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Natural And Natural Sublime

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Many different natural and manmade things can be interpreted as aesthetically sublime. Things that are sublime are all around, and they attract a lot of attention from the public. Most tourist attractions are considered sublime. The sublime portrays the strong emotions of awe that people have when they see powerful forces of the natural world. Along with tourist attractions being sublime, most art pieces, especially paintings, are sublime. While some artists paint natural, sublime scenes like mountains, volcanoes, and waterfalls, the artists Erich Mercker, Hans Müller, and Fritz Gärtner demonstrate the sublime by painting industrial scenes that are immense in size and contain bright orange molten metal which creates feelings of power and fear. The sublime describes the awe and shock that people experience when they see something that is enormous in size. David Rodgers summarizes the works of a man named Longinus, who is credited as the first person to define the sublime. Longinus defines it as “differing from beauty and evoking more intense emotions by vastness, a quality that inspires awe. Whereas beauty may be found in the small, the smooth, the light and the everyday, the sublime is vast, irregular, obscure and superhuman” (Rodgers, 1996, pg. 889). He explains that the sublime is more than just beauty because the sublime captures the massive size of these objects that creates wonderment. Along with Longinus writing about the vast and sheer awe that the sublime creates, Immanuel Kant also explains his definition of the sublime. Kant explains that “the physical properties, whether actually or imaginative perceived, that were generally accorded to the sublime by 18th-century writers, were vastness, obscurity and irregularity, all of which could evoke a degree of terror” (Rodgers, 1996 pg. 890). He also agreed that the impressive size of things helped make them sublime. Overall, the sublime explains the wonderment and awe that someone feels when looking at something that is huge and impressive. A painting that portrays the sublime is Mercker’s Copper Mill at Duisburg on Rhine River (Türk, 2003, p. 266). The painting shows a large factory that is right on a river, and the machines present in the painting

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