the sublime

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

an aesthetic category describing the experience of vastness, power, or overwhelming grandeur that exceeds beauty and produces a mixture of awe, terror, and exaltation in the viewer; theorised by Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant in the eighteenth century, the sublime refers to the capacity of certain natural phenomena — mountains, storms, oceans, the starry sky — and of certain works of art to produce an experience that overwhelms the human subject's capacity for rational comprehension and confronts them with the limits of their own scale and knowledge; the sublime was central to Romantic landscape painting, particularly in the work of Caspar David Friedrich, J.M.W. Turner, and the Hudson River School, and continues to inform contemporary art and discourse about the relationship between human consciousness and the natural world