The Sublime

About

In 1757 Edmund Burke separated the beautiful, which pleases, from the sublime, which thrills through a kind of safe terror: storms, precipices, darkness, infinity. The idea transformed landscape painting. J. M. W. Turner's Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps (1812) swallows an army in a vortex of cloud, and John Martin's apocalyptic canvases, such as The Great Day of His Wrath (1851–53), hurl whole cities into chasms.

In the Americas the sublime took on continental scale. Thomas Cole's The Course of Empire: Destruction (1836) imagines a great city sacked amid storm and fire, and Frederic Edwin Church's Cotopaxi (1862) sets an Ecuadorian volcano smoking beneath a sun dimmed red by ash. Later artists sought the same shiver without scenery. Anish Kapoor's Descent into Limbo (1992), a hole in a floor coated in dark pigment, seems to open onto endless depth.