Raffael’s dispute of the Sacrament –​nothing can be more condensed and vehement in its address than his Elymas, and Death of Ananias; than the Plague and Deluge of Poussin; the dead Christ of Carrache, in the Palais

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Royale; the Possessed Boy, by Domenichino; and above all, the group of Laocoon, in the Belvedere.25

In these lines, the comparison of the arts, and the reference to painting’s eloquence, is clearly anchored in an academic discourse which takes for granted the ut pictura poesis principle and attempts to adapt Longinus’ rhetorical sublime to the theory of painting. Nevertheless, Barry’s argument highlights the idea of a rivalry between the arts, and underlines a ‘force’ and a ‘vehemence’ which may be found in frightening representations of divine retribution. His examples include, once again, Poussin’s Deluge, but also his Plague at Ashod, as well as representations of divine punishment or revelation by Raphael. It is clear that he was still trying to reconcile a thematics of terror with academic practice, still seeing the combination of painterly excellence and awe-​inspiring sacred narratives as a means to convey a Burkean aesthetic experience. This belief, I would like to argue, accounts for some aspects of Barry’s own visual practice, in particular his attempts to transpose into pictures the poetic motifs and scenes that Burke had selected as illustrations of his theory. Whereas Burke had argued that the grandeur of imagery from the Bible, or from authors like Milton and Shakespeare, was beyond the reach of painters, Barry’s conviction that the sister arts were equals could not but lead him to challenge such a view. One work in particular deserves to be mentioned. In 1777, Barry dedicated to Burke an etching of ‘Job Reproved by his Friends’, showing the resilient and dignified Job, isolated in his suffering as his friends argue around him or point at the sky to invoke divine justice, while in the background a group of men carry the dead body of one of his sons. The dedication to Burke is not without significance: the author of the Philosophical Enquiry had selected most of its instances of the biblical sublime from the Book of Job. The section on ‘Power’ in Part II of the essay refers to the book’s ‘heightening’ descriptions of the wild ass, the unicorn and leviathan,26 but also to the awe conveyed by Job himself.27 And the previous section (iv) contains Burke’s comment that painters could never convey the ‘terrible uncertainty’ of Job 4:13–​17, where Eliphaz describes his terror as one of Jehovah’s spirits passes before his face. Barry’s etching could then be seen as a tribute to Burke’s conception of the sublime, but also an attempt to obtain Burke’s

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approval, as well as his admission that painters could depict Job without being ‘ludicrous’. Burke’s approval, however, was only hastily granted, in a short note dictated while dressing: Mr Burke presents his best compliments to Mr Barry, and begs pardon for making use of another’s hand, by giving his thanks for the great honour he has done him by inscribing to him the print of Job; as well as for the prints sent to his son Richard, of the other five designs: but being obliged to go out in great haste, after having been engaged in business for the whole morning, he is under the necessity of dictating this note while he is dressing.28

The busy tone and hasty thank-​you note are revealing. It is, of course, also interesting that Burke mostly thanks Barry for dedicating his print to him, rather than compliments him for the quality of the composition. The rest of the message is even more eloquent. Barry having asked for advice on his project of six paintings for the Society of Arts in the Adelphi, Burke continues as follows: Mr Barry does him too much honour in thinking him capable of giving him any hints towards the conduct of the great design in which Mr Burke is very happy to find he is engaged. Mr Burke is, without any affectation, thoroughly convinced, that he has no skill whatsoever in the art of painting; but he will very cheerfully turn his thoughts towards recollecting passages of modern or middle history, relative to the cultivation of the arts and manufactures.29

The message seems to betray Burke’s refusal to engage in a debate about painting’s abilities, or to concede that his conception of the sublime is within the reach of the visual arts. Instead, it suggests that Burke continues to uphold his conviction that the arts are incommensurate, as he presents himself as wholly unskilled to comment on the art of painting. It also confirms that if his conception of the sublime so successfully spread into British pictorial practices, it was not due to his active encouragement of artists. Barry’s most sustained attempt to provide a visual transcription of the Burkean sublime was his Paradise Lost project, which he started working on in the 1790s but never completed beyond the stage of etchings and drawings. The surviving material suggests that he mostly intended to focus on ‘moments of terrible sublimity’,30 with an emphasis on the heroic and rebellious figure of Satan. As Asia Haut argues, the terrible figure of the rebellious angel is to be 122

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seen first of all as emblematic of the sublime, but also ‘as a symbol of the struggle for creative autonomy’, and of the artist’s quest for originality and self-​determination.31 This unprecedented emphasis on the sublime and original creation had a significant impact on the graphic style of the series. In contrast with Barry’s previous production, the drawings are characterised by jagged and energetic lines, together with moody tonal contrasts and dramatic viewpoints, including the use of close focus or low-​angle perspective.32 While Fuseli’s influence was likely at work, these stylistic and composi­ tional evolutions also imply that when it came to present scenes that the Enquiry had explicitly said to be beyond the powers of visual representation, Barry was prepared to explore a new expressive range. Interestingly, he does not follow Burke’s visual hints about obscurity and confusion in representations of Satan, and evolves his own visual strategy. The scheme, however, was abandoned within a few years, with only a few etchings and two oil sketches, now lost, to show for it. The failure of the project seems to have been related to a crisis in Barry’s artistic career, which ironically intersects with the narrative of rebellion of the Paradise Lost series. In 1799, after an incendiary Letter to the Dilettanti Society, in which he rebelled against those who, at the Royal Academy, were stifling creativity, Barry was expelled from the latter institution. The series, its implicit reflection about artistic self-​determination and its ultimate failure, may be seen as a reflection of this personal crisis. It could also convey Barry’s aesthetic frustrations: the artist might have realised that any attempt to give adequate visual form to the Burkean sublime meant going against the neoclassical principles which had bolstered his pictorial practice so far. Or even that, after all, Burke was right, and pictorial representation was simply inadequate to the true sublime. I would not go as far as to claim that Barry came to admit such a defeat. His assertive drawings, with their bold outlines suggest quite the opposite. They confidently accept the determinacy of visual representation and show it to be compatible with the strongest emotions, when Burke saw it as evidence of the limitations of the visual arts. In plates like Satan, Sin and Death or Satan and his Legions Hurling Defiance towards the Vault of Heaven (Figure 2), Barry’s clearly outlined figures, far from revealing any apprehension of the bathetic, present visual distinctness as fundamental to the sublime. More generally, the Paradise Lost project may be seen as an 123

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Figure  2  James Barry, Satan and his Legions Hurling Defiance towards the Vault of Heaven, c. 1792–​95. act of ultimate defiance towards the author of the Enquiry, in which artistic protest was compounded with political considerations. As at the time Burke was leading the intellectual opposition to the French revolution, the Paradise Lost designs were addressing both 124

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his antipictorialism and his anti-​revolutionary views, and con­necting the two responses. Barry was still trying to prove Burke wrong, this time by asserting the representational abilities of the visual artist, together with their revolutionary nature. Nevertheless, I would say that in these late experiments, Barry does not overcome the aesthetic tensions which are inherent to the Burkean sublime, but only displaces them. Instead of fearing the inadequacy of the pictorial medium, or the tension between representation and the unpresentable, Barry finds himself caught in the contradictions between his ­private personal predilection for originality and frightening drama and the neoclassical principles which for many years had prevailed in his academic teachings. What his drawings for Paradise Lost were showing was not a failure of representation, but an aggressive stylistic energy which he may have felt was going too far beyond the neoclassical ideals which had so far regulated his production. In other words, in these most Burkean of his compositions, Barry had attempted to overcome the representational impossibility signalled by the Enquiry only to encounter another form of visual inadequacy. This discovery of an insurmountable tension between the two aesthetics he had attempted to reconcile for many years could partly explain why the project was eventually not completed. Academism and irrationalism At the same time as Barry was venturing away from the restraint of the great style, a similar evolution was taking place in the work of other artists tempted by the apocalyptic or gothic sublime. Like Barry, they transcended the principles of neoclassical composition by conflating them with the new sensibility. It many cases, such a conflation began by fusing Burkean motifs or narratives into the heroic mode of painting. History painting had already been used as a vehicle of the Longinian sublime, because of its dramatic potential, its representation of noble or awe-​inspiring deeds and its focus on the expression of intense passions. The same category of painting could be adapted to the motifs and themes privileged by the Enquiry: drama was to be filled with an element of terror, and heroic narratives were to be lifted beyond a purely worldly dimension. This approach entailed not so much a redefinition of the pri­ nciples of visual representation as an adaptation of pictorial strategies to existing conventions. Commonly used strategies 125

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included adopting an expressive and vigorous style, often in the manner of Michelangelo; creating drama through unusual lighting, atmosphere or manipulation of scale; using a number of formal exaggerations such as foreshortening, asymmetric poses and unusual viewpoints; or compromising the legibility of the painting through chiaroscuro and the use of nebulous textural effects.33 Tenebrism became an increasingly fashionable style, after Burke had said that ‘[t]‌o make anything terrible, obscurity in general seems to be necessary. When we know the full extent of any danger, when we can accustom our eyes to it, a great deal of apprehension vanishes.’34 As demonstrated by Paley, these strategies may be found in the works of painters like Benjamin West and Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg, who combined dramatic academic techniques with apocalyptic thematics in a particularly effective manner and clearly attempted to reconcile a classicist sensibility with the irrationalism of the new aesthetics. At times, the stylistic and compositional choices of these artists may be seen as explicitly derived from Burke’s theory. West’s Destruction of the Old Beast and False Prophet (1804) (Figure 3) is a rather striking example. The painting represents the rider of Rev. 19:11–​15, often identified with the Messiah, whose ‘name is called the Word of God’. The rider is an especially awe-​ inspiring figure, with flaming eyes and ‘many crowns’, ‘clothed with a vesture dipped in blood’, out of whose mouth comes ‘a sharp sword, that with it he should smite the nations’. In spite of these precise visual details, West, as noted by Paley, takes liberties with the text,35 so as to both reconcile it with academic conventions and address Burke’s concerns concerning the pictorial representation of apocalyptic subject matter. To begin with, there is no sword coming out of the mouth of the rider and only one crown on his head. His power is mostly expressed through the light that radiates from his right fist and forcefully pushes away into the darkness a crowd of demonic figures, which can be identified as ‘the beast, and the kings of the earth, and their armies’ of verse 19. To avoid the precise depiction of elements that Burke would have considered ‘ludicrous’, West either removes them, as in the depiction of the rider, or plunges them into obscurity. Among the defeated armies, the heads of lions may be observed, but some more demonic figures appear to lurk in the dark, leaving much to the imagination of the viewer. Possibly in answer to Burke’s critique of painters’ ‘clear representations’ of hell or demonic figures, which according to him mostly produce 126

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Figure  3  Benjamin West, Destruction of the Beast and the False Prophet, 1804. ‘odd wild grotesques’,36 West suggests that painting is as capable of indistinctness as poetry, and of using the implicit in order to create fear in the viewer. As Paley writes, the painting ‘tests the extent to which the sublime of terror can include the grotesque without being absorbed by it’.37 Significantly, the strategy also addresses the academic preference for noble subject matter, propriety and heroic composition. The simplified representation of the rider, and the surrounding light that enhances his heroic dimension, conform to neoclassical standards. The most striking device employed by West in the painting is of course the nebulous, almost vortical, composition, which violently swirls and blurs the figures of the vanquished armies. This structuring choice, which is enhanced by the asymmetrical placement of the rider in the top left part of the painting, conveys the overpowering energy of the envoy of God, in order to accentuate the awe-​ inspiring effect on the viewer. Here again, a mixture of sensibilities may be observed. Through his choice, West seems to be attempting to create the intensity of affect that according to Burke was associated with terror. At the same time, the nebulous composition was 127

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derived from a practice which had become somewhat conventional since its use by mannerist artists like Correggio. While the latter had relied on such structures to create dynamic effects and free their figures from the constraints and solidity of linear perspective and clear delineation,38 West adapts it to an aesthetics which calls for the evocation of violence and terror. Fuseli, Bodmer and Burke One of the artists who most successfully adapted academic conventions to the new interest in the irrational and its terrors was the Swiss-​born writer, painter and draughtsman Johann Heinrich Füssli, or Fuseli as he called himself following a stay in Italy. Fuseli, who settled in Britain in mid-​life, in 1779, and became a member of the Royal Academy in the year 1790, evolved a position regarding the new conception of the sublime which reflected the variety of his influences. A Burkean inspiration is strongly suggested by his predilection for supernatural and Miltonic subject matter, which led to his opening of the Milton Gallery in 1799, and seems to be confirmed by the fact that he had a copy of the Philosophical Enquiry in his library.39 Nevertheless, Fuseli’s fascination with Milton and response to Burke can be said to have been first mediated by a continental theoretical debate, which focused on issues of the sublime, visual and verbal representation, their translatability or incommensurability and consequently the limits of visual representation. Before visiting Britain, which he did for the first time in 1764, Fuseli would have encountered both the notion of the sublime and the writings of Milton through the teachings of his mentor, the Swiss writer Johann Jakob Bodmer,40 who had adapted Longinus’ theory to German reflections on aesthetics, as well as translated Paradise Lost into German. The painter’s intellectual debt to this teacher was later acknowledged in a double portrait, The Artist in Conversation with Johann Jakob Bodmer (1778–​ 81), which depicted the two men engaged in thoughtful conversation. Bodmer’s influence was crucial for many reasons. First of all, his conviction that Milton was a model of sublimity in art, which he defended in his 1740 treatise Critische Abhandlung von dem Wunderbaren in der Poesie,41 was to play a part in Fuseli’s own 128

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fascination for Miltonic subjects. At the same time, Bodmer’s analyses, which were inspired by Addison and contemporary psychological investigation,42 anticipated Burke in connecting the sublime and terror. In his reflections on ‘das Wunderbare’, he presented the terror and darkness of Milton’s infernal regions as a model of sublime imagery, and in his Critische Betrachtungen über die poetischen Gemählde der Dichter (1741), he connected the sublime and the terrible under the notion of the ‘turbulent’. For this reason, some studies have claimed that Bodmer was one of the first to clearly oppose the concepts of the sublime and the beautiful, before Burke confirmed the distinction.43 There were some significant theoretical differences, however. First of all, in his Critische Briefe of 1746, Bodmer eventually rejected the exp­ erience of terror induced by the numinous as a form of passivity, in order to privilege a conception of the sublime as something which addressed the understanding and which belonged to ‘the realm of human action’.44 What is more, whereas Burke was to highlight the separateness of the realms of painting and poetry, and poetry’s superior ability as far as the sublime was concerned, Bodmer argued for a correspondence of the arts and remained within the tradition of literary pictorialism. His Critische Betrachtungen asserted the translatability of and connections between visual and verbal images, maintaining in particular that literary texts consist of the production of images, painted on the brain. In other words, Bodmer accepted the literary pictorialism of his time and provided theoretical reassurance that the visual representation of poetic material, including sublime poetry, was possible. His influence over Fuseli meant that the latter came to Britain armed with the theoretical means to answer the Burkean challenge. Bodmer’s conception could reconcile a classicist ideal of controlled artistic production with the irruption of terror and the unconscious. His focus on human action and thought rather than the natural sublime bolstered artistic approaches which matched the sublime with the heroic. Finally, his pictorialism could give painters the confidence to rival poetry through their artistic production  –​a confidence which Fuseli’s fellow British artists may not have had to the same extent. All of these aspects of Bodmer’s thought may be found in Fuseli’s own academic discourse, several decades later, when he 129

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argued that the sublime in painting could be derived from the illustration of epic poetry: Invention in its more specific sense receives its subjects from poetry or authenticated tradition; they are epic or sublime, dramatic or impassioned, historic or circumscribed by truth. The first astonishes; the second moves, the third informs.45

Nevertheless, as Luisa Calè shows, Fuseli was also aware of a more recent continental debate about Bodmer’s and Burke’s ideas, through which the Burkean challenge was adapted to German aesthetic reflection.46 By the time Fuseli began to explore the possibility of representing Miltonic material, Bodmer’s views on the correspondence between poetic and visual images had been challenged by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, whose Laocöon (1766) claimed that poetic descriptions were not simply different from paintings, but also more complex and dynamic.47 Significantly, it was through the example of Milton, whose blindness did not prevent the creation of powerful poetic ‘pictures’, that Lessing came to claim that poetry was capable of going beyond the confinement of the realm of sight,48 and to assert that ‘artists are excluded from whole classes of pictures, which the poet has at his command’.49 As is well known, Lessing then went on to argue that the main difference between poetry and painting was ‘that the action of one is visible and progressive, its different parts happening one after another, in the sequence of time; while the action of the other is visible and stationary, its different parts developing themselves near one another, in space’.50 Fuseli was receptive to such arguments, explaining in his third lecture on painting that: ‘Successive action communicated by sounds, and time, are the medium of poetry; form displayed in space, and momentaneous energy, are the element of painting’;51 and yet, he felt the challenge keenly. According to Calè, his Milton Gallery could be seen as a response to these claims, a means to show that painters could produce dynamic pictorial sequences, but also to prove Lessing wrong when he claimed that ‘Milton cannot fill picture-​galleries’.52 Fuseli’s pictorial endeavours could also be seen as indirectly addressing Burke since Lessing’s well-​ known assertion of the separateness of the arts may be traced back to his reading of the Philosophical Enquiry.53 As his correspondence with Moses

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Mendelssohn reveals, he had actually planned to translate the Enquiry into German, and had underlined the implications of Burke’s own dissociation of poetry and painting. Several commentators argue that his Laocoön’s conception of poetry as dynamic and temporal, in opposition to painting’s static and spatial dimension, built on the Enquiry’s own distinction. Burke’s influence, however, is not explicitly acknowledged, possibly because, as James T. Boulton points out, Lessing only saw in the Enquiry a confirmation of his own ideas.54 In other words, even though Fuseli had theoretical support from Bodmer in his endeavours to illustrate poetry and visualise the sublime, Lessing’s conception and possible mediation of Burke’s ideas had introduced serious doubts about painting’s representational and narrative abilities. This theoretical tension may be said to underlie Fuseli’s fascination with heroic narratives with oneiric contents, which allowed him to reconcile a classicist quest for excellence in painting with the awareness of a representational disjunction. Much of Fuseli’s pictorial production consists of scenes taken from famous epic poetry, such as Milton’s Paradise Lost or Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, as well as mythological narratives, showing his confidence in the superiority of history painting and his agreement with Bodmer that sublimity is to be found in noble action and epic subject matter. At the same time, lack of control and instability are reintroduced at several levels of the artist’s work. They figure promi­ nently in the artist’s drawings and sketches, with their aggressive manner, broken outlines and expressive mixture of different media such as chalk, ink and watercolour. In the finished canvases, they may be seen in the artist’s mannerist and phantasmal pictorial style, as well as in the psychological states of his contorted figures, which often imply loss of consciousness or terror. Fuseli is one of the first painters to have found a constant source of inspiration in dreams and nightmares, supernatural apparitions, as well as liminal states between consciousness and unconsciousness, madness and sanity, or life and death. His choice of Shakespearian scenes, among others, is representative of this fascination: it includes several scenes from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Three Witches from Macbeth (1783), Fairy Mab (c. 1815–​20), Queen Katherine’s Dream from King Henry VIII (1781), as well as depictions of the deaths of Cordelia and Juliet, to which may be added an early preparatory 131

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drawing of ‘Edgar Feigning Madness Approaches King Lear’ (1772). Like the rest of his work, these scenes highlight thresholds between worlds and mental states, where consciousness is slipping away. In these compositions, artistic control, which is still asserted, is undermined by such abysses of consciousness, a tension which Fuseli often resolves through the use of tenebrism, by plunging his pale figures within extreme darkness. The conflict between the two sources of theoretical inspiration is exemplified by the contrast between the above-​mentioned double portrait of Fuseli and Bodmer, which the artist began before settling in Britain, and much of the rest of his production. The Artist in Conversation with Johann Jakob Bodmer is clearly about the transmission of knowledge. The message is emphasised by the master’s pointing index finger, Fuseli’s own pensive pose, the presence of books on the floor in the foreground and a prominent bust of Homer behind the two men. A state of heightened consciousness is suggested by the highlighted fingers of the artist, which rest against his temple. The painting proclaims the connection between the arts that Bodmer had demonstrated, by bringing together painting, sculpture and the verbal arts in its homage to the classical cultural heritage. Perhaps more importantly, as Elizabeth Powers has suggested, the painting could have been meant as a ‘representation of sublimity’ as Bodmer understood it: a sublimity which was to be found in ‘great and noble human actions’, and great expressions of the human mind, such as the literary heritage which is alluded to.55 Significantly, the calm and composure of the portrait is not to be found in the work produced by Fuseli after he settled in Britain. These paintings and drawings, which are filled with anguish and indicate the influence of Burkean thematics, reveal a heightened interest for what lies beyond the control of rational forms of representation. While the artist’s neoclassical idiom remains, albeit with enhanced tenebrism and mannerism, his fascination with the unconscious becomes apparent. Against Bodmer, who condemned the notion of a passive sublime, he explores extreme forms of mental passivity connected with terror. The most famous expression of this new interest are the two Nightmare paintings which he produced in 1781 and 1790–​91. Both represent a sleeping woman in a tormented and at the same time lascivious pose: her arms, which are stretched over her head, pull the top part of her body almost 132

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down onto the ground, lifting her chest in a manner which suggests sexual surrender. An incubus squats over the upper part of her body, while in the background emerges from between curtains a ghostlike horse’s head, literally but also punningly a ‘night mare’.56 The visualisation of the incubus naturally enhances the erotic connotations of the painting, but, together with the horse’s head, it is also a means to bring together the tangible world of sensory perception and the intangible world of the subconscious. As the two levels of reality –​ the sleeping figure and her nightmare  –​are given the same visual presence, the unpresentable depths of the psyche appear to take hold of the painting. The terror experienced by the dreaming woman is enhanced by this irruption of repressed imagery, which undermines the classicist control displayed by the artist in his representation of the female figure. Even though the incubus and the horse’s head are examples of the grotesque figures which according to Burke detracted from the sublime, the contrast between their aggressive presence and the elegant outlines of the sleeper is effectively disturbing, if not threatening. We have here a clear shift from Bodmer’s claim that sublimity is to be found in full intellectual control, as well as a questioning of the classicist conventions which used to convey such control. As Martin Myrone points out, the first Nightmare painting is emblematic of Fuseli’s ‘shift from “neoclassical” restraint to “romantic” emotional violence’.57 I  would add that it also illustrates the artist’s theoretical shift from one conception of the sublime to another and his awareness of the representational challenge related to the new conception. In particular, the oneiric figures, whose meaning cannot be grasped at once, suggest the discontinuity between artistic expression and understanding that Burke considered central to the sublime experience. There is no written evidence, either in Fuseli’s correspondence or in his Royal Academy lectures, that he was explicitly responding to such a challenge. His lectures, in particular, are very much in line with the neoclassical pedagogical system which he felt he had to perpetuate. But the context of the British art world, in which Burke was such a strong intellectual and personal presence, made it impossible to ignore the artistic implications of the Enquiry. From the time he settled in England, not only did Fuseli favour narratives involving violent and uncontrolled affects, but this fascination went together with a constant endeavour to prove, in response to Burke and Lessing, 133

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that the painter could match the greatest works of poetry. More than earlier, his favourite scenes were drawn from the plays of William Shakespeare, the epics of Milton and Homer and a variety of mythological sources, from Icelandic as well as Greek sources. His pictorial style also evolved towards increased tenebrism and indistinctness, suggesting the direct impact of Burke’s reflections on obscurity and uncertainty as sources of the sublime. This evolution is especially obvious in Fuseli’s Milton Gallery, on which he worked through much of the 1790s. According to Calè, the series may be seen as an attempt to explore sequential forms of painting, in order to resolve the limitations of the art which had been pointed out by Lessing. It could also be interpreted as a response to the Philosophical Enquiry, which had singled out Milton as the poet of the sublime, who had best ‘understood the secret of heightening, or of setting terrible things … in their strongest light by the force of a judicious obscurity’.58 Many of the scenes chosen by Fuseli for his gallery were selected for their dramatic and heroic potential. Like Barry, he was especially fascinated by the figure of Satan, which allowed him to combine the kind of subjugating and terrifying power that Burke had associated with the sublime and a heroic dimension which was compatible with the great style. As Marcia Pointon explains, by the end of the century, Milton’s Satan had become ‘the independent, heroic, threatening symbol of the age’.59 Fuseli’s depictions in Satan Summoning his Legions, Satan Escaping from Chaos, Satan, Sin and Death or The Flight of Satan at the Touch of Ithuriel’s Spear confirm this heroic dimension while enhancing the awe-​inspiring power of the fallen angel. They celebrate his glory by depicting him as a dynamic figure, whose powerful muscular body is enhanced by tonal contrast and mannerist, almost dance-​ like body positions.60 The Michelangelesque style, tenebrism and low viewpoints, which show Satan triumphantly towering through the succession of scenes, add a dramatic supernatural dimension, completing the combination of the great style and the uncanny. Possibly the most interesting painting in the series is Sin Pursued by Death (1796) (Figure 4), as it represents the scene which had been selected by Burke as an example of such terrifying obscurity and indistinctness. Without mentioning the horrifyingly grotesque description of Sin, with her scaly lower body inhabited by 134

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Figure 4  Henry Fuseli, Sin Pursued by Death, 1794–​96. hell-​hounds, the Enquiry had quoted the ‘portrait of the king of terrors’:         The other Shape, If shape it might be called that shape had none Distinguishable in member, joint, or limb; Or substance might be called that shadow seemed, For each seemed either –​black it stood as Night, Fierce as ten Furies, terrible as Hell, And shook a dreadful dart: what seemed his head The likeness of a kingly crown had on.61

Burke had praised the ‘uncertainty of strokes and colouring’ of Milton’s portrayal of Death, and asserted that ‘In this description all is dark, uncertain, confused, terrible, and sublime to the last 135

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degree.’62 The use of the language of literary pictorialism is interesting, given that only two pages later, Burke claimed that such ‘uncertainty of strokes’ was beyond the evocative powers of the painter, who was confined to clear and determinate representations.63 It suggests that Burke still relied on some important aspects of the sister arts tradition, and understood poetry in terms of ‘poetical picture[s]‌’,64 even when the latter were to him visually untranslat­ able. It also seems to have justified Fuseli’s own attempt to give a pictorial representation of the scene, in spite of the reservations expressed by Burke. Given that the scene was conceived as a poetic picture, Sin Pursued by Death may be understood as an attempt to rival poetry and to develop a visual idiom with a suggestiveness comparable to the text. Interestingly, this representational challenge induces formal explorations that lead the artist away from the classicist ideal. This process is attested by the evolution of the artist’s approach from preparatory sketch to finished painting. In a study that can be found at the British Museum, Fuseli had first represented Death as a sharply outlined skeleton, obviously seeking anatomic precision in his visualisation of the two figures rather than the ‘uncertainty’ praised by Burke. In the finished painting, however, contrary to most of his contemporaries, Fuseli chose to represent Death as insubstantial, a nebulous shape without contours which blends into the darkness, and holds Sin captive between its two indistinct and menacing hands. The viewer may also barely discern the ‘likeness of a kingly crown’ mentioned in the text. The literalness of the illustration is the main source of innovation as Fuseli truly attempts to visualise a shapeless shape, in order to match the confusion and uncertainty praised by Burke. The classicist preference for precision of outline, which is still present in the representation of Sin, seems to be undermined by this formless entity which, meaningfully, appears to draw the contoured female form into the darkness. In spite of its disturbing formal implications, Fuseli’s painting is still firmly anchored in the academic tradition. Thus, a very likely source of inspiration must have been Correggio’s Jupiter and Io, which shows the god in the shape of a cloud, keeping the naked Io in his embrace with his massive, nebulous paw. Significantly, Fuseli considered that particular painting sublime. He said of Correggio:  ‘But that he sometimes reached the sublime, by hiding the limits of his figures in the bland medium which 136

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inwraps them, his Jupiter and Io prove.’65 As this comment suggests, Fuseli’s interest in the painting was linked to reflections about the ‘unlimitation’ of shape, which the artist saw as essential to the production of the sublime. The perception of such unlimitation in Correggio is meaningful, as it connects the Burkean aesthetics of indeterminacy with established pictorial practices. For Fuseli, Correggio’s Jupiter and Io provided a model for a figure without form, and a pictorial solution to the central problem raised by the Enquiry. The academic tradition is also asserted in Fuseli’s representation of the figure of Sin. The voluptuous but clearly outlined body has none of the grotesque elements contained in Milton’s description. However, as mentioned above, this device may be a means to enhance terror, as what the viewer sees is a sensually pleasing form being pulled into the realm of darkness and formlessness.66 The combination of academic form and intimations of formlessness is characteristic of the tensions inherent to Fuseli’s approach, which became more acute as the Milton Gallery project unfolded. Having been elected a Royal Academician in 1790, Fuseli was bound more than ever by classicist principles of composition and drawing, but it is clear that his interest in Milton brought him closer to Burkean aesthetics, which made him aware of the necessity of a certain amount of formal exploration. West’s and Fuseli’s work is emblematic of the way in which a number of artists reconciled the aesthetics of the recently founded Royal Academy of Arts with the new taste for irrationalist affects. While they were prepared to enhance the drama of heroic painting, and to let a form of indistinctness and turbulence enter their paintings, the system of academic conventions prevented them from seeing that Burke’s aesthetics required a major redefinition of visual paradigms. The academic admiration for old masters prevented major stylistic or compositional innovations. Michelangelo was hailed as the artist who had shown what a pictorial sublime could be, and his terribilità could be seen as a sufficient pictorial equivalent of the terror described by the Enquiry.67 For artists working in the heroic mode, a declared ambition was to match his expressive and energetic style. Like Reynolds, Fuseli held him as a model of sublime expression, calling the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel a ‘sublime cycle’, and claiming that the artist had ‘more sublimity, more elementary fire’ than his contemporary Raphael.68 137

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What is more, the most striking compositional strategies of the ‘academic’ artists of the sublime, the uses of obscurity and indistinctness, had been given legitimacy by old masters. Tenebrism had already reached its apogee with Caravaggio and, as we have seen, the use of nebulous structuring had been developed by Correggio. The mastery of these approved devices, which had already introduced the implicit and the tumultuous into the art of painting, could give the illusion that everything was within the reach of visual representation, even the sublime as it had been defined by Burke. As a matter of fact, the latter had himself granted such a possibility, by acknowledging that the ‘judicious obscurity’ he saw in Milton could also be found in painting: [E]‌ven in painting a judicious obscurity in some things contributes to the effect of the picture; because the images in painting are exactly similar to those in nature; and in nature dark, confused, uncertain images have a greater power on the fancy to form the grander passions than those which are clear and determinate.69

Even though the statement was a concession, and as such confirmed the inferiority of painting, it also gave visual hints to painters who wanted to approximate the powerful effects of poetry. Royal Academicians, among them West and Fuseli, but also Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg and Joseph Wright of Derby, in their use of tenebrism and cloudy textures, seem to have made much use of this loophole in the Philosophical Enquiry. Obscurity was the point where well-​established pictorial conventions could meet the new irrationalist aesthetics. It was the point where artists could begin to present the unpresentable, within a mimetic system of representation. The academic painters who were seduced by the sublime aesthetics of the Enquiry clearly realised that it entailed devising new visual strategies. However, as I have argued, their formal explorations went no further than what neoclassical practices had already shown to be possible, and perhaps more importantly, no further than what Burke himself had conceded in his Philosophical Enquiry. The new emphasis on obscurity, in which the darkness of night began to designate an absence which could not be visualised, points to a growing awareness, prompted by Burke, that the sublime is about the presentation of the unpresentable. Nevertheless, this darkness remained, in principle, a figurative element within a conventional 138

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mimetic system. More generally, artistic experiments with the sublime did not address the possibility of non-​mimetic visual strategies, because academic painters considered their art to be already beyond imitation. For this reason, invention mostly focused on subject matter, with an unprecedented fascination for supernatural or supersensible scenes. Fuseli, in his Aphorisms, wrote that ‘One of the most unexplored regions of art are dreams’,70 and in his Royal Academy lectures incited his students to explore them as thoroughly as the world of sense. According to him: Form in its widest meaning, the visible universe that envelops our senses, and its counterpart the invisible one that agitates our mind with visions bred on sense by fancy, are the elements and the realm of invention.71

Fuseli’s insistence on form in this passage was characteristic of the academic approach: if the invisible world of dreams was to provide a major source of invention, it was not conceived as unpresentable, or as likely to lead to irresolvable tensions between conception and presentation. Formlessness was not envisioned as a possibility, nor was the idea that sublime entities could exceed the finite forms of visual representation. In other words, Burke’s fundamental challenge to painting was not addressed. Academic artists at the turn of the nineteenth century still remained convinced that the sublime had to do with excellence in art, a conception which they derived from the Longinian sublime. The idea introduced by Burke of loss of control expressed through the artistic medium itself does not greatly impact their production, especially the finished exhibition paintings. If there is any loss of control, it occurs in the gap between the oneiric form and its meaning, rather than in the act of pictorial production, which is still regulated by neoclassical conventions. Fuseli’s art was, again, emblematic of this contrast between formal control and irrational subject matter. As Christopher Frayling puts it, he produced ‘storytelling pictures which featured idealised figures doing extreme things’.72 Contemporaries of the artist were struck by this disparity. The critic of the Morning Chronicle, for example, wrote about the Nightmare that it was ‘a disagreeable subject, well executed’.73 There is terror in these paintings, but it is not to be found in the production of art itself or in the process of presenting the unpresentable since, to use Lyotard’s words, the academic painters allow themselves the ‘solace of good forms’.74 But of course, this was not quite satisfactory. Fuseli’s own definition of sublimity in his 139

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Aphorisms suggests that in the end, only fragments and incompleteness may be grasped: Whatever hides its limits in its greatness  –​whatever shows a feature of immensity, let the elements of Nature or the qualities of animated being make up its substance, is sublime.75

Notes 1 William L. Pressly, James Barry: The Artist as Hero (London: Tate Gallery Publications, 1983), pp. 32–​3. 2 William L. Pressly, The Life and Art of James Barry (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981), p. 75. 3 Pressly, The Artist as Hero, pp. 33–​4. 4 Liam Lenihan, The Writings of James Barry and the Genre of History Painting, 1775–​1809 (Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014), p. 21. 5 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, ed. Adam Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), IV, xxix, p.  143. Unless otherwise indicated, further references are to this edition. 6 Pressly, Life and Art of James Barry, p. 75. 7 Among studies which outline Barry’s literary abilities and interest in literature, one should especially mention Lenihan’s The Writings of James Barry. 8 The Works of James Barry, Esq. Historical Painter; Formerly Professor of Painting at the Royal Academy … Containing his correspondence from France and Italy with Mr. Burke –​His Lectures on painting delivered at the Royal Academy (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, Strand, 1809), vol. I, p. 10. 9 Works of Barry, vol. I, p. 10. 10 Works of Barry, vol. I, p. 32. 11 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, II, i, p. 53. 12 Works of Barry, vol. I, p. 59. 13 Works of Barry, vol. I, p. 59. 14 Morton D. Paley, The Apocalyptic Sublime (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986), pp. 8–​9. 15 Paley, who examines the impact of Poussin’s painting on a succession of British artists, mentions Horace Walpole as the first to write about Poussin’s painting in 1774. However, Barry’s letter to Burke was written at the time of Barry’s stay in Paris, in 1765–​66. 16 Paley, The Apocalyptic Sublime, pp. 8–​9, 1.

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7 Paley, The Apocalyptic Sublime, pp. 11–​16. 1 18 Works of Barry, vol. I, pp. 54 and 88. 19 Works of Barry, vol. I, p. 54. 20 Works of Barry, vol. I, p. 54. 21 Works of Barry, vol. I, pp. 87–​8. 22 ‘Lecture II: On Design’, Works of Barry, vol. I, p. 405. 23 ‘Lecture II: On Design’, Works of Barry, vol. I, p. 405. 24 ‘Lecture II: On Design’, in Works of Barry, vol. I, p. 411. 25 ‘Lecture IV: On Composition’, in Works of Barry, vol. I, p. 457. 26 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, II, v, p. 61. 27 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, II, v, p. 62. 28 Works of Barry, p. 252n. 29 Works of Barry, p. 252n. 30 Pressly, Life and Art of James Barry, p. 154. 31 Asia Haut, ‘Barry and Fuseli:  Milton, Exile and Expulsion’, in Tom Dunne and William L. Pressly (eds), James Barry, 1741–​1806: History Painter (Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), p. 101. 32 See Pressly, Life and Art of James Barry, p. 158. 33 These strategies are analysed by Paley; see also Paul Duro, ‘Observations on the Burkean Sublime’, Word and Image 29:1 (2013), 41, 44–​5. 34 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, II, iii, p. 54. 35 Paley, The Apocalyptic Sublime, p. 34. 36 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, II, iv, pp. 58–​9. 37 Paley, The Apocalyptic Sublime, p. 35. 38 See Hubert Damisch, A Theory of /​ Cloud/​ :  Toward a History of Painting (1972), trans. Janet Lloyd (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), pp. 4–​20. 39 Luisa Calè, Fuseli’s Milton Gallery: ‘Turning Readers into Spectators’ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), p. 150. 40 See Marilyn Klein Torbruegge, ‘Bodmer and Füssli, “Das Wunderbare” and the Sublime’ (PhD thesis, University of Wisconsin, 1968). 41 See in particular Torbruegge, ‘Bodmer and Füssli’, pp. 145–​7. 42 Elizabeth Powers:  ‘Where Are the Mountains? Johann Jacob Bodmer and the Pre-​Kantian Sublime’, Goethe Yearbook 20 (2013), 199–​222, here 202. 43 Carsten Zelle, ‘Der Anfang doppelter Ästhetik bei Boileau, Dennis, Bodmer und Breitinger’, in Christine Pries (ed.), Das Erhabene: Zwischen Grenzerfahrung und Größenwahn (Weinheim: VCH, Acta Humaniora, 1989), pp. 55–​73. 44 Powers, ‘Where Are the Mountains?’, pp. 210–​14. 45 Henry Fuseli, ‘Lecture III: On Invention’, in John Knowles, The Life and Writings of Henry Fuseli (London: Bentley, 1831), vol. II, p. 156. 46 Calè, Fuseli’s Milton Gallery, pp. 107–​10.

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47 Edward Bell, Selected Prose Works of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, trans. E. C. Beasley and Helen Zimmer (London: George Bell and Sons, 1879). 48 Bell, Selected Prose Works of Lessing, p. 88. 49 Bell, Selected Prose Works of Lessing, p. 89. 50 Bell, Selected Prose Works of Lessing, p. 90. 51 Fuseli, ‘Lecture III’, p. 134. 52 Bell, Selected Prose Works of Lessing, p. 88. Quoted in Calè, Fuseli’s Milton Gallery, p. 110. 53 Calè, Fuseli’s Milton Gallery, pp. 107–​10. 54 See Calè, Fuseli’s Milton Gallery, pp.  109–​ 10; Tom Furniss, ‘Our Neighbors Observe and We Explain:  Moses Mendelssohn’s Critical Encounter with Edmund Burke’s Aesthetics’, Eighteenth Century 50:4 (Winter 2009), 327–​54; James T. Boulton, ‘Editor’s Introduction’, in Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, ed. James T.  Boulton (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), pp. cxxiii–​cxxiv. 55 Powers, ‘Where Are the Mountains?’, 214. 56 As Paley suggests, this is probably a visual pun, since Fuseli must have known that the word derived from the Old English mare, which means an incubus (Paley, The Apocalyptic Sublime, p. 7n.). See also Christopher Frayling, ‘Fuseli’s The Nightmare: Somewhere between the Sublime and the Ridiculous,’ in Martin Myrone (ed.), Gothic Nightmares:  Fuseli, Blake, and the Romantic Imagination (London:  Tate Publishing, 2006), p. 11. 57 Martin Myrone, ‘Fuseli to Frankenstein: The Visual Arts in the Context of the Gothic’, in Myrone, Gothic Nightmares, p. 45. 58 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, II, iii, p. 55. 59 Marcia Pointon, Milton and English Art (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 1970), p.  95. Myrone writes that ‘the heroic  –​even Promethean  –​ideal of Satan’ had been ‘reinvigorated as an emblem of the righteous spirit of rebellion’ during the revolutionary era of the 1790s. Gothic Nightmares, p. 92. 60 On this point, see Wendy Furman-​Adams and Virginia James Tufte, ‘Henry Fuseli’s Milton Gallery, 1799/​1998’, in Charles W. Durham and Kritin A. Pruitt (eds), Reassembling Truth: Twenty-​First Century Milton (Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 2003), pp. 213–​40, here pp. 224–​5. 61 John Milton, Paradise Lost, II, lines 666–​73. 62 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, II, iii, p. 55. 63 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, II, iv, pp. 57–​8. 64 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, II, iv, p. 57. 65 Henry Fuseli, ‘Lecture XI:  On the Prevailing Method of Treating the History of Painting’, in Knowles, Life and Writings, vol. III, p. 31.

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66 The tension between form and formlessness was Fuseli’s way to reconcile the grand style with the formal experimentation required by the Burkean challenge, but it has left some critics puzzled. Marcia Pointon acknowledges Fuseli’s wish to represent Sin and Death as ‘real actors’, but finds that the pictorial transposition of a literary allegory is often a source of clumsiness, thus implicitly reiterating Burke’s prejudice against a pictorial sublime: ‘To a certain extent Fuseli is correct. Sin and Death in Paradise Lost are very substantial figures, but a certain freedom or looseness is possible in literary allegory which, if carried into pictorial allegory, may result in incongruity or confusion. This shows itself most clearly in some of the more abstract scenes which Fuseli chose to illustrate. The attempt to portray the seduction of the very fleshy Sin by the iron-​visored, insubstantially bodied Death in “Sin Pursued by Death” is odd to say the least’ (Pointon, Milton and English Art, pp. 133–​4). 67 Samuel Monk, The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories, in XVIII-​ Century England (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1935), pp. 188–​9. 68 Fuseli, ‘Lecture III’, p. 161, and ‘Lecture XI’, p. 27. 69 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, II, iv, p. 58; my emphasis. 70 Fuseli, ‘Aphorism 231’, in Knowles, Life and Writings, vol. III, p. 145. 71 Fuseli, ‘Lecture III’, p. 137. 72 Frayling, ‘Fuseli’s The Nightmare’, p. 11. 73 Morning Chronicle, and London Advertiser, 4048 (9 May 1782), 2, col. C. 74 Jean-​ François Lyotard, ‘Answering the Question: What is Post­ modernism?’, in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), p. 81. 75 Fuseli, ‘Aphorism 37’, in Knowles, Life and Writings, vol. III, p. 74.

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PART II Beyond the ‘narrow limits of painting’

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u Immersive spectatorship at the panorama and the aesthetics of the sublime

While academic painting could accommodate the aesthetics of the Enquiry by conflating the great style with terrifying, supernatural or irrational subject matter, it did not initially respond to the call for formal innovation that was implicit in Burke’s criticism of painting. The confidence given by neoclassical precepts –​but also by the new status conferred on artists by the Royal Academy –​made it possible to overlook Burke’s argument that, as a literal and mimetic medium, painting could not rival the sublimity of poetry; that its determinacy prevented it from conveying the unpresentable, the excessive or the incommensurate. The need to transform visual media in order to render them indeterminate, or push them beyond their limits, was more manifest in the unprecedented diversification of artistic practices which occurred in the last decades of the eighteenth century and continued well into the next century. Richard Altick has demonstrated the great variety of visual shows that flourished and often were invented in London at the time, from Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg’s Eidophusikon to Madame Tussaud’s wax museum, or from the panorama to the Great Exhibition.1 Several other studies since have emphasised the diversity of Romantic visual culture, and the emotional and perceptual intensification made possible by the multiplication of spectacles, prints, sketches, book illustrations and other supposedly minor arts. These developments have often been viewed as part of the major social and economic evolutions of the time, linked in particular to the industrial revolution and 147

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the growth of middle-​class and working-​class culture. But they can also be understood as aesthetic experiments and as the exploration of new visual paradigms, at a time when artists hoped to convey an increased range of emotions. They can especially be viewed as part of a quest for a sublimity that eluded the more conventional formats of pictorial representation. In the following chapters, I examine a number of these ‘minor’ –​ but greatly fashionable –​visual practices, in which formal experi­ ments seem to have been conceived as a means to heighten the visual experience and to reach the sublime by removing boundaries or compositional conventions. I focus more specifically on practices which intended to unlimit visual representation by freeing it from constraints of size, framing or internal structuring: the panorama, book illustrations, landscape sketches and studies, and the architect­ ural fantasy. This chapter deals with the panorama, whose central sig­nificance in the visual culture of the Romantic period has recently been brought to the fore by critics from the fields of visual culture studies and art history alike. Even though the medium is often understood as ‘an agent of popular taste’,2 its artistic merits have been increasingly underlined, with an emphasis on the new scopic modes it introduced, and the ‘crisis in representation’ it was symptomatic of.3 The panorama has especially been interpreted as an early form of virtual reality and ‘immersive spectatorship’,4 participating in the construction of a new ‘aesthetics of immersion’.5 What was radically new about the panorama was the ability it gave viewers to cross into spaces which until then had been kept within the quadrilateral frame of the painting or illustration, or separated from the viewer by physical distance. For a majority of urban viewers, the panorama simply provided the possibility of being instantly transported from the hustle and bustle of the modern metropolis to distant cities or magnificent natural sce­ nery, without the inconvenience of actual journeying. Its illusionistic technology allowed them to imagine themselves momentarily displaced, plunged within exotic environments which they would probably never experience in real life. As a contemporary review humorously put it: Panoramas are among the happiest contrivances for saving time and expense in this age of contrivances. What cost a couple of hundred

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pounds and half a year a century ago, now costs a shilling and a quarter of an hour.… Now the affair is settled in a summary manner. The mountain or the sea, the classic vale or the ancient city, is transported to us on the wings of the wind. And their location here is curious. We have seen Vesuvius in full roar and torrent, within a hundred yards of a hackney-​coach stand, with all its cattle, human and bestial, unmoved by the phenomenon. Constantinople, with its bearded and turbanned multitudes, quietly pitched beside a Christian thoroughfare, and offering neither persecution nor proselytism. Switzerland, with its lakes covered with sunsets, and mountains capped and robed in storms; the adored of sentimentalists, and the refuge of miry metaphysics; the Demisolde of all nations, and German geology –​stuck in a corner of a corner in London, and forgotten in the tempting vicinage of a cook-​shop; and now Pompeii, reposing in its slumber of two thousand years, in the very buzz of the Strand.6

This primary function of the panorama as a simulacrum of travel partly explains why it was viewed with suspicion by the artistic and literary elite of the time. According to Gillen D’Arcy Wood, ‘[t]‌he consensus in the art establishment was that panoramas were somehow vulgar’.7 The criticism focused on the medium’s artificiality, its illusionistic techniques and in particular its strict topographic imitation, which were said to prevail over artistic invention.8 The ‘mechanical’ illusionism of the medium meant that it could not be granted the status of ‘high’ art. The panorama, however, was not simply about virtual travel and gratifying popular cravings for the illusion of exotic places. It introduced another kind of spatial transgression, which had significant aesthetic implications. By placing viewers within the painting rather than outside of it, in other words by allowing them to cross into the pictorial space, it ushered in a new conception of visuality which the art world could not ignore. The internal viewing position of the panorama visitor allowed the gaze to move within the painting and to shift through a succession of perspective viewpoints, without being stopped at the edge of the picture. Such a comprehensive and dynamic visual paradigm could be exalting for the viewing subject, who was no longer constrained by the closure of the quadrilateral frame, and was free to look into a multiplicity of directions. Unsurprisingly, a number of prominent Romantic artists, including David and Delacroix, were tempted by these new visual possibilities, even though they still saw the panorama as being outside 149

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the realm of art.9 Caspar David Friedrich, who considered creating a panorama himself, after a stay in the Riesengebirge,10 staged his reflection about unlimited or immersed viewpoints in paintings like Wanderer above the Sea of Fog,11 or Monk by the Sea. Other professional and academically trained painters tried their hand at the medium, and, like Robert Ker Porter, attempted panoramic transpositions not just of landscape but also of history painting. As their interest in the medium suggests, the exaltation of crossing into the pictorial space, of viewing pictorial subjects from within, was not simply a cheap thrill, but it could also be seen as a response to contemporary aesthetic reflection. In this chapter, I would like to underline that this new scopic experience was actually anchored in the aesthetic debates of its time, and owed as much to this intellectual context as to the cravings of urban audiences. I will contend more specifically that it addressed the representational concerns raised by eighteenth-​century theories of the sublime, and that its definition of new visual paradigms may be linked to the pursuit of that particular aesthetic experience. The argument will be based on the remaining visual traces of those ephemeral productions (the much scaled-​down preparatory sketches, engravings and orientation keys), as well as on contemporary verbal accounts of the panorama, in particular the detailed programmes, narratives and descriptions which were increasingly provided to viewers, from about 1802.12 These textual sources allow us to see how consciously panorama makers engaged with prevailing aesthetic discourses, vied with traditional pictorial practices in order to unlimit visual representation and redefined the terms of the experience of the sublime for new audiences and new visual needs. Immersion, astonishment, empowerment The panorama was invented in the mid-​1780s by Robert Barker, an Irish painter, who devised a method for painting a circular picture, an entire 360-​degree view, without apparent distortion on the horizon line.13 In 1787, Barker received a patent for the design of an architectural apparatus that would allow the display of such a picture, and after a couple of makeshift exhibitions, in 1794, he opened the first circular building to house such paintings on a large scale, at Leicester Square. The cross-​section of the rotunda, drawn by its 150

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Figure  5  Cross-​section of Robert Barker’s two-​level panorama at Leicester Square, c. 1793. architect, Robert Mitchell (Figure 5), shows a two-​storied building in which visitors first accessed the very large lower panorama, and then ascended to the smaller upper view.14 Barker’s purpose was to place the viewer within a picture, and to create the illusion of being immersed within a real environment, as was explicitly specified in his patent: Now know ye, that by my invention, called La Nature à Coup d’Oeil, is intended, by drawing and painting, and a proper disposition of the whole, to perfect an entire view of any country or situation, as it appears to an observer turning quite round.15

This illusion of reality was created through a number of devices, the first and most obvious one being the accurate drawing of a circular view: [T]‌he painter or drawer must fix his station, and delineate correctly and connectedly every object which presents itself to his view as he turns round, concluding his drawing by a connection with where he began.16

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The deception was then sustained by the whole architecture of panoramic display. An essential prerequisite was the magnitude of the display, with the lower panorama being 90 feet in diameter and displaying 10,000 square feet of canvas.17 Another prerequisite was that the view should not be interrupted by reminders of its artificiality. Indirect light, ‘entirely from the top’, guaranteed that the viewers would not see the projection of their shadows on the wall. Any intrusive elements or perceptible boundaries between the work and its milieu were blacked out, with necessary steps taken ‘to prevent an observer seeing above’ or ‘below the bottom of the drawing or painting’.18 Finally, the access to the panorama was from below so as to preserve the continuity of the view: The entrance to the inner inclosure must be from below a proper building or framing being erected for that purpose, so that no door or other interruption may disturb the circle on which the view is to be represented.… [A]‌nd the inner inclosure may be elevated, at the will of an artist, so as to make observers, on whatever situation he may wish they should imagine themselves, feel as if really on the very Spot.19

Such a description makes it obvious that a strong reality effect was Barker’s main intention, and the whole apparatus of display was subservient to this impression of real immersion in a real place. Even though he did not use false terrain (which was introduced in later panoramas), Barker understood the necessity to maintain the illusion beyond the pictorial space, sometimes even within the viewing platform. In his 1794 panorama of the Grand Fleet at Spithead in 1791, the observation platform had been fitted out with real ship parts in order to resemble the poop deck of a frigate. The impression of being immersed within the scene itself was so convincing that Queen Charlotte, one of the first visitors of the new attraction, is reported to have felt seasick.20 The powerful reality effect did not just result in the type of ­somatic reaction experienced by Queen Charlotte, but rather, one could say, in a paradoxical combination of bewilderment and empowerment. Among the first emotions felt by viewers when arriving on the viewing platform, there was bound to be a form of astonishment at suddenly being surrounded by a completely new environment, which in most cases had never been seen before. Illusionistic display on such a scale was a radically

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novel experience for the early viewers of the panorama who, like Queen Charlotte, could be physically overwhelmed by the intensity of the experience. To enhance this type of reaction, Barker made his viewers walk through dark, dimly lit corridors, allowing a sort of blank transition between the impressions of the world outside and the virtual reality of the panorama. The viewer’s arrival into the exhibition space was consequently sudden, unmediated by other visual perceptions, and his/​her immersion into this new environment felt all the more overwhelming. This effect was enhanced by the unprecedented situation of being surrounded by a painting rather than viewing it from the outside. In particular, the simultaneous presence of a multiplicity of possible viewpoints resulted in the confusion and disorientation of the viewer, who was used to visual representations with a single perspective viewpoint. This immediate combination of surprise and disorientation, however, would soon give way to a gratifying sense of full visual control. To begin with, the viewer was provided with the illusion of being placed on a commanding vantage point. Usually, panoramic views were taken from elevations like hilltops or towers which gave visitors the ‘thrill of seeing the entire circle of the horizon’, of complete control over a 360-​degree view.21 That Barker intended to provide such a commanding view is suggested by the original name he had given to his invention, ‘la nature à coup d’oeil’, a phrase which was generally used in a military context and referred to the ability to assess the topography of a place at a glance. To increase the viewer’s sense of control, Barker provided keys and, from about 1803,22 narrative programmes which guided the eye to specific points that were considered to be especially worthy of attention. The first keys, which were anamorphic, reproduced the effect of a full 360-​degree view, with the simultaneity of all focal points making their apprehension almost as disorienting as the view itself. Their successors, from about 1815, were rectilinear (see Figures  6 and 7), unfolding the view in two rectangular strips which, as Edward Ziter notes, were much more legible and provided a reassuring route into the image,23 as well as more topographic information. The narratives provided detailed historical and ethnographic information, as well as topographic explanations, 153

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Figure 6  Henry Aston Barker, Description of a View of the North Coast of Spitzbergen, Painted from Drawings Taken by Lieut. Beechey, who Accompanied the Polar Expedition in 1818; which is Now Exhibiting in the Large Rotunda of Henry Aston Barker’s Panorama, Leicester Square. London: Adlard, 1819.

Figure  7  Robert Burford, Description of a View of the Ruins of the City of Pompeii, Representing the Forum, with the Adjoining Edifice and Surrounding country, Now Exhibiting in the Panorama, Strand; Painted from Drawings Taken on the Spot by Mr. Burford. London: Adlard, 1824.

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which ensured that the panorama was not simply a visual thrill, but also an instrument of cognition. The creation of comprehensive knowledge from a commanding viewpoint has often been associated with the age’s intellectual ambitions and imperial context, as cognitive and political control over the world simultaneously increased. Denise Oleksijczuk, for example, sees the panorama as ‘bound up with the discourses of imperialism’,24 while Bernard Comment goes as far as saying that the medium was ‘a response to a particularly strong nineteenth-​century need –​for absolute dominance’.25 ‘An Improvement on Painting’ and a response to the Burkean challenge Because of the duality of the experience, the succession of disorientation and control, of sensorial overpowering and cognitive empowerment, the panorama may also be seen as articulating the quintessential aesthetic experience of the age: that of the sublime. In The Critique of the Power of Judgment, published in 1790, at about the same time as Barker produced his first panoramas (of Edinburgh and London), Kant analysed the mathematically sublime as a mental process which involves two moments. First, the imagination, as a ‘sensible faculty’, apprehends the absolutely great or the infinite, but cannot comprehend it ‘in one whole of intuition’. This defeat of the imagination, however, is followed by the victory of reason, as the latter steps in and ‘makes simultaneity intuitable’, in other words provides an intuition which makes simultaneous comprehension possible. The initial ‘displeasure’ of limited ‘aesthetic comprehension’ is thus superseded by the ‘pleasure’ of ‘intellectual comprehension’.26 The panorama, by first preventing immediate sensible comprehension and then leading to a sense of rational control over the complete horizon, seems to have provided precisely this kind of experience. As the viewer emerges onto the observation platform, simultaneous comprehension is initially impossible, causing a form of aesthetic –​and sensorial or somatic –​displeasure. Then, as the multiplicity of viewpoints and focal points are linked together into a meaningful whole, through prolonged observation and study of the narrative programme, the pleasure of a comprehensive grasp, and possibly mental elevation, is eventually provided.27 155

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Naturally, it is unlikely that Barker would have known of such theoretical developments, but he would have been acquainted with the prevailing British discourse on the sublime, which articulated similar tensions between the limitations of perception or representation, and whatever exceeded such limitations, whether it was the vastness of nature or mental expansion. He would also have been aware that finding adequate pictorial means to convey the sublime, which seemed to transcend material representation, was one of the prevailing concerns of the painters of his day. I would like to contend that, to some extent, the invention of the panorama may be seen as a response to this aesthetic context, and in particular to Burke’s canonical formulation of British views on the sublime. As I explained in the first chapter, Burke had notably interpreted the psychological opposition of pleasure and pain as the root of the distinction between our ideas of the beautiful and the sublime; he had also argued that the latter’s connection with pain, and consequently fear, made it a much more intense aesthetic experience than the former, as long as some form of aesthetic distance was possible.28 Like Kant, he described an experience characterised by two successive moments or displeasure and elation. First, as the mind encounters a source of fear, it is filled with ‘astonishment’, reason is overpowered, the mind is robbed ‘of all its powers of acting and reasoning’;29 but eventually exaltation prevails as the experiencing subject realises he or she is safe from the observed danger. The intensity of the initial terror is transformed into aesthetic delight, ‘a sort of delightful horror, a sort of tranquillity tinged with terror’.30 Barker’s panorama may be seen as a product of this realisation that heightened aesthetic enjoyment could be derived from the acute illusion of danger, from a fully immersive experience in which it was possible to bring viewers as close as possible to fearful or awe-​ inspiring objects while allowing them to keep the necessary mental distance. The panorama was the kind of borderline visual experience which could bring together terror and delight in the manner described by Burke. It could also be understood as a response to the conviction, introduced by Burke, developed by Lessing and shared by literary critics of the Romantic period, that painting was constrained by

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the ‘narrow limits’ of mimetic representation, and could not rival the emotive power of poetry. According to Burke, the only way for painting to approach the sublime was through the imitation of sublime objects, which necessarily affected the mind more than the copy: If I make a drawing of a palace, or a temple, or a landscape, I present a very clear idea of those objects; but then (allowing for the effect of imitation, which is something) my picture can at most affect only as the palace, temple, or landscape would have affected in the reality.31

It is possible to view Barker’s panorama as a literal and extreme response to this challenge. The very size of the painting was intended to match the vastness of real objects, and to affect the mind as powerfully as the original would have. And the illusionistic devices described earlier were a way to achieve such an effect while denying the limitations of painting. Barker’s enthusiastic publicity for his invention suggests that he was consciously addressing the Burkean challenge. Upon the opening of his first panorama (of Edinburgh), in 1787, he advertised it as an ‘Improvement on Painting, Which relieves that sublime Art from a Restraint it has ever laboured under’ (my emphasis).32 He also asserted that he was ‘unlimiting the bounds of the Art of Painting’.33 Words, images and the panoramic sublime Even though his first panoramas were topographic views (of Edinburgh and London), it soon became apparent that Barker saw his invention as a very adequate pictorial support for sublime subject matter. From the onset of the Napoleonic wars, he produced several panoramas of dramatic battle scenes, no doubt to allow viewers to partake of the nation’s heroic feats as if they were actually involved in them, but also to produce the intense thrills of a reality effect combined with the terror of battle. Through the intensity of illusion, mixed with dramatic narratives, it is likely that he was rivalling academic history painting, intending to demonstrate the superior ability of the panorama to produce the sublime. The descriptions of contemporaries confirm that they were ready to be convinced by such a strategy. The following extract, from a review of the Battle of the Nile (1799) in the Morning Chronicle, suggests

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that viewers willingly submitted to a terror which they knew to be an illusion, or at least a distanced danger, in order to be thoroughly thrilled: Nothing can be more perfect or more sublime than the illusion which this Painting of the Battle of the Nile possesses. The effect is the most striking that we ever witnessed from the combination of light and colours. It is actually magical, for the Spectators are surrounded on all sides with the flames of the engagement, and they shrink from the explosions that threaten to cover them with the burning fragments of the ship blown up. It is the chef d’oeuvre of this work, and greatly exceeds all the former representations that Mr. Barker has given us in this new art.34

Barker’s dramatic battle scenes were so effective that they were soon emulated by rival exhibitions, in a context of heightened patriotic sentiment. Thus Robert Ker Porter, a former student of the Royal Academy, successfully painted, among others, the storming of Seringapatam (1799), the siege of Acre (1801) and the battle of Alexandria (1802) in half panoramas at the Lyceum. These large semi-​ circular paintings, which combined Porter’s knowledge of academic history painting with the spectacular effects of the panorama, would have been a means to ‘unlimit’ heroic painting and affect viewers as powerfully as epic poetry. Nevertheless, there was in the combination of panorama and heroic narrative a significant obstacle to sublime effect, which contemporaries underlined. As pointed out by Bernard Comment, critics like Aubin-​Louis Millin (in his Dictionnaire des Beaux-​ Arts, 1806) argued that the principle of illusion made it absurd for a panorama to depict ‘the frenzy of a land or sea battle, as Mr Barker advises’, and claimed that the depiction of an idealised moment that would capture the essence of such a narrative should remain the prerogative of history painting.35 In order to achieve a thorough illusion, the static nature of the panorama seemed to exclude narrative developments. This incompatibility appears to have led to an evolution in the use of the panorama as a vehicle of the sublime. After the death of Robert Barker in 1806, but also more markedly with the end of war with France, the popular dynamic battle scenes were superseded by townscapes and landscapes, in which there was no need to create the illusion of movement. Nevertheless, the wish to use the spectacular dimensions of the apparatus to convey the sublime 158

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remained, and from then on mostly focused on scenes of natural grandeur or desolation. The Panorama of the North Coast of Spitzbergen, produced in 1819 by Henry Aston Barker, who had succeeded his father at the head of the Leicester Square Panorama, illustrates this evolution. The exhibition, at the time, was the only communication to the public of the expedition led by Captain David Buchan, which had attempted to reach the North Pole a year earlier, but had been caught for over two months in the ice at Spitzbergen.36 It was supplemented with an informative narrative of the expedition, based on travel notes by Lieutenant William Beechey, who had also provided the drawings that were used for the view.37 The interaction between the view and its narrative programme is a good example of how panorama makers adapted their aesthetic ambitions to their awareness of the staticity of their medium. In this case, the text makes explicit the sublime emotions which the visitor is expected to experience, thus allowing the visual representation to focus on other aspects. As noted by Laurie Garrison, ‘[t]‌he style of the narrative portion of the programme is akin to that of other popular writing about the Arctic, and Barker may have taken some inspiration from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) or Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere” (1798)’.38 More specifically, the text abundantly resorts to the fashionable themes of the sublime and describes visual processes that recall the succession of awe and exaltation which were said to be characteristic of the experience. The approach to the island of Spitzbergen is described as a mind-​filling process, in which the weight of desolation is succeeded by the elation derived from natural vastness: Its shores at first present a true picture of dreariness and desolation:  the principal objects which attract the attention are craggy mountains, with their summits towering above the clouds; deep glens, filled with eternal snows; and stupendous icebergs. The eye, however, soon becomes familiarized to such a scene, and the mind is filled with admiration of the grandeur and magnificence of its objects.39

The mind-​ filling experience may recall Burke’s explanation that with the astonishment caused by the natural sublime, the mind is ‘so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other’.40

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But the Burkean conception of the sublime as an experience whose intensity originates in terror and defies representation is especially apparent in the description of the storm encountered by the expedition after its release from the ice: A few hours, however, had scarcely elapsed, when the sea rose to a prodigious height, and the gale, that had long been gathering, raged with such unexampled fury, that every sail was furled. At this critical moment, the ice was seen so close to leeward, as to hold out little probability of weathering it; and presented a prospect so truly terrific, that but slender hopes of saving the vessels were entertained.… The ships, half buried in the sea, fast approached the margin of the ice, –​which presented a scene of horror far beyond the power of language fully to describe.41

Terror, ineffability, natural vastness and power had become well-​ known topoi of the sublime, and the narrative makes it clear that such intense aesthetic emotions were expected to be part of the experience of the Spitzbergen panorama. Nevertheless, the view itself, instead of illustrating moments of terror or man’s confrontation with the powers of nature (such as the storm or the expedition’s confinement in the ice), shows the north coast of the island as the vessels are eventually released from the grip of the ice. There may have been a simple practical reason for such a choice, as the drawings were provided by a member of the expedition rather than Barker or another artist. But the programme gives another explanation: It is [the vessels’] approach to the margin of the ice, on the evening of their extrication, which is intended to be represented by the present Panorama; when a diversity of scenery was observable, that appeared well calculated to convey a general idea of the nature of the Arctic Regions.42

In other words, the educational and documentary usefulness of the view is presented as the main reason why it was selected. This intention is confirmed by the key (Figure 6), its reference numbers and the corresponding explanations in the second part of the programme, which all focus on the topography of Spitzbergen and a selection of arctic animals. In this specific instance, the emphasis on visual instruction may be due to the panorama being conceived as ‘an Admiralty-​approved medium of distributing expedition results’.43 The interaction between the verbal narrative and the view itself outlines a specific aesthetic project. To begin with, it shows that the panorama was meant to be a complete experience, combining 160

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spectacle and instruction. At the same time, the complementariness of text and image becomes a means to intensify the experience, not just in educational terms, but in aesthetic ones. As the example of the Spitzbergen panorama shows, the introduction of programmes allowed the inclusion of a temporal, dramatic dimension, which the static nature of the medium seemed to preclude. In this case, it could also be seen as a way to preserve the heightened emotions felt by viewers in the early days of the panorama, before the novelty of this form of illusion wore off. In the case of the Spitzbergen panorama, the aesthetic ambitions of the medium are subdued, as the image resorts to the text in order to convey human drama and powerful emotions. Henry Aston Barker’s thoroughly topographic conception of panoramic painting may have explained why sublime effect was kept for the text. His assistant and successor, Robert Burford, however, was much more confident in the panorama’s ability to exalt through visual devices, and explicitly addressed this aesthetic challenge through frequent references to the sublime in his programmes. Taking into account the staticity of his medium, Burford sought the sublime in landscapes rather than historical or literary subject matter,44 often favouring scenes which spoke of natural desolation or elemental power, rather than reassuring picturesque views. If human presence was included, it was often dwarfed by the grandeur of the scenery, sometimes explicitly to remind the viewer of man’s insignificance in the face of natural powers or the passing of time. His two panoramas of Pompeii, produced in 1824, and exhibited respectively at the Strand and Leicester Square, are a good illustration of this evolving approach. While the views are strictly based on the topography of the place, Burford also attempted to fill them with a sense of the horror which had struck the town, by representing a smoking Vesuvius in the distance, and by emphasising the transience of human presence and achievements. This intention is made explicit in the narrative which supplemented the first view, exhibited at the Strand: As it is desirable to impress the spectator with such feelings as accompany those who visit the desolate and unpeopled ruins of Pompeii, any circumstance that might tend to destroy those impressions has been carefully avoided: this is the reason why so few figures are introduced in the Panorama.45

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As Burford explains, the sublime of the ruins was enhanced by the scarcity of human presence. What is more, the few figures included in the painting were symbolic of decline and of historical irony. The key (Figure 7) explains that they were ‘Peasants celebrating a festival’ (no. 30) and ‘Pifferari, or pipers’ (no. 31), in other words pastoral figures whose lives seem to evoke no sense of the vanished city. The juxtaposition of empty ruins and contemporary rural figures to connote the end of a historical cycle was a topos of contemporary academic landscapes, and was used to great effect by Turner in his Greek and Italian landscapes. Burford’s use of the motifs suggests that he intended to rival academic painting in the production of what could be called a historical sublime. By using the immersive technology of the panorama to plunge viewers within the pictorial space, by implying in fact that they were the lonely figures of a deserted scene, as the description suggests, he may even be said to have attempted to significantly outdo these ‘historical landscapes’. The viewing subject was conceived as immersed in isolation within the desolation of Pompeii in order to apprehend bodily the sense of tragedy which filled the place, even though the crowded conditions of panorama viewing must have undermined the effect! This ambitious conception is especially obvious in Burford’s predilection for places which were at the time considered to be emblematic of the natural sublime, and perhaps even more in the manner he publicised these panoramas. His View of the Falls of Niagara, exhibited at Leicester Square in 1833, was supplemented by a ‘Description’ which made explicit the wish not only to match the sublime power of nature, but also to emulate poetry’s evocative powers. The prospectus opens with Byron’s Romantic description of waterfalls on the Velino River, in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage IV, which renders the awe-​inspiring scene and the exaltation of the experiencing subject through a quick succession of exclamations and a rich imagery of elemental confusion. The passage seems to have been selected for its Burkean thematics of terror and pain, mixed with aesthetic delight. The scene is ‘horribly beautiful’,46 and the powerful motions of nature are a scene of ‘horror’ and ‘agony’: The fall of waters! Rapid as the light, The flashing mass foams, shaking the abyss; The hell of waters! Where they howl, and hiss,

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And boil in endless torture; while the sweat Of their great agony, wrung out from this Their Phlegeton, curls around the rocks of jet That gird the gulf around, in pitiless horror set.47

By quoting Byron, and this passage in particular, Burford is making a clear statement that the scene has to be viewed as sublime. Poetry and the panorama complete one another to enhance this aesthetic experience. But Burford goes further, and makes a confident claim for the powers of the panorama to create such an aesthetic response through its own illusionistic devices: The Falls of Niagara are justly considered one of the greatest n ­ atural ­curiosities in the known world; they are without parallel, and exceed immeasurably all of the same kind that have ever been seen or ­imagined; travellers speak of them in terms of admiration and delight, and ­acknowledge that they surpass in sublimity every description which the power of language can afford; a Panorama alone offers a scale of ­sufficient mag­nitude to exhibit at one view (which is indispensable) the various parts of this wonderful scene, and to convey an adequate idea of the matchless extent, prodigious power, and awful appearance, of this ­stupendous phenomenon of nature.48

Although Burford starts by quoting Byron, he immediately afterwards makes the daring claim that the panorama provides the most adequate representation of a scene which even ‘the power of language’ cannot convey. The justification lies in the technology of illusion, in the ‘magnitude’ of the painting which provides the closest imitation of the natural original. The very literalness of painting, on a spectacular scale, becomes more powerful than words. Such assertions may be understood as a bold reconsideration of the respective powers of poetry and painting. By the end of the eighteenth century, Burke’s doubts about the powers of the visual arts had led to a widespread suspicion of painting and images among the literary elite, who reasserted –​with Coleridge and Lamb among others –​that poetry was the most adequate vehicle of the sublime, and that painting was too literal or mimetic to exalt in a comparable manner.49 One may see Burford’s ‘Description’ as a response to this intellectual context, and a call for a reappraisal of the powers of painting, as they had been transformed by the panorama. The quotation from Byron may suggest a desire to reassert the complementariness of arts that had been considered until recently as 163

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‘sisters’, but the statement that follows is actually a reversal of the hierarchy: words are not powerful enough, and it is complete pictorial mimesis, achieved through the vast scale of the panorama, that can ‘alone’ give an idea of the sublimity of the natural site. A few years later, with his View of Mont Blanc, the Valley of Chamounix, and the Surrounding Mountains, which opened at Leicester Square in 1837, Burford was even more explicit. Once again, the supplemental ‘Description’ began with a quotation from Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, an evocation of the Alps from Canto III, which once again brought together the Burkean components of terror, exaltation, and a sense of man’s insignificance: All that expands the spirit, yet appals, Gather round these summits, as to show How Earth may pierce to Heaven, Yet leave vain man below.50

This tribute to the evocative powers of poetry, however, was followed by an unambiguous defence of the panorama: To present a clear and intelligible image, of a scene so fearfully grand and imposing, by a verbal description is impossible; the most fertile imagination, aided by the pen of Byron, or the matchless pencil of a Claude in a painting of moderate size, must alike fail to convey an adequate impression of the reality; for nature is here almost too magnificent, and the whole is on a scale of such inconceivable vastness, that it sets at defiance any attempt to depict it with ordinary means; the Panorama alone, and that to an extent considerably beyond its usual limits, can hope to approach any thing like a fair delineation of this sublime scene, and even that, vast as it is, must fall far short of presenting it in all its glorious and ever varying beauty.51

According to Burford, then, the spectacular illusionism of the panorama was sublime because it was what could come closest to the ‘reality’ of grand natural scenes. More importantly, other art forms were powerless in comparison:  neither idealised academic landscapes –​like Claude’s –​nor poetry –​even when produced by ‘the pen of Byron’ –​could ‘depict’ the natural sublime as convincingly as the panorama. Such an assertion could reflect Burford’s awareness that the new scopic mode of the panorama made former comparisons of the respective sublimity of poetry and painting irrelevant. Not only were the old sister arts presented as powerless, 164

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but illusionistic realism and the bodily participation of the subject within representation were now presented as the basis of the experience of the sublime in art. The panorama’s reflection about and pursuit of the sublime could be said to articulate the aesthetic evolutions of its time. Barker’s invention, as I have argued, was partly presented as a response to the contemporary debate on the sublime and the resulting denigration of the visual arts. It was, according to Barker himself, a pictorial technology that would unlimit painting and allow it to exalt as powerfully as poetic language. However, its sensationalist redefinition of sublimity, in which mimesis and illusion became a central criterion, did not convince the contemporary artistic elite. Wordsworth, among others, criticised            The spectacles Within doors …         those mimic sights that ape The absolute pretence of reality, Expressing, as in mirror, sea and land, And what earth is, and what she has to show.52

Nevertheless, what the panorama was asserting was not simply popular taste against the taste of the elite. It was a new form of visuality, based on immersion, bodily participation and instant virtual transport from place to place. In the latter respect, it participated in the acceleration of visual experience which went along with growing urbanisation. The fact that this novel experience was still described in terms of the sublime is significant. It shows in particular the extent to which this emerging modern visual culture was also very much anchored in earlier aesthetic debates, as Barker’s and Burford’s writings confirm. But it also suggests that the concept of the sublime participated in the construction of a new visuality. The panorama was partly conceived as a means to convey that specific aesthetic experience; but it also redefined it, linking it to new forms of awe and elation, which had to do with the thrills of virtual reality, of sudden plunges into distant realities on a vast scale. The panorama showed the usefulness of the aesthetics of the sublime to account for these new scopic experiences and for modern forms of spectatorship. 165

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Notes 1 Richard Altick, The Shows of London: A Panorama History of Exhibitions, 1600–​1862 (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1978). 2 Oliver Grau, Virtual Art:  From Illusion to Immersion (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), p. 57. 3 Peter Otto, ‘Between the Virtual and the Actual: Robert Barker’s Panorama of London and the Multiplication of the Real in Late Eighteenth-​Century London’, Romanticism on the Net 46 (May 2007), §51. Accessed 9 September 2014. www.erudit.org/​revue/​ron/​2007/​v/​ n46/​016130ar.html. 4 Alison Griffith, Shivers Down Your Spine: Cinema, Museums and the Immersive View (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), p. 39. 5 Grau, Virtual Art, pp. 13–​15. 6 William Henry Pyne [pseud. Ephraim Hardcastle], ‘The Panorama’, Somerset House Gazette, and Literary Museum; or, Weekly Miscellany of Fine Arts, Antiquities, and Literary Chit Chat 2 (London: W. Wetton, 1824), pp. 151–​3. 7 Gillen D’Arcy Wood, The Shock of the Real: Romanticism and Visual Culture, 1760–​1860 (New York: Palgrave, 2001), p. 104. 8 See, for example, Bernard Comment, The Panorama (London: Reaktion Books, 2002), pp. 84–​7; D’Arcy Wood, The Shock of the Real, pp. 99–​ 120; Scott B. Wilcox, ‘Unlimiting the Bounds of Painting’, in Ralph Hyde (ed.), Panoramania! (London: Trefoil, 1988), pp. 13–​44, here pp. 25–​9; Otto, ‘Between the Virtual and the Actual’, §§24–​7. 9 See Comment, The Panorama, pp. 86–​7 and 144. 10 Comment, The Panorama, p. 86. 11 Otto, ‘Between the Virtual and the Actual’, §§1–​15. 12 Much of this material has recently been put together in a five-​volume collection, which is of great use to researchers: Laurie Garrison, Sibylle Erle, Verity Hunt, Peter West and Phoebe Putnam (eds), Panoramas, 1787–​1900: Texts and Contexts (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012). 13 Altick, The Shows of London, p. 129. 14 Although the two panoramas were not usually connected, sometimes they functioned as a pair, as in 1801, when Barker exhibited two panoramas of Constantinople: one from the Tower of Galata and the other from the Tower of Leander. 15 Robert Barker, ‘Specification of Mr Barker’s Patent for displaying Views of Nature at large, by Oil-​Painting, Fresco, Water-​Colours, &c.’, in The Repertory of Arts and Manufactures:  Consisting of Original Communications, Specifications of Patent Inventions and Selections of Useful Practical Papers From the Transactions of the Philosophical Societies of All Nations, etc., vol. IV (London, 1796), p. 165.

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6 Barker, ‘Specification’, p. 165. 1 17 George Corner, The Panorama (Leicester Square):  with Memoirs of its Inventor, Robert Barker, and his Son, the Late Henry Aston Barker (London: Robins, 1857), pp. 6–​14. 18 Barker, ‘Specification’, pp. 166–​7. 19 Barker, ‘Specification’, p. 167; my emphasis. 20 Corner, The Panorama, p. 7. 21 Denise Oleksijczuk, The First Panoramas: Visions of British Imperialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), p. 5. 22 Garrison et al., Panoramas, 1787–​1900, vol. I, p. 39. 23 Edward Ziter, The Orient on the Victorian Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 26. 24 Oleksijczuk, The First Panoramas, p. 2. 25 Comment, The Panorama, p. 19. 26 Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2000), §27, p. 139–​43. 27 Peter Otto makes a relatively similar point in his analysis of Barker’s first panorama of London, from the Albion Mills. According to him, the sublime of that particular painting arises from the conflation of the chaotic world of the rapidly expanding metropolis and the rising forces of commerce, industry and empire. According to Otto, ‘As in all experiences of the sublime, whether in the panorama or in the actual world, its power depends on its ability first to engineer the experience of a disordered, unmanageable whole, which stops us in our tracks, and then to induce the spectator to read this disorder as the indirect presentation of a primary power.’ A power which in this case is ‘modernity itself’ (Otto, ‘Between the Virtual and the Actual’, §48). 28 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, ed. Adam Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), I, vii, p. 36. Unless otherwise indicated, further references are to this edition. 29 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, II, ii, p. 53. 30 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, IV, vii, p. 123. 31 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, II, iv, p. 55. 32 Edinburgh Evening Courant, 29 December 1787, 1. 33 The Diary: or Woodfall’s Register, 9 April 1789. 34 Quoted in Nicholas Tracy, Britannia’s Palette (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-​Queen’s University Press, 2007), p. 137. 35 Comment, The Panorama, p. 106. 36 Garrison et al., Panoramas, 1787–​1900, vol. I, pp. 155–​6. 37 Garrison et al., Panoramas, 1787–​1900, vol. I, p. 155. 38 Garrison et al., Panoramas, 1787–​1900, vol. I, 156.

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39 Henry Aston Barker, Description of a View of the North Coast of Spitzbergen, Painted from Drawings Taken by Lieut. Beechey, who Accompanied the Polar Expedition in 1818; which is Now Exhibiting in the Large Rotunda of Henry Aston Barker’s Panorama, Leicester Square (London: Adlard, 1819), pp. 3–​4; my emphasis. 40 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, II, i, p. 53. 41 Barker, Description, pp. 5–​6; my emphasis. 42 Barker, Description, p. 5; my emphasis. 43 Garrison et al., Panoramas, 1787–​1900, vol. I, p. 156. 44 One exception was his 1829 panorama of Pandemonium, a rather unsuccessful experiment, which was not repeated. 45 Robert Burford, Description of a View of the Ruins of the City of Pompeii, Representing the Forum, with the Adjoining Edifice and Surrounding country, Now Exhibiting in the Panorama, Strand; Painted from Drawings Taken on the Spot by Mr. Burford (London:  Adlard, 1824), p. 3. 46 George Gordon, Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, IV, lxxii. 47 Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, IV, lxix. 48 Robert Burford, Description of a View of the Falls of Niagara, Now Exhibiting at the Panorama, Leicester Square, Painted by the Proprietor, Robert Burford, from Drawings Taken by Him in the Autumn of 1832 (London: Brettell, 1833), pp. 3–​4. 49 See the Introduction to this volume on that point. 50 Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, III, lxii. 51 Robert Burford, Description of a View of Mont Blanc, the Valley of Chamounix, and the Surrounding Mountains, Now Exhibiting at the Panorama, Leicester Square, Painted by the Proprietor, Robert Burford, from Drawings Taken by Himself, in 1835 (London:  Brettell, 1837), pp. 3–​4. 52 William Wordsworth, The Prelude, Book VII, lines 245–​51.

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u Frames, edges and ‘unlimitation’

While panorama makers chose to overwhelm their viewers through the sheer size of their displays, others realised that in order to address contemporary criticism of the limitations of painting, a different type of formal experimentation was necessary.1 Instead of pushing outward the boundaries of visual representation or even denying their existence through the use of large canvases and panoramas, some of these artists consciously explored the physical edges of the artwork, as a place of potential ‘unlimitation’ rather than circumscription.2 The periphery of paintings, sketches and drawings became a place where the artist’s expressive energy, especially its simultaneous tension toward form and beyond containment, could be visualised. This chapter examines some of the ways in which the aesthetics of the sublime, especially as formulated by Burke, called for a reassessment of the boundaries of the artwork, both within the pictorial space and at its edges. I argue that these Romantic practices highlight the artists’ reflection about the finiteness of the visual image, together with their awareness of the necessity to explore new visual paradigms in order to overcome these limitations. I examine practices in which the edges of visual representation become a place to contain and unlimit the artist’s expressive energy at the same time, but also to evoke the sublime incommensurability of representation and imagination. To understand the significance of these edges, and why they were a privileged ground of formal experiments for artists seeking the sublime, I  will situate Romantic developments 169

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in relation to other framing practices and explain them in terms of parergonality, a notion introduced by Kant and more recently developed by Jacques Derrida. I will explain that Romantic formal experiments with unlimitation often took place in visual practices that were free from the quadrilateral frames of exhibition paintings, which were both ‘alienated’ from and auxiliary to the art work.3 Book illustrations, in particular, where visual representation could often provide its own edges, were a privileged ground of parergonal explorations. Such formal experimentations could also be observed in landscape sketches and studies, where expressive immediacy often meant open-​ended margins, as well as uncircumscribed pictorial spaces. These ‘unframed’ practices will be examined as experiments with indeterminacy and formal incompleteness, and consequently a response to claims that these qualities were specific to poetry. Frames, parerga and the unlimiting limit Picture frames are usually a convenient mechanism to isolate the work of art from its surroundings, to provide closure or protection to it, and to allow the viewer to contemplate a coherent and autonomous representational space. The frame, Rayna Kalas argues, is ‘the material and temporal foil to the abstractions that it offsets’.4 It may also be seen as a rhetorical device through which the work of art is presented as a distinct object. According to Louis Marin, ‘[i]‌n its pure operation, the frame reveals; it is deictic, an iconic “demonstrative” ’, while framing devices within a visual representation are ‘a forceful exhibitory mechanism of self-​ presentation’, ‘through which representation in painting defines the specific modalities of its presentation’.5 Such a conception of the frame is especially relevant to pictorial practices where ostentatious ornamental edges assert their artificiality and materiality as a means to emphasise the specificity of the artwork, or to isolate it from its milieu. The highly convoluted arabesques, shells and garlands of baroque ceiling frescoes or rococo compositions and the theatrical curtains or architectural frames of some neoclassical paintings all demonstrate the need to emphasise the distinct status of the artwork. As Wolfgang Ernst notes, in the neoclassical aesthetics of display, framing devices ‘were the very condition of aesthetics, easing the transition of the gaze from outer to inner world with the device of a splendidly elaborate frame’.6 170

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These framing practices implied that the artwork had to be seen as a complete and self-​sufficient whole, and that the pictorial space could be circumscribed. British Romantic experiments with visual edges signal a significant shift away from this conception, largely in response to the aesthetics of the sublime and its emphasis on the unlimited, the boundless and the formless. From Addison’s discussions of greatness to Kant’s reflection about the mathematical sublime, theories of the sublime emphasise boundlessness. Burke, for one, argued that while visible contours and formal limitation partook of the aesthetics of the beautiful, which was associated with small, comprehensible objects,7 the sublime was to be found where sensible representation reached its limits and the mind found itself carried beyond these limits. It occurred when ‘the eye not being able to perceive the bounds of’ external objects, ‘the imagination meets no check which may hinder its extending them at pleasure’.8 Consequently, ‘clear and determinate’ forms,9 but also visual limits like contours, horizons and frames, prevented painting from conveying the sublime, which led beyond boundaries, into the unpresentable. This insight was furthered by Kant’s analyses, which presented the sublime as what exceeded the sensible representation of the imagination and could only be grasped by ‘a faculty of the mind that surpasses every measure of the senses’,10 by which Kant meant reason. Kant confirmed that formal limitations distinguished the beautiful from the sublime, as he stated: ‘The beautiful … concerns the form of the object, which consists in limitation; the sublime, by contrast, is to be found in a formless object insofar as limitlessness is represented in it.’11 Coleridge, who had read both Burke and Kant, was led to contrast ‘the narrow limits of painting’ with ‘the boundless power of poetry’, based on this distinction.12 And as the idea of the ‘narrow limits’ of painting became a topos of Romantic aesthetics, British artists began to explore the physical boundaries of the artwork, in an attempt to unlimit them. To begin with, the significance of the frame, as the most obvious boundary of visual representation, evolved. From being an emphatic ‘demonstrative’, protection or ornament, it became the place where painting’s yearning for unlimitation and the unpresentable was acted out. To explain this new emphasis on formal tension at the edge of representation, the concept of the parergon, as it is introduced in Kant’s third Critique and analysed by Derrida in The Truth in Painting, may be more satisfactory than that of framing. I will therefore begin 171

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with a presentation of their views, before discussing specific aspects of this evolution in British Romantic art. When Kant reflected about the parergon in his Critique of the Power of Judgment, he had in mind the highly ornate frames of rococo and neoclassical compositions of his time. According to him, parerga (literally what is ‘around’ the work, the ergon) were the minor supplements of the art work, the marginal decorations which, because of their free ornamental play, best corresponded to ‘the requirements of a pure aesthetic judgment’.13 Such framing or decorative devices were examples of free beauty rather than adherent beauty: ‘Flowers, free designs, lines aimlessly intertwined in each other under the name of foliage, signify nothing, do not depend on any determinate concept, and yet please.’14 Although Kant was making a clear distinction between ergon and parergon, and reflecting about frames as self-​referential forms of display, he was also drawing attention to this pictorial component as a place of aesthetic indeterminacy, aimlessness, rather than as one of visual closure or deixis. Derrida’s deconstructivist interpretation of Kant makes much of this indeterminacy to use the notion of the parergon as a means to undermine arbitrary aesthetic demarcations, for example between the work and its milieu, inside and outside, or between work and ornament. According to him, by partaking of the inside and the outside at the same time, the parergon opens rather than closes the work, and allows a ‘transcendent exteriority’ to encroach on it.15 One way of understanding this ambivalent interaction is to view the parergon as an organic complement to the artwork rather than a simple ornamental supplement, the dynamic interaction between the two being constitutive of each.16 Derrida insists that the parergon’s ‘transcendent exteriority comes to play, abut onto, brush against, rub, press against the limit itself and intervene in the inside only to the extent that the inside is lacking.… Without this lack, the ergon would have no need of a parergon.’17 This emphasis on organic complementariness is a first indication of how the notion of the dynamic parergon –​in contrast with the static frame –​could be especially relevant to Romantic praxis. But it is mostly by showing how parergonality could articulate the differ­ ence between the beautiful and the sublime that Derrida provides a key to the Romantics’ changing approach to frames and visual margins. In his analysis of the colossal, the ‘almost unpresentable’ or ‘almost too large’,18 Derrida observes that the main difference 172

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between the sublime and the beautiful is that ‘the presence of a limit is what gives form to the beautiful’ while ‘[t]‌he sublime is to be found in an “object without form” ’.19 He adds that ‘[i]f art gives form by limiting, or even by framing, there can be a parergon of the beautiful, parergon of the column or parergon as column. But there cannot, it seems, be a parergon for the sublime’,20 the reason being that ‘the infinite cannot be bordered’21 and ‘the sublime cannot inhabit any sensible form’.22 At the same time, while the sublime ‘refuses all adequate presentation’, while it cannot be contained ‘in a finite natural or artificial object’, the question of the presentation of this ‘unpresentable thing’ remains.23 Derrida asserts that there can only be an inadequate, violent presentation of the infinite within the finite, which acknowledges its very inadequation, which is in fact only ‘adequate to its inadequation’, and which he sees as taking place in the colossal.24 He argues that the locus of this violent presenta­tion is the ‘cut’ or ‘cise’ of form against formlessness. Following Kant and Hegel, who ‘reflect the line of cut or rather the pas crossing this line between finite and infinite as the proper place of the sublime’,25 he concludes: ‘This double trait of a cise which limits and unlimits at one and the same time, the divided line upon which a colossus comes to cise itself, incise itself without cise, is the sublime.’26 In such a description, the tensions inherent to the sublime seems to be articulated by parergonality. Boundaries therefore remain essential, but no longer as a place to display the self-​containment of the work, rather as a place to visualise the abyss between limitation and unlimitation, between the work and what exceeds presentation. They may also be seen as the place where the beautiful ends, and the sublime begins. Jean-​Luc Nancy draws out the full implications of such a possibility, when he states: Form or contour is limitation, which is the concern of the beautiful:  the unlimited, to the contrary, is the concern of the sublime.… The unlimited as such is that which sets itself off on the border of the limit, that which detaches itself and subtracts itself from limitation (and hence from beauty) by an unlimitation that is coextensive with the external border of limitation.27

Romantic book illustration For British Romantic artists who were seeking the sublime, the significance of parerga as a place of indeterminacy, unlimitation or violent delimitation, caught between form and formlessness, seems 173

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to have been central. By criticising the literalness of painting, and its physical limits, Burke had drawn attention to the site where mimetic representation both exhausts itself and opens itself to what exceeds visual representation. With some painters and engravers, experimenting with visual margins and borders consequently became a means to inscribe incommensurability and boundlessness at the edge of representation. Significantly, these artists were especially drawn to visual forms that were emancipated from a supplemental frame, like prints, book illustrations, studies and sketches. Some of the most formally innovative visual work of the Romantic period is actually to be found in book illustrations, which became, towards the end of the eighteenth century, a recognised practice with an unprecedented degree of creative freedom. The leading illustrators of the time, who had become ‘their own masters’,28 especially took liberties with the quadrilateral formats and frames that had prevailed until then. Experimental artists seem to have found that the page, whose own straight edges provided little by way of material framing, allowed them to create their own parerga and play with the margins of pictures, by supplying graphic frames that complemented designs, by designing irregular borders within the straight lines of the paper support or simply by eluding framing devices. John Flaxman, in his illustrations to Homer or Dante (1787–​94), drew austere figures floating in spaces without internal boundaries, delimited by thin, barely visible quadrilaterals that emphasise their own artificial interruption of the blank page. Thomas Stothard experimented with several framing styles, from festooned ovals to frameless vignettes. There were some playful precedents in the rococo designs and extravagant illustrative frames of earlier eighteenth-​century artists, for whom the opening of the frame meant the free multiplication of ornaments and witty motifs around the illustration (one thinks of Richard Bentley’s illustrations of Gray, for example). But free borders took on a new significance with Romantic artists, as they were trying to overcome the finiteness of visual representation. Among them should be included two prominent figures of the period, William Blake and Joseph Mallord William Turner. Although I  will devote a chapter to each, focusing on their specific conceptions of the sublime and responses to Burke, their illustrative works should be mentioned here, as eloquent examples of the marginal explorations prompted by the aesthetics of the sublime. 174

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The visual image’s emancipation from static boundaries is especially striking in Blake’s composite art, or ‘illuminated’ books as he called them in reference to medieval illuminations. The artist, who –​as I will argue in Chapter 8 –​professed a strong dislike of ‘Burke’s Treatise on the Sublime & Beautiful’,29 sought the sublime on his own terms, and saw it as perfectly compatible with the visual arts, also understood that the formal freedom of illumination could allow him to challenge the boundaries of the artwork. Much of his illustrative production is characterised by its denial of closure, through the energetic interaction of text and image in particular. Blake’s original technique of relief etching, which as Joseph Viscomi and Robert Essick have shown allowed him to engrave text and design simultaneously,30 was a powerful medium to produce dynamic boundaries. In particular, it allowed the work to provide parerga which were shaped by its own internal tensions, instead of being constraining auxiliary ornaments. It also invalidated the distinction between the work and its border, by allowing Blake to produce marginal designs which both frame the text and interact organically with it, weaving themselves between lines or around blocks of text. What is more, most designs, even when they are not marginal, may be said to be parergonal, inasmuch as they tend to surround the text. While at times the text is fitted into the design as if it were a natural frame, as in the floral illustrations of the Songs of Innocence (‘The Blossom’, ‘The Divine Image’ and ‘Infant Joy’ being obvious examples), in many cases half-​page illustrations are often prolonged in a way to fully embrace the text. The device may be found throughout Blake’s production in relief etching, including in his last prophecy, Jerusalem. Plate 28 of the poem (Figure 8), which opens its second chapter, is a striking example of such transformations of design into frame. In the top half of the page, two naked figures embrace each other inside a giant lily flower, against a background of water and sky. The design then unfurls into a succession of tendrils, waves and sea creatures to surround the text in the lower part of the page. The figurative elements may be seen as illustrative of the text: the naked figures have been interpreted as small counterparts of Albion, the universal man, and his emanation Jerusalem in the Vegetable world, the world of Generation; and the whole illumination has been understood as a reflection about the world ‘as potentially regenerative or potentially entrapping’.31 But the designs also have a parergonal function, and thus partake of 175

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Figure 8  William Blake, Jerusalem, copy E, pl. 28, 1804–c. 1820.

a reflection about boundaries and unlimitation. The main design appears stylised and ornamental, due to the sharp outlines and convoluted shapes of the petals and leaves, as well as the golden hue of the sky in the hand-​coloured version of the poem (copy E); and as 176

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the leaves turn into tendrils in the left margin of the page, and the water spills out shells and sea creatures on the right, the whole illumination becomes a decorative frame, whose motifs remind one of baroque or rococo practices, but whose function is radically different. Instead of closing the visual work upon itself, framing devices signal the desire to open up the illustration, to prolong it and connect it with the non-​visual milieu that surrounds it. What is more, the use of well-​known framing motifs as simultaneously margins and extensions of the main illustration may be seen as self-​reflexive, as a deliberate intention to blur the boundaries between the intrinsic and the extrinsic, between ergon and parergon. By making the illustration itself a parergon, which is simultaneously illustration and frame, Blake removes the need for a distinct graphic or pictorial component that would isolate the artwork from its surroundings, and allows the visual work to shape itself around the text, rather than within an external edge. The significance of Blake’s experiments with parergonality is particularly well illustrated by plates 8 and 10 of America:  A Prophecy (Figures 9 and 10),32 which respectively show the demiurgic Urizen, who embodies materiality, law and reason, and Orc, the spirit of revolution. On plate 8, the top half of the page shows Urizen, crouching with extended arms within a billowing cloud. The posture conveys the figure’s authority and the domination of law and reason over creative energy, just as the text refers to ‘The fiery joy, that Urizen perverted to ten commands’.33 Urizen’s cloud then expands beyond the main illustration to enfold the text within swirling outlines, and fuse with a dark watery edge at the bottom of the page, which connotes materiality. The prevailing impression is one of oppressive closure: the sharp cloudy outline, together with the dark hues of the margins (especially in the hand-​coloured versions), visually isolate the text even while they absorb it into Urizen’s material universe. The binding forces of reason and materiality forcefully separate the text as they enframe it. Plate 10 may be seen as an exact visual antithesis and chiasmic inversion of the previous one. The lower half of the page shows Orc rising from among flames that flow around his unfolding body and extending arms. Although his posture is an exact mirror image of Urizen’s –​he squats on his left leg while Urizen squats on his right one  –​his muscular nakedness signifies the ‘fiery joy’ and energy 177

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Figure 9  William Blake, America a Prophecy, copy M, pl. 10, c. 1807. that Urizen’s law was stifling. The whole composition enhances the release of creative energy, as the flames soar upward, surround the text above the illustration, to the left and right, and even as interlinear motifs, simultaneously enfolding the text and instilling dynamic 178

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Figure 10  William Blake, America a Prophecy, copy M, pl. 12, c. 1807. motion into it. Creative energy fills the page all the more effectively as the framing devices stem freely from the illustration itself and enfold the composition without closing it up: the flames even open up at the top of the page, which remains blank. 179

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Such a visual antithesis highlights Blake’s awareness that parerga may be places of closure as well as nonclosure, of ontological stasis as well as becoming. It is clear that as an artist, Blake considered visual margins as a means to express the ongoing process of artistic creation rather than its material limitations, and used them as places of dynamic semantic production:  they interact with the text at the same time as they illustrate the creative flux and formal metamorphoses that are central to his poetry. This is nowhere as obvious as in the margins of Jerusalem and Milton, with their ‘metamorphic sequences’ of interwoven bodies, tendrils, flames and sinews.34 These are not simply a dynamic adaptation of the playful arabesques and floral designs of earlier framing traditions. What they visualise is not the free play of beauty, but the endless process of formal production and the exuberance of generative forces. These parergonal strategies were a means for Blake to deny the finite nature of the visual image. His marginal designs are places of mutability, flux or becoming, which through their organic interaction with it, complement rather than supplement the work, which in fact blur the limit between work and frame, between the intrinsic and the extrinsic, just as they blur the limit between text and illustration. They may also be seen as an essential device to convey the sublime. Blake claimed that he painted ‘a World of Imagination & Vision’,35 and displayed through his printing techniques ‘the infinite which was hid’;36 but he also believed that the firmness of visual representation was evidence of the reality of this spiritual perception, and asserted that ‘the more distinct, sharp and wirey the bounding line, the more perfect the work of art’.37 His artistic practice consequently hinged on the necessity to reconcile the infinite of a world of vision with the sensible boundaries of visual representation. His metamorphic marginal designs, by showing the endless process of formal production, may be said to visualise precisely this attempt to contain form without limiting it, to unlimit through the very process of containing. By thus visualising the tension between sensible, bounded form and the forms of his imagination, by enfolding without circumscribing, Blake’s parerga may be considered to be an essential locus of the sublime in his art. The dynamic interaction of text and design in Blake’s illuminated poetry evidently facilitated such visual non-​closure while providing an original response to Burke’s denigration of the visual arts. But even in illustrated books where text and illustration were kept 180

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separate, their simultaneous presence, together with the possibility of working without a quadrilateral frame, seems to have attracted artists who were keen to demonstrate the visual arts’ ability to convey the sublime as convincingly as poetry. Thus, Turner, whose determination to reach the sublime in painting is examined in Chapter 9, seems to have been particularly aware of the experimental possibilities offered by illustrations. Although this side of his production is today largely overshadowed by his work in other media, it is no less significant as it allowed him to directly engage with the poetic material that he illustrated, and contend with its suggestiveness and unlimitation by structuring designs independently of a pre-​given external frame. Turner’s major work in illustration was produced in the 1830s, when he designed 150 vignettes for the works of Samuel Rogers, Walter Scott, Lord Byron, Thomas Campbell and Thomas Moore.38 Although the diminutive size of the book illustrations and of the preliminary designs would have made the limitations of the visual arts even more obvious, Turner seems to have discovered in the vignette style a rewarding place for experiments with the edges of visual representation. Vignette designs originally were ornamental additions to a text consisting of grapes and vine-​leaves  –​hence their name. By the eighteenth century, they had become full pictures with irregular borders determined by the motifs within the illustration rather than pre-​existing delimitations, often in order to fit into the layout of the printed page. As noted by Jan Piggott, by Turner’s day, ‘[t]‌he form of the vignette … was already tending towards the ellipse’,39 as it had become common to allow the edges of the design to fade into the blankness of the page. Thomas Bewick had introduced the device in his wood engravings for A History of British Birds and for A General History of Quadrupeds, and by liberating the design from precise limits had brought greater integration of text and image. Rosen and Zerner claim that this ‘revolutionary change’, which enhanced the evocative power of illustration, ‘abolished the distinction between illustration and ornament’ and also created ‘a more intimate association between images and typography’, which was to become central in Romantic illustration.40 Turner, however, drew out the full formal implications of this evolution, which seems to have addressed his own dissatisfaction with the structuring constraints of conventional rectilinear framing. 181

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Turner’s predilection for vortical and circular structuring is a well-​known feature of his practice, which is already apparent in early academic paintings like Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps (1812) and becomes increasingly evident with his growing tendency to structure pictorial space around sunlight, as in The Decline of the Carthagianian Empire (1817) or Regulus (1828). In these paintings, geometrical forms and architectural lines seem to curve around a vast, almost tangible globe of light, which dissolves and absorbs solid forms at the same time. Understandably, this original practice has been understood as the expression of the artist’s desire to transform visual paradigms, and to anchor the pictorial composition around internal components rather than to make it depend on the external monocular origin of perspectival construction. W. J. T. Mitchell sees in the vortical form in particular a means to overturn ‘the old paradigms of vision and pictorial space … in favour of new ones’.41 As Turner was partly structuring his compositions vortically from inside, the quadrilateral boundaries which were adequate to the perspective cube of Renaissance painting could only seem more inadequate than ever. While vortical forms visualised creative energy and expansion, those boundaries must have been felt as evidence of the limitations of painting. Turner’s remarkable interest for the vignette form in the 1830s suggests that he did indeed feel constrained by conventional framing and discovered in these ‘free’ boundaries the means to adapt the picture’s edges to the structuring forces that he had introduced into his paintings. In the elliptical vignettes, freedom from the material frame allowed Turner to create coherent configurations which stemmed from internal motion and energy instead of adapting to fixed contours. His illustrations for Rogers’s ‘The Voyage of Columbus’ (c. 1831–​32), published in Rogers’s Poems, show that he availed himself of this possibility almost as soon as he started working in the medium, in order to find poetic visual forms that would match Rogers’s sublime imagery. ‘A Tempest’ (Figure 11), which illustrates the moment in Canto XII when the angel who guided Columbus on his way to America tells him that the wind recalls him to Spain, makes evident his will to create visual structures that could conflate natural and supernatural powers in the same manner as the poem. The angel warns Columbus that ‘in a night of clouds, thy Foes prepare /​To rock the globe with elemental wars, /​And dash the floods of ocean to the stars’.42 In one sweeping upward-​rising 182

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Figure 11  J. M. W. Turner, ‘A Tempest –​Voyage of Columbus’, for Rogers’s Poems, c. 1830–​32. vortex, Turner links the tiny ships, the powerful elemental forces that surge over them and the supernatural powers (the angel and Columbus’s foes) which orchestrate the confrontation. Colour (rather than edges) gives shape to the composition, which revolves around a bluish tornado-​like structure rising from the ships to the dominating figure of the angel. The dynamic, spiralling composi­ tion, which is only made possible by the absence of conventional framing, allows the artist to ‘dash the floods of ocean to the stars’, to conflate water and sky, human agency and supernatural agency, as if they all flowed from one another. Turner obviously saw these small frameless designs as a place to explore new compositional paradigms. ‘A Hurricane in the Desert (The Simoom)’ (Figure  12), also designed for Samuel Rogers’s Poems, may be seen as a powerful revision of the vortical structuring which Turner had experimented with in Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps. The design is a literal transcription of Rogers’s poem ‘Human Life’, in which ‘some great Caravan, from well to well, /​Winding as darkness on the desert fell’ is ‘in an instant lost –​a hollow wave /​Of burning sand their everlasting grave!’43 183

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Figure 12  J. M. W. Turner, ‘A Hurricane in the Desert (The Simoom)’, for Rogers’s Poems, c. 1830–​32.

Yet Turner was clearly drawn to the vortical image of the wave, which he had already used in Snow Storm. In both compositions, tiny human figures and animals, reduced to insignificance in spite of their visibly violent sufferings, are engulfed within a sweeping surge of elements, a vortical wave of snow and rock in one case, of sand and wind in the other, which billows over a dim apocalyptic sun or moon. The same dark palette is used in both images –​even though the design for the Rogers illustration uses watercolour –​while similarly expressive brushwork conveys the same elemental violence. The differences have to do with size and framing. In spite of its much smaller scale (127 × 127 mm), the watercolour design is an exultant denial of the limitations of painting. As only the blankness of the page meets the gradually fading design, the expressive gesture of the artist is no longer arrested by the material frame, while the wave which structures the composition is allowed to give its shape to the whole. It was upon receiving the illustrated edition of Rogers’s Poems and before opening it that Charles Lamb wrote to Rogers, expressing his famous criticism of the reductive explicitness of pictorial 184

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illustrations of literature.44 It is not clear whether opening the book and viewing Turner’s innovative approach to book illustration would have made Lamb revise his conviction that the sister arts were incommensurate. Turner’s formal experiments, however, were a way to address criticisms of pictorial limitations, even to challenge them. In most of his vignettes, Turner uses parergonal ellipsis as a means to deny closure, suspend meaning and thereby integrate poetry and illustration both at a semantic and at a formal level. In his illustrations to Byron, for example, these fading edges evoke the transience of empires, the vanishing of human inscription and the ensuing sense of ‘sublime vacuity’45 which the poet draws from the ruins and battlefields of Europe, and which may only be filled through imaginative re-​creation. The self-​effacing boundaries, by calling for the imagination to supplement what cannot be given finite form, may be seen as a visual transposition of this poetic process of re-​creation. They are also very much in agreement with the Burkean notion that the sublime requires the imagination’s emancipation from and unlimitation beyond sense perception. Turner would in fact have found a justification for this visual strategy in Burke’s appreciation of unfinished sketches, which are mentioned in the Philosophical Enquiry as the only form of visual representation capable of offering more to the imagination than the literal and limited imitation of objects of sense.46 Turner’s work with vignettes, then, may be seen as experiments with the suspension of visual representation, of figuration, aiming to convey the excess that cannot be contained, and the tension between limitation and unlimitation that is central to the sublime. In canvas paintings, such experiments with unlimitation were more difficult, as a result of the practice of setting the canvas on an easel and framing it with a matching quadrilateral structure. Nevertheless, Turner seems to have sought to transpose the vortical or circular structuring of vignette designs to those larger compositions. As Lawrence Gowing and Jan Piggott point out, a number of late paintings make obvious the artist’s attempt to adjust the squareness of canvas and frame to the inherent circularity of some of his pictorial compositions.47 The Angel Standing in the Sun (1846), War –​The Exile and the Rock Limpet (1842) and its pendant Peace –​Burial at Sea (1842), Light and Colour (Goethe’s Theory) –​The Morning after the Deluge (1843) and its pendant Shade and Darkness –​The Evening of the Deluge (1843), all have in common an almost exactly square 185

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format which the artist attempts to bend to the swirling brushwork and halo-​like composition, either through the assertive tracing of circular edges that are inscribed within the square canvas or by folding the corners to form an orthogonal shape. Both the inscription of the circle within the square and the orthogonal shape are compromises, but they are also striking visualisations of the disjunction between the artist’s conception and the pre-​given quadrilateral frame. What was at stake in those tensions at the edges of pictorial composition was the validity of a well-​established pictorial system: the Renaissance conception of the painting as a window opening onto a geometrically ordered space, organised by linear perspective. While conventional rectilinear borders had been adequate to both the image of the window and perspectival constructions which pre-​ existed the pictorial subject, Turner was trying to see how visual borders could adapt to, rather than jar with, dynamic structuring components within the painting itself. Studies, sketches and the deconstruction of a closed pictorial space Removing the quadrilateral boundaries of canvas paintings was a practical problem which few British Romantic painters confronted. Nevertheless, the urge to deny the finiteness of painting undermined the idea that the view enclosed within quadrilateral edges was a self-​contained whole. The coherence given to such a shape by the metaphor of the window was questioned, and the arbitrariness of rectilinear cuts over the visual continuum was increasingly made visible, especially in landscape painting. This growing recognition of the fragmentary nature of the view, which may be seen as a pictorial counterpart of the aesthetics of the fragment in Romantic poetry, led to similarly far-​reaching formal implications. Some of the most striking formal evolutions occurred in landscape practices, in connection with the development of plein-​air painting in particular, which highlight a growing tendency to unravel the perspective space at the edges of representation. To begin with, framing mechanisms within the pictorial composition itself became less obtrusive. Picturesque and ideal landscapes in the manner of Claude Lorrain offered vistas that were held together by the succession of planes from foreground to far 186

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distances, circumscribed by a distant but clearly discernible horizon, and enclosed by a proscenium-​like combination of vegetation and architectural elements that literally framed them. With the practice of plein-​air oil painting, which emerged in the seventeenth century, these conventional foregrounds were often removed to focus on middle distances and backgrounds,48 although studio work usually reintroduced them. As side framing became less essential, the horizon often asserted itself as the only remaining internal limit of the pictorial space. But although it anchored the composition, it neither framed it nor contained it. In fact, it visualised the possibility of endless extension into the distance. It functioned as a threshold between the finite and the infinite, a shifting limit that could always be pushed further, or unlimited.49 It became the strikingly adequate figure of a sublime which, after the writings of Addison, Burke and Kant, was conceived as a process of reaching beyond sensible limits. The horizon gave visual form to this process, which Jean-​Luc Nancy has since described as ‘an unlimitation, a dissipation of the border on the border itself’, or the ‘motion through which, incessantly, the unlimited raises and razes itself, unlimits itself, along the limit that delimits and presents itself’.50 It was a limit which could only ever begin to delimit. British Romantic landscape painters, who increasingly favoured sketching from nature as a means to transcribe the natural sublime, also increasingly tended to free the pictorial field from its pre-​given boundaries. The immediacy of watercolour drawings and oil sketches, together with the direct encounter with nature, often meant the removal of foreground framing and coulisses. This opening of the pictorial space in conjunction with the attempt to convey the magnitude of nature occurred with growing frequency as watercolour sketching emancipated itself from topographic accuracy to convey emotion. Francis Towne’s Source of the Arveyron (1781) (Figure 13), a watercolour view of a famous Alpine tourist site of the time, demonstrates how the attempt to encompass the natural sublime undermines conventional landscape structuring. The most spatially outstanding feature of the composition is its removal of all foreground elements, such as the promontories, framing trees and staffage that mediated picturesque topographic views, to plunge the viewer directly into the vastness of the site and convey the immediacy and shock of the encounter with Alpine immensity. The closest motif is a tiny strip of distant pine trees at the foot of the rising 187

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Figure 13  Francis Towne, The Source of the Arveyron, 1781. geological structure, a first layer –​rather than a first plane –​which in no way provides framing. It mostly lends scale to the whole and thus makes it clear why human presence is precluded: this is a landscape beyond human measure. Without conventional mediations, the viewer is overwhelmed by natural powers that defy comprehension. In fact, the whole composition appears to be guided by the unmediated forms of nature, which prevent rational ordering and containment. The visualisation of successive planes receding into 188

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the distance seems to be made impossible by the rising mountainous formation, which resists perspectival construction. Geological masses appear to be layered on top of one another in an almost two-​dimensional fashion. The absence of any opening into the distance, to the exclusion of a small patch of sky at the very top of the view, contributes to the confusion of the viewer, who cannot recognise familiar structures. Towne’s composition, to some extent, addresses the limitations of the pictorial image –​which in this case are enhanced by its reduced size –​by undermining the perspectival system and framing mechanisms that had been devised since the Renaissance in order to control space. The artist suggests ways in which the pictorial medium could disorient, overwhelm and indeed lead to the sublime through formal confusion and displacement of boundaries. Against those who, after Burke, criticised the determinacy and narrow limits of painting, he introduces formal indeterminacy as a means to capture the sublimity of nature. The aspiration to unlimitation became more clearly marked in the watercolours of artists like John Robert Cozens, Thomas Girtin and then John Sell Cotman or Richard Parkes Bonington, who besides painting directly on the paper without preliminary contours also often removed foreground frames and coulisses to suggest open-​endedness. While still drawn to the sublimity of mountains, they also found a new interest in seascapes, sweeping plains and other natural expanses whose apparent boundlessness was only stopped by the horizon, itself a figure of unlimitation. John Robert Cozens’s The Thames from Richmond Hill Looking Southwest (c. 1791) (Figure 14), is a characteristic example of this transformation of the pictorial space. Although centred on the river Thames and viewed from a slight elevation, the watercolour drawing loses many of the picturesque attributes that would have previously framed the view. As the horizon stretches uninterrupted from side to side, the homely setting becomes a spacious wooded plain without apparent limits, whose immensity is enhanced by the muted palette and the distant fading of the landscape into the vast, empty sky. Thomas Girtin’s famous White House at Chelsea (1800) (Figure 15) goes one step further by placing the viewpoint at the level of the water. The foreground is taken up by an unframed stretch of the river Thames, while the few markers of human presence are situated on a narrow strip of land beyond the watery expanse: a windmill, a church spire and between them the white house, whose deep reflection in 189

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Figure 14  John Robert Cozens, The Thames from Richmond Hill Looking Southwest, c. 1791.

Figure 15  Thomas Girtin, The White House at Chelsea, 1800.

190

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the water faintly anchors the mainly horizontal composition. Again, most of the pictorial space is taken up by a cloudy sky, above the low horizon, but a new sense of impermanence derives from the impression that the narrow shore floats between sky and water, which dreamily mirror one another. Like many paintings by Girtin, The White House has been admired for its moody light and restrained palette, which give a poetic atmosphere to the topographic subject. To my mind, however, its most powerful achievement is its ability to unlimit through a minimalist spatial configuration. This is, essentially, a composition without boundaries, whose only delimitation, the thin strip of land between the sky and the water that reflects it, invites the mind to project itself into the unknown distances that unfold from it. In both paintings, the horizon stops being the outmost boundary of a closed geometrical construction and becomes the main event of the painting, calling for a projection beyond perceptual limits rather than signifying the reassuring closure of the field of vision. It is an unlimiting limit, an uncertain and moving boundary. Some landscape painters and watercolourists experimented with spatial unlimitation in even more radical ways. Of particular interest are their explorations of shapeless and impermanent configurations, such as clouds, atmospheric formations or stormy seas that could be neither fixed nor contained. In A Theory of /​Cloud/​, Hubert Damisch demonstrates the significance of such motifs or ‘themes’ in the assertion of nebulous and insubstantial structures against ‘the architectonic norms of linear perspective’.51 He argues that they were used by artists from the time of Correggio to undermine the cubic space of perspectival painting, and to introduce indefinable, possibly infinite, depth within it. And through a reflection on Ruskin’s Modern Painters, he acknowledges the contribution of British Romantic (‘modern’) painters to the development of these motifs which undermined the stability and permanence of ­classical constructions and invited the spectator ‘to take p ­ leasure in ­ obscurity, the ephemeral, change, and to derive the greatest ­satisfaction and instruction from that which was the hardest to fix and ­understand: wind, light, cloud shadows, and so on’.52 British artists were quite conscious of the unlimiting potential of these nebulous, unstable and impermanent motifs. Their awareness could partly be traced back to the teachings of Alexander Cozens, 191

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John Robert’s father, an influential drawing master at Eton and the author of the famous New Method of Assisting the Invention in Drawing Original Compositions of Landscape (1785). The treatise explained how landscapes could be constructed from ink blots produced by chance on paper, as ‘an assemblage of accidental shapes’, although following an initial idea of ‘the general form of the composition’.53 As James Twitchell underlines, this method, which was ‘inductive, rather than projective’, allowed the com­ position to proceed from ‘polysemous, “open” ’ forms instead of fitting forms into pre-​given structures. It also freed the image from its strict mimetic function, by making form precede meaning and introducing a momentary gap between the two.54 It is quite possible that Cozens saw his blotting method as a solution to the visual limitations that had been outlined by Burke. Contemporary testimonies suggest that he was impressed by the Burkean topoi of darkness, dullness and heaviness.55 But he also seems to have sought ways of rivalling the verbal medium in order to attain the sublime, as his insistence on the indeterminacy of blotting implies. According to him: ‘To sketch, is to delineate ideas; blotting suggests them.’56 In other words, he perceived the blots as a means to surmount the finiteness of pictorial forms, but also to create non-​ mimetic visual forms and to produce open meanings. The Cloud, a graphite and watercolour study of c. 1770 (Figure 16), shows how such blotting can provide the basis of an indeterminate landscape composition. A dark mountainous shape cuts across the paper, with a variety of cloud formations above it. No figurative elements are recognisable below the mountain ridge, and the clouds themselves seem to be of uncertain shapes. The preliminary layer of blots, still visible in some parts, suggests that we are seeing nature in the making. The process of form-​making seems to prevail over determinacy and fixed delineations. Twitchell, who considers the work ‘a study in romantic sublimity’, notices how the image undermines conventional limits through this emphasis on process, but also through the ‘collapse of depth’, the removal of any sense of perspective, and the resulting ‘imminence of the horizon’.57 The same emancipation from geometrical or rigid structures may be observed in Constable’s sky and cloud studies, of which the artist painted a great number in the 1820s as his attention focused on meteorological phenomena. These compositions, which generally fully removed foregrounds, seem to correspond to a desire to 192

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Figure 16  Alexander Cozens, The Cloud, c. 1770. structure the composition from natural principles themselves rather than according to an intellectual order within a predetermined closed space. As Constable explained in a long letter to Fisher of 23 October 1821, ‘the sky … must and always shall with me make an effectual part of the composition.… The sky is the source of light in nature, and governs everything.’58 Although these sky studies were clearly not meant to be pictorial wholes, they facilitated the removal of picturesque flanking motifs in many of the artist’s finished landscapes, in particular in his later seascapes and views of Hampstead, where the composition seems to be held together by a portion of sky and a strip of land or sea. By placing shapeless atmospheric configurations at the centre of their compositions, landscape painters found a way to question and undermine not so much the visible frame of the painting, but rather the closure of the pictorial field as it had been delimited by picturesque conventions and Renaissance perspectival principles. To some extent, as Hubert Damisch demonstrates, the emphasis on sky and meteorological phenomena challenges and in some cases reverses the well-​established pictorial process which consists in first 193

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circumscribing the pictorial field, through a perspectival construction, and then filling this perspectival framework with a pictorial subject.59 When the composition largely stems from the observation of atmospheric and meteorological phenomena, as with Constable’s and Turner’s skyscapes and seascapes, its external delimitations appear entirely contingent, instead of being a founding moment of the composition. Without obvious framing devices within the pictorial field, the material border then points at its own artificiality and arbitrariness. It is an arbitrary cut over a shapeless continuum and open visual field which much exceeds it. It therefore opens the work at the very moment that it closes it, by suggesting that there can be no final boundary. In this sense, it could be seen as an untypical parergon which, instead of giving form or complementing the artwork, can only emphasise its inadequacy to what it delimits. Derrida argues that parergonality and sublimity are incompatible because ‘the infinite cannot be bordered’, and because ‘the sublime is to be found … in an “object without form” ’.60 The arbitrary delimitations of shapeless atmospheric objects or of a visual continuum, however, may be seen as parerga that articulate the tensions of the sublime, by pointing at the necessary incompleteness of the artwork, the emptiness beyond its edges, and the incommensurability of apprehension and representation. One of the ‘functions’ of these edges is to make visible the fragmentary nature of the art work, as well as its illimitability. In these landscapes, parerga thus become part of an aesthetics of the fragment where the material limit mostly points at what exceeds it rather than at a unified whole within it. This shift is perhaps especially true of the numerous sketches and studies of British Romantic painters, whose spontaneous brushwork and untidy edges often make visible the tension toward an open field of vision and representation which more finished works seem to contain. In Constable’s oil sketches, this effect is often enhanced by brushwork which spills onto the tacking margins, as in Branch Hill Pond, Hampstead (c. 1821),61 A Landscape Near East Bergholt, Evening (1812),62 Brighton Beach, with Fishing Boat and Crew (1824)63 or Barges on the Stour at Flatford Lock (1812). Although, as Mark Evans points out, the effect could have been the result of using a previously stretched piece of canvas,64 the compositional implications of such spontaneous work are significant. Rather than marking out a space 194

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Figure 17  John Constable, Rainstorm over the Sea, c. 1827.

before filling it in, Constable, like many of his contemporaries who sketched from nature, often seems to paint ‘outward’, from a central focal point to edges which no longer ‘frame’ the view. In Rainstorm over the Sea (Figure  17), one of the sky studies which Constable painted during his stays in Brighton (possibly in 1824 or 1825), the landscape is structured by the highly textured brushwork, which defines –​but does not delimit –​a narrow strip of sea and sand in the foreground, a dark menacing cloud and, most strikingly, vertical sheets of rain falling from an invisible space above the painting. The composition is held together by internal forces rather than external boundaries. The horizontal sea and vertical rain abruptly cut across the pictorial field to meet at a right angle on the horizon line, a transient formal arrangement that owes nothing to pre-​given framing. The circumscription of the pictorial field is further undermined by the spontaneity and looseness of the sketching technique: the strip of sand in the foreground is simply the ground of the painting laid bare, while the interrupted brushstrokes at the top of the painting emphasise the fragmentary nature of the sky study. 195

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Turner’s own numerous studies, most of which were produced in watercolour, also partake of this fascination for fragments and open-​endedness. From the 1820s, he started producing series of ‘Beginnings’, or ‘Colour Beginnings’, to use the term introduced by A. J. Finberg in his inventory of the artist’s sketches and drawings.65 Many of these studies, which were structured by transparent and brilliant colour, may be seen as ‘the underpainted colour structures of subsequent designs’.66 As Eric Shane argues, they are a ‘pictorial shorthand’ rather than non-​representational colour arrangements.67 Nevertheless, they highlight a practice which seems to reverse the intellectual order that often mediated representations of nature and closed the pictorial field. They show how Turner, after the mid-​ 1810s, increasingly worked from a simple initial colour structure, an underpainting study of light washes, to which was very gradually added tonal strengthening, over several stages.68 Turner’s working process from simple colour to tone, by adding depth gradually into colour rather than fitting painterly elements into a pre-​constructed three-​dimensional field, was one way to undermine the closure of the pictorial field. No less significant, however, is the freedom from framing that such studies seem to have provided Turner. To begin with, foregrounds are faint and empty, as the artist focuses on objects in the middle distances, which receive most of the tonal strengthening. The watercolour studies for the Picturesque Views in England and Wales series (1824–​38),69 for example, generally place the buildings or top­ ographical features under study at a distance and emphasise them through tonal contrast, but pay little or no attention to foreground details. The latter were added afterwards and even enhanced in the final engravings, suggesting that the picturesque framing was a conventional supplement. What is more, most of the preparatory views have fading or untidy edges which result from rapid sketching, but also remind one of the vignette style the painter so much relished. Consequently, even though colour beginnings were primarily a way to explore colour and luminosity,70 this economical and spontaneous technique was also a way to experiment with unlimitation. Their untidy margins of light brushstrokes or washes, together with their empty foregrounds, unbind the view from the conventions of the finished work. What is more, the inscription of emptiness at the margins of representation suggests the emergence of a new conception of pictorial space. 196

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Turner’s predilection for sketches, and more generally that of many British landscape painters of the time, draws attention to the edge of representation as the place where the pictorial illusion may be broken through. In a comparison of Western and Far Eastern art, Hubert Damisch argues that unlike Chinese painting, Western painting preserved this illusion by systematically covering the emptiness of the material substratum of the painted image, in other words by denying it.71 Such an illusion is undermined by the parergonal practices of British Romantic artists. In the numerous landscape sketches they produced, but also some of their finished watercolour landscapes (one thinks of work by Girtin or Cotman), there is a meaningful admission and acceptance of the gaps which often appeared between the pictorial work and the edge of the page or canvas. The image is not meant to fit into a neat rectangle or to hide the absence which painting was meant to fill or to cover. What is shown is the work in progress, as a tension toward a visual completion that is denied. In these practices, the edges of the artwork signal the imperfection, the absence that begins where visual representation stops, at the same time as they reveal the visible friction and overlapping of the representation and its substratum. They mark out a space where the illusion of representation begins to unravel. Pictorial and graphic explorations at the edge of visual representation, as has been shown, took many forms in British Romantic art. They were, to some extent, a way to address the contemporary antipictorialism, and more particularly the criticism of visual limitations that writers on the sublime, beginning with Burke, had levelled against the visual arts. By pointing at the static and arbitrary nature of the material frame, and undermining framing devices within the composition itself, British Romantic artists made it obvious that they were looking for new paradigms that would unlimit pictorial representation. Central to that reflection was a form of parergonality which was a denial of itself, or at least of the completion that it brought to the artwork; one which made visible its arbitrariness, or inscribed the emptiness of the page or canvas within the pictorial space and thus began to unravel the integrity of the pictorial or graphic image. This approach may be contrasted with the self-​ reflexive production or design of sophisticated exhibition frames by contemporary continental artists like Caspar David Friedrich,72 Ingres and the Nazarenes, or by a later generation of British artists (the Pre-​Raphaelites in particular), to replace the standardised and 197

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purely ornamental mouldings of frame-​makers. While the latter artists used parerga as a means to complete the pictorial whole, and therefore isolate it from external encroachments, British Romantic artists more frequently understood them as a place of tension and open-​ endedness. Their purpose, especially in landscapes, was to unlimit by giving a visual intimation of a hidden infinite and by emphasising the transience of formal limitations. Yet, by drawing attention to the frictions between the illusion of representation and the materiality of the pictorial substratum, which made itself visible at the edge of representation, they were suggesting another way for the visual artist to overcome the ‘narrow limits’ of painting: incomplete pictorial and graphic edges partook of a new emphasis on the artist’s gesture, on the process of form-​making and on the indeterminacy of the artistic medium. In his criticism of the literalness of the visual arts, Burke, as I  mentioned earlier,73 had made an exception for ‘unfinished sketches’, which allowed the imagination to project itself beyond sensible representation.74 Although he did not explicitly connect this medium to the sublime, the British painters who experimented with landscape sketches and studies seem to have realised that there lay a possibility to address the challenge he had raised. Others found another type of response in the fragmentation, internal destructuring and unlimitation which could take place within the pictorial space itself (rather than at its edges), through the use of architectural forms and ruins. The next chapter will examine the connection between the flourishing of ruin paintings and architectural fantasies at the turn of the nineteenth century and the aesthetics of the sublime. Notes 1 Several sections of this chapter were published earlier in ‘Beyond the “Narrow Limits of Painting”:  Strategies for Visual Unlimitedness and the Burkean Challenge’, Word and Image 31:1 (May 2015), 28–​42. 2 ‘Unlimitation’ is the term used by Jeffrey S. Librett to translate Jean-​Luc Nancy’s notion of ‘illimitation’. I prefer it to ‘unlimitedness’, as it conveys the idea of a process, of a continuous tension of the artwork beyond its own limits. Jean-​Luc Nancy, ‘The Sublime Offering’, in Jean-​François Courtine (ed.), Jeffrey S.  Librett (trans.), Of the Sublime:  Presence in Question (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993).

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3 Rayna Kalas, Frame, Glass, Verse: The Technology of Poetic Invention in the English Renaissance (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2007), pp. 30–​1. 4 Kalas, Frame, Glass, Verse, p. 50. 5 Louis Marin, ‘The Frame of Representation’, in Paul Duro (ed.), The Rhetoric of the Frame (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 79–​95; pp. 82–​4. 6 Wolfgang Ernst, ‘Frames at Work:  Museological Imagination and Historical Discourse in Neoclassical Britain’, Art Bulletin 75:3 (September 1993), 481–​98; here 490. 7 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, ed. Adam Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), III, xiii, pp. 102–​3 and III, xxvii, pp. 113–​14. Unless otherwise indicated, further references are to this edition. 8 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, II, viii, p. 67. 9 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, II, iv, p. 58. 10 Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2000), §25, p. 134. 11 Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, §23, p. 128. 12 See Introduction, n.7. 13 Winfried Mennighaus, ‘Hummingbirds, Shells, Picture-​Frames:  Kant’s “Free Beauties” and the Romantic Arabesque’, in Martha B. Helfer (ed.), Rereading Romanticism (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), pp. 27–​46. 14 Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, §4, p. 93. 15 Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 56. 16 Simone Heller-​Andrist analyses this interdependence in terms of an oscillation between the parergon’s status as supplement, and its ability to complement, the parergon being ‘at its most powerful shortly before its energy is deployed in the work. As soon as it has given rise to the work, it falls back into passivity’. Simone Heller-​Andrist, The Friction of the Frame (Tübingen: Francke, 2012), p. 32. 17 Derrida, The Truth in Painting, pp. 56–​60. 18 Derrida, The Truth in Painting, pp. 119–​47. 19 Derrida, The Truth in Painting, p. 127. 20 Derrida, The Truth in Painting, p. 127. 21 Derrida, The Truth in Painting, p. 128. 22 Derrida, The Truth in Painting, p. 131. 23 Derrida, The Truth in Painting, p. 131. 24 Derrida, The Truth in Painting, p. 131. 25 Derrida, The Truth in Painting, p. 134. 26 Derrida, The Truth in Painting, p. 144.

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7 Nancy, ‘The Sublime Offering’, p. 35. 2 28 Edward Hodnett, Five Centuries of English Book Illustration (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1988). 29 William Blake, ‘Annotations to the Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds’, in The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman (New York: Doubleday, 1988), pp. 660–​1 (hereafter, Erdman). 30 On this point, see especially Joseph Viscomi, Blake and the Idea of the Book (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1993), p.  26. See also Robert Essick, William Blake Printmaker (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1980). 31 William Blake, Jerusalem:  The Emanation of the Giant Albion, ed. Morton D. Paley and David Bindman (London: Tate Publishing, 1991), p. 173. 32 The plate numbers are taken from David Erdman, The Illuminated Blake (New York: Dover, 1992), pp. 146, 148. 33 William Blake, America a Prophecy, plate 8, line 3, Erdman, p. 54. 34 The phrase is borrowed from Mitchell. W.  J. T.  Mitchell, Blake’s Composite Art: A Study of the Illuminated Poetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), p. 26. 35 William Blake, ‘Letter to Revd Dr Trusler, 23 August 1799’, Erdman, p. 702. 36 Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Erdman, p. 41. 37 Blake, ‘Annotations to Reynolds’, Erdman, p. 646. 38 Jan Piggott, Turner’s Vignettes (London:  Tate Gallery Publishing, 1993), p. 13. 39 Piggott, Turner’s Vignettes, p. 15. 40 Charles Rosen and Henri Zerner, Romanticism and Realism:  The Mythology of Nineteenth-​Century Art (New York: Viking, 1984). 41 W. J. T. Mitchell, ‘Metamorphoses of the Vortex: Hogarth, Turner, and Blake’, in Richard Wendorf (ed.), Articulate Images:  The Sister Arts from Hogarth to Tennyson (Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 1983), p. 144. 42 Samuel Rogers, Poems (London: John Murray, 1834), p. 264. 43 Rogers, Poems, pp. 93–4. 44 See Introduction, n.5. 45 John Dixon Hunt, ‘Wondrous Deep and Dark. Turner and the Sublime’, Georgia Review 30 (1976), 139–​64; here 147. 46 As mentioned in Chapter  3, Burke considered that in ‘unfinished sketches of drawing’, which ‘pleased [him] beyond the best finishing’, ‘the imagination is entertained with the promise of something more, and does not acquiesce in the present object of the sense’. Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, II, xi, p. 70.

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47 Lawrence Gowing, Turner: Imagination and Reality (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1966), p. 23. Piggott, Turner’s Vignettes, p. 16. 48 Michael Rosenthal, Turner and Constable:  Sketching from Nature (London: Tate, 2013), p. 11. 49 Interesting reflections on the changing significance of the horizon in Romantic art are provided by Michel Collot, in L’horizon fabuleux, vol. I, XIXe siècle (Paris:  Librairie José Corti, 1988) as well as Céline Flécheux, L’horizon:  des traités de perspective au Land Art (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2009). 50 Nancy, ‘The Sublime Offering’, pp. 36–​7. 51 Hubert Damisch, A Theory of /​ Cloud/​(1972), trans. Janet Lloyd (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 16. 52 Damisch, A Theory of /​Cloud/​, p. 187. 53 Alexander Cozens, A New Method of Assisting the Invention in Drawing Original Compositions of Landscape (London:  J. Dixwell, 1785), pp. 6–​8. 54 This interpretation is developed by Jean-​Claude Lebesztejn, in L’art de la tache:  introduction à la Nouvelle méthode d’Alexander Cozens (Epinal: Éditions du Limon, 1990), pp. 123–​4. 55 James B. Twitchell, Romantic Horizons: Aspects of the Sublime in English Poetry and Painting, 1770–​ 1850 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1983), pp. 157–​61. 56 Cozens, A New Method, p. 9. 57 Twitchell, Romantic Horizons, p. 161. 58 Joshua C. Taylor, Nineteenth Century Theories of Art (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989), p. 301. 59 Damisch, A Theory of /​Cloud/​, p. 210. 60 Derrida, The Truth in Painting, pp. 127–​8. 61 No. 45 in Mark Evans’s catalogue of the Victoria and Albert Museum collection of oil sketches by Constable. Mark Evans, John Constable: Oil Sketches from the Victoria and Albert Museum (London: Victoria and Albert, 2011). 62 Evans, John Constable, no. 19. 63 Evans, John Constable, no. 64. 64 Evans, John Constable, p. 93. 65 Alexander J. Finberg, A Complete Inventory of the Drawings in the Turner Bequest, 2 vols (London: Darling & Son, 1909), vol. II, p. 814. Finberg placed the colour beginnings in the Turner Bequest CCLXIII group. 66 Eric Shanes, Turner’s Watercolour Explorations 1810–​1842 (London: Tate Publishing, 1997), p. 21. 67 Shanes, Watercolour Explorations, p. 13.

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8 Shanes, Watercolour Explorations, p. 24. 6 69 See, for example, Shanes, Watercolour Explorations, plates 12, 13, 14, 20, 34, 50, 51, 54, 56, 62 and 74. See also John Gage, J. M.  W. Turner: ‘A Wonderful Range of Mind’ (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1987), pp. 85–​8. 70 See Gage, J. M. W. Turner, pp. 87–​9. 71 Damisch, A Theory of /​Cloud/​, pp. 227–​8. 72 On Friedrich’s use and design of frames, see Brad Prager’s excellent analysis, ‘Kant in Caspar David Friedrich’s Frames’, Art History 25:1 (2002), 68–​86. 73 See Chapter 3. 74 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, II, xi, p. 70.

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u ‘Sublime dreams’: ruin paintings and architectural fantasies

From the beginning of the eighteenth century, ruins, vestiges of the past and architectural fragments became an essential feature of the British cultural imaginary and a recurrent topos in the arts. For more than a century, the fascination they exerted was fuelled by archaeological discoveries, direct encounters with classical sites by British visitors on the Grand Tour and then social and political upheavals which forcefully drew attention to the transience of all things. Such an interest more or less coincided with the taste for the sublime, but the two only really began to converge in the second half of the eighteenth century, notably with the development of gothic fiction and increasingly visionary ruin paintings and drawings. The sublime potential of ruins and ancient edifices was not immediately made evident, largely because they elicited an impressive complexity of responses. Malcolm Andrews isolates five main types of ‘attitudes towards ruins’ in the eighteenth century: ‘the antiquarian response, which seeks to reconstruct the ruin in the imagination’; ‘the moral response’, which sees the ruin as a memento mori, a reminder of the vanity of all human achievements; the ‘political’ one, for which ruins connote ‘Nature’s levelling of haughty tyranny’; the ‘aesthetic’ one, which focuses on ‘the decorative nature of the ruin’; and the ‘sentimental’ one, which is ‘that indulgence of melancholy and horror associated with Graveyard poetry and Sublime aesthetics’.1 The last two responses could be said to correspond respectively to the aesthetics of the picturesque and the sublime. The growing association with terror reflected the evolution of the 203

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discourse on the sublime, and while it began to be discernible from the 1740s –​in Graveyard poetry, as Andrews notes –​it increasingly prevailed in the second half of the century. In the visual arts, the evolution towards ‘melancholy and horror’ in the depiction of ruins and architecture became especially pronounced towards the end of the century, in ‘apocalyptic’ history paintings, but also in landscape painting, ruin painting and architectural drawing. Next to reassuring archaeological reconstructions and pleasing picturesque combinations of architectural fragments and vegetation, disturbing visions of future vestiges and apocalyptic scenes of the destruction of empires saw the light of day. These uncanny visions of ruins, which reflected a significant shift in sensibility, were not exclusively linked to evolutions in the aesthetic discourse. From the 1790s, they owed much to the European context of revolution and war, which made the association of ruins and terror all the more meaningful. Sinister new overtones were felt, which first became manifest in the work of the French painter Hubert Robert, who was directly affected by the political upheavals of his time. His imaginary View of the Grande Galerie of the Louvre in Ruins (1796), painted after the French revolution and Robert’s own imprisonment, strikingly conveyed the gloom which these events had cast over the perception and representation of ruins: the picturesque pathos of his earlier compositions, which had prompted Diderot’s melancholy meditations about the passing of time and frailty of human things, was replaced by a frightening anticipation of the destruction of existing edifices. The same unsettling vision of future decline was soon to be found in Joseph Gandy’s depictions of Soane’s Bank of England in ruins, while premonitions about the fall of the British empire increasingly became associated with depictions of vestiges of the past in architectural drawing and landscape painting. These increasingly dark overtones make it clear that ruins and architectural fragments were not simply a topos of the aesthetics of the picturesque, but could be seen as a vehicle of the sublime too. Their historical connection with violent destruction seems to have been the main catalyst of intense affect. Such effects could best be explained by associationist theories of the sublime like Alison’s: by evoking past or future devastation, especially in ominous political contexts, ruins could raise powerful emotions. But could they and their numerous visual representations provide a response to the 204

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aesthetics outlined by Burke in the Enquiry and overcome what he saw as the limitations of painting? The Enquiry does not contain many discussions of ruins, but the few occurrences of the theme are significant. To begin with, Burke connects them with historical tragedy rather than with the pleasing melancholy or reverie which many of his contemporaries found in them. In Part I, section xv of the treatise, he even offers an apocalyptic vision of a future London, devastated by an earthquake or other such conflagration, whose ruins become an object of intense aesthetic appreciation, heightened by the tragedy that has taken place: ‘[S]‌uppose such a fatal accident to have happened, what numbers from all parts would crowd to behold the ruins, and amongst them many who would have been content never to have seen London in its glory?’2 This brief analysis is mostly meant to illustrate Burke’s idea that the sublime works most effectively through sympathy, and in conjunction with human tragedies. But it also anticipates the Romantic interest in imaginary ruination of present edifices as a source of terror and sublimity. Perhaps more interestingly for the present argument, Burke briefly hinted at the formal interest of architectural fragments, either as ruins or as parts of larger wholes, suggesting that their indistinctness and incompleteness  –​rather than their association with tragic events –​could convey the sublime. His only example of existing ruins in the Enquiry is Stonehenge, which according to him impresses because of the ‘immense force and labour’ involved in its production, but also because of ‘the rudeness of the work’, which ‘excludes the idea of art, and contrivance’.3 The apparent absence of purpose, which defies comprehension, seems to partake of the sublime of the ruins as much as the greatness of their dimensions. Here, Burke hints at a sublimity which derives from the indeterminacy of vestiges of the past. Elsewhere, he reflects on incompleteness in architecture as a source of sublimity: in his section on ‘Succession and uniformity’, he explains how architecture impresses most effectively when it cannot be perceived as a whole, and a ‘kind of artificial infinity’ is thus created. His examples are the designs of cathedrals and of rotundas, where ‘you can nowhere fix a boundary’, ‘the same object seems to continue, and the imagination has no rest’.4 These brief references to ruins and architecture are useful inasmuch as they suggest that architectural fragmentariness may be one way for the visual arts to grasp the sublime: by signalling a whole 205

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that cannot be fully grasped, but also by introducing indeterminacy within visible forms themselves, such fragments may be a way to visualise the tensions inherent in the sublime. More specifically, they point to a representational gap between the visible form and the conception that exceeds it, which is sublime in itself.5 Although this interpretation is not made explicit by Burke himself, in the following analysis I  will examine to what extent the structural incompleteness of ruins and architectural fragments, and their use in painting and drawing, provided visual solutions to his radical conception of the sublime. I will more specifically examine the encounter between the aesthetics of the sublime and the capriccio genre, and argue that artists found in the latter’s inventive use of ruins and architecture a way to address the formal issues raised by the Enquiry. Piranesi’s influence on British architects and artists will be highlighted, as the Venetian master’s fantasies provided a combination of irrationality, indeterminacy and boundlessness that made it possible to deny the figurative limitations of the visual arts. I will then more specifically look at work by J. M. W. Turner and Joseph Gandy which may be seen to conflate a Burkean conception of the sublime with Piranesian invention. Italian influences The taste for imaginary ruins or architectural fantasies asserted itself in Italy in the second half of the seventeenth century, in the paintings, prints and drawings of numerous artists, including Alessandro Salucci, Giovanni Ghisolfi, Alberto Carlieri and Marco Ricci. In their compositions, generally referred to as capricci, ancient Roman monuments and sculptures were rearranged freely to provide dramatic fictional views. Ruins, which had previously remained in the background, moved into the foreground and acquired a new aesthetic and emotional value, which gradually superseded their previous significance as vanitas motifs or moral narrative elements. The motif of the ruin as a vehicle of emotion was to have a significant impact on artistic developments in Europe in the eighteenth century. In France, it was to lead to the ‘sentiment des ruines’ or what Diderot described as the ‘poétique des ruines’ after his first encounter with Hubert Robert’s paintings:6 a pleasing form of melancholy or nostalgia, leading to a philosophical meditation about the passing of time and the transience of human inscription. In Britain, it 206

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gave rise to a long-​lasting taste for picturesque ruins, in gardens and paintings alike, as a means to convey a variety of emotions. But the capriccio itself was more than a simple ruin painting. It was an imaginary arrangement of real or fictional monuments, a ‘caprice’, a whimsical, dreamlike invention or composition, in which ruins and fanciful architecture alike were combined in an unconventional manner. As such, it could be used as primarily a place for formal experimentation and a medium through which artists could subvert the rules of academic composition. It is this aspect which, according to me, was to have a significant impact on British pictorial practices, even more than the melancholy meditation induced by the motif of the ruin. Before the genre found a place among British visual practices, a number of Italian artists had understood that the capriccio was a way to eschew the constraints of classical composition. Giovanni Panini’s numerous vedute of Rome can thus be seen as so many compositional experiments, in which the fragments of antique architecture become the building blocks of unexpected and profuse formal arrangements. His exuberant museal spaces, in his imaginary views of Roman galleries and collections of art –​like his famous Roma antica (1757) and Galeria con vedute della Roma moderna (1759)  –​are a good illustration of this formal emancipation. In these compositions, Panini breaks up the pictorial space into a multiplicity of exhibition spaces and saturates it with artworks and paintings within the painting as well as a succession of receding arches which all contribute to a sense of excess and boundlessness. The purpose of the paintings was to bring together all the remarkable monuments of antique and modern Rome through a collection of vedute, sculptures and antique artefacts. The result is a fragmented space, only artificially held together by a theatrical curtain in the foreground. The combination of excess and fragmentation overwhelms the viewer and undermines the coherence of the pictorial space. Among the painters of capricci, one could also mention Francesco Guardi, who created imaginary landscapes in which he enhanced emotion by blurring the distinction between real and imaginary ruins, but also undermined formal solidity by using fragments of architecture as uncertain compositional anchors. Both Guardi and Panini frequently used the motif of the ruined arch, standing without support in an unframed composition, as a means to enhance the 207

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frailty and dreamlike quality of the productions of art, perhaps even the ultimate nothingness into which they will vanish. The artist who seems to have been most aware of the formal inventiveness made possible by the capriccio was Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–​78), a Venetian architect and engraver who specialised in architectural etchings, both archaeological and fictional. According to John Wilton-​Ely, Piranesi’s interest in the capriccio was grounded in a new conception of art and a new sensibility: Throughout his career, from his first publication, the Prima Parte di Architettura et Prospettive of 1743, Piranesi recognised the potential of the architectural fantasy, or ‘capriccio’ as a means of shock therapy to stimulate the torpid imagination of the contemporary architectural profession, as well as providing a means of formal analysis to explore new concepts.7

Piranesi was not the first or only Italian artist to use the instability and excess of the capriccio as a source of invention or as a means to increase the emotional range of visual representation; but he filled his fantasies with heightened drama and made the most of the genre to develop a unique spatial vision. To begin with, he introduced into these architectural fantasies baroque scenographic devices which allowed him to create vast, complex but also discordant spatial structures. Early on, for instance, he made much use of the device of the scena per angolo, recently invented by the Bibiena family, in which single-​point perspective, with a frontal view, was replaced by two-​point perspective and diagonal axes. He first experimented with this compositional device in his Prima parte di archittetura (1743), as a means to open up the field of vision, but also in order to convey dynamism and instability, since the eye of the viewer is given several choices. Piranesi combined these scenographic devices with his own fondness for ornament and exuberant, non-​ Vitruvian architectural forms. This allowed him to create striking compositions like his famous etching of an ‘Imaginary View of the Via Appia’, in Le antichita romane, II (1756). As in Panini’s exhibition scenes, the oblique view is used as a means to saturate the pictorial space with an apparently endless variety of artefacts: mausoleums, gravestones, busts, urns and broken-​up statues. One cannot but be struck by the multiplicity of shapes and styles which are assembled, the ornamental excess which is thus conveyed and the endless combinatory possibilities that are suggested. A comparable image is Piranesi’s ‘Part 208

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Figure 18  Giovanni Battista Piranesi, ‘Parte di ampio magnifico porto’, Opere varie di archiettura, prospettive, grotteschi, antichità; inventate, ed incise da Giambattista Piranesi architetto veneziano, c. 1749–50. of a Great Harbour’ (Parte di ampio magnifico porto) (Figure 18), a visionary reconstruction of an antique city that combines archways, stairways and an amphitheatre, in an exuberant and spatially improbable manner. In such compositions, Piranesi’s awareness of the contemporary discourse on the sublime is evident: the taste for excess and incompleteness, for boundless imaginative freedom and disturbing irrational combinations reflects the change in aesthetic sensibility which was taking place in Europe at the time. Even more irrational and terrifying were Piranesi’s famous Carceri d’invenzione, or prison fantasies, of which two editions were produced in 1749 and 1760 respectively. These are mostly known for their dark, oppressive settings and their evocation of carceral violence, but also for the fact that they called for a complete reassessment of pictorial space (see Figure 19). The fascination they still exert today is largely due to their formal audacity:  they are disorienting, non-​perspectival spaces, with multiple viewpoints, 209

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Figure  19  Giovanni Battista Piranesi, ‘The Gothic Arch’, Carceri d’invenzione, plate XIV, 2nd edn, 1761. articulated by tonal contrasts and fragments of larger structures whose bounds cannot be perceived. They call the viewer within, by suggesting an internal journey through their complex succession of staircases, ramps and bridges;8 but this is a restless journey with an improbable succession of viewpoints, and the final coherence of the represented space is kept beyond the field of representation. The viewer remains lost in a labyrinth of architectural forms which no longer make sense and become almost abstract. Aesthetic encounters The influence of these imaginary spaces on British Romantic art cannot be overstated. It is well known that Romantic poets like Coleridge and De Quincey were fascinated by the visionary quality of the Carceri. But Piranesi’s inventions first of all had repercussions on visual practices. This may have been partly due to the fact that the Venetian master was one of the artists who had the 210

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most direct influence on visiting British architects and designers in Rome. He is known to have developed a close friendship with the Scottish architect Robert Adam, who stayed in Rome between 1754 and 1758. The two men spent much time sketching together at Hadrian’s villa in Tivoli, and worked on a large plan of the Campo Marzio for Piranesi’s magisterial Il Campo Marzio dell’antica roma in 1762. As a token of his friendship, Piranesi dedicated the volume to his Scottish friend; he also inscribed his name, together with that of the Scottish painter Allan Ramsay, on two of the tombs in his ‘Imaginary View of the Via Appia’.9 According to John Wilton-​Ely, Piranesi taught Adam ‘to experiment freely in the application of antiquity for modern uses’, ‘to see the dramatic potential of space and light’ in ruins,10 and more generally to develop a dynamic conception of architectural design. He also instilled in him a life-​ long interest for the capriccio. Even though this proto-​Romantic sensibility remained subdued in the Scottish architect’s neoclassical interior designs, he produced a large number of watercolour and pen drawings of ‘romantic landscapes’, or landscape fantasies, in which he mixed picturesque architecture and wild natural scenery. In these non-​professional productions, steep rocks and imposing castles, dramatised through low viewpoints and atmospheric tonal contrasts, convey heightened moods that reveal the lasting influence of Piranesi.11 Adam also contributed to the British taste for and imitation of Piranesian fantasies through his praise of his friend’s ‘amazing and ingenious fancies’, which he described as ‘the greatest fund for inspiring and instilling invention in any lover of architecture that can be imagined’.12 After the departure of Robert Adam, Piranesi’s social circle included other British architects, among whom were Adam’s brother James, Robert Mylne (another Scotsman) and George Dance, whose design for Newgate Gaol has been connected with the Carceri.13 In 1778, a few months before his death, Piranesi briefly met John Soane, who made much of the encounter. Soane felt especially honoured to have been given by Piranesi (or so he claimed) four etchings of The Pantheon, The Arch of Constantine, The Arch of Septimius Severus and The Tomb of Cecilia Metella, all of which provided a matrix of ideas for his later architectural designs.14 Then, before leaving Italy, he purchased Piranesi’s views of Paestum, which are still today in his museum at 13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields. As with Adam, the influence of Piranesi’s capricci on Soane was more private than 211

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public. In his teachings and architectural practice, Soane followed and advocated neoclassical principles, criticising Piranesi for his ‘whimsical combinations’ which mistook ‘confusion for intricacy’;15 but in the eclectic decoration and spatial arrangements of his house at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, the Venetian master’s influence was undeniable. Several critics have compared the house to a Piranesian fantasy, emphasising the ‘baroque theatricality’, the atmospheric manipulation of light and unconventional configurations, the multiplication of points of view and ‘pockets of space’, connected in unexpected spatial connections.16 According to John Wilton-​Ely, the affinities between Piranesi and British architects were partly contextual, and could be linked to the Greek revival and the Greco-​Roman controversy that ensued. As the French defended the sobriety and authenticity of Greek architecture, Piranesi ‘swiftly abandoned his former contacts with the French Academy in Rome, as a growing focus of philhellenism, in favour of visiting architects from Britain’.17 I  would like to argue that British artists were also drawn to Piranesi because he shared and gave visual shape to the new sensibility which had been developing in the British aesthetic discourse since the beginning of the eighteenth century. At a first level, his architectural fantasies provided the ‘formal variety’ and ‘historical associations’ which characterised the picturesque and produced the kind of ‘pleasing melancholy’ that could be found in most ruin paintings.18 But their irrationalism was more extreme. Some of them, especially the Carceri, could actually be seen as adequate visualisations of the sublime, at a time when artists were eagerly seeking ways to convey this intense aesthetic experience. The significance of such models became especially crucial after the publication of the Philosophical Enquiry. Burke, as explained in Chapters 1 and 2, had placed the sublime beyond the reach of the pictorial medium, arguing that its ‘clear representations’ and finite forms could not affect as powerfully as the descriptions of poetry. He had also argued that it was the boundless combinatory power of language which allowed poetry to reach the sublime, by preventing the full comprehension of the poetic message. Piranesi’s capricci provided visual strategies that could address Burke’s criticism and demonstrate the possibility of a pictorial or graphic sublime. His sensibility brought him close to the aesthetics 212

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of the Enquiry, not only because he privileged motifs of terror and demonstrated the boundless combinatory powers of the visual arts, but also because his use of ruins was motivated by his awareness of a gap between conception and representation in the visual arts. In his first publication, Prima parte di architetture e prospettive (1743), he explained that the inspiration provided by Roman ruins was due to their intimation of images that were beyond finite visual forms: ‘these Speaking Ruins have filled my spirit with images that accurate drawings, even such as those of the immortal Palladio, could never have succeeded in conveying’.19 As John A. Pinto argues, it was the ruins’ ‘incompleteness’ that allowed Piranesi to exert his creative abilities.20 One could add that it was his use of incompleteness and tension towards forms that eluded representation which allowed him to provide visual solutions to the limitations outlined by Burke. Piranesi’s ability to create spaces which conveyed the impossibility of encompassing things was especially decisive. The Carceri d’invenzione, in particular, with their unresolved labyrinthine configurations and fragmentary apprehension of ungraspable architectural structures, were a clear denial of the visual arts’ finiteness. In other compositions, the deconstruction of the pictorial space through an excess of architectural fragments or ornaments powerfully conveyed the irrationalism and lack of control that Burke had associated with the sublime. The visual profusion of motifs within these spaces suggests, against Burke, that the graphic medium is as capable of indeterminacy and confusion as poetic language, even when the artist’s style is extremely detailed. In images like the ‘Imaginary View of the Via Appia’ or ‘Part of a Great Harbour’ –​as in Panini’s imagined museal spaces –​the viewer is overwhelmed as much by the sheer abundance of motifs, shapes and styles as by their incomprehensible combinations and juxtapositions. Perhaps most importantly, these sensational inventions are images of terror:  the unravelling of the coherent, self-​contained space of classical representation leads to a frightening sense of transience and emptiness. Even more disturbing are the apparently endless repetition of architectural components, the implied magnitude of the buildings and the insignificance of the human figures which are at times inserted. This, once again, is especially obvious in the 213

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Carceri, which are explicitly meant as images of terror. Thus, in plate X, Piranesi uses the dramatic device of an imposing foreground arch opening onto a vast labyrinth of ramps and staircases, to draw the viewer in but also to make it obvious that what is perceived is only a fragment of an ungraspable immensity. He also adds an element of concrete horror by representing the figures of chained prisoners, in the foreground, in the manner of Michelangelo’s slaves.21 To some extent, one could say that Piranesi’s fantasies give visual form to the ‘delightful horror’ which Edmund Burke described as central to the experience of the sublime:  there is terror at the inability to comprehend what exceeds representation and at the same time delight at the formal inventiveness which is made possible by this boundlessness. Piranesi may visualise a sinister world in his Carceri and unsettle his viewer through spatial saturation and dislocation, but his whole work is an exuberant display of the inexhaustible variety which is possible in architecture and graphic representation. This convergence between Piranesi’s and Burke’s aesthetic sensibility preceded the publication of the Enquiry, although it is quite possible that the Venetian artist was acquainted with the treatise through his international contacts in the 1750s and 1760s.22 The evolution of his Carceri in the 1760 version could corroborate such a claim. The aggressive style, the darkening of the designs through the use of violent crosshatchings and the increased fragmentation of space, which makes the engravings even more confusing, bring Piranesi closer than ever to Burke’s aesthetics of terror and confusion.23 Even if Piranesi’s work was not consciously responding to Burke’s treatise, one could say that with him, the capriccio genre goes beyond its earlier baroque theatricality, but also beyond its nostalgic historical associations, to become the vehicle of a dramatic, destabilising form of the sublime. For British artists who were seeking visual strategies to respond to Burke’s conception of the sublime, these designs were extremely valuable. Their sublime potential was confirmed by the British reception of Piranesi’s work and the influence of his capricci on the pre-​Romantic and Romantic imagination. In British writings of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, their appeal was accounted for in Burkean terms, with an emphasis on their exuberance, irrationality and  –​in the case of the Carceri  –​nightmarish quality. It was for 214

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some of these qualities that Horace Walpole, in 1771, recommended the study of his designs as a source of inspiration for architects: This delicate redundance of ornament growing into our architecture might perhaps be checked, if our artists would study the sublime dreams of Piranesi, who seems to have conceived visions of Rome beyond what it boasted even in the meridian of its splendour. Savage as Salvator Rosa, fierce as Michael Angelo, and exuberant as Rubens, he has imagined scenes that would startle geometry, and exhaust the Indies to realize. He piles palaces on bridges, and temples on palaces, and scales Heaven with mountains of edifices. Yet what taste in his boldness! What grandeur in his wildness!24

For William Beckford, Piranesi’s carceri provided an exemplary model of the sublime of terror. This interpretation appears in an account of his meditations about the ducal prisons in Venice, where to convey his horror at the idea of carceral life, he invokes Piranesi’s style: Horrors and dismal prospects haunted my fancy on my return. I  could not dine in peace, so strongly was my imagination affected; but snatching my pencil, I drew chasms and subterraneous hollows, the domain of fear and torture, with chains, racks, wheels and dreadful engines in the style of Piranesi.25

De Quincey’s famous description of the Carceri, based on an account given to him by Coleridge rather than on an actual knowledge of the prints, is equally revealing of the Burkean ‘filter’ through which these designs were perceived: Many years ago, when I was looking over Piranesi’s Antiquities of Rome, Mr Coleridge, who was standing by, described to me a set of plates by that artist, called his Dreams, and which record the scenery of his own visions during the delirium of a fever. Some of them (I describe only from memory of Mr Coleridge’s account) represented vast Gothic halls: on the floor of which stood all sorts of engines and machinery, wheels, cables, pulleys, levers, catapults, &c. &c. expressive of enormous power put forth and resistance overcome.…. With the same power of endless growth and self-​ reproduction did my architecture proceed in dreams.26

In this account are brought together the Enquiry’s reflections on power, on the sublimity of constructions (like Stonehenge) that have required ‘immense labour’27 and on the ‘artificial infinity’ which may be found in architectural designs based on succession.28 Perhaps most interesting is De Quincey’s emphasis on the 215

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mechanisms through which artistic form reaches beyond its own finiteness, through endless growth, and his suggestion that the same tension towards a limitlessness that is beyond representation may be found in the visual arts as in poetry. Besides hinting at a sublimity of the artistic process itself, his reference to Piranesi suggests that such a process is within the reach of the visual arts. Such literary endorsements of Piranesi, even by writers who, like Coleridge, followed Burke and Lessing in saying that the sublime was beyond the ‘narrow limits of painting’, suggest that the Venetian artist provided an effective visual response to the challenge of the Enquiry. It is no wonder, then, that Romantic visual practices drew much inspiration from his work in their quest for the sublime. British adaptations The influence of Piranesian capricci in British visual practices took many forms. Some of the most remarkable are to be found in the work of two artists who had access to Soane’s collection of prints and drawings, through their friendship and collaboration with the architect: J. M. W. Turner and Joseph Gandy. Turner was first acquainted with Piranesi in the early 1790s, through the collection of John Henderson, who allowed him and Thomas Girtin to make copies of the drawings of old masters in his possession. According to John Lewis Roget, the artist was initially less struck by the creative potential offered by Piranesi than his friend: ‘At Mr. Henderson’s, Turner is said to have preferred copying from Hearne, while Girtin copied from Canaletti and Piranesi.’29 A  watercolour copy of Piranesi’s ‘Carcere oscura con antenna pel supplizio dè malfattori’ (‘dark prison with a courtyard for the punishment of criminals’), from the Prima parte di architettura e prospettive (1750) (Figure 20), is nevertheless attributed to him.30 As John Gage explains, he would have found in this engraving the kind of ‘dramatic breadth of light and shade’ that he used ‘to monumentalise his Gothic interiors’ in the 1790s.31 Piranesi’s composition, however, is more conventional than what may be found in the Carceri. Even though the prison space is multiplied by the use of the scena per angolo device, with colonnades opening onto further subsections, and a staircase leading to an upper level that remains hidden from view, the whole is framed by a solid and almost symmetrical 216

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Figure 20  Giovanni Battista Piranesi, ‘Dark Prison’, Prima parte di architetture e prospettive, plate II, c. 1743.

arch, and the composition appears both contained and stable. This early work suggests that Turner was initially not so much drawn to Piranesi’s exuberant formal ‘invenzione’ as to the way he made light and architecture interact. 217

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Turner’s interest in Piranesi seems to have been rekindled by his interaction with Soane, as he prepared his Royal Academy lectures on perspective around 1810. His friend, who was then the Academy’s Professor of Architecture, obviously encouraged him to draw inspiration from the Venetian master and gave him access to his collection of prints and drawings. Some of the lecture illustrations refer to the Paestum views in the Soane collection, others to Piranesi’s prints of Roman columns and others to the prison fantasies.32 The ‘Carcere oscura’ copied by Turner in the 1790s provided the basis for several diagrams, freely adapted from it. ‘Lecture Diagram 75: Interior of a Prison’ reproduces the lofty structure and its two levels separated by an arched bridge, but shifts the view to the left, increases the height of the building by drawing a rib-​vault ceiling and opens up the space by unframing it in the foreground as well as flooding it with light in the distance (Figure 21). ‘Lecture Diagram 65:  Interior of a Prison’, on the other hand, compresses the composition by removing the upper architectural elements, and transforming the lower part into a dark corridor, with the bridge becoming a plain arch (Figure 22). As a night scene, it also reverses the light effects of the other view: by placing a figure with a lamp under the arch, Turner allows this area –​the darkest in daytime –​ to become the only pocket of light, while the rest of the building is plunged in darkness. In both diagrams, the Piranesian influence can be felt in the dislocation of space, through the use of the scena per angolo technique and the removal of foreground framing, as well as in the study of the interaction between light and architecture. Although these are only ‘diagrams’, their moody use of light and space  –​especially in diagram 65, with its menacing darkness, enhanced by the oppressive heaviness of imposing architectural components  –​suggests that there is a reflection about the architectural sublime. This reflection brings together Piranesi’s inventions and the British aesthetic discourse and is intricately linked with the awareness of the sublimity of the fragment, the incomplete architectural structure whose whole or boundaries cannot be comprehended. Turner finds in Piranesi a number of devices that allow him to convey spatial indeterminacy. Thus, the combination of an oblique construction with the use of light and shade leads to a disturbing open-​endedness, whether the end of the corridor is plunged in darkness (as in diagram 65) or light (as in diagram 75). Nevertheless, the incompleteness is conveyed in a 218

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Figure 21  J. M. W. Turner, ‘Lecture Diagram 75: Interior of a Prison’, c. 1810. much more sober fashion than in Piranesi’s prison fantasies. The austere succession of plain arches in diagram 65, and of arches and rib-​vaults in diagram 75, actually evokes the combination of ‘succession and uniformity’ that Burke considered necessary to create 219

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Figure 22  J. M. W. Turner, ‘Lecture Diagram 65: Interior of a Prison’, c. 1810. an ‘artificial infinity’ in architecture.33 By removing the framing arch of the original ‘Carcere oscura’, Turner enhances the effect, and seems closer to the latter conception than to Piranesi’s exuberant one. This approach is confirmed by his lecture notes, which repeatedly express his interest in perspective effects in which columns appear to continue to infinity.34 Turner’s diagrams also seem to illustrate the idea, developed in the lectures, that oblique lines allow an architectural fragment to convey ‘infinity’. As he explains in an analysis of Raphael’s cartoon, ‘Saint Paul Preaching from the Areopagus’: Parralel [sic] lines carry with them no idea of hight [sic] –​but the oblique one may rise to infinity … altitude must be the natural feeling of the mind viewing only a fragment of architecture. For however collosal [sic] man may be in interlect [sic] he must [view?] some scale of his inferiority and in the words of Rousseau feel ‘all the littleness of man’ before the immense mass of marble which composes the Areopagus.35

The lectures on perspective thus seem to have provided Turner with the opportunity to explore the sublimity of architectural forms 220

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and fragments. It is quite possible that at this stage, Burke’s ideas on architecture would have been mediated for him by Soane, who had a copy of the Enquiry in his library and used Burkean terms to praise the sublimity of architecture in his own lectures. His descriptions of Egyptian architecture, whose ‘sublimity’, ‘magnitude’, ‘uniformity and tiresome monotony’ he contrasted with the ‘beauty and variety’ of Grecian works, bear witness to this theoretical influence. According to Soane: It is impossible not to be impressed with the grandeur and magnitude peculiar in the works of the Egyptians in general, but particularly in their sacred buildings.… The extent of these structures tires the eye, their grandeur and unaffected simplicity fire the imagination whilst the varied play of light and shade, bursting through different parts in every direction and occasionally falling upon the colossal sculpture on the walls, must always produce the most powerful effects on the beholders.36

Turner’s lecture diagrams seem to have fused such a conception, with its emphasis on the power of apparently unending repetitive structures, into the Piranesian model, divesting it of its baroque extravagance in order to better reach a sublime of open-​endedness rather than profusion. Turner’s explorations of the architectural fragment as a source of sublimity took other, more inventive forms. In his later production, he evolved his own adaptation of the capriccio, in his imaginary representations of ancient cities and monuments, but also in his views of contemporary ruined sites. In these compositions, formal disintegration goes together with the frightening evocation of ultimate nothingness. Views like Modern Rome: Campo Vaccino (1839) or the Forum Romanum: for Mr Soane’s Museum (1826) are characterised by a Piranesian saturation of space, but at the same time much greater formal uncertainty and indistinctness than the Venetian master’s own views of the city. The dreamlike ruins become the means to unravel the pictorial space from within, as the crumbling forms of past monuments appear to fade away or suggest chaotic structures. By this stage, one can say that Turner had understood the necessity to transform the pictorial medium even more radically than was suggested by eighteenth-​century capricci if he was to convey the fearful sense of transience that his own experience of history had imprinted in him. These are evolutions which I will study more thoroughly in Chapter 9. 221

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The encounter between the formal inventiveness of the capriccio and the British discourse on the sublime took a particularly conscious form in the work of Joseph Gandy (1771–​1843), an architect and draughtsman who is mostly known for his atmospheric perspective views of John Soane’s designs. Gandy’s fertile imagination was nourished in his formative years by an early predilection for the Burkean sublime, a three-​year period of study in Italy –​from 1794 to 1797 –​, as well as the highly tumultuous context of the 1790s, all of which laid the basis for one of the most interesting visual responses to the aesthetics of the Enquiry.37 The influence of Burkean aesthetics came first. Significantly, the very short biographical account written by Gandy in introduction to his Italian correspondence, or ‘Gandy Green Book’ as it is known,38 includes a reference to his encounter with ‘the sublime Burke’ as one of the most memorable events of his time at the Royal Academy. The account, written in the third person, emphasises his pride at having been distinguished by Burke: During his pupilage, about 18, he became a student and was rewarded at the Royal Academy with the silver and gold medals, the last given by Sir Joshua Reynolds, when the floor of the Lecture room gave way, and alarmed many eminent persons, amongst the audience was the sublime Burke, who favoured Jos. Gandy’s works.39

By the time he travelled to Rome in 1794, he had assimilated Burke’s reflections on sources of the sublime in architecture. As Brian Luckacher notes, his entry for the 1795 Concorso Clementino of the Accademia di San Luca, a design for a sepulchral chapel, may be seen as ‘an architectural essay in the Burkean sublime’.40 The moody perspective drawing which Gandy added to the diagrams, with its striking tonal contrasts and incomplete colonnades, was a masterful rendition of the ‘artificial infinity’ and use of ‘gloomy’ lighting which Burke had considered essential to the sublime in buildings.41 If Gandy’s predisposition to the visionary owed much to this early influence, it was certainly intensified by his discovery of the vestiges of Rome and the melancholy sense of transience that they conveyed. Like many British architects in Rome before him, he was drawn to Piranesi’s fantastic transcriptions of these qualities, his ‘visionary archaeology’ of the city as Luckacher puts it.42 A letter to his father written just before his return to England mentions 154 Piranesi prints that he intended to take back with him.43 Other 222

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letters suggest that shortly before his departure, Gandy’s Piranesian, dramatic perception of the vestiges of classical Rome was fused into an even more tragic conception of history by his direct experience of the French invasion and sacking of Rome.44 As he witnessed the pillaging of antique statues by the French army, he lamented the further fragmentation of the city, arguing that it would have been better if the invaders had taken the whole city, so that the museum could have been preserved.45 Galvin sees in this destructive episode ‘a catalyst for two of his designs representing the loss of paradise’,46 illustrating Milton’s descriptions of the Throne of God and of Pandemonium. The second sketch, which he described to his father as illustrating the ‘fabric huge’, ‘Built like a temple’ with ‘Doric pillars’ and ‘golden architrave’, and the hill ‘whose grisly top belch’d fire and rolling smoke’ of the capital of Hell,47 was probably the basis for his 1805 Pandemonium, another remarkable exercise in the sublime. In this composition, Gandy brilliantly combines inconceivably vast temples and endless rows of columns with the most violent expressions of the natural sublime, in a chaotic landscape of jagged rocks and fire. By conflating Piranesian architectural excess with elemental drama, in a manner reminiscent of Monsu Desiderio, the composition demonstrates the compatibility of the capriccio with sublime terror. Following his return to England, Gandy failed to become the successful architect he had hoped to be, and primarily worked as an assistant for others, notably John Soane. He is mostly known today for atmospheric watercolour drawings which promoted Soane’s projects by making them come to life. Nevertheless, he also became a master of architectural fantasy, and developed personal adaptations of the capriccio in which Italian ‘invenzione’ was fused with a Burkean sensibility. His two composite views of Soane’s designs, A Selection of Parts of Buildings, Public and Private, Erected from the Designs of John Soane (1818, showing the completed work) and Architectural Visions of Early Fancy in the Gay Morning of Youth and Dreams in the Evening of Life (1820, showing the unrealised designs) (Figure 23), are proficient adaptations of Panini’s imaginary galleries. More significantly perhaps, much of his independent work consisted of ‘architectural history paintings’, or ‘perspectives of classical architecture’ which he exhibited at the Royal Academy on a yearly basis for most of his career.48 These lavishly detailed compositions often were imaginary recreations of lost or fictional 223

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Figure  23  Joseph Michael Gandy, Architectural Visions of Early Fancy in the Gay Morning of Youth and Dreams in the Evening of Life, 1820. classical architecture, inspired by a variety of poetic descriptions. Their visual profusion, exuberance of ornament, dramatic devices of perspective and use of light and shade have led some critics to call Gandy ‘the English Piranesi’;49 but their ambitions owed much to the British aesthetic discourse. Not only did Gandy’s atmospheric use of watercolour increase the range of emotions that the architectural fantasy could raise, but his combination of monumental architecture, mountainous and stormy surroundings and an implicit historical reflection about the loss of past splendour reveals his thematic indebtedness to British conceptions of the sublime. What is more, Gandy’s textual sources, which included Milton’s Paradise Lost and Walpole’s Castle of Otranto, suggest that he considered his fantasies a match for the most sublime literary descriptions. He may have intended to demonstrate that a focus on architecture rather than dramatic action avoided the ludicrousness that Burke had associated with literal representations of spirits and supernatural subjects. The formal freedom of the capriccio allowed Gandy to carry out such a demonstration by unlimiting his compositions, mainly through visual excess, saturation of space and proliferation of viewpoints. Typical compositions include Architectural Visions, as well 224

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Figure 24  Joseph Gandy, The Tomb of Merlin, 1815.

as The Great Temple of Ceres at Eleusis (1815, Soane Museum), in which the layered oblique perspectival construction makes possible a multi-​dimensional maze of terraces and staircases, receding into the distance and rising at the same time. Such configurations suggest that his fantasies, like Piranesi’s ‘inventions’, have to be viewed as experiments with spatial unlimitation. Some of Gandy’s compositions reveal more specifically the influence of the Carceri. This is particularly true of the sepulchral designs which the artist produced in the years which followed his return from Rome,50 and then a few years later, with his Tomb of Merlin (Figure 24 and Plate 2), presented at the 1815 Royal Academy exhibition. This watercolour perspective shows the glowing tomb of Merlin at the centre of a richly decorated burial chamber in the Anglo-​Norman style. Although, as critics have observed, the architecture of the building bears many resemblances to Roslin Chapel,51 the profusion of ornamental and emblematic details, as well as the saturation of the pictorial space, are truly Piranesian. More specifically, the subdued light evokes the confined atmosphere of the Carceri, while the use of two-​point perspective and the multiplication of space through successions of stairs and colonnades remind one of their dislocated architecture. Several motifs seem to be directly borrowed from these:  the massive columns, vaulted ceilings, tiny figures that 225

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convey the vast scale of the building and the hanging light, which recalls the pulleys of the Carceri. The interest of this composition resides in its combination of architectural fantasy with poetic inspiration, as a means to convey the sublime. As Gandy himself pointed out in the exhibition catalogue, he had in mind the following lines from John Harrington’s translation of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso: The very marble was so clear and bright That though the sun no light into it gave The Tomb itself did lighten all the cave.52

Orlando Furioso also provided the Arthurian narrative elements which are included in the composition:  the reference to Merlin’s prophetic powers, which are visualised by the light emanating from the tomb; the small figure of Bradamante, the lady knight, kneeling in prayer next to it; and the barely noticeable Lady of the Lake, the sorceress who murdered Merlin to steal his powers, entering through a distant door on the left. These uncanny narrative elements would have been considered beyond the reach of painting by Burke. And yet, by blending them into an atmospheric fantasy in which they are barely discernible, by fusing them into the uncanny lighting or profuse ornamentation of the chamber, Gandy seeks visual strategies to transcribe the poetic original without falling into bathos. The mysterious setting itself, not epic action or supernatural figures, is the vehicle of affect. The intimation of limitlessness which is made possible by architectural fantasy (through excess and incompleteness) provides the indeterminacy which Burke considered essential to the sublime. The atmospheric quality of watercolour enhances the effect, by filling the surroundings of the tomb with visual qualities which the Enquiry had said to be sublime: a gloomy, disquieting obscurity and a palette of ‘sad and fuscous’ colours.53 Burkean aesthetics and the formal inventions of the capriccio are perhaps most obviously conflated in Gandy’s Bridge over Chaos (1833, Figure  25 and Plate 3), which illustrates Satan’s return to Pandemonium and discovery of the ‘stupendious Bridge’ joining Hell to this World, in Book X of Paradise Lost.54 The Miltonic infernal setting is the kind of subject that Burke would have considered to be archetypal of the sublime, but also beyond the abilities of painters. Instead, Gandy demonstrates that the ‘wondrous Pontifice’,55 the ‘Mole immense wrought on /​Over the foaming deep high Archt’56 226

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Figure 25  Joseph Gandy, Bridge over Chaos, 1833.

is a fit subject for the formal inventiveness of architectural fantasy. He especially draws inspiration from Piranesi’s maze-​ like structures, with their abrupt shifts of viewpoints and their tortuous successions of bridges and ramps. The dramatic shift from a 227

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bird’s-​eye view in the foreground to an ascending perspective from the bridge to a distant hypostyle hall, owes much to the Carceri’s non-​perspectival spaces. Gandy also borrows from the Venetian master’s views of Rome the design of the bridge, which is reminiscent of Roman aqueducts, and from his views of Paestum the Doric style of the distant hall.57 As with Piranesi, sublime terror is mostly conveyed by the chaotic spatial structure. But these structural elements are fused with a rich compilation of Burkean themes and motifs: terror and violence are enhanced by geological features such as the chasm within which the capital of Hell is encased, by the motifs of skulls along the parapets, and of gallows and racks along the bridge, and more explicitly by the depiction of narrative elements from Paradise Lost. Even though, once again, these scenes are barely discernible within the visual profusion of the composition, one can notice some rebel angels, turned into winged snakes after Satan’s return,58 tormenting the damned souls who walk across the abyss. In the foreground, on top of a jagged rock, sits a monstrous hybrid figure with a snake’s body and three dogs’ heads, probably a reference to Sin’s hell-​hounds. Luckacher sees two representations of Satan in the shape of a vulture  –​in reference to the ‘ravenous fowl’ to which Satan is compared  –​and in that of the sea-​serpent under the bridge  –​in reference to the fact that Satan becomes ‘dragon grown’ following God’s curse.59 Such details make evident Gandy’s wish to remain close to his literary source, but their extremely reduced size suggests that he was aware of the possibility of bathos signalled by the Enquiry. The same awareness leads him to transpose the violence of the narrative to the dislocated pictorial space itself. By focusing on the theme of chaos, and using the licence acquired through the practice of architectural fantasy, Gandy is able to experiment freely with this space and is led to seek the sublime in new visual configurations. Gandy was not the only British artist to have thought that architectural fantasy could be a means to address the limitations outlined by Burke, in order to reach the sublime. The Enquiry’s inclusion of architecture among sources of sublimity inspired other experiments in this genre, among which may be counted work by George Maddox or the famous composite view by Charles Robert Cockerell, The Professor’s Dream. Some of the most explicitly Burkean adaptations of the capriccio are John Martin’s cataclysmic scenes, such as The Fall of Babylon, Belshazzar’s Feast or Pandemonium, in 228

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which vast halls of columns and towering pyramidal constructions interact with cosmic forces to produce terror in the viewer. Martin’s approach, however, by bringing together as many sources of terror as possible, together with obscurity and vastness of dimension, raises the possibility of bathos again. His productions, however large they may be, remain the literal and comprehensible representations that Burke criticised, with none of the irrational or confusing treatment of space that Piranesi had suggested. The tension of the creative process towards what eludes representation is not addressed, and the inconclusive formal strategies of the capriccio have been replaced by comprehensible perspective views. One of Martin’s contemporaries, Edward Bulwer-​Lytton, wrote of him: ‘Vastness is his sphere, yet he has not lost nor circumfused his genius in its space; he has transfused its character into narrow limits; he has compassed the Infinite itself with mathematical precision’ (my emphasis).60 As such an enthusiastic comment suggested, there were still some who, well into the nineteenth century, believed that pictorial determinacy and orthodox mimesis could convey terror and infinity, without seeing the materially ‘narrow limits’ of painting as an obstacle. To fully address the reflection about the artistic medium introduced by Burke, visual artists had to define processes that could be as open-​ ended as those of the poetic medium. Among the few who seem to have fully understood this challenge may be included William Blake and J. M. W. Turner, whose work I will discuss in the last two chapters of this book. Notes 1 Malcolm Andrews, The Search for the Picturesque (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989), pp. 45–​6. 2 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, ed. Adam Phillips (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1990), I, xv, p. 44. Unless otherwise indicated, further references are to this edition. 3 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, II, xii, p. 71. 4 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, II, ix, pp. 68–​9. 5 On the implications of the fragment in Romantic aesthetics, see Sophie Thomas, ‘The Fragment’, in Nicholas Roe (ed.), Romanticism:  An Oxford Guide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 502–​20. 6 Denis Diderot, ‘Salon de 1767’, in Oeuvres de Denis Diderot. Salons. Tome II (Paris: Brière, 1821), p. 568.

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7 John Wilton-​Ely, ‘An Electric Revolution in Art: The Adam Achievement Reassessed’, Royal Society of Arts Journal 140:5430 (June 1992), 454. 8 See John Wilton-​Ely, The Mind and Art of Giovanni Battista Piranesi (London: Thames and Hudson, 1988), p. 83. 9 Wilton-​Ely, ‘An Electric Revolution in Art’, p. 454; see also John-​Wilton Ely, ‘Introduction’, in Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Observations on the Letter of Monsieur Mariette, trans. Caroline Beamish and David Britt (Los Angeles: The Getty Research Institute, 2002), p. 16. 10 Wilton-​Ely, ‘An Electric Revolution in Art’, pp. 454–​5. 11 Some of these drawings may be seen at the Victoria and Albert Museum. ‘Cullen Castle, Banffshire’, at the National Gallery of Scotland, is a remarkable instance of this lesser known side of Adam’s work. 12 John Fleming, Robert Adam and his Circle, in Edinburgh and Rome (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), p 167, n28. 13 Wilton-​Ely, The Mind and Art of Piranesi, p. 90. 14 John Wilton-​Ely, Piranesi, Paestum and Soane (Munich:  Prestel, 2013), p. 12. 15 John Soane, ‘Lectures on Architecture,’ in David Watkin, Sir John Soane:  Enlightenment Thought and the Royal Academy Lectures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 603. 16 See, for example, Robin Middleton, ‘Soane’s Spaces and the Matter of Fragmentation’, in Margaret Richardson and Maryanne Stevens (eds), John Soane, Architect:  Master of Space and Light (London:  Royal Academy, 2015), pp. 29–​30; Wilton-​Ely, Piranesi, Paestum and Soane, p.  7; and Helen Furján, Glorious Visions:  John Soane’s Spectacular Theater (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), e.g. pp. 4 and 33. 17 Wilton-​Ely, Piranesi, Paestum and Soane, p. 21. 18 Andrews, Search for the Picturesque, pp. 42 and 48. 19 Dorothea Nyberg, ed., ‘Original Text of Prima parte and English Translation’, in Giovanni Battista Piranesi: Drawings and Etchings at Columbia University, exh. cat. (New York: Avery Architectural Library/​ Department of Art History and Archaeology, Columbia University, 1972), pp. 115–​18. 20 John A. Pinto, Speaking Ruins:  Piranesi, Architects and Antiquity in Eighteenth-​Century Rome (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012), p. 3. 21 The analogy is made by Wilton-​Ely, The Mind and Art of Piranesi, p. 85. 22 Didier Laroque, for example, makes such a claim in Le Discours de Piranèse:  l’ornement sublime et le suspens de l’architecture (Paris: Éditions de la Passion, 1999), p. 18. 23 Some critics, on the other hand, see some of Burke’s descriptions of the sublime –​in architecture especially –​as almost ekphrastic transcriptions of Piranesi’s etchings. See, for example, Fatma Ipek Ek and Deniz

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Sengel, ‘Piranesi between Classical and Sublime’, METU JFA 24:1 (2007), 17–​34. 24 Horace Walpole, Anecdotes of Painting in England, 4th edn (London, 1780), vol. IV, ‘Advertisement’, p. 398. 25 William Beckford, Dreams, Waking Thoughts and Incidents, printed in 1783 but first published in 1891. Quoted in Wilton-​Ely, The Mind and Art of Piranesi, p. 89. 26 Grevel Lindop (ed.), The Works of Thomas De Quincey (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2000), vol. II, p. 68. 27 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, II, xii, p. 71. 28 These comments, mentioned earlier, are to be found in Part II, section ix, on ‘Succession and uniformity’, pp. 68–​9. 29 John Lewis Roget, A History of the ‘Old water-​colour’ society, 2 vols (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1891), vol. I, p. 87. 30 J. M. W. Turner, Dark Prison, Metropolitan Museum of Art. 31 John Gage, J. M. W. Turner: ‘A Wonderful Range of Mind’ (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1987), p. 102. 32 Andrea Fredericksen, ‘Lecture Diagram 65: Interior of a Prison c.1810 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, June 2004, revised by David Blayney Brown, April 2012, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J. M.  W. Turner:  Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, December 2012, www.tate.org.uk/​art/​research-​ publications/​ j mw- ​ t urner/ ​ j oseph- ​ m allord- ​ w illiam-​ t urner-​ l ecture-​ diagram-​65-​interior-​of-​a-​prison-​r1136535, accessed 23 June 2016. 33 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, II, ix, p. 68. 34 This is especially true of Lectures D (fourth lecture, on ‘Aerial Perspective Light Shade and Color’) and E (fifth lecture on ‘Reflexies, Reflexions and Color’). Add. MS 46151, British Library. 35 Turner, Add. MS 46151, British Library. Lecture C, p. 19. 36 Sir John Soane, The Royal Academy Lectures, ed. David Watkin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), Lecture I, pp. 35–​6. 37 See notably Brian Luckacher, Joseph Gandy: An Architectural Visionary in Georgian England (London: Thames and Hudson, 2006), p. 15f. and Terrance Gerard Galvin, ‘The Architecture of Joseph Michael Gandy (1771–​1843) and Sir John Soane (1753–​1837):  An Exploration into the Masonic and Occult Imagination of the Late Enlightenment’ (PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 2003), p. 27f. 38 Joseph Gandy, ‘Journal of J. M. Gandy A.R.A.’. Two typed transcripts of this book may be found at the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), as well as at Sir John Soane’s Museum, London. The book is referred to as the ‘Gandy Green Book’. 39 ‘Gandy Green Book’, p. 1. 40 Luckacher, Joseph Gandy, p. 20.

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41 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, II, ix, ‘Succession and uniformity’, p. 68 and xv, ‘Light in building’, p. 74. 42 Luckacher, Joseph Gandy, p. 19. 43 4 March 1797, ‘Gandy Green Book’, p. 159. 44 Galvin, ‘The Architecture of Gandy and Soane’, pp. 35–​6; Luckacher, Joseph Gandy, p. 30. 45 ‘Gandy Green Book’, p. 138. 46 ‘Gandy Green Book’, p. 132. 47 John Milton, Paradise Lost, I, lines 170–​75; 670. Letter dated 6 August 1796, ‘Gandy Green Book’, pp. 135–​6. 48 Luckacher, Joseph Gandy, p. 88f. 49 John Summerson, ‘The Vision of J. M. Gandy’, in Heavenly Mansions and Other Essays on Architecture (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1948), pp. 111, 134. 50 Luckacher, Joseph Gandy, p. 32f. 51 Summerson, ‘The Vision of J. M. Gandy’, p. 129. 52 Quoted in John Summerson, ‘Gandy and the Tomb of Merlin’, Architectural Review 89:532 (April 1941), 89–​ 90 and Luckacher, Joseph Gandy, p. 120. 53 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, II, xvi, p. 75. 54 Milton, Paradise Lost, X, line 351. 55 Milton, Paradise Lost, X, line 348. 56 Milton, Paradise Lost, X, lines 300–​1. 57 See Luckacher, Joseph Gandy, p. 128. 58 Milton, Paradise Lost, X, lines 504–​77. 59 Luckacher, Joseph Gandy, p. 128. 60 Edward Bulwer-​Lytton, England and the English, 2 vols (New  York: J. and J. Harper, 1833), vol. II, p. 136; quoted in James B. Twitchell, Romantic Horizons:  Aspects of the Sublime in English Poetry and Painting, 1770–​1850 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1983), p. 109.

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PART III Relocating the sublime: Blake, Turner and creative endeavour

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u Against and beyond Burke: Blake’s ‘sublime Labours’

As the previous chapters have shown, empiricist aesthetics provided a material basis for many of the visual experiments with unlimitation, indistinctness and obscurity which took place in British Romantic visual practices.1 Burke himself, in spite of his antipictorialism, had contributed an exhaustive survey of sensory sources of ‘delightful terror’, suggesting concrete ways in which the sublime could be visualised. More than anything, as appears in the pictorial and graphic experiments which have been studied so far, his description of empirical entities that defied sense perception, such as infinity, privation or ‘magnitude in building’, suggested visual strategies in which representation was still possible but incomplete. Such strategies could be seen as positive responses to the Burkean sublime, which were derived explicitly from what the Enquiry implied or made possible. In this case, formal invention was partly driven by the need to find a kind of adequacy, however imperfect it might be, between visual representation and the empirical sources of the sublime as they had been described by Burke. When compared with such endeavours, William Blake’s theory and practice of art stand out as possibly the most explicitly negative reaction to the Enquiry by a visual artist, both from a philosophical point of view and with respect to compositional and stylistic considerations. But it also appears to be one of the most conscious responses to the treatise, and one of the clearest expressions of awareness that Burke’s claims called for a radical reassessment of the paradigms of visual representation. 235

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Blake, who was born in the same year that Edmund Burke published the first edition of his Philosophical Enquiry, was familiar with the terms of the Enlightenment aesthetic debate. More specifically, his frequent use of the word ‘sublime’ in his poetry, letters or artistic pamphlets shows that he gave it a central place in his aesthetics, reflecting, as can be expected from his composite approach to art, both about its poetic and its visual dimension. He called his poetic universe a ‘sublime allegory’,2 a phrase which aptly encompasses the prolific and complex creations of his ‘prophecies’, in their defiance of univocal meanings and their challenge to readers’ ordinary perceptions. In Jerusalem, his very self-​reflexive last epic prophecy, the central object of artistic striving and production is ‘the sublime Universe of Los & Enitharmon’;3 in The Four Zoas, the purpose of Los’s ‘fires’ is to ‘fabricate forms sublime’.4 The sublime is also a recurrent term in Blake’s writings on art, where it designates the highest form of artistic expression: it figures pro­ minently in his annotations to Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses on Art, partly in answer to its use by Reynolds, but also with a clear personal intentionality. Blake’s conception of the sublime, however, seems to have been an isolated and puzzling one in its context, largely due to his rejection of the Enquiry and its foundation of the sublime on an empirical basis. While the Burkean imagery of natural vastness, confusion and obscurity found immediate practical applications in the work of his contemporaries, and led them to increase pictorial formats, manipulate scale, favour chiaroscuro and seek certain forms of indistinctness, Blake’s visual production explicitly rejected such innovations and was characterised by its determinacy, small formats and refusal of illusionism. This approach, together with an explicit attack against Burke in his writings on art, has often disqualified him as an artist of the sublime. Those who have taken his claims to visual sublimity seriously have generally emphasised his predilection for sublime subjects, and pointed out the thematic influence of Burke. Anthony Blunt was the first to stress that Blake’s choice of biblical, Shakespearian and Miltonic subjects for his paintings and illustrations was wholly in keeping with the examples of the sublime provided by Burke and with the contemporary practice of fellow artists.5 Morton D.  Paley, who has repeatedly stressed the centrality of the concept of the sublime in Blake’s thought,6 has also demonstrated that Blake’s choice of subject matter makes him 236

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a major contributor to this specifically British development, the ‘apocalyptic sublime’, in spite of stylistic divergences mostly based on Blake’s refusal of naturalistic representation.7 By examining these stylistic and philosophical divergences, however, other approaches to the Blakean visual sublime have been made possible. David Baulch has thus argued that Blake’s aesthetics of the sublime have to be revalued as working outside of the empirical framework of Burke’s theory, within his own personal conception of perspectival states. Baulch shows how Blake integrates the Burkean sublime, as an empirical aesthetics, within his fallen states (Ulro and Generation) and looks for real sublimity in the state of Eden, where imaginative activity is highest (whereas in Burke’s conception the mind is passive).8 Steven Vine sees a more profound departure from Enlightenment aesthetics. In the light of postmodern interpretations, he shows the Blakean sublime to be closer to Jean-​François Lyotard’s view of the sublime as a historical/​temporal process, or event, engaged with materiality than to either Burke’s empirical interpretation or even to Kant’s own transcendental approach. This new approach allows Vine to take seriously Blake’s stylistic claims that accuracy of line and ‘minute particulars’ are vehicles of the sublime: the bounding line operates as a ‘sublimation of materiality’,9 is ‘a sublime event itself, for the line draws definition upon chaos’10 and the minute particulars ‘anticipate Lyotard’s postmodernism’ by ‘instituting a sublime of particularity and differentiation rather than of any universalizing “grand narrative” ’.11 Vine, however, does not examine Blake’s actual graphic and pictorial practice, applying the stylistic comments mostly to textual considerations. As a matter of fact, the recent reappraisal of the Blakean sublime has mostly taken place from a textual point of view. Blake’s poetry has proved to be a particularly apt illustration of the postmodern interpretations of the sublime, which describe a temporal experience, driven by the fear of closure, the provisionality, immediacy and urgency of artistic production, as well as the excess of thought in the making. This understanding of the sublime as an immanent ‘event’ of artistic production, located in the tension between conception and presentation, and driven by the need for novelty and the intimation of the unpresentable, has provided a stimulating angle of study for Blake’s prophecies. His constant fear of the cessation of imaginative energy and activity (which he expresses as a fall into Beulah or Ulro), as well as his textual and graphic exuberance, 237

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open-​endedness and medium-​reflexivity, bring him close to such a conception of the sublime as an immanent experience, taking place in the very moment of artistic production, and in the strife to sustain it. In various ways, Tilottama Rajan (The Supplement of Reading), Donald Ault (Narrative Unbound) and Fred Dortort (The Dialectic of Vision), among others, have explored the indeterminate and transformational nature of the Blakean text.12 They have highlighted its self-​reflexivity and lack of closure, which bring forward the labour of writing itself, and its continuation in the reading process. Although the features they have highlighted need not be linked to the theories of the sublime, and have also been linked to the comic and to Blake’s ample use of irony and satire,13 the anguish of indeterminacy as well as the exhilaration of open-​ endedness bring to mind the new interpretations of sublimity. Other critics have made this point more clearly, and explicitly identified a sublime experience derived from the textual complexity of the later prophecies. Vincent De Luca has thus defined Blake’s programme as ‘displacing the natural sublime object with a text’ and identified the ‘sublime event’ as taking place ‘in the actual difficulties of the reading experience’.14 De Luca’s research enhances the anti-​narrative physicality of Blake’s text, with its profuseness and semantic opacity being comparable to a ‘wall of words’ inducing in the reader a sentiment very much like the vertiginous exhilaration characteristic of the sublime.15 Peter Otto, in his reading of The Four Zoas, argues that such a conception of the text as a barrier is another form of transcendental sublimity. Instead, he writes, the discursive complexities of The Four Zoas call for an active readerly experience in which, as in the sublime of Wordsworth and Keats, ‘the humiliation of the understanding (or an analogous entity), unable to move beyond the objective world … throws into relief the constructive power of the imagination’.16 What brings together these analyses is their emphasis on the provisional and transformational nature of textual production and reception, and the heightened awareness of the text itself as it unfolds, in all its complexity –​opacity or richness. Such an emphasis on the ‘textuality’ or ‘materiality’ of the text points to a sublimity immanent to the process of production or discovery, in its conflation of intoxication and urgency. The following analysis will contend that a similar conception of the sublime as process can be discerned in the visual dimension 238

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of Blake’s art. In this more ‘physical’ side of his work, the artist’s expression of the temporal processes of his production is actually heightened by his awareness of material constraints specific to graphic and pictorial media. Seeing Blake as an artist dedicated to the energetic labour of printing, engraving and painting allows one to see his engagement with materiality in a more positive light than his attacks against empiricism suggest. It also makes it possible to understand his visual practice as one of the most insightful responses to the Burkean challenge, which combines the desire to assert the painter’s or engraver’s imaginative powers with an acute awareness of the representational gap highlighted by the Enquiry and of the artistic striving that this induces. I will suggest that Blake’s refusal of an empirical sublime, his striving for artistic perfection –​against Burke’s antipictorialism  –​his heightened awareness of the artistic medium and its process, together with his reflection on the (in) adequacy between conception and execution, far from being contradictory, are complementary facets of this complex response. I will also argue that this conception, by shifting the focus to the act of artistic production itself, was drawing out the full implications of the Burkean sublime. A conscious stand against Burke In the context of British pre-​Romantic and Romantic visual arts, William Blake’s conception of the sublime appears to go resolutely against the tide, standing in sharp contrast with the thematic and stylistic innovations which Burke’s treatise had prompted. The motifs of the natural sublime, the vast expanses of wilderness, the oceanic or mountainous scenes which so fascinated most painters of the day only made it into his repertoire as evidence of the mind’s subjection to the fallen physical world. The vastness of scale or format which panorama makers or artists like John Martin and James Ward attempted was incompatible with his graphic or pictorial media (illuminated printing, colour printing and watercolour). The dramatic use of chiaroscuro (as in the work of Wright of Derby, de Loutherbourg or, for that matter, his own friend, Fuseli) was according to him a narrowing of perception, comparable to putting ‘Points of Light’ into ‘a dark hole’ or ‘a dark cavern’.17 Most importantly, his dismissal of expressive colourism and suggestive indistinctness as ‘Blots & Blurs’18 or ‘Broken Colours & Broken Lines & Broken 239

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Masses [which] are Equally Subversive of the Sublime’19 isolated him from those who, like Turner, had made this stylistic choice to answer Burke’s contention that words were more suggestive than images, and therefore better vehicles of the sublime. The conflict of ideas found its most explicit expression in his annotations to Reynolds’s Discourses on Art, which were according to him based on Burkean aesthetic premises. He especially criticised Reynolds for promoting Burkean obscurity and indistinctness, and made it clear that to him these ‘qualities’ were mostly the result of weakness of conception and execution. When Reynolds explicitly followed the Enquiry by arguing that obscurity, as a source of the sublime, could be used by a poet ‘when his meaning is not well known to himself’,20 he retorted: ‘Obscurity is Neither the Source of the Sublime nor of any Thing Else.’21 He also connected Reynolds’s and Burke’s aesthetic thought to an intellectual context which he rejected as a whole: Burke’s Treatise on the Sublime & Beautiful is founded on the Opinions of Newton & Locke on this Treatise Reynolds has grounded many of his assertions. In all his Discourses I read Burkes Treatise when very Young at the same time I  read Locke on Human Understanding & Bacons Advancement of Learning. … They mock Inspiration & Vision Inspiration & Vision was then & now is & I hope will always Remain my Element my Eternal Dwelling place.22

As Blake was well aware, his dislike of Burke was based on a sharp disagreement with the theoretical premises on which the Philosophical Enquiry was grounded: the philosophy of empiricism and its emphasis on the mind as a receptor, which he saw as a cause of intellectual torpor, and led him to blame the fall of Albion on ‘Bacon, Locke & Newton’ in the prophecies.23 The crucial point against Burke, which is implicit in Blake’s defence of ‘Inspiration & Vision’, was that he too emphasised the passivity of the mind in his conception of the sublime. Whereas Blake saw vision and inspiration as active workings of the imagination, Burke based the sublime experience on what could appear as a form of mental surrender. The following passage is worth quoting again: THE PASSION caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. In this case the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it

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cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that object which employs it.24

The idea that the mind could be overwhelmed by its object and thus submitted to external forces it could not quite control was quite alien to Blake’s own philosophy and aesthetics. For this reason, he could not agree with Burke’s method of tracing the sublime back to its many external causes. Whereas these sources provided new themes and a working idiom for many fellow artists, for Blake they were only evidence of the hold of the external world on weak minds. Significantly, they made their way into Blake’s production, but mostly by providing a powerful imagery of the fallen world and of the mind’s passive immersion in externality. Thus, where Burke saw vastness and darkness as productive of sublimity, Blake considered them as evidence of mental dissolution and loss. In his early prophecies, especially Europe and the Urizen books, which explore the theme of the rise of Reason (Urizen) and of its ascendency over imagination and energy (identified with the figure of Los), the imagery of cosmic powers, darkness, skies and open waters, far from being the source of an exalting experience, contributes to an overall sense of material oppression. Clouds, oceanic expanses and obscurity partake of what appear to be representations of imprisonment in matter. In the colour printed versions, this effect is enhanced by the oppressive use of opaque and dark colours, the ‘sad and fuscous colours, as black, or brown, or deep purple, and the like’ which Burke had presented as productive of the sublime.25 As these images suggest, Blake saw nothing uplifting, no ‘delightful horror’ in man’s sense of powerlessness or awe in front of the physical world, but only evidence of imaginative failure. His use of Burkean thematics was the visualisation of a post-​lapsarian world subjected to reason and materialism. An interesting example of Blake’s visual critique of Burke is plate 70 of Jerusalem (Figure  26), which shows a gigantic trilithon towering over three diminutive human forms. The vastness of scale implied by the presence of human referents, the sense of power and awe derived from the massive construction, make this design one of Blake’s most explicit visualisations of the Burkean sublime, probably alluding to the Enquiry’s inclusion of Stonehenge among manmade sources of sublimity. It is, however, fraught with criticism. Druidism being for Blake the epitome of religious cruelty, 241

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Figure 26  William Blake, Jerusalem, copy E, pl. 70, 1804–​c. 1820.

the hyperbolic sacrificial altar can be read as an ironic allusion to Burke’s ‘delightful horror’, and a critique of religious awe as a source of the sublime. It might not have escaped Blake’s attention that Burke had shown an interest in the Druids’ ability to create terror, by ‘perform[ing] all their ceremonies in the bosom of the darkest 242

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woods’.26 Not surprisingly, this reflection about religious terror and the mental passivity connected with it goes along with a critique of ‘Abstract Philosophy’:27 the three human forms, who are to be seen as overpowered by such an emblem of cruelty and superstition, are probably ‘Bacon & Newton & Locke’, whose names appear just above the structure.28 As such examples suggest, Blake’s use of a Burkean imagery and visual style is a means to undermine the philosophy which provided the main premises of the Enquiry’s aesthetics. Even though, as Blunt or Paley have argued, he does seem to favour subjects that his Burke-​inspired contemporaries would have called sublime, he also repeatedly appears to subvert the idiom. In many such cases, Blake is exposing the contradictions of an experience that is based on the visual perception of material objects and claims transcendence at the same time. The infinite, as he reminds us repeatedly, is not to be found in magnitude observable in the physical universe, but in visionary activity: ‘The Microscope knows not of this nor the Telescope. they alter /​The ratio of the Spectators Organs but leave Objects untouchd /​For every Space larger than a red Globule of Mans blood. /​Is visionary: and is created by the Hammer of Los.’29 Blake’s belief that the path to infinity was visionary activity made it impossible for him to validate a sublime experience derived from the simple visual perception of ‘vastness’, ‘magnitude’ or ‘obscurity’. It entailed another definition of the sublime, and a new visual idiom and practice, where creative form-​making (as the above reference to Los suggests) plays a prominent part. Corporeality, visionary expansion and the visual media As his annotations to Reynolds suggest, Blake partly shaped his conception of art as an antagonistic reaction to the prevailing discourse of empiricism and its straightforward adaptation to the aesthetic debate by Edmund Burke. This may explain why, at times, his interpretation of the sublime appears to be resolutely removed from any anchoring in the world of experience. Thus, in his letter to Thomas Butts of 6 July 1803, Blake described his new poem Milton as a ‘Sublime Allegory’, adding:  ‘Allegory addressed to the Intellectual powers while it is altogether hidden from the Corporeal understanding is My Definition of the Most Sublime Poetry.’30 It would be misleading, however, to view Blake’s conception of the sublime 243

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as simply antithetic to Burke’s empirical sublime and detached from material or sensory considerations. The apparent dualism of Blake’s ‘Definition of the Most Sublime Poetry’ should in fact be examined in the light of Blake’s complex conception of the corporeal and the material. The ‘corporeal’ here means what belongs to the natural body, and ‘Corporeal understanding’ is understanding derived from the closed ‘vegetable’ senses (a recurrent image in the prophecies), as in the empirical method; but this natural body is only the fallen and divided fragment of the fully integrated body, in which the open senses fuse with the creative imagination. Working in isolation, this ‘Selfhood’ is unable to experience sublimity. On the other hand, reunited with the imagination and expanded by Man’s creative energies, the body itself becomes the locus of visionary activity. Thomas Frosch makes a convincing case against the idea that Blake’s thought may be dualist, by showing that sensory perception is actually integrated in a vast conception of ‘perceptual improvement’;31 instead of being negated or transcended, the natural body and the five senses are filled with the imagination and expanded.32 A powerful expression of this renovation can be found in this famous passage from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: But first the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul, is to be expunged: this I shall do, by printing in the infernal method, by corrosives, which in hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid. If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is: infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.33

As there are various states of the body and the senses (which can be ‘narrow chinks’ or ‘doors of perception’), so the corporeal can be part of man’s perceptual opening to the infinite. Significantly, in this passage, it is Blake’s own printing and relief-​etching activity which is presented as the catalyst for such a liberating experience, as the reference to ‘corrosives … melting apparent surfaces away’ makes clear. The corporeal is therefore reintegrated as perceptual expansion fused with creative activity, ultimately leading to visionary revelation. These changing perspectives may explain why graphic concreteness and representational determinacy are actually central to Blake’s 244

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conception of the visual sublime, in which they may be seen as positive features of a complete experience. In his annotations to Reynolds, Blake notably states:  ‘Without Minute Neatness of Execution. The. Sublime cannot Exist’, and shortly afterwards:  ‘Singular & Particular Detail is the Foundation of the Sublime’.34 Even though he is protesting against Reynolds’s empirical method of abstraction from particular to general form, and defending the preciseness of vision against the weak copies of nature, these assertions go together with a resolutely representational visual bias. Blake only conceives of ‘neatness of execution’ and ‘particular detail’ in relation to his prime visual subject, the human form. He objects to a sublimity of suggestiveness and obscurity, in which contours and bodily substance are dissolved in painterly features like tone and colour; and he makes the corporeal central to his own representation of the visionary. As he claims in the ‘Descriptive Catalogue’: ‘A Spirit and a Vision are not, as the modern philosophy supposes, a cloudy vapour or a nothing: they are organised and minutely articulated beyond all that the mortal and perishing nature can produce.… Spirits are organised men.’35 The firm delineation of the human body, for an artist opposed to formal abstraction and who had developed a bold linear idiom, was the natural visual receptacle of the spiritual. Unlike Blake’s definition of ‘the most Sublime Poetry,’ this literal and anthropomorphic approach made it clear that the ‘corporeal’ had a part to play in his visual sublime. The discrepancy highlighted the major tension between physicality and intellectuality at the heart of Blake’s graphic and pictorial work. It also reflected verbal/​ visual tensions. Blake’s poetry, especially in the prophetic books, does indeed challenge the reader’s ‘corporeal understanding’. As W.  J. T.  Mitchell has convincingly shown, it goes against the pictorialist tradition of its time with its unvisualisable mental spaces and dramatic voices36 and its undescribed personae with shifting narrative and thematic functions. The visual concreteness of the accompanying designs, on the other hand, boldly reintroduces the corporeal. Even though the emblematic or allegorical value of the designs addresses the intellect and prevents any easy i­dentification, the overwhelming presence of the naked human body makes ­‘corporeal understanding’ a central component of our appreciation. The contrast is especially striking in Jerusalem, where the thematics of bodily distortion and fragmentation in the text is at variance with the solidity, firm contours and muscular relief of the 245

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Figure 27  William Blake, Jerusalem, copy E, pl. 26, 1804–​c. 1820. human figures in the designs. In the coloured version of the poem (copy E), the completion of many years of masterful and industrious graphic work, the physical presence of the body is enhanced by the brilliant combination of pictorial and etching techniques and the almost sensual use of colour. Dark blue, brown and red washes provide tone and give bodies a sculptural aspect, especially as they are well contained within the thick russet contours of relief etching. On a number of plates, the effect is heightened by the combination of dark watercolour with an etching style inspired by line engraving, in which the design is shaped by a succession of thin lines. On plate 26 (Figure 27), for instance, the two forms of Hand and Jerusalem, emerging from the dark background, acquire an astonishing physicality: the rich watercolour washes, blended with sinuous line patterns, display Hand’s muscular anatomy in a manner reminiscent of an écorché, while they liken Jerusalem to a living statue with intermingled bodily fibres and thin folds of drapery. This perfected representation of the human body gives the corporeal a more positive value than the thematics of fragmentation and shrinking in the 246

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text. Hand’s écorché appearance, it cannot be denied, is a visual accomplishment, ‘a figure of terrible beauty’, as Mitchell writes.37 The design highlights the centrality of the ‘corporeal’ in Blake’s visual sublime. By conflating corporeal beauty with Burke’s aesthetics of terror, it demonstrates how the human body itself could be a vehicle of the sublime. More importantly, it reveals the active role played by the artist’s body itself. Hand, whose printed name makes explicit the self-​reflexive dimension of the design, cannot but be seen as a visualisation of the artist’s ‘hand’, drawing our attention to the very process of his representation. And as so often in Blake’s visual work, the human figure is primarily the vehicle of the artist’s craft, displaying his range of visual techniques, and his ‘Minute Neatness of Execution’ without which ‘The Sublime cannot Exist’. If Blake’s visual practice requires us to conceive of the sublime as anchored in physicality, it is by directing our attention to the material world of the creative process itself, and by making the artistic medium and the artist’s hand so clearly visible. In particular, it allows us to discern the parts played out by the artist and his materials, by not concealing the latter’s resistance and intentionality. The vibrancy of the Hand and Jerusalem design results from the almost experimental fusing of pictorial and graphic techniques, the unexpectedly successful encounter of watercolour, relief etching and line engraving. Here as throughout his production, the artist incorporates the visible specificities of his media into the significance of the design. The ‘Minute Neatness of Execution’ may then be sublime because it is the artist’s successful channelling of energies that resist his control. In this dialectical exchange, the materials are not destroyed to become transparent vehicles of meaning, but enhance meaning through their visible presence. This awareness of the artistic medium, of its physical presence and intentionality, gives added significance to Blake’s emphasis on execution in his statements on the visual sublime. It once again draws our attention to the immanent process of artistic production as the place where we may locate this sublime. The artistic medium: physicality and reflexivity Blake’s active engagement with the artistic medium has been demonstrated by persuasive experimental work on his techniques, conducted since the 1980s notably by Robert N. Essick (William 247

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Blake, Printmaker) and Joseph Viscomi (Blake and the Idea of the Book), as well as Michael Phillips (The Creation of the Songs).38 Contrary to previous emphases on the visionary and intellectual dimension of his visual work, such research highlights the physicality of Blake’s graphic and pictorial production, his exceptional involvement in the process of it, and what is more, a high degree of medium reflexivity. At a time when Sir Joshua Reynolds had made a point of defending the status of the visual artist by highlighting the intellectual dimension of his art and playing down the ‘mechanical’ side of it, seeing the stages of execution as secondary to ‘invention’ and ranking pictorial styles from the most ‘mental’ to the most ‘ornamental’,39 Blake made a deliberate choice to be involved at all stages of his production, including the more ‘mechanical’ ones, such as making his own colours or the laborious process of etching, inking and printing. His experience as an accomplished craftsman, combined with the invention of visual designs and poetic text, meant the reunion of a vast range of intellectual and technical skills, which would have been impossible for almost anyone else. It was the perfect illustration, and perhaps the leading cause, of his poetic and philosophical striving for wholeness, for the ultimate fusion of man’s faculties: execution could not be divided from invention; technical skills had to be fused with intellectual ones, rather than separated, or worse, delegated. It also meant that Blake was acutely aware of the processes of artistic production, and more specifically of the resistance of the artistic medium or, as Essick puts it, its ‘intentionality or telos’.40 Blake’s necessary awareness could be linked to the method of illuminated printing which he had perfected for the production of his illuminated books. A  detailed account of this method is provided by Robert N. Essick and Joseph Viscomi. Both convincingly show why it is most likely that Blake composed directly on the bare copper plate, contrary to what had been asserted by previous arguments in favour of transfers from preliminary design to copper plate (Ruthven Todd being the leading proponent of the latter explanation). To achieve this, he developed a technique of ‘relief etching’ in which, instead of cutting out the text and design and then inking them, as in the more common practice of intaglio engraving, he drew and wrote directly on the plate with a stop-​out varnish, and then etched out the exposed background with acid, prior to inking. 248

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This essentially meant that he abolished the traditional distinction between invention and execution. As Viscomi writes: In illuminated printmaking, the labor of artist (delineavit) and engraver (sculpsit) is the same labor, occurring in the same place at the same time. This relation between conceiving and making, between invention and execution, is encouraged by the very act of drawing as opposed to tracing and/​ or translating designs already drawn and thus composed.41

A direct consequence of such immediacy was the characteristic roughness of design that one finds in most of his illuminated books. As immediacy of expression prevailed over accuracy of reproduction, and as the lines drawn with the varnish were thicker and more prone to visible imperfections than thinner, engraved or etched-​out lines, this effect was a result both of the artist’s intention and of the medium’s specificity. It was Blake’s decision to preserve the visibility of the artistic medium, as part of his original project. As Essick puts it, ‘Blake used relief etching exclusively for original composition and never attempted to disguise it as another medium.’42 The same primacy of the artistic medium can be found in Blake’s use of colour printing, alternately with watercolour, for the colouring of his illuminated books. The technique Blake used consisted in applying colours directly onto the printing plate, using water-​miscible paints mixed with glue (size) in order to prevent the colours from spreading and overlapping, and completing the ensuing unfinished areas with watercolours.43 The physical presence of the artistic medium was undeniable in the resulting mottled texture (due mostly to the use of size and to the interaction of the colour with oil-​based inks) and the contrasts of matt and shiny surfaces (due to the co-​presence of colour printing and watercolour finishing). As with relief etching, immediacy of composition went together with the visibility of the artistic medium. The fact that Blake used the method not just in the production of illuminated books, which required rapidity of conception and execution, but also in the series of separate, large colour prints composed from 1795 to probably at least 1804, suggests that he considered the unusual textural effects worthy of artistic consideration. In some cases, as in the famous Newton print, the mottled and reticulated effect is left to create meanings of its own, suggesting an underwater background aptly representing the ocean of materiality within which the scientist is immersed. 249

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Such freedom left to colour and texture, together with the richness of effect, contradicting as it does Blake’s statements against Venetian colouring and the ‘unorganized Blots & Blurs of Rubens & Titian’,44 also suggests that the resistance of the artistic medium is

Figure 28  William Blake, The First Book of Urizen, copy A, pl. 8, 1794. 250

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well accepted and integrated into his artistic project. The technical choices of relief etching and colour printing not only contributed to making invention and execution simultaneous, but they also enhanced the physicality of execution, the very process of etching or printing showing itself for what it was rather than making itself the invisible vehicle of an original design. While such methods allowed Blake to compose directly on the printing plate, and therefore removed mediations between vision and representation, they also meant that vision could be altered by the independent play of the artistic medium. Blake’s awareness of the artistic medium as an actor to contend with, actually physically to wrestle with, is perhaps best illustrated by the struggle between Los, the dominant figure of the artist in the late prophecies, and his Spectre. According to Essick, the latter can be interpreted as ‘the powers of execution’, like etching skills, or ‘the materials (e.g., copperplates) and social relations (e.g. patronage) necessary for the embodiment of the imagination –​but also the resistance of matter to mind and personal entanglements that thwart creative acts’.45 Similarly, in The Book of Urizen, Urizen’s book-​making activities and submersion within materiality are an obvious mise en abyme of Blake’s own ongoing experiments with the recalcitrant colour printing medium. The artist’s difficult extraction of monolithic figures from the printing medium, which is visible throughout the illustrative sequence, is replicated by the creative efforts of the eponymous protagonist. In particular, Urizen’s proud display of an unfinished and clumsily coloured book on plate 5 (or 8 depending on the versions) may be understood as an ironic reflection about Blake’s own painful struggle to extract form from formlessness (Figure 28).46 The dynamics of the sublime: Blake, Burke and Kant The artist’s engagement and struggle with his media makes the artistic process, even more than its product, central to the Blakean sublime. It highlights Blake’s awareness of a disjunction between conception and representation, which may only be surmounted by the artist’s endeavours. This assertion of creative energy as a means to match invention and execution may be seen as a response to Burke’s own emphasis on the gap, in visual representation, between the intimation of the sublime and its artistic presentation. Whereas Burke saw such a gap as unsurmountable and intended to deter 251

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visual artists from attempting to convey the sublime, Blake’s much more active understanding of artistic production led him to promote visionary energy and material exertions as a means to bring visual representation closer to sublime conceptions. In other words, Blake acknowledged the incommensurability outlined by the Enquiry, but insisted on the necessity of representational effort to come to terms with it. Through his insistence on active production and refusal of the passive defeat of the mind which he saw at work in Burkean aesthetics, he was changing the terms of the debate and suggesting a much more dynamic understanding of the experience of the sublime than had previously been defined. His insistence on representational endeavour has actually been explained in terms of the Kantian sublime, which as mentioned previously hinges on processes of presentation and questions the very possibility of representation.47 In Kant’s conception, the imagination, which is the ‘faculty of presentation’,48 struggles to give a sensible presentation of the ‘absolutely great’,49 to give form to what it apprehends, but cannot, ‘for what is properly sublime cannot be contained in any sensible form, but concerns only ideas of reason’.50 The frustration of the imagination is then succeeded by the pleasure derived from the resolution eventually provided by reason. Blake’s conflicting statements about the sublime may be seen to revolve around a comparable pattern of inadequacy and representational effort, a similarity of structure which Vincent De Luca has convincingly demonstrated, showing that although the roles of reason and imagination are reversed, ‘Blake’s and Kant’s defining conditions for the sublime have, mutatis mutandis, an identical structure. What is a barrier to the faculty allied with sense is an avenue to its more privileged counterpart.’51 There are some strongly Kantian echoes in Blake’s statement that ‘Allegory addressed to the Intellectual powers while it is altogether hidden from the Corporeal understanding is My Definition of the Most Sublime Poetry.’52 Blake’s dealings with ‘sensible form’ as a visual artist and his belief in the visionary powers of the imagination, however, reinstate representation as central to the experience of the sublime, not as an impossible goal, but as a necessary process. The sense of incommensurability is still the driving dynamics of such sublimity, but it is intensified by the necessity to give forms, and by the actual engagement with the world of sense that necessarily occurs with artistic production. Whereas Kant asserted that ‘what is properly 252

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sublime cannot be contained in any sensible form’,53 Blake bestows on his representative Los the task to ‘fabricate forms sublime’.54 The artist’s activity itself becomes the locus of the sublime disjunction that Kant saw as a conflict of faculties. The predicament now has to do with the representational activity. Blake’s vision requests visualisation, yet cannot be satisfied by it. ‘Sensible forms’, as Kant puts it, cannot convey the sublime, yet sensible forms must be produced, and the Blakean sublime resides in the repeatedly frustrated striving to make those forms adequate to their visionary originals. Blake’s art would be a denial of vision, the production of the ‘mortal eye’ addressed to the ‘mortal eye’,55 if one considered it merely as a finished product. If one sees it as a process, an endeavour to convey vision in sensible form, to match execution with invention, then it becomes clear that the sublime is not to be found in vision itself, but in the artist’s struggle to capture vision; not in a transcendental realm but in the reality of artistic production. This fits with a conception of art which emphasises the artist’s hand and the intractability of the visual medium, because it is the energetic striving to produce forms, rather than the finished form, which reveals the imaginative power of the artist. Medium reflexivity in the later prophecies: the ‘sublime Labours’ of form-​making This conception seems to motivate many uses of the term ‘sublime’ in the later prophecies, where it is often linked to the never-​ending process of form-​making, the ‘eternal labours’ of Los, who often appears as a blacksmith at his furnaces.56 The mise en abyme of Blake’s artistic labour is a prominent feature of the Albion cycle, where the plunge into formal reflection is literally abysmal, with a succession of formal states each embedded in the other and reflecting on the other. Medium reflexivity focuses on the endless production of visual forms at least as much as on the production of discourse  –​with both activities being eventually conflated at the end of Jerusalem, when Albion speaks ‘Words of Eternity in Human Form’.57 Of particular interest is the fact that the making of the concrete physical forms of Generation is explicitly presented as a sublime activity. In The Four Zoas, for example, Enitharmon, the female emanation of Los, asks the latter to ‘fabricate forms sublime /​Such as the piteous spectres may assimilate themselves into’.58 253

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Such an appeal establishes a clear link between the sublime and the central redemptive activity of the three poems, the purpose of Los and Enitharmon’s ‘terrible eternal labour’,59 that is to say the production of generated bodies and of the city of Golgonooza. The sublime is immanent to the compelling process which requires Los’s unrelenting effort to extract form out of formlessness and to reclaim humanity from the world of shadows into which it has fallen with Albion. At the other end of the cycle, form-​making is also necessary to the perpetuation of imaginative activity. The dynamics of the Blakean sublime is indeed also the agonising urgency to translate pure Vision, ‘Mental Forms’, into spatial terms, and therefore sensible representation. The central moment of the Eternal Man’s projection into an Emanation can be seen as Blake’s poetic transposition of this predicament:        Lo the Eternal Great Humanity To whom be Glory & Dominion Evermore Amen Walks among all his awful Family seen in every face As the breath of the Almighty. such are the words of man to man In the great Wars of Eternity, in fury of Poetic Inspiration, To build the Universe stupendous: Mental forms Creating But the Emanations trembled exceedingly, nor could they Live, because the life of Man was too exceedingly unbounded His joy became terrible to them they trembled & wept Crying with one voice. Give us a habitation & a place In which we may be hidden under the shadow of wings For if we who are but for a time, & who pass away in winter Behold these wonders of Eternity we shall consume60

The ‘wonders of Eternity’, the ‘Mental Forms’ of poetic inspiration, if they are not to burn and consume, require ‘a habitation & a place’. What is ‘too exceedingly unbounded’ calls for boundaries. This picture of the necessary interaction of Eden and Beulah, which is so central to Blake’s conception of the imagination, could also be read as a powerful symbolic rendering of the sublime. It vividly dramatises the incommensurability of Vision and sensible, bounded form, as well as the desperate longing for representation which this entails. It also stages the tormenting dilemma of representation, which is both a compelling necessity and a first step towards the 254

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realm of shadows: a contraction of vision and a division from pure mental life. The urgency and continued sense of inadequacy this entails are properly sublime. Since the above narrative can also be read as Blake’s mise en abyme of the verbal/​visual tensions he encountered in the production of his illuminated books (‘Mental forms’ being presented as verbal creations, of the ‘words of man to man’), one could see this sublime process immediately occurring in the visual projection of text in the prophecies. Blake’s ceaseless effort to prevent his designs from becoming a visual shrinking of the text could itself be said to be sublime. The visual forms we encounter through Blake’s illuminated world, in their diminutive format and thick lines, threaten to anchor the artist’s vision in the reduced material reality that he so much decries, yet Blake explores every possible way to prevent this rigidification. The renewal of the visual dimension with each new copy of an illuminated work is perhaps the most obvious aspect of the designs’ resistance to containment: these well-​ known colour and graphic variations reflect the artist’s continuous involvement in the visual aspect of his work, while they question the stability of the text itself in their shifting interaction with it. Even within a single copy, the illuminations are not static translations of the poetry. W. J. T Mitchell has demonstrated how Blake gives dynamism to his designs by using them as polysemic independent actors, moving alongside the text as a ‘counterpoint’ rather than as a literal transcription.61 To continue with my interpretation, this use of design could be seen as a sublime struggle for the perpetuation of visual movement, against the threat of formal petrifaction. In Jerusalem especially, the liberation of design from text contributes to a remarkable sense of creative energy. The semantic openness of illustrations placed at unexpected distances from their possible textual referents is one aspect of this dynamism. Another is the sheer variety of visual expressive means displayed in the prophecy. As Mitchell points out, Blake’s style in Jerusalem ranges from his most sophisticated use of fine lines to the roughest sketches.62 The resulting visual exuberance is particularly enhanced by his outstanding use of margins, in a manner unprecedented since the Songs. These very ornamented and stylistically varied designs stage their own drama of flux and mutability, with hybrid vegetable, human and fiery forms, free from any textual referent, defying the 255

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very notion of formal boundaries. Some have thematic links to the text: the right margin designs in plate 34, which show human forms fusing into vegetal surroundings, or those in plate 42, an indistinct chain of humans pressing on one another, are powerful visualisations of man’s fallen state. Others contradict the text, as with the open and leaping human figures of plate 36, which present a striking contrast with the description of Albion’s sickness. Yet what most strongly emerges is a powerful visual expression of exuberance and motion, working against the graphic rigidity of the text, almost fighting for space against it in its profuseness. These designs could be said to present their own self-​reflexive visualisation of the endless process of form-​making which the text so much revolves around. They also show that the artist’s drawing of visual boundaries is not a shrinking of mental forms, but a process carried forward by its own dynamic need for novelty and its excessiveness. Blake’s illuminations thus bring together the urgent striving for novelty as well as the pleasure in excessiveness that recent definitions of the sublime have identified. These sublime dynamics of form-​making must have been strongly felt by Blake, as the echoing mise en abyme in the poem suggests. It is significant that the labours of Los are called ‘sublime’ at the same time as they are presented as unceasing ‘contendings’: Yet ceasd he not from labouring at the roaring of his Forge With iron & brass Building Golgonooza in great contendings Till his Sons & Daughters came forth from the Furnaces At the sublime Labours for Los. Compelled the invisible Spectre To labours mighty63

More generally, the unceasing energy and Titanic activity of Los’s ‘sublime Labours’ may be read as an original conception of the sublime as a mode of production, anchored in Blake’s artistic practice, which went far beyond the contemporary thematic and stylistic adaptations of the Burkean sublime. Through his intense involvement in graphic and printing production, Blake was led to conceive of an experience of sublimity which was not a transcendental elevation, away from the physical world, but which was an integral part of his own artistic activity, endlessly driven forward by the provisional nature of artistic production, and by the necessity to resist formlessness, division or petrifaction for imaginative activity to 256

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continue. The sublimity of Los’s ‘sublime Labours’ resides precisely in this dynamic process, in the fact that his greatest creation, the city of Golgonooza, is ‘continually in the act of being formed’,64 and that in the midst of chaos ‘Is Built eternally the sublime Universe of Los & Enitharmon’.65 This conception of sublimity as sustained creative labour should account for what seems to isolate Blake’s conception in the artistic context of his time. It shows in particular that his refutation of Burke’s empirical approach was not meant to substitute a transcendental experience to one derived from the senses, but instead should be understood as an assertion of creative energy (intellectual and corporeal) against the passivity of affect. In this respect, it is important to note that in the later prophecies, Blake often uses the term ‘sublime’ in relation to Los’s most inspired, energetic and conquering labour. Thus, following Enitharmon’s request to ‘fabricate forms sublime’, ‘his hands divine inspired began /​To modulate his fires studious the loud roaring flames /​He vanquished with the strength of Art’.66 It is also quite significant that this unceasing labour itself becomes a cause of ‘delight’ and intoxication, thus conferring on creative activity the sublime delight that Burke derived from terror and a sense of helplessness. Blake possibly projected some of his own productive delight in this description of the Daughters of Los at work: Endless their labour, with bitter food. void of sleep, Tho hungry they labour: they rouze themselves anxious Hour after hour labouring at the whirling Wheel Many Wheels & as many lovely Daughters sit weeping Yet the intoxicating delight that they take in their work Obliterates every other evil67

The necessity to sustain creative work accounts for another major point of contention with Burke: indistinctness, ‘obscurity’ as Burke and Blake call it, far from being a prerequisite of sublimity is only the manifestation of the mind’s inability to cope with the energetic workings of the imagination. Consequently, seeing the sublime as a process is what allows Blake to restore distinctness of form and to proclaim its sublimity, as he does in his annotations to Reynolds. In the later prophecies, the continuing process of form-​making is primarily a protection against indistinctness, a means to rescue being

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from ‘Non Entity’ or ‘the Indefinite’. For this reason, Burke’s idea that the visual arts are too determinate to convey the sublime is irrelevant in Blake’s conception, which is based on the necessity to give visible forms, and more particularly on the vital moment of the artist’s drawing of the ‘bounding line’ that will extract form from formlessness: ‘Leave out this line and you leave out life itself; all is chaos again.’68 Outlining, the sublime gesture Following Enitharmon’s request to ‘fabricate forms sublime’, Los first ‘drew a line upon the walls of shining heaven /​And Enitharmon tinctured it with beams of blushing love’.69 The graphic process of drawing and outlining is presented, in the prophecies as well as the theoretical writings, as the initial moment of form-​making, that which retrieves form from nothingness. Its centrality in Blake’s conception of the sublime has to do with the fact that it articulates many of the tensions that contribute to the self-​perpetuating dynamism of artistic production. Indeed, while the act of drawing gives life to shapes, at the same time it contains the possibility of their closure and petrifaction, and the continuing labour of form-​making can be seen as drawing that cannot cease, for fear of falling either into the world of shadows or into that of selfhood. Blake’s original conception of line and drawing is articulated by a dialectic between the desire for finished forms and the necessity to keep visionary activity alive. As Eaves and Viscomi have argued, in his quest for immediate linear firmness as the expression of determined original thought, Blake sought to reconcile Romantic spontaneity with neoclassical perfection of form,70 which was a most challenging task, if not an impossible one:  ‘Blake advocated the aesthetic of the sketch but not its form  –​which, of course, raises theoretical and technical problems for an artist committed to line, a stylistic feature associated with last thoughts and reasons.’71 One could add that the ultimate object of Blake’s emphasis on line might not have been the reconciliation of spontaneity and reason (or formal perfection), but the very tension entailed by the conflation of such apparently contradictory aesthetics. The act of drawing or outlining may thus be seen as the visualisation of Blake’s dialectic thought, of his early conviction that ‘Without Contraries is no progression’,72 and of his realisation that the excess, energy and 258

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delight of the imagination must be contained, and actually need the boundaries of reason: ‘Energy is the only life and is from the Body and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy … Energy is Eternal Delight.’73 There is something of the Kantian sublime in the fascination with the inexhaustibility of spontaneous and energetic expression and in the idea that it can only be checked by the ‘circumference’ provided by reason: as with Kant, the very possibility of representation is questioned if the imagination (the faculty of representation according to Kant) can only provide an energetic surge and needs Reason to give it containment. At the same time, the Blakean line should not be seen as simply the ‘circumference’ or boundary drawn by reason, but as the gesture of tracing itself, as a marker of the artist’s identity. Blake’s emphasis on line as the dominant feature of his graphic style can indeed be understood as the expression, or rather projection, of the artist’s imagination, where the expressive motion of outlining matters more than the finished form. In his recurrent statements about line, Blake is not advocating academic perfection, but the expression of the artist’s identity and of his individual energy and desire. In his ‘Public Address’ (a defence of his engraving style against the practice of more conventional, and successful, contemporary engravers) he praises the originality of lines ‘Drawn with a firm and decided hand at once [with all its Spots & Blemishes which are beauties & not faults]’,74 while in ‘A Descriptive Catalogue’ he asserts: ‘neither character nor expression can exist without firm and determinate outline’.75 Morris Eaves sees such statements as illustrations of the fact that for Blake ‘making a line expresses identity’ and drawing has to be seen primarily as an act, ‘the fundamental artistic act’, rather than the objectified result of such an act.76 The imperfections of line, contrary to what Blake calls the ‘Blots & Blurs’ of colourists,77 are ‘beauties’ inasmuch as they make that act, and the decisive energy that drives it, visible. The beauty is that of the purposeful gesture which draws the line: ‘Every Line is the Line of Beauty it is only fumble & Bungle which cannot draw a Line this only is Ugliness[.]‌That is not a Line which Doubts & Hesitates in the Midst of its Course’.78 With this conception of drawing as stemming directly from the artist’s mind, Blake’s art is an apt illustration of the Romantic turn from mimesis to expression, which M.H. Abrams describes as a shift from a conception of the artist as a receptor and recorder of the external world, to an emphasis on 259

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the process whereby he/​she projects, ex-​presses his/​her own mental activity.79 The outline, therefore, is seen primarily as a gesture rather than a closure, which once again goes together with a conception of art as process: Blake’s ‘Bounding Line’ may perhaps be best understood as an attempt to give form without actually binding, an expressive play rather than an authoritative delimitation, in which the dynamic and expressive gesture of the artist overrides the concern of adequacy between imagined form and represented outline. This conception of line is also properly sublime rather than beautiful, if one is to follow Jean-​Luc Nancy’s distinction between the beautiful as formal adequacy and the sublime as properly sublimitas –​literally below the limit –​being the process of coming into touch with the absolute limit, which cannot be given formal representation and eventually defeats the imagination: The beautiful is the figure that figures itself in accord with itself, the strict accord of its contour with its design. Form or contour is limitation, which is the concern of the beautiful: the unlimited, to the contrary, is the concern of the sublime.80

The sublime, as Nancy shows, has less to do with any form or design than with the very gesture of tracing, which can only point to its own process: One would have to say that the unlimited is not the number but the gesture of the infinite.… That is, the gesture by which all (finite) form gets carried away into the absence of form. It is the gesture of formation, of figuration itself (of Ein-​bilding), but only insofar as the formless itself stands out –​ without itself taking on any form –​along the form that traces itself, and presents itself.81 For the thought of the sublime, the contour, the frame, and the trace point to nothing but themselves –​and even that is saying too much: they do not point at all, but present (themselves), and their presentation presents its own interruption, the contour, frame, or trace.82

Nancy’s emphasis on the gesture of delineation in the experience of the sublime gives a good idea of what is at stake in Blake’s own adamant defence of line against the prevailing pictorial idiom of his own time: line, as it is being drawn, could be understood as the locus for the sublime conflation of the finite and the infinite, form and formlessness, sensible representation and what exceeds sensible 260

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representation. The process of drawing the line could be said to contain in itself the sense of incommensurability that is at the heart of the sublime, and as this sublime dynamics can only be sustained if the gesture of tracing itself continues, without ever reaching closure, Blake’s own visual prolificacy finds its justification here. Form, with him, is ‘carried away’ by its yearning for infinity, which requires both the perpetuation of outline, and its expansion:           for every-​ thing in Eternity is translucent: The Circumference is Within: Without, is formed the Selfish Center And the Circumference still expands going forward to Eternity.83

The reversibility, translucence and continuing expansion of the circumference is Blake’s image for form in Eternity. It is also an apt transcription of a sublimity which, as Nancy puts it, takes place at the edge of any limit, which strives for form and at the same time exceeds any limitation. Blake’s immersion in the realities of graphic and pictorial form-​ making, however, adds a more concrete meaning to the sublimity of delineation. While it actualises the image of the gesture, it also shows how much such a gesture is anchored in materiality, being first and foremost the extraction of form from formlessness and the assertion of the artist’s imaginative energy in the process of transforming the plastic medium into meaningful form. The thick, granulated lines of relief etching, with their earthy hues, in many of the illuminated books are a constant reminder of the resistance of matter, and the unfinished quality of this linearism suggests that the struggle for the absolute takes place not in a metaphoric delineation that defies representation, but in the actual process of drawing or etching, in the encounter between the imagined form and the materials for its representation. The coarse russet outlines of Jerusalem, so barely distinguishable from the pervasive bodily fibres that illustrate the theme of corporeal unravelling and weaving, are a powerful expression of this sublime contention. By relocating the sublime within the process of artistic production, by making it immanent to creative activity, Blake provides a powerful refutation of Burke’s antipictorial conception. The Enquiry’s criticism of visual determinacy as an obstacle to sublimity becomes irrelevant in an interpretation according to which the act of drawing a line, of giving determinate form without binding, is 261

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itself the locus of the sublime. Yet, Blake knew the Enquiry well, and may have understood its most far-​reaching implications. His awareness that the sublime hinges on the incommensurability between vision and its material visualisation may have owed something to Burke’s own reflections on the gap between artistic representations and what exceeds them. His emphasis on the sublimity of the artistic processes and media was not far removed from the treatise’s reflection on the open-​endedness and dynamism of the poetic medium. More importantly perhaps, Burke’s emphasis on terror as the most powerful source of the sublime seems to have made a significant impression on him, not just in his imagery, but also in his reflections on the process of artistic production itself. In his prophecies, the urge to extract forms from formlessness is repeatedly driven by the terror of falling further into shapeless matter. And in his ‘theory’ of art as a whole, drawing a line may be seen as a gesture that must be endlessly continued for fear of closure. Blake’s sublime ‘terror’, if there is any, might well reside in the threat of interrupted visual production –​and consequently imaginative activity  –​which would happen with the discovery of closed and ‘perfect’ outlines. This displacement suggests that Blake understood the radical implications of Burke’s theory for artistic representation. By focusing on the tormenting process of giving visual form to the unpresentable, Blake seems to have conflated Burke’s aesthetics of terror with the failure of visual representation that the Enquiry outlined. He also seems to have understood what Lyotard made explicit much later:  that the Burkean sublime, with its emphasis on obscurity, privation and what exceeds presentation, connected the fear of nothingness with the necessity to create. Notes 1 An earlier version of this chapter was published as ‘William Blake’s Visual Sublime: The “Eternal Labours” ’, European Romantic Review 21:1 (2010), 29–​48. 2 The phrase is used in a letter to Thomas Butts, written on 6 July 1803, which suggests that the ‘Sublime Allegory’ is the poem Milton. However, it can be inferred to apply equally to the other two major prophecies, Jerusalem and The Four Zoas, whose production overlapped with that of Milton and which share many thematic and ‘narrative’ developments with it. David V. Erdman, The Complete Poetry and Prose of William

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Blake, rev. edn (New  York:  Doubleday, 1988), p.  730 (henceforth Erdman: all quotations of Blake’s work come from Erdman’s edition). 3 William Blake, Jerusalem, 59: 21; Erdman, p. 209. 4 Blake, Jerusalem, 98: 22; Erdman, p. 370. 5 Anthony Blunt, The Art of William Blake (New  York:  Columbia University Press, 1959), pp. 13–​21. 6 Morton D. Paley, Energy and the Imagination: A Study of the Development of Blake’s Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), pp. 1–​60; Morton D. Paley, The Continuing City: William Blake’s Jerusalem (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), pp. 57–​66. 7 Morton D. Paley, The Apocalyptic Sublime (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986), pp. 71–​100. 8 David M. Baulch, ‘“To rise from generation”:  The Sublime Body in Blake’s Illuminated Books’, Word and Image 13:4 (1997), 340–​64. 9 Steven Vine, ‘Blake’s Material Sublime’, Studies in Romanticism 41:2 (2002), 237–​57, here 243. 10 Vine, ‘Blake’s Material Sublime’, 247. 11 Vine, ‘Blake’s Material Sublime’, 248. 12 Tilottama Rajan, The Supplement of Reading: Figures of Understanding in Romantic Theory and Practice (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990); Donald Ault, Narrative Unbound:  Re-​ visioning Blake’s The Four Zoas (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press, 1987); Fred Dortort, The Dialectic of Vision: A Contrary Reading of William Blake’s Jerusalem (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Arts, 1998). 13 Mitchell’s recognition of these features in Milton leads him to call it a ‘radical comedy’, by which he means that the poem should be seen as ‘a kind of living theater, open-​ended, inconclusive, and reaching out to involve its audience in the action’. W. J.  T. Mitchell, ‘Blake’s Radical Comedy: Dramatic Structure as Meaning in Milton’, in Stuart Curran and Joseph A. Wittreich, Jr (eds), Blake’s Sublime Allegory: Essays on The Four Zoas, Milton, and Jerusalem (Madison, WI:  University of Wisconsin Press, 1973), pp. 281–​307, here p. 282. 14 Vincent A. De Luca, Words of Eternity:  Blake and the Poetics of the Sublime (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 30–​1. 15 Vincent A. De Luca, ‘A Wall of Words: The Sublime as Text’, in Nelson Hilton and Thomas A. Vogler (eds), Unnam’d Forms:  Blake and Textuality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), pp. 218–​41, here p. 231. 16 Peter Otto, Blake’s Critique of Transcendence:  Love, Jealousy, and the Sublime in The Four Zoas (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 26. 17 William Blake, ‘Public Address’, Erdman, p. 579. 18 Blake, ‘Public Address’, Erdman, pp. 575–​6.

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9 William Blake, ‘Annotations to Reynolds’, Erdman, p. 652. 1 20 Sir Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art (1769–​1790), ed. Robert R. Wark (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997), p. 119. 21 Blake, ‘Annotations to Reynolds’, Erdman, p. 658. 22 Blake, ‘Annotations to Reynolds’, Erdman, pp. 660–​1. 23 William Blake, Milton 41: 5, Erdman, p. 142. 24 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, ed. Adam Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), II, ii, p. 53; my emphasis. Unless otherwise indicated, further references are to this edition. 25 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, II, xvi, p. 75. 26 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, II, iii, p. 55. 27 Blake, Jerusalem 70: 19, Erdman, p. 224. 28 Blake, Jerusalem 70: 15, Erdman, p. 224. 29 Blake, Milton, I, 29: 17–​20, Erdman, p. 127. 30 Blake, letter to Thomas Butts, 6 July 1803, Erdman, p. 730. 31 Thomas Frosch, The Awakening of Albion: The Renovation of the Body in the Poetry of William Blake (Ithaca, NY:  Cornell University Press, 1974), p. 32. 32 Frosch, The Awakening of Albion, p. 41. 33 William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Erdman, p. 41. 34 Blake, ‘Annotations to Reynolds’, Erdman, pp. 646–​7. 35 William Blake, ‘A Descriptive Catalogue’, Erdman, pp. 541–​2. 36 W. J. T. Mitchell, Blake’s Composite Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), pp. 20–​4. 37 Mitchell, Composite Art, p. 203. 38 Robert N. Essick, William Blake, Printmaker (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1980); Joseph Viscomi, Blake and the Idea of the Book (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1993); Michael Phillips, The Creation of the Songs: From Manuscript to Illuminated Printing (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 2000), esp. pp. 15–​ 31 and 95–​108. 39 Many examples of this classical hierarchy come to mind. The fourth discourse is Reynolds’s most complete illustration of the idea that ‘[t]‌he value and rank of every art is in proportion to the mental labour employed in it, or the mental pleasure produced by it’ (Reynolds, Discourses, p. 57). 40 Robert N.  Essick, ‘How Blake’s Body Means’, in Hilton and Vogler, Unnam’d Forms, p. 206. 41 Viscomi, Blake and the Idea of the Book, p. 32. 42 Essick, William Blake, Printmaker, p. 120. 43 Viscomi, Blake and the Idea of the Book, p. 121. 44 Blake, ‘Public Address’, Erdman, p. 576.

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45 Robert N. Essick, ‘Jerusalem and Blake’s Final Works’, in Morris Eaves (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to William Blake (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 251–​71, here p. 259. 46 For a more detailed analysis of this particular work, see my essay ‘Parody, Terror and the Making of Forms:  Blake’s Aesthetics of the Sublime in The Book of Urizen’, Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net 59–​60 (2011). doi.org/​10.7202/​1013275ar. 47 Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2000), §§26–​7, pp. 137–​43. See Chapter 2. 48 Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, §23, p. 128. 49 Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, §25, p. 131. 50 Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, §23, p. 129. 51 De Luca, Words of Eternity, p. 25. 52 Blake, letter to Thomas Butts, 6 July 1803, Erdman, p. 730. 53 Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, p. 129. 54 William Blake, The Four Zoas 98: 22, Erdman, p. 370. 55 Blake, ‘Descriptive Catalogue’, Erdman, pp. 541–​2. 56 Blake, Jerusalem 53: 20, Erdman, p. 203. 57 Blake, Jerusalem 95: 9, Erdman, p. 255. 58 Blake, The Four Zoas 98 [90]: 22–​3, Erdman, p. 370. 59 Blake, Jerusalem 12: 24, Erdman, p. 155. 60 Blake, Milton 30: 15–​27, Erdman, p. 129. 61 Mitchell, Composite Art, pp. 9–​12. 62 Mitchell, Composite Art, p. 194. 63 Blake, Jerusalem 10: 62–​5; Jerusalem 11: 1; Erdman, p. 154. 64 Paley, Continuing City, p. 136. 65 Blake, Jerusalem 59: 21, Erdman, p. 209; my emphasis. 66 Blake, The Four Zoas 98 [90]: 25–​7, Erdman, p. 370. 67 Blake, Jerusalem 59: 30–​5, Erdman, p. 209. 68 Blake, ‘Descriptive Catalogue’, Erdman, p. 550. 69 Blake, The Four Zoas 98 [90]: 35–​6, Erdman, p. 370. 70 Morris Eaves, William Blake’s Theory of Art (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1982), pp. 11–​15; Joseph Viscomi, Blake and the Idea of the Book, p. 39. 71 Viscomi, Blake and the Idea of the Book, p. 39. 72 Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Erdman, p. 34. 73 Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Erdman, p. 34. 74 Blake, ‘Public Address’, Erdman, p. 576; the second part of the sentence was deleted. 75 Blake, ‘Descriptive Catalogue’, Erdman, p. 549. 76 Eaves, William Blake’s Theory of Art, pp. 44, 19. 77 Blake, ‘Public Address’, Erdman, p. 576. 78 Blake, ‘Public Address’, Erdman, p. 575.

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79 Meyer H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953), pp. 21–​4; 48. 80 Jean-​ Luc Nancy, ‘The Sublime Offering’, in Jean-​ François Courtine (ed.), Jeffrey S. Librett (trans.), Of the Sublime: Presence in Question (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), p. 35. 81 Nancy, ‘The Sublime Offering’, p. 36. 82 Nancy, ‘The Sublime Offering’, p. 42. 83 Blake, Jerusalem 71: 6–​8, Erdman, p. 225.

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u Turner: from sublime association to sublime energy

Turner’s formal innovations have often been considered to anticipate impressionism, sometimes even abstraction, allowing them to be placed by some critics in the modernist tradition rather than the early nineteenth-​century context.1 They could just as meaningfully be understood as the culmination and synthesis of British pictorial responses to the representational issues raised by the eighteenth-​century debate on the sublime. Without mentioning the Philosophical Enquiry, Andrew Wilton sees Turner as the painter who put an end to the decades of uncertainties that had followed Burke’s first doubts about the sublimity of painting, and finally ‘grasp[ed] the sublime bull by the horns’.2 Other critics see his pictorial production more specifically as a realisation of the Burkean sublime. According to John Dixon Hunt: [N]‌o artist more than Turner, who started to paint in the 1790s, exemplified and revitalized Burke’s sublime aesthetic. Indeed, what Burke had written about Milton’s lines on Satan assumes in retrospect a prophetic vision of Turnerian subjects: ‘images of a tower, an archangel, the sun rising through mists, or in an eclipse, the ruin of monarchs, and the revolutions of kingdoms.’ Compare those ‘great and confused images’ with, among others, Dolbadern Castle, North Wales; The Angel standing in the Sun; Norham Castle, Sunrise; Ancient Rome:  Agrippina landing with the Ashes of Germanicus; or The Decline of the Carthaginian Empire. In all these sublime studies Turner seems to be exploring and extending the full repertoire of effects and means that Burke had announced.3

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Hunt goes on to argue that Turner’s pictorial explorations were driven by a constant quest for the sublime, which led him to seek ‘adequate … visual vocabularies for the sublime’. Significantly, he also suggests that the artist’s well-​known reliance on literary subjects and verbal adjuncts (such as titles or quotations) owed something to ‘Burke’s stress upon the advantage that poetry possesses over painting as a sublime structure’.4 In other words, that Turner resorted to poetic material, and even created his own, in order to make up for the deficiencies of painting. It is correct to identify these two complementary developments as the dual legacy of Burke’s Enquiry. Their connection, however, may be viewed in terms of a more profound, if not necessarily conscious, response to Burke’s aesthetics. Hunt suggests that Turner felt he needed the support of poetry in order to reach the sublime. But it is also possible to understand his quest for a visual vocabulary of the sublime as an emulation of the poetic medium, and as an attempt to demonstrate that the pictorial medium could be sublime in itself, in its processes and striving for form, rather than through its dependence on poetry. As his literary contemporaries revived Burke’s doubts about the sublimity of the visual arts, and as Lessing’s evocation of the ‘narrow limits of painting’ became a topos of Romantic criticism, Turner was naturally led to reflect about the relationship between the two sister arts and poetry’s potential superiority as a vehicle of the sublime. His own poetic endeavours, in his ‘Verse Book’ of c. 1805–​10, in The Fallacies of Hope, the occasional verses which he appended to some of his Royal Academy exhibits, as well as throughout his sketchbooks, clearly suggest that he relied on poetry to intensify the aesthetic experience. At the same time, he also expressed the conviction that the pictorial medium, while distinct from the poetic medium, could rival the latter’s affective powers. As he was preparing his Royal Academy lectures in 1809, Turner wrote a long note in his Perspective sketchbook in which he insisted on the differences between ‘the painter’s beauties’ and the poet’s. He argued that the former were ‘definable’, while the latter were ‘imaginary’ and related to ‘associations’. He explained the difficulty of translating a poetic passage into pictorial form, complained of the disgrace that met painters when they failed to convey a poet’s thoughts and concluded that a painter ‘should be allowed or considered equal [to the poet] in his merits and having conceived his differences of method 268

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should be allowed to have produced what is exclusively his own’.5 He also examined the difficulty of conveying motion in painting, admitting that in such endeavours the painter had to strive for what the poet could easily convey in words: One word is sufficient to establish what is the greatest difficulty of the painter’s art: to produce wavy air, as some call the wind … to give that wind … he must give the cause as well as the effect … with mechanical hints of the strength of nature perpetually trammeled with mechanical shackles.6

As such comments suggest, Turner was keenly aware of the contemporary debate about the respective powers of painting and poetry, he knew of Lessing’s distinction between the temporal dimension of the latter and the staticity of the former and he was especially eager to render painting more dynamic. In other words, his dependence on literary material went hand in hand with a real desire to reassert the powers of the pictorial medium. According to James Heffernan, Turner’s rivalry with poetry ‘springs from a relentlessly contentious temperament’, which it is well known led him to compete with old masters like Claude and contemporary artists like Wilkie and Constable.7 It could especially be seen as a reaction to those literary critics who excluded mimetic pictorial representation from the aesthetics of the sublime. Proving that painting could convey the sublime as convincingly as poetry would have been a logical ambition for an artist who ‘thrived on emulation’.8 Heffernan, who focuses on Turner’s own poetic creation, briefly suggests that one of the artist’s intentions, by ‘seizing the role of the poet’ and creating verse that illustrated his pictorial work, was to ‘refut[e]‌Burke’s contention that painting cannot match the sublimity of poetry’, by ‘[c]hallenging the exclusionary claims made for words’.9 In this chapter, I contend that this ambition pervades much of Turner’s production, leading him to provide one of the most adequate pictorial responses to the challenge initiated by Burke’s Enquiry. One which implied much more than a simple assimilation of the topoi to which the Enquiry had contributed, but involved a radical transformation of the pictorial medium, and of its processes in particular, in order to allow it to rival poetry in suggestiveness and emotive power. I also argue that this transformation of the pictorial medium was as much the culmination and outcome of the experimental processes that had been set in motion by artists before him as a conscious response to a clearly perceived 269

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challenge. This contention requires examining the various channels through which eighteenth-​century theories of the sublime reached Turner, before assessing his exploration of pictorial processes which attempt to overcome the mimetic limitations of visual representation and articulate the presentation of the unpresentable. Poetic endeavours In Chapters 6 and 7, I have already included Turner’s work among contemporary examples of experiments with unlimitation in watercolour sketches, book illustrations and architectural drawing. His interest in these ‘minor’ practices has underlined his awareness of the formal redefinitions that the aesthetics of the sublime entailed for visual media. More generally, one could say that Turner’s art as a whole was taking to its logical conclusion a reflection about the artistic medium which had been set in motion by the quest for the sublime and by the growing awareness of inadequacies inherent to mimetic pictorial representation. That Turner’s aspiration to sublimity and infinity led to striking formal innovations and subversions of orthodox mimesis is undeniable. Whether he deliberately wished to ‘refut[e]‌Burke’s contention that painting cannot match the sublimity of poetry’, as Heffernan puts it, is more difficult to ascertain. To a great extent, the Turnerian sublime was the product of converging discourses and artistic practices, together with the artist’s experience of contemporary social and political turmoils, rather than a direct response to Burke’s Enquiry. It was a wide-​ranging conception, which owed as much to poetic sources as to theoretical reflections, as much to Augustan aesthetics as to Romantic developments. The classical sublime of Thomson’s Seasons, as has been amply demonstrated, was a determining influence, informing both Turner’s poetic endeavours and his visual practice.10 The poet’s rigorous and emotional descriptions of nature, of light and of the sun in particular, seem to have provided the basis for an atmospheric, even dramatic conception of landscape. It may especially have inspired Turner’s original motif of a blinding sun, facing the artist/​viewer and dissolving all shapes in its blaze, which increasingly pervades Turner’s landscapes from the mid-​1810s. Even though such views provided a convincing visualisation of Burke’s reflections about the sublime effect of dazzling sunlight which ‘overpowers the sense’ 270

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when ‘immediately exerted on the eye’,11 Turner is more likely to have had in mind the following lines from Thomson’s ‘Summer’: ’Tis raging noon; and, vertical, the sun Darts on the head direct his forceful rays. O’er heaven and earth, far as the ranging eye Can sweep, a dazzling deluge reigns; and all From pole to pole is undistinguish’s blaze.12

The poetry of Thomson, encountered by Turner at a formative time, provided a vision which allowed the artist to reconcile a classical ideal of landscape with flights of imagination and emotional intensity. Its sublimity, however, was closer to Addison’s conception of natural greatness, which amazes and stretches the imagination beyond its capacity, than to the Burkean aesthetics of terror. It filled and expanded the artist’s representational abilities, rather than undermined them. While the desire for such a fulfilling sublime could be felt throughout Turner’s pictorial output, including in the sun-​ filled landscapes of his late years, in which dazzlement seems to lead to complete formal dissolution, other poetic influences introduced discontinuities and anxieties which were more characteristic of the Burkean or the Kantian sublime. Milton’s poetry, for example, was for Turner alternately a source of fulfilling elevation and terror, just as it had been for eighteenth-​century writers on the sublime. As Jerrold Ziff pointed out, Turner’s enthusiasm for Milton was first made obvious by quotations from L’Allegro and Paradise Lost’s description of Evening in his perspective lectures. These tranquil and yet highly imaginative descriptions had been selected by Reynolds as examples of the flights of imagination that were within the grasp of painters, and did not exactly challenge classical representational conventions.13 Turner turned to more formally disruptive scenes in his 1834 vignette illustrations for Paradise Lost, notably the ‘Mustering of the Warrior Angels’ and ‘The Fall of the Rebel Angels’, whose vortical composition around a halo of light was to provide a template for later apocalyptic scenes like Shade and Darkness –​the Evening of the Deluge and Light and Colour (Goethe’s Theory) –​The Morning after the Deluge (exh. 1843). In these designs, Turner attempts to convey not just the terrifying subject matter, but the Miltonic poetic style which had been praised by Burke for its ability to hurry the mind ‘out of itself’ through 271

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‘a croud of great and confused ideas’. The formal dynamism of the vortical designs along which are faintly aligned or hurled the masses of Warrior Angels is enhanced by the bold juxtaposition of cosmic objects and epic action. As Pigott points out, ‘Turner has combined the narrative of the mustering of the angels of light with the representation of the primordial separation of the sun from the “globose” moon and the stars –​“et deviderent lucem et tenebras”.’14 One could add that the combination of semantic excess, allusive shapes and compositional dynamism, especially in the reduced format of the vignette, is dizzying in a manner which Burke had associated with poetic expression. In these tiny designs, Turner seems to have aimed to demonstrate that the exhilarating confusion of the Miltonic sublime, contrary to what had been claimed in the Enquiry, was within the reach of visual artists. It is in Byron’s poetry, and more specifically Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–​18), that Turner was to find a poetic conception of sublimity that was specifically articulated by the unfulfilling tension towards the invisible or the unpresentable.15 Byron’s descriptions of Italy and Greece in particular, with their tragic sense of the irretrievable ‘sublimities’ of the past, which having ‘relaps’d to chaos’16 may only be experienced through ruins and decayed forms, and immaterially apprehended by the artist’s imagination, was to inform his own vision of the Mediterranean and of the decline of empires in the last three decades of his career. Turner and Byron shared a fascination for vestiges of past civilisations which rested on the terrifying awareness that no artistic form could adequately retrieve what had been destroyed by the passing of time. As John Dixon Hunt argues, their responses to Italy rested on a shared conviction that artistic representation would always be inadequate to the splendours that had been lost. Just as Byron admitted that ‘there need no words, nor terms precise’ to ‘describe the undescribable’,17 Turner surrounded the architectural forms of Rome and Venice with a luminous haze which more than ever in his work connoted formal transience and artistic endeavour. His paintings of Venice in particular drew upon Byron’s oneiric description of the declining city as the ghost of past splendours, whose glory may only be conjured up by an enchanter, in the opening lines of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage IV: I stood in Venice, on the Bridge of Sighs; A palace and a prison on each hand:

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I saw from out the wave her structures rise As from the stroke of the enchanter’s wand: A thousand years their cloudy wings expand Around me, and a dying glory smiles O’er the far times when many a subject land Looked to the winged Lion’s marble piles, Where Venice sate in state, throned on her hundred isles!

As the rest of the canto suggests, the poet himself may play the part of the enchanter, by recapturing what has been lost through his imagination: as Venice’s palaces are ‘crumbling to the shore’, his task is to repeople them with ‘beings of the mind’.18 Turner, who quoted Byron’s opening lines to accompany his 1840 Venice, Bridge of Sighs, seems to have striven to play a similar role. His paintings of the city convey the impression that it rises from the waves ‘as from the stroke of the enchanter’s wand’, and compellingly plunge the viewer into the languid and misty atmosphere through the beguiling use of painterly texture. And yet, at the same time, the dreamlike appearance of Venetian palaces whose reflections in the water seem more real than the buildings themselves suggests that the past splendour is vanishing, that solid forms are ‘crumbling to the shore’, and that not even art may retrieve what is caught in an inevitable process of erasure (see for example Figure 29). This shared conception of the sublime was Burkean in many respects: its main features were indeterminacy, unfinished or impermanent forms, as well as a terrifying sense of destruction and, ultimately, vacuity. It was a sublime of privation and longing, rather than a fulfilling one, which Burke had intimated when he had argued: ‘All general privations are great, because they are all terrible; Vacuity, Darkness, Solitude and Silence.’19 But these themes, initially developed by Burke’s Enquiry, were given a wholly new dimension by both the poet and the painter, who were both adapting the aesthetic discourse available to them, and responding in a similar manner to the contemporary context of revolution and war. The Napoleonic wars had filled them not so much with patriotic pride as with a pessimistic vision of the course of history and a tendency to see all human achievements (heroic or artistic) as ultimately futile. As David Blayney Brown points out, Byron’s depiction of Waterloo as a field of mingled corpses, soon to be absorbed by the earth, ‘Rider and horse, –​friend, foe, –​in one red burial blent’,20 and the 273

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Figure 29  J. M. W. Turner, The Dogano, San Giorgio, Citella, from the Steps of the Europa, 1842. visual transcription of it by Turner’s own Field of Waterloo (1818), struck a discordant note amid historical narratives that emphasised national glory and moral improvement.21 This grim vision was not limited to battle scenes: just as Britain emerged victorious from the wars, a frightening sense of human transience and insignificance began to pervade Turner’s historical landscapes and was echoed by Byron’s famous reflections on the course of empires: There is the moral of all human tales; ’Tis but the same rehearsal of the past, First Freedom, and then Glory –​when that fails, Wealth, vice, corruption, –​barbarism at last. And History, with all her volumes vast, Hath but one page22

With both Turner and Byron, the sic transit gloria mundi trope was revived and fused with a new terror and fear of ultimate emptiness, which bore out the full implications of the Burkean sublime. Just like Byron’s poetry, Turner’s pendant paintings of decline and fall, or ancient glory and modern ruin –​for example his Carthage paintings 274

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or his views of ‘Ancient’ and ‘Modern’ Rome –​conveyed terror less through the depiction of violent action than through the evocation of the interchangeability of historical fates and ultimate erasure of human inscription. Their common intuition of the blankness which eventually threatens all cultural productions, and of the necessity to give artistic form to what is already irretrievable, has much in common with the way Lyotard understood the Burkean sublime, as driven by the necessity to fill the void. Theoretical transmissions While poets appear to have played an important role in shaping Turner’s conception of the sublime, theoretical influences were also at work. To a great extent, his interest in the aesthetic debate seems to have grown with his rising status at the Royal Academy, especially following his election as Professor of Perspective in 1807. Jerrold Ziff and Andrew Wilton have shown that Turner’s preparations for his lectures involved an intensive period of reading, evidence of which is recorded in his sketchbooks for the years 1807–​11, as well as in his lecture notes.23 These theoretical reflections include references to Charles Dufresnoy, Roger De Piles, Jonathan Richardson, Reynolds’s and Opie’s lectures, as well as to the two versions of Mark Akenside’s Pleasures of Imagination (1744; 1772). The Derbyshire sketchbook of 1808, notably, includes notes on Hugh Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres as well as Reynolds’s Discourses.24 Burke’s Enquiry does not figure among the theoretical sources mentioned by Turner, and there is no evidence that he read the treatise at that time. However, his main sources on the interactions between painting and poetry, on the sublime and on imagination would have mediated important aspects of Burke’s thought for him. Reynolds, as I have argued, confirmed Burke’s distinction between the powers of poetry and painting and insistence on the greater suggestiveness of poetry, but also appears to have shared aspects of Burke’s anti-​rationalist aesthetic sensibility in his later discourses, which praise genius and imagination. Turner’s lecture notes, which express admiration for the former president of the Royal Academy, suggest that these aspects of the discourses were particularly influential. They especially link Reynolds’s teachings with the recognition of the genius of Michelangelo and with reflections about the 275

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translation of poetry into painting.25 Jerrold Ziff considers that Turner’s analysis of verse in his fourth lecture was connected with Reynolds’s own discussions of painter and poet in his thirteenth discourse, adding that this was ‘the discourse where Reynolds, the arch defender of art as a rational and intellectual pursuit, accepts the pre-​ eminence of the individual, or subjective imagination’.26 Ziff also underlines the central influence of Mark Akenside’s The Pleasures of Imagination, which is mentioned in three of the perspective lecture manuscripts.27 Turner seems to have found, in Akenside’s combination of Platonism and praise of the creative mind, support for his own conviction that the artist’s imagination should be able to rise above academic rules. His analysis of Poussin’s Deluge as an example of such emancipation is followed by a meaningful quotation from Akenside’s verses:        For, amid The various forms which this full world presents Like rivals to his choice, what human breast E’er doubts, before the transient and minute, To prize the vast, the stable, the sublime?28

Here, Turner reveals his interest in the classical conception of the sublime as an elevated, or ideal, form of the beautiful. But Akenside’s poem also prompts Turner to reflect about the ability of painting to affect strongly through association of ideas. His fourth lecture paraphrased and quoted Akenside’s reflections about the ‘mysterious ties, the busy power /​Of Memory’ which set in motion the powers of the mind in the creative process,29 suggesting that similar operations could occur in the reception of an artwork and contribute to the affective impact of a painting. Significantly, he argued that the more terrifying aspects of Poussin’s Deluge, its ‘deep tone, horrid interval of approaching horror in gloom’, summoned ‘those mysterious ties which appear wholly dependent upon the associations’.30 In other words, Akenside’s associationism allowed him to explain how painting could convey the terror that Burke had said to be beyond its grasp. Akenside may also have mediated aspects of Burke’s aesthetics for Turner, since his revised version of his poem, which Turner also read and quoted,31 seems to have taken into account some of the innovations introduced by the Enquiry. Jeffrey Hart, who notices 276

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the sharper opposition drawn between the beautiful and the sublime in the 1757 version of Book I, suggests that Akenside could have encountered this important aspect of Burke’s thought by having access to the manuscript of the Enquiry, before its publication. He also points at lexical changes which may reflect the Burkean emphasis on terror and privation.32 The latter aspect of Burke’s aesthetics, however, was most likely mediated by the writings of Hugh Blair, whose Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres Turner read around 1808. As noted by Brown, he copied some of their discussions on ‘Style’ and ‘Structure of Sentence’ in his Derbyshire sketchbook.33 He must have been equally interested in the Lectures’ reflections on sublimity, which, as Blair himself acknowledged, owed ‘several ingenious and original thoughts’ to the Enquiry.34 Without fully endorsing Burke’s emphasis on terror as the main source of the sublime,35 Blair clearly distinguished the sublime from the beautiful in terms which recalled the Enquiry: The emotion is certainly delightful; but it is altogether of the serious kind: a degree of awfulness, and solemnity, even approaching to severity, commonly attends it when at its height; very distinguishable from the more gay and brisk emotion raised by beautiful objects.36

Blair also followed Burke in stressing the ‘mighty power and strength’ of nature and ‘all the uncommon violence of the elements’ as a constant source of sublime ideas,37 possibly bolstering Turner’s own interest in the natural sublime and elemental energy. In a very close paraphrase of the Enquiry, the Lectures also brought to the fore some of Burke’s most striking thematic innovations. Thus, Blair followed Burke when he asserted: ‘All ideas of the solemn and awful kind, and even bordering on the terrible, tend greatly to assist the Sublime; such as darkness, solitude, and silence.’38 The original passage read: ‘All general privations are great, because they are all terrible; Vacuity, Darkness, Solitude and Silence.’39 More importantly for Turner, Blair drew very closely on the Enquiry’s sections on obscurity and indistinctness. Although he did not repeat Burke’s criticism of painting, his paraphrase necessarily drew attention to the limitations of distinct and clear representations: Obscurity, we are farther to remark, is not unfavourable to the sublime. Though it render the object indistinct, the impressions, however, may be

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great; for, as an ingenious Author [Burke] has well observed, it is one thing to make an idea clear, and another to make it affecting to the imagination; and the imagination may be strongly affected, and, in fact, often is so, by objects of which we have no clear conception. Thus we see, that almost all the descriptions given us of the appearances of supernatural Beings, carry some Sublimity, though the conceptions which they afford us be confused and indistinct.40

Significantly, the above discussion of obscurity is illustrated by the very same extract from the Book of Job that Burke quotes to exemplify ‘the terrible uncertainty’ of obscure descriptions. But instead of leading to the disparaging comparison with painting which may be found in the Enquiry, it is followed by a reflection about distance and indistinctness that may have influenced some of Turner’s later stylistic choices: In general, all objects that are greatly raised above us, or far removed from us, either in space or in time, are apt to strike us as great. Our viewing them, as through the mist of distance or antiquity, is favourable to the impressions of their sublimity.41

In his historical landscapes, and in his views of Italy in particular, Turner appears to have taken quite literally this idea that the ‘mist of distance or antiquity’ could be a source of sublimity. Once again, his pendant paintings of ancient and modern Rome or his Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage –​Italy, in which the lost or ruined monuments of the past are bathed in a suggestive mist, come to mind. Blair’s very literal adaptation of the Enquiry played a crucial role by removing the most contentious elements of the treatise’s discussions of painting. It renewed Burke’s combination of indistinctness and thematics of terror, but in terms that painters could more readily adopt. For these reasons, it may be considered as an important mediation of Burke’s aesthetic ideas for Turner. What is more, although it suppressed their most challenging dimension for painters, by focusing exclusively on literary examples (mostly the ones which had been selected by Burke) it implicitly called on visual artists to rival the sublime powers of poetry. Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps: from sublime association to sublime energy A few years into Turner’s academic career, such inflections of the Burkean sublime, together with the competing aesthetic theories and 278

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poetic influences that I have underlined, coalesced into a conception that proved to be artistically liberating. The preparatory theoretical work to the Lectures in particular seems to have crystallised these various influences into a new awareness that the sublime could be located as much in the visible energy of the pictorial medium and of the expressive gesture as in sublime themes, motifs and associations. This realisation brought to fruition the visual explorations of the sublime that Turner and his predecessors had hitherto carried out, and provided one of the most satisfactory responses to the doubts that had been raised half a century earlier by Edmund Burke concerning the possibility of a pictorial sublime. The painting which best illustrates this turning point is the 1812 Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps (Figure 30 and Plate 4), which may primarily be interpreted as a remarkable exercise in the sublime. To understand this pivotal moment, another likely Scottish influence may be mentioned here, although it does not figure among the theories mentioned in Turner’s lecture notes or sketchbooks. Archibald Alison’s Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste (1790), as mentioned in Chapter 2, explained how works of imagination could surpass natural sources of sublimity by triggering

Figure  30  J. M.  W. Turner, Snow Storm:  Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps, 1812. 279

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associations of ideas. More specifically, Alison’s discussion of association provided a particularly adequate theoretical justification for Turner’s attempts to render his landscapes sublime through historical evocation. By including a reflection on places and the emotional power of the memories connected with them, he was showing how landscapes could be sublime through their historical associations alone. He argued: The sublime is increased, in the same manner, by whatever tends to increase this exercise of imagination. The field of any celebrated battle becomes sublime from this association. No man, acquainted with English history, can behold the field of Agincourt, without some emotion of this kind.… The majesty of the Alps themselves is increased by the remembrance of Hannibal’s march over them.… And what is it that constitutes that emotion of sublime delight, which every man of common sensibility feels upon the first prospect of Rome? It is not the scene of destruction which is before him. It is not the Tiber, diminished in his imagination to a paltry stream, flowing amid the ruins of that magnificence which it once adorned.… It is ancient Rome which fills his imagination. It is the country of Caesar, and Cicero, and Virgil, which is before him.… Take from him these associations, conceal from him that it is Rome that he sees, and how different would be his emotion!42

Whereas the topos of the emotive power of Roman ruins could be found in other authors, Alison’s idea that the sublime of the Alps was compounded by their association with Hannibal seems to have provided Turner with an early solution to the representation of sublime landscapes. His Hannibal, which brings together several motifs of terror such as the unleashing of natural powers and horrifying war scenes, also connects the sublimity of the Alps with the heroic action associated with it. Here as in his numerous historical landscapes, the artist seems to have understood what Emily Brady calls Alison’s ‘culturally dependent notion of the sublime’,43 and the powerful emotions derived from the historical significance of place. At the same time, Hannibal points to a more disturbing conception of the sublime. The chosen scenes –​of rape and looting –​undermine the heroic dimension praised by Alison and suggest a form of t­error beyond rational expression which is closer to Burke’s conception. More significantly, the stylistic energy of Turner’s depiction of the storm and the unprecedented vortical composition already suggest that the sublimity of painting may be found not in association, 280

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but in the pictorial process itself and in its endeavour to convey what exceeds sensible boundaries and visual representation. Turner had already found in the Alps natural structures which resisted the conventional or rational ordering of landscape into framed views and successive planes, and which as such were especially conducive to the sublime. His sketches and paintings of the passage of Mount St Gothard, narrowly framed on each side by seemingly endless and precipitous mountain sides, reveal his interest in a verticality that precludes the habitual horizontal progression from foreground to far distances and makes it impossible for the viewer to comprehend the whole, let alone to imagine a secure position within the pictorial space. His views from the Devil’s Bridge in particular provide a convincing illustration of Burke’s notion that ‘[a]‌perpendicular has more force in forming the sublime, than an inclined plane, and the effects of a rugged and broken surface seem stronger than where it is smooth and polished’.44 Another Alpine painting, Fall of an Avalanche in the Grisons (1810), may be considered an early attempt to convey the terrifying dynamic processes of nature, and to capture motions that were supposed to be beyond the reach of the visual arts. But Hannibal is unprecedented in its formal indistinctness, which makes the artist’s gesture prevail over comprehension, and which affects through its sheer energy, even before the viewer may understand what the subject of the painting is. Its elemental confusion even surpasses that of Fall of an Avalanche, in which masses of ice and rocks may still be distinguished from one another. Here, the indistinct masses of whirling snow and mountainous rock are caught in one dark towering wave, which threatens to engulf the human action below, but at the same time makes visible the artist’s vigorous work on the canvas. In other words, the quest for the sublime seems to lead to medium-​specific solutions in which expressive energy matters as much as the sublimity of the imitated, external object. This evolution does not mean, as Andrew Wilton points out, that Turner sacrifices ‘truth’ to effect,45 but instead that the motions of the artist match those of nature itself. By making his own expressive energy central to the sublime of the painting, Turner goes beyond Alison’s simple reliance on associations to account for the sublimity of artworks. For a similar awareness of the power of the artistic process, a precedent could be found in theories which, following Longinus, had explored the rhetorical sublime, and more specifically in Burke’s Enquiry. As I argued in 281

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Chapter 2, Burke’s reflections on the affective immediacy of language, whose energetic combinations precede comprehension, drew attention to the processes of the artistic medium as a source of sublimity. Turner’s experiments with the pictorial medium point to a similarly modern conception, even though they may have resulted from his own rivalry with the sublime effects of poetry rather than from any knowledge of the Enquiry. The whirlwind of elements which structures Hannibal and threatens to engulf the human action aims to confuse and stir as powerfully as poetry, through the energy of the pictorial process itself, rather than its mimetic value. The viewer’s frightening confusion is meant to precede comprehension, much in the manner of the aesthetic experience which Burke had associated with Milton’s poetry: ‘The mind is hurried out of itself, by a croud of great and confused images; which affect because they are crouded and confused.’46 Through this new emphasis on the pictorial medium and its intrinsic energy, Hannibal addressed Burke’s conviction that the sublime was beyond the grasp of a mimetic art like painting, in which clarity undermined the affective power of the artwork. It is in this respect that Turner may be considered to have provided a particularly adequate response to Burke’s denigration of the pictorial sublime. He understood that the ‘narrow limits of painting’ so decried by some of his literary contemporaries could not be overcome by simply removing the physical boundaries of the canvas, but required a reassessment of the pictorial medium and its functions. Hannibal is the first work by Turner to show so explicitly that painting is as much about transcribing the world as about transmitting the expressive energy of the artist. It is here that Turner’s stylistic evolution from accurate delineations of nature to dynamic motion on the surface of the canvas first becomes noticeable.47 It is significant that this shift occurred in a painting which so explicitly attempted to convey the sublime. Hannibal demonstrates the convergence and culmination of several conceptions of the sublime in Turner’s art:  the epic sublime praised by the Longinian tradition, the historical sublime of Alison, as well as Blair’s adaptation of the Burkean sublime, with its emphasis on ‘all the uncommon violence of the elements’. But it is its response to the doubts introduced by Burke concerning the sublimity of the pictorial medium which is most interesting. While the first generations of artists who had dealt with the implications 282

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of the Enquiry had accepted the idea of poetry’s superior dynamism and indistinctness, Turner seems to have felt the need to make the pictorial medium itself both dynamic and indistinct, and to fill it with the energetic confusion which Burke had considered the privilege of poetry. From Hannibal onwards, this realisation remained central to his practice. It was to animate many of his depictions of the natural, historical or apocalyptic sublime, and to culminate in the later style of his academic canvases. Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying –​Typhoon Coming On (exh. 1840), Light and Colour (Goethe’s Theory) –​The Morning after the Deluge (exh.  1843), Shade and Darkness –​The Evening of the Deluge (exh. 1843), or Snow Storm –​Steam Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth (exh. 1842) are among the most striking examples of Turner’s conflation of elemental violence with the energetic display of the artist’s work. In the 1842 Snow Storm (Figure 31 and Plate 5), for example, the composition

Figure  31  J. M.  W. Turner, Snow Storm  –​Steam-​ Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth Making Signals in Shallow Water, and Going by the Lead, 1842. 283

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seems to be simultaneously structured by the dynamics of the waves and the motion of the artist’s brush on the canvas, free from any pre-​given structure other than the picture frame. The terror of the storm, which Turner claimed to have experienced himself, tied to the mast of a ship, is thus enhanced both by the confusion of elements and the strong emotional projection of the artist in the process of painting itself. The apparent immediacy of the composition, which seems to be determined by the flurry of elements and the energetic brushwork rather than by more rational or conventional structuring, causes an initial bewilderment which may be compared to the effects of words and of poetry as they had been described by Burke. As seen in Chapters 1 and 2, Burke had argued that words and the descriptions of poetry affected much more than the minute or exact descriptions of painting, precisely because they were disconnected from clear images and not linked by resemblance to ‘the thing represented’.48 More specifically, it was their indistinctness, their fast processes and thus their opacity as an artistic medium which heightened their effects. Snow Storm, like many of Turner’s late paintings, intensifies the pictorial medium in a manner which prevents the immediate identification of ‘the thing represented’. Significantly, the visual work requires the elucidation of a fairly long title in order to be understood. The full title, Snow Storm –​Steam-​ Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth Making Signals in Shallow Water, and Going by the Lead. The Author was in this Storm on the Night the ‘Ariel’ left Harwich, suggests that a lengthy explanation is necessary to understand both the subject of the painting and Turner’s attempt to immerse the viewer within the scene. It also hints at the inadequacy of words to convey the overpowering visual experience which is presented. In this situation, words have become the literal and determinate medium, while the pictorial medium confuses, terrifies and exalts. Turner thus reverses the contemporary bias against painting by endowing his art with the opacity and confusing energy which Burke had considered to be specific to poetry. This new emphasis on the dynamism and indistinctness of the visual medium, which characterises much of Turner’s late production, is not a rejection of figuration, as has been suggested by some critics. It may more properly be seen as the introduction of a hiatus between the visual work and ‘the thing represented’, in order to allow painting to match the affective power of poetry. In Turner’s late style, the accurate delineation of the world becomes 284

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less valuable than emotional intensity, and the energetic process of presentation becomes more important than the literal representation. By thus emancipating his medium from the immediate connection to recognisable forms, Turner finds a ‘Burkean’ response to the limitations outlined several decades earlier by Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry and taken for granted by the literary elite of his day. At the same time, Turner’s raw brushwork underlines the significance of endeavour in the work of the visual artist, by making visible his attempts to capture the powerful processes of nature rather than its finished forms. The 1842 Snow Storm, like its 1812 predecessor, clearly aims to convey what Coleridge (after Spinoza) called natura naturans, or ‘nature in the active sense’, the dynamic cause of finished or ‘passive’ forms.49 But it also suggests that the act of painting, which may be traced in the brushstrokes and scratches on the surface of the canvas, can only strive to present this powerful activity. A representational gap is implied in the energetic motions of the artist, who seems to aspire to what eludes representation. Much of Turner’s later work, in fact, seems to revolve around this striving and what the more recent theories of the sublime have called the presentation of the unpresentable. The unpresentable and the irretrievable In several respects, Turner’s practice of art allowed him to reach beyond the theories of the sublime that had been available to him and nourished his conception. The growing indistinctness that characterised his use of the pictorial medium reflected his awareness that confusion was necessary for strong affect, as Burke and after him Blair had emphasised. But it also suggested that art could only strive to contain what exceeded formal containment, that formal perfection could only be transient, or even that all artistic endeavour was ultimately threatened by chaos or vacuity, and could only remain an endeavour. This conception seems to have inspired his renderings of the natural sublime and of the dynamic forces of nature, as the Snow Storm paintings underline, and as the numerous unfinished landscapes of his later years suggest. It was perhaps even more significant in his historical landscapes and ruin paintings, in which a dark historical vision went together with an anguished self-​reflection about artistic production. In many of these, the indistinct haze in which monuments of the past seem to fade not only points at the 285

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fearful oblivion that awaits even the most enduring of artworks, but also signals the painter’s unfulfilled endeavours to retrieve past architectural achievements from this oblivion. As John Dixon Hunt has observed, several of these historical landscapes seem to revolve around a ‘customary pool of emptiness’, an undefined area bathed in blinding sunlight, into which all natural and architectural forms appear to be immersed, fade and ultimately vanish.50 This feature, I would argue, is not simply atmospheric but points at a representational gap and an awareness that painting may not accurately delineate what is beyond the powers of the artist, either because it is unpresentable or because it is irretrievable. As the recurrence of the feature suggests, the disintegration of former artwork and the fear of artistic vacuity associated with it seem to have haunted Turner. They appear to have been exacerbated by his reading of Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, by the context of the Napoleonic wars and then by his own discovery of antique ruins from the moment he was able to travel to Italy, in 1819. The dazzling indistinctness and devouring light began to pervade his imaginary reconstructions of antique settings, from the mid-​1810s. The Carthage paintings  –​Dido Building Carthage (1815), The Decline of the Carthaginian Empire (1817) and Regulus (1828) –​ make evident Turner’s growing fascination with the process of formal erasure and fear of ultimate emptiness. In all three paintings, which each represent a harbour in the manner of Claude, antique buildings are bathed in the light of the sun which faces the viewer and architectural surfaces are conceived as reflectors of light rather than as solid permanent shapes. But whereas in Dido the soft light mostly conveys a serene atmosphere, in the other two paintings the presence of the sun becomes increasingly aggressive and destructive. In The Decline of the Carthaginian Empire, which was explicitly conceived as a pendant to Dido, the powerful light appears to make architectural shapes curve around its tangible presence in the foreground and the more distant constructions already seem to be in the process of being absorbed within it. In Regulus (Figure 32), the blinding sun –​much paler and larger than in the previous canvases –​ aims to convey the terrifying plight of the eponymous Roman general, whose eyelids had been removed by the Carthaginians after he had failed to obtain the liberation of some of their fellow citizens. The dissolution of forms is clearly an evocation of Regulus’s suffering. But it also partakes of a broader reflection about the sublime. 286

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Figure 32  J. M. W. Turner, Regulus, 1828 (reworked 1837).

Just as Burke had explored the physiological causes of the aesthetic experience, and highlighted painful tension on the retina as a source of the sublime,51 Turner links the painful effects of a blinding light with a heightened aesthetic emotion. At the same time, the fading contours of the shapes caught within the luminous halo allude to the irretrievability of former architectural achievements, which not even art may recover or delineate. The dazzling light, which is now drawing buildings, ships and onlookers towards its centre, has assumed a devouring power that human actors appear helpless to stop. From this moment, it becomes a recurrent feature in Turner’s art and a source of formal dissolution in many of his unfinished landscapes, in cityscapes like Zurich (1842) or Heidelberg (1846) and even in interior scenes, as in the 1837 Interior at Petworth (recently renamed Interior of a Great House: The Drawing Room, East Cowes Castle). As the Carthage paintings suggest, this dissolving light is at its most terrifying when associated with historical decline, the rise and fall of empires, and especially the ruination of former architectural 287

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achievements. The combination of a frightening sense of transience with the intimation of a perfection that may no longer be grasped is sublime in more than one respect. By fusing imaginary reconstructions of past splendours with intimations of their destruction, it brings together the neoclassical conception of the sublime as a heightened form of the beautiful and the Burkean aesthetics of terror; but it also anticipates the more recent interpretations of the sublime, which emphasise the impossibility of representation. The unfinished style which becomes increasingly characteristic of Turner’s work may be understood as both an attempt to affect through confusion (in Burkean spirit) and a reflection about the impossible delineation of forms which are necessarily transient. Turner’s visualisation of a tension between the unfinished process of painting and the forms that it aims to present may reflect his heightened awareness of historical change and of the uncontrollable flux of all things. At a time of violent upheavals and major evolutions in society as well as in modes of production, he seems to have been much readier than other artists to acknowledge that the adequation between pictorial representation and an overwhelmingly fast-​changing world was no longer possible. His fascination with the new technologies and industrial landscapes of his time, which was unparalleled among artists of his generation, reflects this awareness perhaps even more strikingly than his historical landscapes.52 It is especially pronounced in paintings like The Fighting Temeraire (1838) or Rain, Steam and Speed (1844), in which the technological productions of the industrial age –​a metallic tugboat, a locomotive and Brunel’s Maidenhead Railway Bridge  –​sharply cut through the haze or mist that surrounds the fading productions of the previous age, a ghostly sailing ship or an older bridge. It may also be observed in his view of ‘Dudley, Worcestershire’ for the Picturesque Views in England and Wales (1835), in which industrial activity in the foreground is shown to supersede the habitual picturesque motifs of ruined castles and church spires, still discernible in the background behind the smoke of factories. Such works have often been interpreted as enacting the struggle between industry and nature, or between the old and the new. They may as well be understood as a reflection about the passing of artistic ideals –​classical or picturesque –​and about the advent of forms that question the possibility of pictorial representation. Rain, Steam and Speed (Figure 33), as its bold title underlines, attempts to capture 288

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Image not available due to copyright restrictions

Figure 33  J. M. W. Turner, Rain, Steam and Speed, 1844.

what, since Burke’s Enquiry and Lessing’s Laocoön, had been considered to lie beyond the powers of the visual artist: dynamic motion and the sensorial confusion associated with it. The sharp contours of the locomotive, cutting through the mist, together with the use of the bridge as vanishing lines, which appears to project the foreshortened train directly from the vanishing point to the picture plane, are a masterful use of classical techniques to convey rapid speed, while the indistinctness surrounding the train convincingly evokes the bewilderment of viewers inside it. The dynamic effect is enhanced by the choice of an asymmetrical composition, as well as striking textural and tonal contrasts, which convey the full power of the rushing engine. In all these respects, Turner’s virtuosity allows him to respond to the critics of the ‘narrow limits of painting’ by amplifying speed and transcribing the awed perceptions of his contemporaries. And this response appears to have been prompted by the fast visual mutations brought about by the industrial revolution. 289

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Rain, Steam and Speed, however, seems to take the reflection about the sublime beyond the fearful wonder of technological invention. The emerging form of the train out of the thick texture of rain and steam may also be considered to visualise the endeavour of the artist to extract forms out of formlessness, and to draw attention to a process which was not free from its own terrors. Like many of the unfinished late canvases that have so intrigued critics, the painting suggests that Turner may have found the process of formal delineation and completion increasingly challenging. By visualising various stages of painting, from formless colour and texture to delineated subject, Rain, Steam and Speed seems to reflect about the event of painting and the energy involved in it, rather than its completion. It also draws attention to the daunting task of delineating forms in a world that was proving increasingly difficult to grasp. Strikingly, the shape that emerges out of atmospheric and textural confusion is both threatening and impermanent:  it is about to pass by the external viewer at a frightening speed, but also to vanish from view at the very same moment. The heightened aesthetic experience that may be derived from such a pictorial feat is a remarkable response to the eighteenth-​century challenge of the sublime, which seems to draw some of the most radical implications of the new aesthetics. By exploring the dynamic perceptual experience of a rapidly modernising world, and seeking new compositional paradigms to render it, Turner was finding original ways of putting the sublime within the reach of painting. But he was also suggesting that the sublime was to be found in the artistic process itself, in the endeavour to extract form from formlessness and in the growing realisation of a gap between accurate visual delineation and the perceived world. As an artist who was keenly aware of this inadequacy, and fascinated by an increasingly elusive flux of perceptions, one could say that Turner came to view the sublime as having to do with the struggle to present the unpresentable. Notes 1 The most famous advocate of such an interpretation is Lawrence Gowing, in his Turner: Imagination and Reality (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1966). 2 Andrew Wilton, Turner and the Sublime (London:  British Museum Publications, 1980), p. 74.

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3 John Dixon Hunt, ‘Wondrous Deep and Dark: Turner and the Sublime’, Georgia Review 30 (1976), 140–​1. 4 Hunt, ‘Wondrous Deep and Dark’, 141. 5 Quoted in Jerrold Ziff, ‘J. M. W. Turner on Poetry and Painting’, Studies in Romanticism 3:4 (1964), 197. 6 Quoted in Ziff, ‘Turner on Poetry and Painting’, 198. 7 James A.  W. Heffernan, Cultivating Picturacy:  Visual Art and Verbal Interventions (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2006), p. 118. 8 Heffernan, Cultivating Picturacy, p. 118. 9 Heffernan, Cultivating Picturacy, p. 127. 10 See notably Janis A. Tomlinson, ‘Landscape into Allegory:  J. M.  W. Turner’s Frosty Morning and James Thomson’s The Seasons’, Studies in Romanticism 29:2 (1990), 181–​6 and Andrew Wilton and Rosalind Mallord Turner, Painting and Poetry:  Turner’s ‘Verse Book’ and his Work of 1804–​1812, exh. cat. (Tate Gallery: London 1990), p. 54. 11 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, ed. Adam Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), II, xiv, p. 73. Unless otherwise indicated, further references are to this edition. 12 James Thomson, The Seasons, ‘Summer’, lines 432–​6. 13 Ziff, ‘Turner on Poetry and Painting’, 199–​201. 14 Jan Piggott, Turner’s Vignettes (London:  Tate Gallery Publishing, 1993), p. 60. 15 For a broader and more thorough analysis of Byron’s influence on Turner, see David Blayney Brown’s Turner and Byron (London:  Tate Gallery, 1992). 16 George Gordon, Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, IV, liv. 17 Byron, Childe Harold IV, l, liii. 18 Byron, Childe Harold IV, iii, v. 19 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, II, vi, p. 65. 20 Byron, Childe Harold III, xxviii. 21 Brown, Turner and Byron, pp. 30–​1. 22 Byron, Childe Harold IV, cviii. 23 Jerrold Ziff, ‘Turner on Poetry and Painting’, 193–​214; Wilton and Turner, Painting and Poetry. 24 See Wilton and Turner, Painting and Poetry, p. 15. 25 J. M.  W. Turner,’ Royal Academy Lectures. 1810–​ 1827’. Add. MS 46151 A–​BB. British Library, London, vols A, pp. 1–​2 and C, p. 4. 26 Ziff, ‘Turner on Poetry and Painting’, 199. 27 Ziff, ‘Turner on Poetry and Painting’, 202–​7. 28 Mark Akenside, The Pleasures of Imagination (1772), Book I, lines 227–​ 31, in Laetitia Barbauld, The Works of Mark Akenside, M.D., in verse and prose (New Brunswick, NJ: William Elliot, 1808), vol. I, p. 96.

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29 Mark Akenside, The Pleasures of Imagination (London, 1744), Book III, lines 348–​55. 30 Turner, ‘Royal Academy Lectures’, Box I, MS 14, p. 22. Quoted in Ziff, ‘Turner on Poetry and Painting’, 204. As Ziff points out, Turner is fusing verse 349 together with Akenside’s note to verse 348: ‘The act of remembering seems almost wholly to depend on the association of ideas’ (Akenside, Pleasures of Imagination, 1744, III, note to verse 348). 31 See Ziff, ‘Turner on Poetry and Painting’, 202, n.28. 32 Jeffrey Hart, ‘Akenside’s Revision of The Pleasures of Imagination’, PMLA 74:1 (March 1959), 67–​74. Hart mentions the transformation of ‘sacred paths’ into ‘awful solitudes’ in the 1757 version of Book I (p. 72). 33 David Blayney Brown, ‘Notes on Grammar (Inscriptions by Turner) 1808 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, July 2010, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J. M. W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, December 2012, www. tate.org.uk/ ​ a rt/ ​ r esearch- ​ p ublications/ ​ j mw- ​ t urner/​ j oseph-​ m allord-​ william-​turner-​notes-​on-​grammar-​inscriptions-​by-​turner-​r1129638, accessed 23 August 2016. 34 Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, 3rd edn (London, 1787), p. 70. 35 Blair, Lectures, p. 70. 36 Blair, Lectures, p. 59. 37 Blair, Lectures, p. 61. 38 Blair, Lectures, pp. 61–​2. 39 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, II, vi, p. 65. 40 Blair, Lectures, p. 64. 41 Blair, Lectures, p. 65. 42 Archibald Alison, Essays on the nature and principles of taste (1790) (Hartford, CT: Goodwin and Sons, 1821), pp. 30, 38. 43 Emily Brady, The Sublime in Modern Philosophy:  Aesthetics, Ethics and Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 33. 44 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, II, vii, p. 66. 45 Wilton, Turner and the Sublime, p. 72. 46 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, II, iv, p. 57. 47 The stylistic significance of the painting has been underlined by Andrew Wilton, who notes: ‘The crisp precision of [Turner’s] earlier delineations of the Alps is replaced by a vast blur of involved and battered fragments of the air in which the landscape is disintegrated.’ Turner and the Sublime, p. 72. 48 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, V, iv, p. 153.

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49 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Philosophical Lectures:  1818–​ 19, Hitherto Unpublished, ed. Kathleen Coburn (London: The Pilot Press, 1949), p. 370. 50 Hunt, ‘Wondrous Deep and Dark’, 149–​50. 51 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, IV, ix, pp. 124–​5. 52 Frédéric Ogée links Turner’s fascination with historical cycles to the recurrent theme of the crossing, which according to him conveys the artist’s awareness of the transitory nature of his own times. Frédéric Ogée, J. M. W. Turner: les paysages absolus (Paris: Hazan, 2010), pp. 28, 168–​9.

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I believe it is fruitful to let the wheels of intertextuality rotate fully in order to see how the interplay of influence works in unexpected ways. Sometimes the most profound influence is the one you discover afterward, not the one you find immediately. (Umberto Eco, ‘Borges and My Anxiety of Influence’)1

The full implications of eighteenth-​ century theories of the sublime for the visual arts were not played out immediately. Burke’s challenge to visual representation and to the pictorial medium, in particular, required a complex process of diffusion, intellectual cross-​fertilisation and resurgences, before its impact was fully perceived. As I have argued, most painters of Burke’s generation felt the influence of the themes and motifs of terror that had been made fashionable by the Enquiry, without realising that its conception of the sublime entailed a profound rethinking of the artistic medium. This realisation was only gradual. It came intuitively to artists like Blake, who connected the Burkean terror with the anxiety of artistic production, and to the many experimenters of the late eighteenth century who understood that the sublime required new visual formats. It was properly kindled after Lessing had spelt out that the pictorial medium was incapable of temporal development, and Romantic poets or critics had fused his reflection on the ‘narrow limits of painting’ with a conception of the sublime that emphasised the vigorous workings of the imagination. More generally, it was invigorated by the encounter, or rather back and forth exchanges, 294

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between the British eighteenth-​ century aesthetics of terror and continental aesthetic theories. Kant, whose 1764 essay on the sublime was inspired by the writings of Addison and Burke, developed almost thirty years later, in the third Critique, a much more sophisticated reflection on representational impossibility, which in its turn gave new significance to Burke’s reflections about representation and the artistic medium. He made it clear that the main source of displeasure in the experience of the sublime was due to a failure of the imagination, or ‘faculty of presentation’, to comprehend an object that exceeds it and that it could only endeavour to present. To British Romantic authors, this demonstration further justified the superiority of poetry and allowed them to revive Burke’s conviction that the literal (or iconic) nature of the pictorial medium prevented it from conveying the sublime. Thus, Coleridge’s reflection about the incommensurability of painting and poetry, by adding Kantian and Lessingian accents to the Enquiry’s initial distinction, stated more clearly what made poetry more sublime than painting: its emphasis on imaginative endeavour rather than the finished form, its ‘substitution of a sublime feeling of the unimaginable for a mere image’ and its production not of ‘a distinct form’, but of ‘a strong working of the mind’.2 The ‘wheels of intertextuality’, to use Eco’s image, had allowed Burke’s ideas to come full circle and to return to Britain nourished with a clear connection between the struggles of imaginative and artistic presentation and the experience of the sublime. This prolonged ‘interplay of influence’ may explain why it took decades before visual artists began to truly question the representational accuracy of their medium and to seek to visualise artistic endeavour itself rather than its finished products. Of course, artists like Turner and Blake may not have been conscious that they were completing the representational implications of mid-​eighteenth-​century reflections on the sublime. And even though  –​as I  have argued especially in relation to Blake in Chapter  8  –​their awareness of representational effort has been interpreted in terms of the Kantian sublime, it is unlikely that they were acquainted with either Kant’s writings or Coleridge’s Lectures. But the emphasis on the sublimity of artistic endeavour was an idea which was taking hold among Romantic circles and which they would have encountered, directly or indirectly. At the same time, as I have argued throughout this book, striving for what exceeded or eluded representation was a reality for 295

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many visual practices, which had followed their own paths since the Enquiry had expanded artists’ repertoires with its inventory of motifs of terror, power and magnitude. A few decades after its publication, the simple requirement of conveying natural vastness and power had fostered the development of media, formats and techniques that undermined the possibility of formal completion or explored spatial unlimitation and temporal development. And artistic intuitions about the sublime emerged, which could be seen as intertwined with theoretical concerns, but were anchored in specifically artistic contexts. Thus, at the same time as Kant was redefining the sublime as a conflict between sensible forms and rational apprehension, Blake was visualising the struggle between graphic execution and visionary originals. And while Coleridge was introducing Kantian theory to British Romantic circles, Turner was developing his own interest in process and medium  –​rather than the finished form –​through his experiments with genres as diverse as topographic watercolour drawings, exhibition landscapes in oil, illustration designs, architectural drawings and ruin paintings. The well-​known transformations of his style could be connected with evolving visual responses to the sublime which, independently of theoretical developments, were progressing from an initial exploration of themes to a genuine engagement with the medium and the event of artistic production. To account for the growing interest in a sublime that was to be located within artistic endeavour itself, then, it is possible to argue that the Enquiry’s significance was revived by Romantic thinkers and artists alike, with a new emphasis. The representational issues which had been originally highlighted by Burke but overshadowed by his innovative psychological enquiry, were beginning to come to the fore and to supersede the initial fascination with motifs of terror. If Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment undeniably acted as a catalyst for this new emphasis, evolutions in artistic practice also played a significant role. In some respects, they even went ahead of theory, by showing that pictorial and graphic media could renew themselves in unexpected manners, and in particular challenge the premise of representational accuracy, which according to Burke was the main obstacle to sublimity in painting. While Kant and Coleridge still considered that the sublime was beyond the grasp of painting, which they considered to be imitative and literal, visual artists were introducing a gap between medium and meaning, or between the 296

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event of painting –​or drawing –​and form, which allowed them to show that the visual arts had their place in the debate on the processes of artistic representation and on the sublime. What this book has aimed to show, to a great extent, is how artists took part in this debate not only by emancipating their medium from conventional formats, from mimetic conventions and from the imitated object, but also by exploring the temporality of artistic production, either through the boundlessness of expression or through the evocation of transience and the fear of ultimate vacuity. As I  have argued, the artists who most clearly visualised the sublime tensions inherent in graphic and pictorial processes were Blake and Turner. But neither of these two artists was seeking abstraction or believed that the independence of the artistic medium meant that it should be dissociated from representational intentions. Instead, they highlighted the striving towards form, the process of presentation itself, suggesting that it was inadequate to what it aimed to present, but never implying that it should cut the link with an external  –​ physical or visionary –​reality. Just as Kant described the workings of the imagination as the presentation of an unpresentable which ultimately encountered its sensible limits, these artists’ conception of the sublime made evident a representational gap between visual presentation and its object. Although this inadequacy signalled a significant departure from classical aesthetics and its definition of a stable perfect form, it was not yet a conscious rejection of the principle of representation itself. For such a rupture to be taken into account within the aesthetics of the sublime, one had to wait for a much later resurgence of Burke’s ideas. In his 1948 essay ‘The Sublime is Now’, Barnett Newman explained how he and fellow American avant-​garde artists were defining a sublime that was finally free both from ‘the absolutisms of perfect creations’ and from standards of sublimity that, being external to artistic creation, could not be reached. By focusing on pure expression, free from any external standards, he and his fellow artists were finally breaking the bonds with constraining notions of beauty, ‘denying that art has any concern with the problem of beauty’, and defining a modern sublime: We are reasserting man’s natural desire for the exalted, for a concern with our relationship to the absolute emotions.… We are freeing ourselves of the impediments of memory, association, nostalgia, legend, myth, or what

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have you, that have been the devices of Western European painting. Instead of making cathedrals out of Christ, man, or ‘life’, we are making it out of ourselves, out of our own feelings. The image we produce is the self-​evident one of revelation, real and concrete, that can be understood by anyone who will look at it without the nostalgic glasses of history.

Significantly, as he was reviving the aesthetics of the sublime, Newman looked back to former theories which had not managed to disentangle the sublime from the beautiful, observed that the confusion between the two was made by Longinus, Kant and Hegel but made a parenthetical exception for Burke: (Only Edmund Burke insisted on a separation. Even though it is an unsophisticated and primitive one, it is a clear one and it would be interesting to know how closely the Surrealists were influenced by it. To me Burke reads like a Surrealist manual.)3

It would also be interesting, of course, to know why Newman made such a connection between Burke and the Surrealists. In any case, it is quite revealing that as Newman made the case for a sublime of pure expression, liberated from any connection with external realities or values, driven by the self-​evidence of an autonomous artistic production, the name of Burke should have recurred. While Burke had opposed the idea of a pictorial sublime, Newman sees in his theory the ‘unsophisticated’ anticipation of avant-​garde pictorial developments. There is one obvious way of understanding why this paradox was possible:  Newman and the abstract expressionists had completely removed the link with figuration which had been the basis of Burke’s objection to a pictorial sublime. But Newman was mostly insisting on Burke’s liberating separation of the sublime from the beautiful and therefore from constraining artistic ideals or ‘absolutes’. He does not seem to have been aware of Burke’s own reflection on the autonomous processes of the artistic medium. Newman’s reference did not go unnoticed, however. When in his 1984 essay, ‘The Sublime and the Avant-​Garde’, Jean-​François Lyotard attempted to account for Newman’s claim that ‘the Sublime is Now’, he also explained why Burke was so significant for the avant-​garde. As I argued in Chapter 2 of this book, he insisted on the central role played by terror in the Enquiry, and saw it as the main impetus for the development of ‘an art of invention, rather than mimesis’. He saw clearly that Burke was challenging artists 298

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to focus on artistic endeavour, rather than representation. And he most importantly suggested that the intuition that the sublime was about the presentation of the unpresentable owed as much to Burke as it did to Kant, although the latter formulated it more in a more elaborate manner. Lyotard even briefly suggested how Burke’s comparison of the pictorial and poetic media, together with his praise of the affective power of language, could have influenced the development of painting, by questioning its representational nature. He especially considered the Enquiry’s observations on language to signal the emancipation of the artwork from the classical rule of imitation. But he mostly had in mind the avant-​garde practices of artists like Newman rather than the immediate legacy of the treatise. Once again, the ‘wheels of intertextuality’ appeared to have rotated fully, to revive the significance of Burke’s aesthetic writings and show their relevance for both pictorial abstraction and postmodern thought. And so, as the sublime came back into ‘fashion’ with postmodernism, to use Jean-​Luc Nancy’s terms,4 so did the Enquiry. Even though Kant was the central figure of this renewal of interest, the treatise’s adaptability to evolving aesthetic preoccupations was once more borne out. This recent re-​evaluation of the Enquiry has been particularly meaningful, as it has made it possible to highlight its influence on pictorial developments, in spite of its own original warnings to painters. The obstacle which according to Burke stood in the way of sublimity in painting, namely the limitations of a mimetic imperative, had been removed. The pictorial medium had shown that it could function in a manner which bore similarities to the processes of language as they had been described by him. His conception of an artistic sublime had therefore become applicable to painting, against his own expectations. What postmodern views on the sublime suggest, then, is that Burke’s theory could now account for transformations in the visual arts that he had not considered. What I  have argued is that he even partly fostered these developments, through his very objection to a pictorial sublime. Many other factors have contributed to these evolutions, and the ‘interplay of influence’ has necessarily been complex and prolonged, but Burke’s challenging conception of painting played a part in inciting visual artists to reach beyond the paradigms that were available to them, and its relevance to our understanding of art historical developments 299

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should not be underestimated. I have stopped short of saying that a necessary consequence of Burke’s aesthetics was pictorial abstraction, and the work of Turner in particular has indicated that the most his conception called for was a disjunction between the artistic process and its referent, rather than a full rupture. Nevertheless, by encouraging such a discontinuity and highlighting its affective power, Burke was one of those who paved the way for a further emancipation of the artistic medium. Notes 1 Umberto Eco, ‘Borges and My Anxiety of Influence’, in On Literature (London: Vintage, 2006), p. 133. 2 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lectures 1808–​ 19:  On Literature, 2 vols, ed. R. A. Foakes. The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge 5 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), vol. II, p. 496. 3 Barnett Newman, ‘The Sublime is Now’, Tiger’s Eye (December 1948), quoted in Barnett Newman, Barnett Newman:  Selected Writings and Interviews, ed. John Philip O’Neill (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 170–​3. 4 Nancy’s essay ‘The Sublime Offering’, begins with the statement:  ‘The Sublime is in fashion’ (‘Le sublime est à la mode’). Jean-​Luc Nancy, ‘The Sublime Offering’, in Jean-​ François Courtine (ed.), Jeffrey S.  Librett (trans.), Of the Sublime: Presence in Question (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), p. 25.

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Note: ‘n.’ after a page reference indicates the number of a note on that page. Literary works can be found under authors’ names. Adam, Robert 211, 230n.11 Addison, Joseph 29, 30, 39, 40, 41, 42, 89, 90, 129, 187, 295 greatness, distinct from sublimity 34–​5, 49, 271 pictorial sublimity 49–​50 ‘Pleasures of the Imagination, The’ 34, 49, 50 aesthetics of endeavour 12–​14, 19–​20, 43, 63, 71–​2, 73–​9, 295, 298–​9 Blake’s ‘sublime Labours’ 251–​8 Turner and 285–​90 Akenside, Mark 35 Pleasures of Imagination 275–​7 Alison, Archibald 63–​6, 204 antipictorialism of Burke’s Enquiry 8, 9, 10, 11, 16 of Romantic literary elite 4, 10, 197

apocalyptic sublime 7, 116–​17, 125–​8, 204, 237 architectural fantasy see capricci Ariosto, Orlando Furioso 226 artistic processes sublimity, immanent to 10–​13, 15, 16, 63, 71–​2, 75–​80, 180, 237–​9, 247, 297 in Blake’s art 237–​9, 246–​62 in Turner’s art 278–​85 as superseding mimetic conception of art 62, 68, 259–​60 associationism and the sublime 36, 51–​2, 64–​6, 204, 276, 280 Baillie, John 35–​6, 39, 51 Barker, Henry Aston 159–​61 Barker, Robert 11, 17, 150–​8, 165 Barry, James 6, 8, 16, 17, 79, 86, 109–​25

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correspondence with Burke 113–​19, 122 ‘Job Reproved by his Friends’ 121–​2 Paradise Lost project 122–​4 Portraits of Barry and Burke in the Characters of Ulysses and a Companion 109–​12 Royal Academy lectures 119–​21 bathos in painting 43–​4, 78, 85, 126–​7 avoided in architectural fantasies 226, 228 Beattie, James 52–​3 beautiful and sublime, as distinct aesthetic categories 40–​1, 73, 75, 173, 260, 277, 297–​8 Beckford, William 215 Bewick, Thomas 181 Blair, Hugh, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres 275, 277 its mediation of Burke’s aesthetics 278 Blake, William 6, 7, 11, 15, 19–​20, 79, 80, 174–​80, 235–​62, 297 America: A Prophecy 177 Burke and Reynolds, criticism of 239–​43 colour printing method 249–​51 commitment to line 258–​62 Europe: A Prophecy 241 Four Zoas, The 238, 262n.2 Jerusalem 175–​7, 180, 236, 241–​3, 245–​7, 253–​6, 261, 262n.2 Milton 180, 243, 262n.2 relief etching and formal experiments 175, 248–​9 sublimity of artistic processes 237, 243, 251–​62 text/​image interactions 174–​80

thematic influence of Burke 236–​7 Urizen books 241, 250, 251 see also aesthetics of endeavour; artistic processes; incommensurability; parergon, parergonality; presentation of the unpresentable; unlimitation Bodmer, Johann Jakob 128 Boileau, Nicolas 30 Bonington, Richard Parkes 189 Book of Job 43, 121 boundaries of the artwork see boundlessness; finiteness and determinacy of visual arts; unlimitation boundlessness 4, 13, 17, 40, 44, 72–​4, 171, 174–​98, 206, 207 Boydell, John see Shakespeare Gallery Burford, Robert 161–​5 Burke, Edmund friendship with Barry 86, 109–​25 friendship with Reynolds 86–​8, 117 Philosophical Enquiry 5–​11, 29–​30, 13–​21, 86, 88, 128, 134, 138, 156–​7, 294–​300 architectural sublime 205–​6, 221 Barry’s response to 111, 113–​16, 119, 121, 123 Blake’s response to 239–​43, 261–​2 British aesthetic theory, and 36–​47 combinatory powers of language 212, 282 on imitation and the artistic medium 67–​73

315

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Index

Burke, Edmund (cont.) and Reynolds’s Discourses on Art 96–​105 and theories of representation 61–​3 Turner’s art and the Enquiry’s legacy 267–​8 see also ‘delightful horror’; finiteness and determinacy of visual arts; ‘great style’; irrationalism; Lyotard, Jean-​François; mimesis; neoclassical aesthetics; obscurity; paragone; privation, as a source of the sublime; sister arts tradition; terror and the sublime Burnet, Thomas 32, 33, 40 Byron, George Gordon, Lord 181 Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage 162–​4, 272–​5, 286 capricci 19, 206–​17 and Burkean sublime 223–​9 formal invention 207–​20 Caravaggio 138 clouds and nebulous compositions 126–​8, 136–​8, 191–​4 Cockerell, Charles Robert 228 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 3–​4, 163, 171, 210, 215, 294–​6 ‘Rime of the Ancyent Marinere, The’ 159 Colman, Samuel 7 Constable, John 192–​5 Rainstorm over the Sea 195 Correggio 128, 136–​8, 191 Cotman, John Sell 189, 197 Cozens, Alexander 191–​3 Cloud, The 192–​3 New Method of Assisting the Invention in Drawing Original Compositions of Landscape 192

Cozens, John Robert 189 The Thames from Richmond Hill Looking Southwest 189–​90 creative endeavour see aesthetics of endeavour; artistic processes Danby, Francis 7 Dance, George 211 David, Jacques-​Louis 149 Delacroix, Eugène 149 ‘delightful horror’ 7, 9, 13, 19, 33, 35, 37–​9, 40, 41, 61, 156 in Addison 35, 38, 57n.40 Blake’s rejection of 241–​2 in Burke’s Enquiry 7, 9, 13, 19, 37–​9, 40, 41, 61 in John Dennis 33, 38, 57n.40 Lyotard’s adaptation of the concept 75–​6 in panoramas 156, 159, 162, 164 in Piranesi’s Carceri 214 De Loutherbourg, Philippe–​Jacques 7, 11, 116, 126, 138, 239 Dennis, John 9, 32–​3, 39, 40 De Piles, Roger 48, 89, 275 De Quincey, Thomas 210, 215 Derrida, Jacques 12, 13, 15, 74, 172–​3, 194 determinacy of painting see finiteness and determinacy of visual arts Diderot, Denis 7, 10, 29, 204, 206 Du Bos, Jean-​Baptiste 43, 67, 68 Dufresnoy, Charles 275 empiricist epistemology Blake’s rejection of 240–​3 and British theories of the sublime 31–​2, 35, 36, 37, 38, 40, 50–​3, 64, 67, 90, 129, 235 energy (creative or stylistic) and the sublime 95–​6, 123–​6, 127, 131, 169, 182–​6, 237, 244–​5, 251–​62, 279–​85

316

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Index

excess, associated with the sublime 13, 39, 63, 70–​2, 74–​5, 77, 98, 115, 207–​9, 213, 223–​4, 256 Farington, Joseph 86–​7 Félibien, André 48 finiteness and determinacy of visual arts 156–​7, 171 according to Burke 10, 11, 21, 30, 42, 43, 47, 63, 72, 118–​19, 136 according to Reynolds 100–​3 ‘narrow limits’ of painting 2, 4, 21, 157, 171, 198, 216, 229, 289, 294 see also boundlessness; unlimitation Flaxman, John 174 form and formlessness 136–​7, 139, 171 distinguishing the beautiful and the sublime 73, 173 fragment, aesthetics of 19, 186, 194, 196, 204–​7, 218 see also ruin painting framing see finiteness and determinacy of visual arts; parergon; unlimitation Friedrich, Caspar David 150, 197 Fuseli, Henry 6–​7, 8, 14, 17, 79, 128–​40, 239 Artist in Conversation with Johann Jakob Bodmer, The 128, 132 Milton Gallery 1–​2, 128, 134–​7 Nightmare, The 132–​3, 139 Sin Pursued by Death 134–​6 Gandy, Joseph 204, 206, 216 Architectural Visions 223–​4

Bridge over Chaos 226–​8 Burkean sublime and architectural fantasy 222–​8 Tomb of Merlin 225–​6 Gerard, Alexander 51–​2 Gilpin, William 21 Girtin, Thomas 189, 197, 216 White House at Chelsea 189–​91 ‘great style’, and the neoclassical sublime 16, 17, 48–​9, 53, 64, 89–​91, 94, 102, 105, 111–​12, 117–​20, 134, 143n.66 praised by Burke 117 Gothic themes 9, 42, 125, 203 Guardi, Francesco 207 historical sublime see ruins and the historical sublime history or heroic painting 1, 3, 5, 49, 53, 110–​12 in panoramas 150, 158 its sublimity 125–​31, 132, 134, 137 Hogarth, William 47 horizon see unlimitation Hume, David 35 illustrations 11, 17, 18, 173–​86 imagination, its combinatory powers 63–​5 unbounded by the sublime 3, 34, 35, 36, 39, 42, 90 imitation see mimesis immersive spectatorship 11, 18, 148–​53, 156, 284 see also panoramas incommensurability Blake’s conception of 239, 251–​4, 260–​1 of conception and (re) presentation 20, 74, 101–​2, 169, 194, 206, 213 of faculties in Kant 12, 73

317

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Index

indistinctness and indeterminacy 77, 96, 118, 170, 172, 173, 189, 198, 205, 240 Blake’s criticism of 236, 239–​40, 244–​5, 257–​9, 261–​2 in capricci 213, 218 conveying the sublime 6, 21, 42, 62, 68 in Cozens’ New Method 192–​3 in Fuseli’s art 134–​7 Reynolds’s interest in 99–​101 in Turner’s paintings 273, 281–​6 ineffability see representational inadequacies infinity, as source of the sublime 32, 37, 39 irrationalism in academic pictorial practices 125–​37, 139 in British theories of the sublime 32–​3, 37, 98 in Burkean aesthetics 5, 16, 39, 41, 42, 89, 118–​19 in capricci 206, 209, 212, 214 influence on Reynolds 103–​5

Lamb, Charles 2–​3, 163, 184 landscape sketches 18, 19 language, its affective and transformational powers 16, 36–​7, 45–​6, 51, 52, 56n.30, 68–​72, 83n.49 Locke’s theory of language 69–​70, 82n.35 Leicester Square Panorama 151–​4, 159, 162, 164 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 2, 10, 21, 29, 46, 59n.67, 130, 134, 156, 268–​9, 289, 294 Locke, John 35, 38, 45, 46, 50, 69–​70, 90, 240, 243 Longinus 30, 48, 70, 72, 298 influence on Reynolds 89–​95, 102 Longinian tradition in Britain 32, 34, 37, 49, 79–​80, 112, 139, 281 Lyotard, Jean-​François 12, 13, 15, 63 and avant-​garde painting 12, 75, 78 interpretation of Burke’s Enquiry 75–​8

Johnson, Samuel 29, 86–​7, 105n.7 Kames, Lord [Henry Home] 52, 63, 77 Kant, Immanuel 5, 29, 35, 40, 61–​2, 155–​6, 173, 187, 259, 295–​9 conflict of faculties in the Kantian sublime 61–​2, 73, 79, 155, 252–​3, 296 Critique of the Power of Judgment 12, 13, 61, 73–​5, 171, 295–​6 see also Derrida, Jacques; incommensurability; Lyotard, Jean-François; parergon, parergonality; presentation of the unpresentable; unlimitation

Maddox, George 228 Martin, John 7, 228–​9, 239 medium (artistic), affecting through its own processes 10–​11, 15–​16, 68–​71, 247–​51, 268 medium reflexivity 19–​20, 71, 78, 249–​51, 253–​62 Michelangelo 48, 49, 117, 137, 214, 215, 275 model of pictorial sublimity 93–​6, 98, 103–​4 Terribilità 98, 137 Milton, John 34, 64, 71, 121, 128, 130, 134 Barry’s Paradise Lost illustrations 122–​5

318

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Gandy’s Bridge over Chaos 226–​8 Paradise Lost 42, 43, 45, 68, 76, 128, 131, 134–​5 in Reynolds’s Discourses 99–​100 Turner’s Paradise Lost illustrations 271–​2 see also Barry, James, Paradise Lost project; Fuseli, Henry, Milton Gallery mimesis Burke’s views on 66–​70 limitation for painting 3, 4, 5, 8, 11, 14, 16, 21, 42, 43, 67–​9, 72, 156–​7 non-​mimetic visual strategies 11, 15, 16, 19, 20, 72–​3, 78–​80 in panoramas 157, 163–​5 and pictorial sublimity 50–​4, 229 undermined by aesthetics of the sublime 67–​9, 72, 75 Mortimer, John Hamilton 85 Nancy, Jean-​Luc 12, 13, 15, 74–​5, 173, 187, 260–​1 natural sublime 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37 in landscapes sketches 187–​91 in panoramas 158–​64 pictorial imitations of 53, 63 superior to painting 115 in Turner’s art 281, 285 neoclassical aesthetics 16, 17, 53, 80, 86, 89, 91, 94, 95, 98, 101, 111 and aesthetics of terror 123–​5, 127 compatible with Burkean sublime 112–​13, 116–​20, 131 practices of display 170–​1

preventing representational failure 102 and representational disjunctions 131–​3 see also ‘great style’, and the neoclassical sublime; Reynolds, Joshua Newman, Barnett 12, 78, 297–​8 Northcote, James 87–​8 obscurity 34, 37, 42, 43, 68, 138, 240, 277–​8 see also indistinctness and indeterminacy Panini, Giovanni 207, 223 panoramas 11, 17, 147–​68 Panorama of the North Coast of Spitzbergen 159–​61 Panoramas of Pompeii 161–​2 View of the Falls of Niagara 162–​4 View of Mont Blanc 164 paragone Burkean sublime and 4, 8–​9, 11, 16, 47, 53, 278 panoramas’ rivalry of poetry 162–​5 Turner’s emulation of poetry 268–​9 see also sister arts tradition parergon, parergonality 17–​18, 170–​3, 186–​7, 194, 197–​8, 199n.16 in Blake’s illuminated poetry 174–​80 Derrida’s analysis of 172–​3 in Kant’s third Critique 171–​2 physiological sublime 20, 37, 38, 56n.34 pictorialism see sister arts tradition Piranesi, Giovanni Battista 7, 19, 208–​22

319

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Index

Piranesi, Giovanni Battista (cont.) Carceri d’invenzione 209–​20, 225, 228 combinatory powers of visual arts 208–​10, 213 ‘Imaginary View of the Via Appia’ 208, 211, 213 interaction with British artists 210–​12 ‘Part of a Great Harbour’ 209, 213 Porter, Robert Ker 150, 158 Postmodern conceptions of the sublime 12, 16, 18, 63, 73–​8 Poussin, Nicolas 48, 86, 119 Deluge 114–​16, 120–​1, 140n.15, 276 presentation of the unpresentable 11, 12, 13, 14, 20, 43, 62, 73–​5, 77, 78, 173, 297–​9 in Blake’s works 237, 262 in Fuseli’s paintings 138–​40 in Turner’s paintings 272–​3, 284–​90 privation, as a source of the sublime 34, 37, 75–​7, 273–​5 Ramsay, Allan 211 Raphael 48, 93–​4, 98, 137 representational inadequacies 73–​5, 131–​3, 160, 297 artistic endeavour and 63, 70–​2, 270 Blake’s awareness of 239, 251–​3 in Kantian sublime 61–​2, 73–​4 of painting 16, 21, 42, 62, 79–​80 Reynolds, Joshua 6, 14, 15, 16, 47, 48, 79, 86–​105, 117, 271 Blake’s criticism of 240 Discourses on Art 48, 87–​105, 118, 264n.39, 275–​6 ideal beauty and great style 90, 93 influence on Burke 117–​18

rhetorical sublime 31, 34, 36 Richardson, Jonathan 48–​9, 89, 91, 275 rivalry of painting and poetry see paragone and sister arts tradition Robert, Hubert 204, 206 Rogers, Samuel 181, 182–​4 Rosa, Salvator 115, 215 Royal Academy of Arts 1, 3, 5, 11, 16, 17, 48, 85–​9, 102–​5, 117, 120, 137, 147, 158, 275 academic adaptations of the sublime 86, 111, 119–​39 ruin painting 17, 19, 203–​6, 212 see also capricci ruins, and the historical sublime 162, 204, 272–​5, 285–​8 and tension towards form 205, 207, 213 Ruskin, John 191 sensualism, of Burkean aesthetics 16, 36–​8, 40, 67, 71 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of 29, 32–​3, 41, 42 Shakespeare, William 1, 121, 134 Shakespeare Gallery 1–​2 Shelley, Mary 159 sister arts tradition 1–​4, 14, 21, 29, 46, 47, 48, 49, 95, 120–​1, 129, 136, 185, 268 academic revivals of 102–​3, 112, 120–​1, 134–​6 Burke’s challenge to 9–​10, 14, 16, 43, 45, 46, 68, 98, 135–​6 enargeia 46, 50 incommensurability of painting and poetry 4, 8–​9, 11, 16, 42, 43, 47

320

321

Index

Romantic book illustrations 174–​86 see also Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim; paragone Soane, John 204, 211–​12, 216, 218, 221–​3 somatic responses to the sublime 18 Stewart Dugald 63–​5 Stonehenge 205, 215, 241 Stothard, Thomas 174 supernatural, and the sublime 41, 42, 58n.57 in painting 8, 116, 128, 131, 139 tenebrism 7, 126, 132, 134, 138 terror and the sublime 38, 128–​9, 160–​1, 277 compatible with painting 8, 17, 85, 114–​15, 121–​2, 131–​5, 139 immanent to artistic creation 75–​6, 78, 257, 262, 290 in the Longinian sublime 31 in Piranesi’s Carceri d’Invenzione 213–​15 and ruin paintings 203–​5 specific to the Burkean sublime 8, 9, 17, 38, 41, 42, 58n.60, 75–​6, 91 in Turner’s works 271–​5, 277, 280, 282, 284 Thomson, James 46, 270–​1 Towne Francis (Source of the Arveyron) 187–​9 Turner, J.M.W. 6–​7, 11, 14, 19, 20, 181–​6, 297 Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage –​ Italy 278 colour beginnings 196 Decline of the Carthaginian Empire, The 286 Devil’s Bridge –​Mt St Gothard 281

321

Dido Building Carthage 286 Dogano, San Giorgio, Citella from the Steps of the Europa, The 274 emulation and illustration of poetry 268–​75 Fallacies of Hope, The 268 Field of Waterloo 274 Forum Romanum: for Mr Soane’s Museum 221 lecture diagrams 218 Modern Rome: Campo Vaccino 221 Picturesque Views in England and Wales 196 Piranesi’s influence on 216–​21 Regulus 286–​7 Royal Academy lectures 218, 268, 275–​6, 279 Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps 183–​4, 278–​83 Snow Storm –​Steam Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth 283–​4 sublimity of artistic medium 268–​9, 281–​5 sublimity of artistic processes 280 ‘Verse Book’ 268 vignette designs and formal experiments 181–​6, 196, 271–​2 see also artistic processes; indistinctness and indeterminacy; Milton, John; natural sublime; paragone; presentation of the unpresentable; sister arts tradition; terror and the sublime; unlimitation, in Romantic illustrations

322

Index

unlimitation 10, 14, 17, 18, 19, 21, 136–​7, 173, 198n.2, 260 in Blake’s illuminated designs 180 in Gandy’s architectural fantasies 224 and horizon 187, 189–​91 in landscape studies and sketches 186–​98 and nebulous motifs 191–​4 in panoramas 150, 157–​8 in Romantic illustrations 174–​86 see also boundlessness; finiteness and determinacy of visual arts

ut pictura poesis see sister arts tradition vignette illustrations 181–​6 Virgil 76 Walpole, Horace 140n.15, 215, 224 Ward, James 239 West, Benjamin 7, 116, 137 Destruction of the Old Beast and False Prophet 126–​8 Wordsworth, William 165 Wright of Derby, Joseph 7, 138, 239

322

1

newgenprepdf

Plate 1  James Barry, Portraits of Barry and Burke in the Characters of Ulysses and his Companion Fleeing from the Cave of Polyphemus, c. 1776.

2

Plate 2  Joseph Gandy, The Tomb of Merlin, 1815.

3

Plate 3  Joseph Gandy, Bridge over Chaos, 1833.

4

Plate 4  J. M.  W. Turner, Snow Storm:  Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps, 1812.

Plate 5  J. M. W. Turner, Snow Storm –​Steam-​Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth Making Signals in Shallow Water, and Going by the Lead, 1842.