As a leading landscapist, with early training in architectural drawing and topographic painting, J.M.W. Turner was, in his own times, a recognized master of perspective, whose command of the technique earned him in 1807 the Royal Academy's Professorship of Perspective. The lectures which he consequently delivered from 1811 to 1828, almost on a yearly basis, failed however to convey clearly his original conception of art in general, and of perspective in particular. Turner's audiences were baffled by his poor public speaking abilities, as a number of contemporary testimonies bear witness, many of them praising the beauty of the lecture diagrams while complaining about the unintelligibility of both the verbal content and the delivery itself (Whitley 205-08; 255-59). Commentaries ranged from the famous statement by an anonymous critic in the Annals of Fine Arts of 1820 that the course was "distinguished for its usual inanity, want of connection, bad delivery and beautiful drawings" (98), to more forgiving appreciations like the following: Mr. Turner illustrated his discourse with some admirable perspective drawings well calculated to afford clearness to the definition of a science so abstruse as perspective, and which would otherwise be unintelligible in an oral essay. We make particular mention of these illustrative drawings, not merely on account of the high beauty which it may be supposed they possess, emanating from the hand of so celebrated an artist; but though to find fault is always a disagreeable task, we cannot help observing that Mr. Turner's delivery is by no means clear, and we apprehend that without the aid of the graphic auxiliaries his auditory would derive very little benefit from his lectures.
William Blake was one of the leading actors of a revolution in aesthetics which, by releasing the imagination and the subconscious from rational control, and by emphasizing the intensity of perception and the freedom of creative genius, fostered a new yearning for an absolute within human reach. The concept of the sublime provided a theoretical framework for this opening of boundaries, as the pervasive contemporary debate on the subject attests, and became a working paradigm for the changes which took place in the arts and thought of the time. Blake, who was born the same year as Edmund Burke published his landmark Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), was necessarily familiar with the terms of the debate, and his frequent use of the word "sublime" in his poetry, letters and artistic pamphlets shows that he gave it a central place in his aesthetics, reflecting, as can be expected from his composite approach to art, both about its poetic and its visual dimension. He called his poetic universe a "sublime allegory," 1 a phrase which aptly encompasses the prolific and complex creations of his "prophecies" in their defiance of univocal meanings and their challenge to readers' ordinary perceptions. In Jerusalem, his very self-reflexive last epic prophecy, the central object of artistic striving and production is "the sublime Universe of Los & Enitharmon" (59: 21; E 209); 2 in The Four Zoas, the purpose of Los's "fires" is to "fabricate forms sublime" (98: 22; E 370). The sublime is also a recurrent term in Blake's writings on art, where it designates the highest form of artistic expression: it figures prominently in his annotations to Sir Joshua Reynolds' Discourses on Art, partly in answer to its use by Reynolds, but also with a clear personal intentionality. Blake's position, however seems to have been an isolated and puzzling one in its context, largely due to his definite rejection of the then prevailing theory of Edmund Burke, with its foundation of the sublime on an empirical basis. In his Philosophical Enquiry, Burke, who did not think much of painting as a means to convey the sublime (being too figurative and explicit), had nevertheless provided a number of principles and guidelines for which visual artists had found immediate practical applications. He had notably argued that some objects' material qualities, like vastness, confusion, and obscurity, were necessary conditions for experiencing the sublime, thus leading many artists to increase pictorial formats and scale, and to favour
In The Book of Urizen, Blake’s subversion of authoritative discourses includes a critique of Enlightenment aesthetics, and in particular a parody of the contemporary conception of the sublime. At the same time, however, the aesthetics of terror are displaced onto new grounds, as the artist draws attention to creative anxiety and the endless and laborious production process. This new emphasis, we show, is one of Blake’s most significant contributions to the debate on the sublime. As the self-reflexive dimension of The Book of Urizen attests, it is anchored in his own practice and in his awareness of the incommensurability of formal intentions and execution
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