Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

BEAUTIFUL AND SUBLIME
sublime. In praising Milton’s poetry for the sublimity of its images, he mentions
as themes “the ruin of monarchs, and the revolutions of kingdoms.” 52 John Baillie’s
Essay on the Sublime, published ten years before Burke’s, finds sublimity of
passion in “Heroism, or Desire of Conquest, such as in an Alexander or a Caesar,”
which “generally arises either from a Desire of Power, or Passion for Fame; or
from both.” The sublime is also associated here with love of country, or even the
“Universal Benevolence” which loves all mankind.
But how would the Sublime sink, if . . . the Imagination should fix upon a
narrow Object, a Child, a Parent, or a Mistress! Indeed, Love to any of the
Individuals, nay to all of them, when considered as Individuals, and one by
one, has nothing of Exalted; it is when we love them collectively, when we
love them in vast Bodies stretching over large Countries, that we feel
the Sublime rise. 53
Despite Lessing’s insistence on the radical separation of powers between poetry
and painting, history painters as well as poets reached for the sublime, giving visible
form to the contrasts developed in the texts we have been discussing. To take
a well-known example, the first commentators on Jacques-Louis David’s Oath of
the Horatii (1785, Musée du Louvre) stressed the artist’s “departures from
accepted practice, his defiance of rules and tradition . . . Gorsas [Promenades de
Crites au Salon de l’année 1785] suggests that the ‘sublime’ expression of Horatius
‘would have escaped any other but M. David.’” 54 The Horatii, along with The Lictors
Returning to Brutus the Bodies of his Sons (1789, Musée du Louvre) and other
works of this period, was history painting of a scale and seriousness denied to
English artists by the lack of royal and aristocratic patronage for such works,
despite the efforts of Reynolds, Dance, West, and (above all) Burke’s protégé
James Barry. These were sublime works in the classical (Longinian) sense of treating
noble subjects, in a manner calculated not to attract the taste for decorative
prettiness but, through the idealizing of natural forms, to inspire the viewer to
high and profound thoughts. They were also sublime in the newer, Burkean,
sense of presenting images of fearsome moments, expressive of the artist’s powerful
imagination and inspiring strong feeling in the spectator. David himself spoke
of Michelangelo as his master, and declared, “there is something Florentine in
the rendering of my Brutus,” while a review of the 1789 Salon described this
painting as “male, severe, terrifying.” 55
52 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, pp. 59, 62.
53 John Baillie, An Essay on the Sublime (Los Angeles: The Augustan Reprint Society, Clark Memorial
Library, University of California, 1953), pp. 11–20, 23.
54 Crow, Painters, pp. 211–17.
55 J. L. David, letters to Wicar, in Robert L. Herbert, David, Voltaire, Brutus, and the French Revolution:
An Essay on Art and Politics (New York: Viking, 1973), pp. 123, 124; review in Mercure de France,
October 24, 1789, in ibid., p. 126. See the reviews in the Journal de Paris and the Supplément aux
remarques sur les ouvrages exposés au Salon, tr. in ibid., pp. 126, 127, which state (respectively) that in
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