期刊名称：Miranda. Revue pluridisciplinaire du monde anglophone / Multidisciplinary peer-reviewed journal on the English-speaking world
电子版ISSN：2108-6559
出版年度：2020
期号：21
页码：1-5
DOI：10.4000/miranda.29927
出版社：Université Toulouse 2 - Le Mirail
摘要：Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) is of one of the most well-known texts of eighteenth-century British art and aesthetics alongside with Hogarth’s Analysis of Beauty (1753) and Reynolds’s Discourses at the Royal Academy (1769 – 1790). But The Challenge of the Sublime by Hélène Ibata sheds new and fresh light on the Enquiry as it tackles Burke’s reception and legacy among nineteenth-century British artist. Ibata contends that by implying painters could not rouse sublime feelings as much as poetry, Burke succeeded in provoking painters who became intent on proving him wrong. Just as poets had long been thought to induce sublime thoughts in their readers, painters equally felt there was no reason to check their flights of imagination and restrain their talent for representation on canvas. Ibata pushes her argument one step further: she suggests that the sublime became a (new) challenge for artists to take up in order to win over the technical constraints which they faced with two-dimensional canvasses and the age-old paradigm of mimesis . The “challenge of the sublime” also thus refers to artists’ frustrations at Burke’s underestimation of the powers of pictorial power and thus to Burke challenging artists into renewed creativity: he fueled artists with energy and ideas to experiment further with visual representation. The first part of the book is a survey of the genesis as well as the afterlife of Burke’s Enquiry ; first of all, a genealogy of sublime theories is provided, concerned with highlighting the various strands of thinking on the sublime that went into Burke’s essay which is presented as the “culmination” of a long tradition with radical, subversive potential. The study of his relation to previous explorations of the sublime, notably Longinus Peri Hupsous , as well as his affinities with more recent British writers, highlights Burke’s idiosyncratic and unique place, and his role in subverting and adapting it: Burnet, Dennis, Shaftesbury, Addison and Baillie are called up as possible sources and forerunners of Burke’s ideas. The seeds of important aspects of his essay, its emphasis on terror and on the passions, its repertoire of natural sources of the sublime, and its pioneering “psychology” of the sublime can all be traced back to several layers of British thought. Secondly, the posterity of Burke’s essay is examined particularly in relation to Sir Joshua Reynolds and James Barry, two early shapers of the Royal Academy of Arts. Chapter four highlights the fascinating double portrait by Barry of himself with his friend Burke in a striking and admittedly bewildering epic episode taken from Homer’s Odyssey - Portraits of Barry and Burke in the Characters of Ulysses and a Companion Fleeing from the Cave of Polyphemus (Crawford Art Gallery, Cork) ; this image epitomizes the study conducted in Part I on the actual incidence and import of the intellectual connections and exchanges that shaped the Enquiry . The three chapters of part II of the book study the ways British artists challenged the constraining idea of “narrow limits of painting”, focusing respectively on panoramic canvasses, frames and architectural fantasies. Ibata’s central tenet is Burke’s skepticism about the possibility of a pictorial sublime. Her main target is to gauge whether his ideas hindered or conversely exacerbated pictorial practices in reaction to academic exhibition paintings; she argues that the growing taste for the aesthetics of terror necessitated innovative means to counteract what was often deplored about painting on canvas at that time, the necessarily “quadrilateral frame of the painting” (p. 148). In this part the fashion for book illustration and beyond-the-frame panoramas are studied very closely as visual supplements and tools to transcend pictorial finiteness. The last two chapters of the book (Part III) focus on Blake and Turner’s interpretations of the sublime. While seeing Burke in the context of his contemporary readers, contacts and friendships, such as painters Reynolds and Barry, the book is also shaped by later philosophical and art historical readings of the sublime, notably those of Immanuel Kant, Louis Marin, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Jacques Derrida: their definitions and interpretations are made to reverberate back onto Burke- a non-historicist posture which enables a widening of the acceptation (and expectations) of the late eighteenth-century sublime, but somehow stretches Burke beyond his intent and design. As a whole, the book provides the most comprehensive study to date of the interrelation between a well-established text (too often read in isolation in past writings) and manifold British pictorial practices conceived here as more or less direct reactions to Burke’s ideas and beliefs. As such, needless to say Hélène Ibata’s book is of utmost interest to students and scholars alike of nineteenth-century art and aesthetics.
关键词：paysage; représentation; esthétique; art; sublime; texte et image; arts visuels britanniques; arts sœurs; études de la réception; landscape; aesthetics; mimesis; reception studies; British visual arts; sister arts; word and image; James Barry; Horace Walpole; Edmund Burke; William Blake; William Hogarth; Joshua Reynolds; Immanuel Kant; Henry Fuseli; Joseph Addison; John Baillie; Jakob Bodmer; Thomas Burnet; John Dennis; Ephraim Lessing; Baldine Saint Girons; Earl of Shaftesbury; J;M; Turner; Thomas Whately
