Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

BEAUTIFUL AND SUBLIME
exemplified by pure forms that “represent nothing, no object under a determinate
concept, and are free beauties.” Lest the modern reader be misled by
Kant’s language, which for us points toward “high art” non-representational
painting, it is important to remember that for him “painting” included “the decoration
of rooms with tapestries, bric-a-brac, and all the beautiful furnishings
whose sole function is to be looked at, as well as the art of dressing carefully” and
“a room with all sorts of ornaments (including even ladies’ attire).” 28 For Kant as
for Lessing, among the arts “poetry holds the highest rank,” because it leads us
beyond the world of sensory appearance to the “supersensible” and so “fortifies
the mind.” 29 But poetry itself, as a fine (schön) art has the form of “free play”;
writing, in Kant’s version of the dichotomy, is a beautiful action. As he explained
it in his early Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, to such actions
“belongs above all the mark that they display facility, and appear to be accomplished
without painful toil,” while “strivings and surmounted difficulties belong
to the sublime.” 30 Whatever the limitations of poetry, however, painting lies farther
from sublimity, for the sublime “cannot be contained in any sensible form
but concerns only ideas of reason.” Indeed, “perhaps the most sublime passage
in the Jewish Law is the commandment: Thou shalt not make unto thee any
graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven or on earth, or
under the earth, etc.” 31
The rejection of pictorial imagery by the “people of the book” can be related
to a further dimension of Lessing’s separation of the literary from the visual,
beyond the attack on illustration and symbolism: a critique of realism, more
specifically of genre painting. While language is the medium of truth, painting’s
specialty is, as we have seen, the “imitation of beautiful bodies.” Although freedom
of speech is required for the sciences, restrictions should be placed on the
arts, whose ultimate purpose is to give pleasure. Language is free to represent
the ugly and the laughable, precisely because it is not a physically imitative art;
whereas a picture of an ugly object is itself ugly, a poetic description of an ugly
28 Ibid., p. 77.
29 Ibid., p. 196.
30 Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime [1763], tr. John T. Goldthwait
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960), p. 78. Section Three of this text, “Of the
distinction of the beautiful and sublime in the interrelations of the two sexes,” is devoted to an
analysis of gender in terms of the two aesthetic categories. Thus it begins with the statement that
“certain specific traits lie especially in the personality of [woman’s] sex which distinguish it
clearly from ours [sic] and chiefly result in making her known by the mark of the beautiful. On
the other side, we could make a claim on the title of the noble sex,” with nobility previously identified
with sublimity (p. 76). “Women have a strong inborn feeling for all that is beautiful,
elegant, and decorated” (p. 77) and their “philosophy is not to reason, but to sense” (p. 79). This
philosophy expresses their inner nature; though in polite conversation one should not acknowledge
it with obscenities, only a prude will bridle at the truth that “the sexual inclination
ultimately underlies all her remaining charms” (p. 85).
31 Kant, Critique of Judgment, p. 135.
55