Painting the Sublime

In the second half of the eighteenth century, the category of the ­sublime became a central concept of the fledgling field of aesthetics. Originally located at the margins of discourses on rhetoric, it became a source of fascination in literary and artistic production, but quickly proved to be a complicated matter, especially for the visual arts. Artists and philosophers contended with the question of whether the sublime can be depicted at all or whether the events that can cause viewers to experience the sublime can be adequately represented in painting. The contributions of this special issu e suggest, however, that the contested visual representability of the sublime might have spurred visual artists to devise innovative, experimental solutions in the eighteenth and nineteenth century.