In the 18th century, the concept of the sublime con­ stitutes a genuine novelty and a driving force for ad­ vancements 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 lit­ erary 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. Partic­ ularly in the case of Kant, it was not evident that the arts are at all able to evoke anything sublime. Never­ theless, 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 Incommen­ surable – Painting the Sublime” will discuss the ques­ tion of how artists purposefully explored and exploited the limits and capabilities of painting in order to evoke the incommensurable and paint the sublime.

This workshop is organised by members of the Collabora- tive Research Center (Sonderforschungsbereich, or SFB) 1288 “Practices of Comparing. Ordering and Changing of the World” at Bielefeld University – funded by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, or DFG).

Participation is also possible via zoom. If you are interested, please register by 24.7.2023 with a short, informal mail to paintingthesublime@uni-jena.de.

More information is available at the link below.