Enfilade

Philip James De Loutherbourg, An Avalanche in the Alps, 1803, oil on canvas, 110 × 160 cm
(London: Tate, T00772).

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From the conference website:

Evoking the Incommensurable: Painting the Sublime
In person and online, Friedrich Schiller University, Jena, 26–28 July 2023

Organised by Johannes Grave, Sonja Scherbaum, and Arno Schubbach

Collaborative Research Center (SFB) 1288 “Practices of Comparing,” Bielefeld University, and Research Center for European Romanticism, Friedrich Schiller University Jena.

In the 18th century, the concept of the sublime constitutes a genuine novelty and a driving force for advancements in the theoretical reflection on the arts throughout Europe. Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant distinguished the sublime sharply from the beautiful, i.e., the traditional organizing subject of treatises on painting and literature, and emphasized its excessive strain on the senses, its incommensurability with any measure, and its irreducibility to any bounded shape. It thus constituted a harsh contrast to the beautiful and challenged the aesthetic values of pictorial or literary representation.

Moreover, the sublime was also a challenge to artistic practice. Theoretical discourse concerning the sublime often referred much more directly to our experience of nature than to our experience of artistic works. Particularly in the case of Kant, it was not evident that the arts are at all able to evoke anything sublime. Nevertheless, various attempts to paint the sublime can be seen in the genre of landscape painting. The sublime stimulated painters to push the limits of painting and to explore its capabilities anew.

The international conference Evoking the Incommensurable: Painting the Sublime will discuss the question of how artists purposefully explored and exploited the limits and capabilities of painting in order to evoke the incommensurable and paint the sublime. Participation is possible both on-site or via Zoom. Please register at paintingthesublime@uni-jena.de by 24 July 2023. The conference will be held in a hybrid format. Please let us know if you would like to attend in person or via Zoom.

w e d n e s d a y ,  2 6  j u l y  2 0 2 3

13.00  Arrival and Registration

13.30  Welcome and Introduction

14.00  Panel 1
Chair: Johannes Grave
• Aris Sarafianos (Ioannina), Hard Imitation and the Sublime Real: Art, Exhibitions, Panoramas, Casts, and Displays at the Far Ends of Visibility, c. 1800
• Elisabeth Ansel (Jena), ‘Most Magnificent and Sublime’: Ossian, Blindness, and the Sublime in the Visual Arts
• Hélène Ibata (Strasbourg), Temporal Vertigo and the Historical Sublime in Turner’s Venice Paintings

17.30  Coffee Break

18.00  Keynote Lecture
• Robert Doran (Rochester), ‘Moving Us to Pity’: Visual Art and Sublimity in Burke, Du Bos, and Kant

20.00  Conference Dinner

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9.15  Welcome

9.30  Panel 2
Chair: Mira Claire Zadrozny
• Yvon Le Scanff (Paris), Victor Hugo, ‘Bringing out the Sublime’
• Caroline van Eck (Cambridge), The Animal Sublime, c. 1800
• Sarah Gould (Paris), Mary Somerville’s Scientific Sublime: Picturing the Immaterial

13.00  Lunch Break

14.30  Panel 3
Chair: Britta Hochkirchen
• Laure Cahen-Maurel (Bonn), Viewing beyond the Visible: The Power of the Imagination from the Kantian to the Romantic Sublime
• Mark Cheetham (Toronto), The Incommensurability of Arctic Sublimity: Environmental Stereotypes and the Specificity of the Sublime
• Craig Hanson (Grand Rapids), Before & After: Temporal Strategies for Effecting the Sublime

19.30  Reception at Schillers Gartenhaus

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9.15  Welcome

9.30  Panel 4
Chair: Arno Schubbach
• Marie-Louise Monrad Møller (Leipzig), Pauelsen, Dahl, Lundbye: Aspects of the Sublime in Scandinavian Landscape Painting
• Adèle Akamatsu (Paris), Fjords, Waterfalls and High Mountains: Painting the ‘Rough’ and ‘Grand’ Landscapes of Norway from Germany, 1820s–1860s
• Nikita Mathias (Oslo), Painting the Sublime beyond Painting: From the Easel to the Cinema

13.00  Concluding Discussion