Capturing the Sublime

Capturing the Sublime
Author: Suzanne Folds McCullagh
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2012
Genre: ART
ISBN: 9780300179705

This handsome volume brings together an impressive array of scholars, who analyze an outstanding private collection of 171 Old Master drawings that date from the late fifteenth through the early nineteenth century. The collection vibrantly revealed here includes a wide variety of drawings—from sketches and figure drawings to copies after masters and preliminary studies for major compositions—and features the work of many important Italian artists, including Raphael, Andrea del Sarto, Baccio Bandinelli, Pontormo, Perino del Vaga, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Salvator Rosa, Guercino, and Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, among many others. Each work is reproduced and accompanied by complete documentation: physical description, provenance, bibliography, and exhibition history, as well as background information on the subjects captured in the drawings. Capturing the Sublime opens the beauty of these drawings to a broader public and provides important new attributions and scholarship.

Private Acts

Private Acts
Author: Harriet Heyman
Publisher: Rizzoli International Publications
Total Pages: 223
Release: 2011
Genre: Photography
ISBN: 9780847836734

Photography collides with gravity-defying acts in this sensual and mesmerizing collection of photographs that capture the explosive energy and beauty of bodies. In this extraordinary suite of images by Acey Harper, the energy and beauty of nude female and male bodies-devoid of costumes, greasepaint, stage sets, and lighting-are photographed stripped bare (figuratively and literally), revealing the acrobats' art, craft, and emotions. The beautiful, well-trained, and highly flexible bodies are captured in settings from the natural (beaches in the Marin Headlands, forests in Vermont, the Black Rock Desert) to the gritty urban (a New Jersey steel mill, San Francisco streets, the New York subway). In three captivating essays, Harriet Heyman, well-schooled in trapeze arts, describes firsthand what it feels like to train as an acrobat and what motivates these dedicated artists.

Beyond the Finite

Beyond the Finite
Author: Roald Hoffmann
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2011-02-01
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0199750564

Throughout its long history, and not just as the key aesthetic category for the Romantic Movement, the sublime has created the necessary link between aesthetic and moral judgment, offering the prospect of transcending the limits of measurement, even imagination. The best of science makes genuine claims to the sublime. For in science, as in art, every day brings the entirely new, the extreme, and the unrepresentable. How does one depict negative mass, for example, or the folding of a protein that is contagious? Can one capture emergent phenomena as they emerge? Science is continually faced with describing that which is beyond. This book, through contributions from nine prominent scholars, tackles that challenge. The explorations within Beyond the Finite range from the images taken by the Hubble Telescope to David Bohm's quantum romanticism, from Kant and Burke to a "downward spiraling infinity" of the 21st century sublime, all lucid yet transcendent. Squarely positioned at the interface between science and art, this volume's chapters capture a remarkable variety of perspectives, with neuroscience, chemistry, astronomy, physics, film, painting and music discussed in relation to the sublime experience, topics surely to peak the interest of academics and students studying the sublime in various disciplines.

Sublime Nature

Sublime Nature
Author: Cristina Mittermeier
Publisher: National Geographic Books
Total Pages: 228
Release: 2014
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 1426213018

A photograph collection explores the variations of natural landscapes, plants, and animals and is complemented by perspectives on humanity's visceral connections to the natural universe.

The Sublime

The Sublime
Author: Karl Axelsson
Publisher: Peter Lang
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2007
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9783039111077

The appeal of the sublime in the minds of British critics and poets during the eighteenth century holds a unique position in the history of aesthetics. At no other time has aesthetics displayed a similar interest in the experience of the sublime. This book explores the impulses behind the fascination for that experience. The Greek treatise Peri Hupsous by Longinus constitutes the earliest source for the experience of the sublime, and as such it shaped much of British eighteenth-century criticism. But the attraction of the sublime received stimulus from other sources as well. In the effort to expand the context of the sublime, the author considers the incentives provided not only by Longinus, but also by the criticism of intellectual literature during the second half of the seventeenth century; a body of criticism that was not primarily concerned with the sublime, but which nevertheless served as an important link to its subsequent appeal.

The Lives of Others

The Lives of Others
Author: Simon Watson
Publisher: Rizzoli Publications
Total Pages: 338
Release: 2020-09-08
Genre: House & Home
ISBN: 0847869008

A privileged invitation into a world of beauty--from a seventeenth-century Italian palace and retreats in the Swiss Alps and Morocco to artists' studios and noble residences in Austria and Spain. Simon Watson takes the reader into highly personal environments that reveal the creativity and personality of their esteemed inhabitants. Since the 1990s, Watson has been one of the most prolific chroniclers of remarkable interiors and portraits, gracing the pages of W magazine, Vanity Fair, AD, and T Magazine. From hard-edged modernity and historical exoticism to pure classicism, the photographer has documented rooms of note in cities, atop mountains, and by the sea. Complementing his masterful images, Watson gives an intimate description of each location. On this journey with the photographer, one experiences the Duchess of Alba's Palacio Liria in Madrid, filled with sixteenth- and seventeenth-century masterpieces; interior designer Roberto Peregalli's splendid riad in Tangier; the magnificent and vast Castello Gardena in the Italian Alps owned by the Franchetti clan; Guinness heir Garech de Brun's hillside retreat in County Wicklow, Ireland; the Renaissance Palazzo Massimo alle Colonne in Rome, designed by Baldassarre Peruzzi in the sixteenth century; shoe designer Christian Louboutin's fanciful Parisian apartment; and many other splendid places around the world.

The Possibility of the Sublime

The Possibility of the Sublime
Author: Jane Forsey
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 126
Release: 2018-04-18
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1527510301

The notion of the sublime, used to describe a particular kind of overwhelming or exhilarating aesthetic experience, has garnered a great deal of attention by philosophers, critical theorists and literary scholars. In the midst of this growing body of literature, Professor Jane Forsey published an article asking whether an aesthetic theory of the sublime is even possible, and argued provocatively in the negative. Claiming that efforts to explain the sublime inevitably result in theories that are either contradictory or incoherent, Forsey posed a challenge to anyone who takes the sublime seriously as an aesthetic category. This volume brings together an international slate of philosophers and scholars of the sublime, who have been invited to respond to, and critically engage with, Forsey’s article. Unlike other monographs and anthologies that deal broadly with the sublime in aesthetics, this collection examines specific conceptual problems with the very foundations of sublime theory in a manner that is tightly focused and rigorous. It represents a variety of approaches that defend the sublime, and concludes with an original response by Professor Forsey to her critics.

The Sublime in Everyday Life

The Sublime in Everyday Life
Author: Anastasios Gaitanidis
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 197
Release: 2020-12-30
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1000317552

Notions of the sublime are most often associated with the extraordinary, and include the intra-psychic, high-cultural and exceptional occurrences of elation and exaltation as part of the experience. Using psychoanalytic and aesthetic theories, this book aims to revitalise the sublime by re-evaluating its significance for contemporary life and, in a unique and fascinating endeavour, opens up a space that explores the sublime in the ordinary, everyday and quotidian. Through the exploration of familiar (i.e. love, death, art and nature) and unfamiliar (pornography, education and politics) threads of the sublime experience, this book posits the sublime as invoking an ordinary human response which contains minute, inter-psychic, inclusive and even mass-media cultural elements, and carries within it therapeutic and political potential. It explores loving and caring, as well as hateful, traumatic and destructive encounters with the sublime, demonstrating how it can overflow and destabilise our psychological and social symbolic structures and expose their fictional and constructed nature, but also shows it as something we can engage with in order to re-create and heal ourselves, above and beyond what any 'given' form of reality can offer us. Demonstrating the urgent need to understand the sublime as something that is immanent in our everyday life, a source of energy and inspiration that can be invoked to support our mental health and well-being, this book will be of great interest to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists and art therapists, as well as scholars and students of philosophy and popular culture.

The Sublime in Modern Philosophy

The Sublime in Modern Philosophy
Author: Emily Brady
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2013-08-12
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0521194148

A philosophical study of the sublime from the height of its popularity to its renewed importance as a form of appreciating and valuing nature.

Knowledge, Spirit, Law: Book 2: The Anti-capitalist Sublime

Knowledge, Spirit, Law: Book 2: The Anti-capitalist Sublime
Author: Gavin Keeney
Publisher: punctum books
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2017-12-24
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1947447343

Knowledge, Spirit, Law, Book 2: The Anti-capitalist Sublime takes up where Knowledge, Spirit, Law, Book 1: Radical Scholarship (2015) left off, foremost in terms of a critique of neo-liberal academia and its demotion of the book in favor of various mediatic practices that substitute, arguably, for the one form of critical inquiry that might safeguard speculative intellectual inquiry as long-form and long-term project, especially in relationship to the archive or library (otherwise known as the "public domain"). This ongoing critique of neo-liberal academia is a necessary corrective to processes underway today toward the further marginalization of radical critique, with many of the traditional forms of sustained analysis being replaced by pseudo-empirical studies that abandon themes only presentable in the Arts and Humanities through the "arcanian closure" that the book as long-form inquisition represents (whether as novel, non-fictional critique, or something in-between). As a tomb for thought, this privileging of the shadowy recesses of the book preserves, through the very apparatuses of long- and slow-form scholarship, the premises presented here as indicative of an anti-capitalist project embedded in works that might otherwise shun such a characterization. The perverse capitalist capture of knowledge through mass digitalization is - paradoxically - the negative corollary for the reduction by abstraction of everyday works to a philosophical and moral inquest against Capital. The latter actually constitutes a transversal reduction for works (across works) toward the age-old antithesis to instrumentalized socio-cultural production - Spirit. For similar reasons, the anti-capitalist sublime as presented here is primarily a product of the imaginative, magical-realist regimes of thought in service to "no capital" - to no capitalization of thought. This book seeks to re-establish paradigmatic, a-historical, and universalizing practices in humanistic scholarship associated with speculative inquiry as a form of art, utilizing in passing forms of art and exemplary paradigmatic practices that are also first-order forms of speculative inquiry - suggesting that first-order works in the Arts and Humanities are those works that may "suffer" second-order incorporations without the attendant loss of the impress of sublimity (Spirit).