Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

BEAUTIFUL AND SUBLIME
year. 72 A reader familiar with the later history of the sublime may also be put in
mind of Turner’s Academy diploma picture, Dolbadern Castle (1800), with its
mists, rocks, and tower “Where [in Turner’s own verses] hopeless OWEN, long
imprison’d, pin’d, / And wrung his hands for liberty, in vain.” And Wollstonecraft’s
own writing follows a style consistent with her aim, “to show that
elegance is inferior to virtue”:
Animated by this important object, I shall disdain to cull my phrases or
polish my style. I aim at being useful, and sincerity will render me unaffected;
for wishing rather to persuade by the force of my arguments
than dazzle by the elegance of my language, I shall not waste my time
in rounding periods, or in fabricating the turgid bombast of artificial
feelings, which, coming from the head, never reach the heart. 73
Wollstonecraft’s critique of beauty as degraded state is confirmed by the evidence
of turn-of-the-century salon art. In general, woman, if beautiful, is passive,
grief-stricken, asleep, or dead. Woman represented as active and powerful
reflects the fear voiced by Burke and Rousseau: she is a killer of children or husband
(Medea, Clytemnestra, Phaedra). The former type appears over and over
in the nineteenth century as Juliet, Ophelia, or harem girl (and strikingly in
Jean-Baptiste Clésinger’s Woman Bitten by a Serpent (1847, Musée d’Orsay), in
which the image of death is nearly completely displaced by that of the sexual
pleasure with which it is conjoined or equated). The latter type—the Bad Sublime—takes
fin-de-siècle form as Salome, sphinx, and vampire (she makes a
notable twentieth-century entrance, as we have seen, among the Demoiselles
d’Avignon).
Perhaps the most perfect painted embodiments of the beautiful are the dying
women in Delacroix’s Death of Sardanapalus (Figure 4.2), who have their place
within a sublime image, of a kingdom fallen and a monarch overthrown. Sardanapalus
lies in shadow as the smoke of his burning city billows behind him.
Light falls on the women who are being killed or choosing death; three of these
beautiful bodies form the center of the image. Shifts in perspective, by destroying
a stable pictured space, dematerialize this image filled with precious objects
and making it, not a space we are looking into, but an evocation of the
monarch’s last vision. Subordinate to his will, at this moment of their destruction
they are objects only for his sight. Of one this is not true: the dark-skinned
woman at the center below the bed looks straight out at us. She is perhaps not
unrelated to the female center of another painting by Delacroix. In Liberty Leading
the People (Musée du Louvre), we have the transformation of the Burkean mob
of the “vilest of women” into a revolutionary avatar of Mary Wollstonecraft’s
72 See Nicholas Penny (ed.), Reynolds (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 1986), pp. 251 ff.
73 Ibid., p. 82.
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