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The Sublime in Art: Awe, Terror, and the Limits of Representation

The sublime was one of the central concepts of the Romantic period, and few aesthetic ideas have been more influential. For the Romantic artists, theorists, and writers, the sublime was the experience of awe, terror, and exaltation that arises in the presence of vast, overwhelming, or terrifying objects — the storm at sea, the alpine peak, the vast desert, the chasm, the burning city, the apocalyptic ruin. To evoke the sublime in art was to push the resources of the medium to their limits, to suggest the infinite through the finite, and to give the viewer an experience of the larger forces of nature and history that lie beyond the everyday.

This page surveys the sublime in Romantic art — its theoretical background, its characteristic visual forms, its major artists, and its continuing influence.

The Theoretical Background

The philosophical concept of the sublime was developed in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. John Dennis, Joseph Addison, and the early German theorists wrote on the experience of the Alps and other vast natural scenes. The most important early theoretical statement was Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), which distinguished the sublime from the beautiful and analyzed the mental states — astonishment, awe, terror — that the sublime evokes. Immanuel Kant, in the Critique of Judgment (1790), refined Burke’s account and integrated the sublime into his broader critical philosophy. The Romantic theorists — the Schlegel brothers, Schelling, and others — gave the sublime a central place in their aesthetics.

For Kant, the sublime was the experience of the mind’s own superiority to nature. In the face of an overwhelming object, the imagination reaches its limit, and the mind is brought to a heightened awareness of its own rational and moral vocation. For the Romantic theorists, the sublime was a more ambiguous category — an experience in which the self is both elevated and dissolved, both triumphant and annihilated. Our page on The Sublime explores these theoretical developments in detail.

The Visual Forms of the Sublime

The Romantic visual artists developed a distinctive vocabulary of the sublime. Among the most common visual forms were:

Mountains, chasms, and alpine passes — the high peaks of the Alps, the Apennines, the Andes, and the Rockies were the great subjects of Romantic landscape painting and were often treated as symbols of the infinite.
Storms, tempests, and the sea — the great Romantic painters developed an unprecedented vocabulary for representing storms at sea, hurricanes, snowstorms, lightning, and the overwhelming power of natural elements. The page on Turner’s storms explores one of the great achievements of this tradition.
Ruins, both ancient and modern — the ruins of Rome, the Gothic abbey, the medieval castle, the abandoned temple were important subjects of Romantic painting, emblems of the transience of human power and the persistence of natural time.
Burning cities, battles, and apocalyptic scenes — the burning of Troy, the destruction of Pompeii, the great naval battles of the Napoleonic era, and the apocalyptic visions of the Book of Revelation were among the most popular subjects of Romantic history painting.
The human being in the face of the overwhelming — a lone figure on a mountain peak, a small boat in a stormy sea, a person in contemplation before a vast landscape; this iconic image, sometimes called the “sublime figure,” became one of the most enduring inventions of Romantic art.

The Major Sublime Painters

Among the great Romantic painters of the sublime were:

Caspar David Friedrich — whose misty mountains, frozen seas, and lone contemplative figures are among the supreme expressions of the Romantic sublime. The Wanderer above the Sea of Fog is treated in detail in our page on Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog.
J.M.W. Turner — whose later paintings, especially the great storm scenes and the late Venetian and atmospheric works, are among the most ambitious attempts in the history of art to give visual form to the sublime.
John Martin — the English painter whose vast apocalyptic canvases — The Great Day of His Wrath (1851–53), The Last Judgment (1853), The Plains of Heaven (1851–53) — are perhaps the most extreme visualizations of the sublime in the history of Western art.
Thomas Cole — the American painter whose allegorical landscapes of the Course of Empire and Voyage of Life series are among the great Romantic visualizations of historical and cosmic time.
John Constable — although primarily a painter of the peaceful English landscape, Constable produced major works of the sublime in his great cloud studies, his “Storm on the Sea” series, and the late Salisbury Cathedral paintings.
Eugène Delacroix — whose vast historical canvases — The Death of Sardanapalus, Liberty Leading the People, The Women of Algiers — carry the Romantic sublime into the realm of history, politics, and the exotic.

The Sublime in Sculpture and Architecture

The Romantic sublime was not only a painterly idea. In sculpture, the great monuments of the period — Canova’s tomb of the Archduchess Maria Christina, Thorvaldsen’s Lion of Lucerne, Rauch’s monuments to Frederick the Great and to Queen Louise — invoked the sublime in the inherited classical tradition. The new Gothic Revival architecture, with its towers, spires, and pointed arches, was a major expression of the Romantic sublime in the built environment. Our page on Gothic Revival architecture explores this important strand of the Romantic legacy.

The Continuing Power of the Sublime

The Romantic sublime has had a long afterlife. The great landscape photographers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries — Timothy O’Sullivan, Carleton Watkins, Ansel Adams, Eliot Porter — produced images of mountain peaks, canyons, and vast wilderness that draw on the Romantic vocabulary of the sublime. The cinema of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries — from the great panoramic films of David Lean to the vast visual epics of Peter Jackson, Terrence Malick, and Christopher Nolan — has used the new medium to extend the Romantic sublime into new dimensions. And the contemporary concern with climate change, ecological disaster, and the future of the natural world has given a new urgency to the Romantic idea that human beings, however powerful, inhabit a natural world that exceeds and often overpowers them.