Arts & Culture
How the Sublime Is Represented in Romantic Landscape Painting
Quick fact
Edmund Burke's 1757 treatise on the sublime defined it as 'delightful horror,' a pleasure arising from pain and danger when we are not directly threatened—a concept central to Romantic art.
Why this is interesting
Have you ever stood before a towering mountain or a raging storm and felt both terrified and strangely uplifted? Romantic painters captured that exact feeling—the sublime—in landscapes that dwarf and overwhelm us.