Mathy+Sublime

Chris Mathy Throughout //Frankenstein//, Mary Shelley provides us with dazzling images of nature throughout Europe. As Victor Frankenstein is gradually eaten away by grief, he finds comfort in the immensity of the Alps and the beauty of the Rhine's banks. This fascination with and awe of nature is a prominent feature of Romanticism, and is seen in a variety of forms, including literature, music, and art.

Joseph Mallord William Turner was born in 1775, 41 years before Mary Shelley conceived of //Frankenstein//. Turner was a painter known for his landscapes, some of which give a clear representation of sublimity. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/trnr/hd_trnr.htm

Turner's painting, titled Keelmen Heaving in Coals by Moonlight, gives both a terrifying and majestic sense of the sublime with the portrayal of the sky. The arc of the sky, almost like a dome, seems massive and enclosing. Turner's sky seems much more like a cage than the usual sky. Also, the vast change in shade of blue, intermixed with stormy gray clouds, gives the viewer an even greater sense of awe, as everything is on a large, overwhelming scale. If Turner had instead dotted the sky with a few stars, it would have given a much more soft, calm effect. Lastly, Turner portrays the dock as dark, with a little light coming from some torches or fires. These are diminished by the bright, magnificent moon, which fills the sky and harbor with silver light, a stark contrast to the dim oranges of the dock. http://www.iatwm.com/200711/Crosscurrents/index.html

media type="youtube" key="O2AEaQJuKDY" width="425" height="350" Beethoven is seen as the bridge from the Classical period of music to the Romantic period. His Symphony 9 contains both loud and quiet dynamics, all the while giving a dark, terrifying feeling to the listener. In this case, the sublime is seen in the dissonance of the music, not the pleasure. Beethoven's piece is much fuller than the Baroque and Classical music that preceded the composer. As artists were painting landscapes, musicians were filling their music with sublime emotions, which, in many cases, came through in frightening, disharmonious sounds. http://bostonreview.net/BR24.6/tymoczko.html



//A View of Fort Putnam//, by Thomas Cole, is another good example pf the sublimity seen in nature both the terrifying and pleasing aspect. Painted in 1825, //A View of Fort Putnam//, is, more or less, split up into two parts based on the aforementioned kinds of sublimity. The lower half of the painting contains a forest, a house, some grazing animals, and a man enjoying it all; all is very peaceful and quiet. The top half, however, shows three massive hills and a stormy sky surrounding a fort, which, although a very large structure, is made very minuscule by the immensity of the hills and sky. http://hamiltonauctiongalleries.com/COLE-T25FP.JPG http://hamiltonauctiongalleries.com/Cole.htm

This painting by Charles Sheeler (b. 1883) is titled Classic Landscape 1931. Sheeler shows us that sublimity is still seen in the modern world, but not in the same natural ways. The focus is still on huge objects, the buildings, and stormy, intricate skies. However, nature's place has been taken by manmade structures, such as buildings and railroads. www.mtholyoke.edu describes this change thus: "Sheeler's work records the displacement of the Natural Sublime by the Industrial Sublime." [|http://www.mtholyoke.edu/~gmburch/classweb/American%20Factory/classiclandscape.htm]

//Crossed Structures// is a recent piece of work, made last year by Hunter Logan. He got the idea for //Crossed Structures// from an older painting, //The Wreck of the Hope// by Caspar David Friedrich (shown below). The sublime nature of the landscape is seen both in the towering of the structures, and the way the different pieces of the structures are meshed over one another. This mesh represents "the great flows of ice climbing over one another in [Friedrich's] frigid, desolate environment." Similarly to Sheeler, Logan is portraying the evolution of sublime themes; namely, as the world became more industrialized, there was a "[replacement of] the sublime beauty of nature with the sublime beauty of man-made and natural catastrophe." http://artlmntl.com/art/art02.htm http://www.artsforge.com/agallery/hope.html