The Baroque Sublime: The Affective Power of Landscape

39 Chapter 2 The Baroque Sublime: The Affective Power of Landscape Helen Langdon The domain of the sublime is vast, and in any period hard to define. In this essay, I attempt to explore the concept of the sublime in relation to seventeenth-century landscape painting, mainly from Italy. I have chosen some key works through which to explore aspects of the baroque passion for the stupendous and terrifying, in such phenomena as volcanoes, storms, the jagged peaks of mountains, and the crash of waterfalls, as well as in the prodigies and monsters associated with a dark and still-mysterious natural world. These works evoked emotions of wonder, mystical rapture, and horror or fear, which would only later be categorized as sublime. My concern here has been to contextualize these emotions, to suggest the strains of thought and feeling which contemporary viewers brought to them, and which suggest how the sublime was exper ienced in a pre-Burkian era.1 Classical Sources of the Seventeenth-Century Sublime The major source for the sublime in the seventeenth century was an anonymous treatise on rhetoric titled On the Sublime, probably written in the mid first century CE. It was long thought to be written by Longinus, and I shall here use this traditional name and association. For Longinus, the sublime was a rhetorical phenomenon, a quality of writing that expresses great thoughts in rich and emotionally powerful words and images. It uplifts the soul, and through its intensity and expression of vehement passion sweeps audiences off their feet in amazement, transporting them with wonder.2 Longinus associates his “godlike authors” through metaphor, with the violence of the elements and with soaring beyond “the boundaries by which we are circumscribed.” 3 His instances of sublimity are predominantly drawn from the elemental forces of nature: from the violence of shipwrecks and battle, from immensity and energy, and he admires those writers who can create terror, who can make the hearer feel that they are “moving in the thick of the danger.” 4 The orator had the power to create a lifelike image, causing an overwhelming and visceral shock in his audience, and most of Longinus’s examples of such images are associated with terror. Of the natural world Longinus had little to say, but his citing of the Fiat Lux, where God says “Let there be light, and there was light; let there be land, and there was land,” 5 as one of the 1 I would like to express my gratitude to Caroline van Eck and Maarten Delbeke for inviting me to contribute to their volume Translations of the Sublime, to which this essay is indebted. For this definition of the pre-history of the sublime, see the introduction to that volume, p. 3. [Q: The first part of this note has to go in an unnumbered note. Should ‘For this definition of the pre-history of the sublime, see the introduction to that volume, p. 3’ go with it or stay as the whole of n. 1?] 2 Longinus, On the Sublime, p. 114. [Q: Is this OK, or give as “On the Sublime”, which is how it appears in the refs?] 3 Longinus, p. 155. Longinus, p. 145. 5 Genesis 1:3. 4 40 highest examples of sublimity, immediately associates the sublime with landscape. 6 And, in a famous passage, Longinus declares that whatever is divine in humanity longs for the infinite. We admire, he writes, not small streams, but “the Nile, the Danube, the Rhine, and even m ore than these the Ocean”; not the household fire, but those of the heavens, shrouded in darkness, and the craters of Etna, whose “eruptions throw up from their depths rocks and even whole mountains, and at times pour out rivers of that earth-born, spontaneous fire.”7 Other ancient writers, as we shall see, fed into the seventeenth-century sublime. Most famous of these are perhaps Lucretius, whose similar catalogue of cosmic marvels and earthly wonders fills the sixth book of De Rerum Naturae, and Seneca, who wrote poetically of the power of nature to evoke the mysterious horror of the divine. “The End of the Poet is to Arouse Wonder” 8 In late sixteenth-century Italy there was a growing interest in Longinus’s text, nourished by the early modern fascination with wonder and the marvelous. Traces of Longinus first appear in poetic theory, where terms such as stupore (“wonder”) and meraviglia (“astonishment”) chimed easily with the Longinian sublime. At the opening of the new century, this fascination began to blend with the astonished delight aroused by the new scientific discoveries, both the tiny and the vast, as the world was now studied through the microscope, as well as through the telescope. Above all Galileo had revealed a new heaven of astonishing beauty. He made his discoveries accessible, and in the Starry Messenger, published in 1610, Galileo described with vivid passion the rough mountains of the Moon, “everywhere full of vast protuberances, deep chasms and sinuosities”; of stars “in myriads, which have never been seen before”; and of the beauty of the Milky Way, now for the first time revealed as a multitude of tiny stars. 9 A woodcut image accompanying Galileo’s text shows the seemingly random journeying of endless chains of stars, moving beyond the limits of the page and sweeping away traditional concepts of the universe. 10 In 1612, Lodovico Cigoli painted Galileo’s rough Moon, and placed it at the feet of the Virgin in his Assumption of the Virgin, found in the Pauline Chapel in Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore, Rome.11 Plate 3. Adam Elsheimer, The Flight into Egypt, 31 cm × 41 cm, oil on copper, Alte Pinakothek, Munich, ca. 1609. Photo © bpk/Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen A year before Galileo’s book, Adam Elsheimer’s The Flight into Egypt (plate 3) had created magical effects which play on the tension between the tiny and the vast. He sets the meagerness of “household fires”—Joseph’s torch and the rising sparks of the campfire—against the vast depths of the starry sky, where the Milky Way seems to link the Earth with the unconfined spaces of the heavens like a ladder. Nature rustles around the small fleeing family, and its splendor seems to shelter them; the painting poignantly evokes the fragility of humanity amid the new wonder of the 6 Longinus, p. 124. Longinus, p. 155. 8 Giambattista Marino, Le Rime, n. p. [Q: not listed in refs] 9 Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Science and Imagination, p. 14. Nicolson considers the Starry Messenger the most important seventeenth-century book for its impact on the imagination. Nicolson, p. 4. [Q: are the words Galileo’s or hers?] 7 10 Ingrid Rowland, The Ecstatic Journey, p. 73. Hubert Damisch, Théorie du nuage, p. 244. Lodovico Cigoli, Assumption of the Virgin, 1612, fresco, Pauline Chapel, Santa Maria Maggiore, Rome. 11 41 cosmos.12 It is itself a meraviglia, intricately wrought on a small piece of copper, which creates a glowing luminosity; its evocation, on so tiny a scale, of the immense depths of the dark sky, filled with a profusion of newly revealed heavenly bodies, would have filled the viewer with astonishment. Jan Brueghel’s small tempest scenes from the 1590s create a similar response. His Shipwreck with Castaways, also known as A Sea Storm, shows the anguish of struggling figures confronting death and salvation, yet the painting is tiny, a wondrously crafted luxury object which delights the viewer with the tension between horror and aesthetic delight. 13 There is no fixed foreground, yet the scale and magical touch distance the viewer, who becomes Lucretius’s watcher on the shore, who, free from fear, gazes on another’s tribulations with pleasure. 14 For the poets associated with Giambattista Marino, the sublime suggested the power to enchant and to astonish with something rare and exceptional. But for the Jesuits it had a mystic power, and it was this that was to inform the development of an ascetic sublime. 15 The Chosen Men Meet God More Often: On the Peaks of Mount Horeb and in the Vale of Mamre In the late years of the sixteenth century, hermits, who linked a threatened church with the heroes of its earliest days, became frequent in art. In the seventeenth century, the practice of spiritual retreat was popular, and images of the ascetic mountain men of early Christianity acted as aids to devotion. These hermits’ view of nature contributed to the tradition of the sublime. In the writings of the Church Fathers, descriptions of savage and demon-haunted landscapes, of wastelands, caves, and abysses, were read with fresh interest. St. Jerome had evoked the challenge of a harsh solitude. “I would set out solitary to explore the desert,” he writes, “and wherever I would spy the depth of a valley or a mountainside or a precipitous rock, there was my place of prayer, there the torture house of my unhappy flesh: and, the Lord Himself is witness, after many tears, and eyes that clung to heaven, I would sometimes seem to myself to be one with the angelic hosts.” 16 Implicit in St. Basil’s description of his hermitage is a distinction between the sublime and the beautiful, as he overlooks the river Iris, and compares a rushing waterfall with a still stretch of the river Strymon. The cascade “roughened by the rock which borders upon it […] coils itself into a deep whirlpool, furnishing me and every spectator with a most pleasant sight.” 17 For the hermit, the harsh privation of such landscapes freed the soul to soar unfettered above the pleasures of the senses, and in the early years of the seventeenth century their power as images of hell and suffering remained strong. Such landscapes evoked fear, untempered by any ambivalent pleasure. Angelitta, giving advice to pilgrims traveling to Loreto, wrote that when they encountered precipices, deep valleys, lakes, cliffs, and other horrendous and ugly things, they 12 Elsheimer’s painting pre-dates Galileo’s Starry Messenger and whether the two are connected remains controversial. Elsheimer paints nothing that could not be seen with the naked eye, but it seems inconceivable that he had no interest in the new astronomy. For a summary of these arguments, see Rüdiger Klessmann, Adam Elsheimer, p. 177. 13 Jan Brueghel the Elder, Shipwreck with Castaways (A Sea Storm), ca. 1595, oil on copper, 25.5 × 34.5 cm, National Gallery, London (on loan from private collection). Lawrence Goedde argues that it is not until the eighteenth century that storm paintings are informed by “the concept and experience of the sublime.” But Goedde is invoking a Kantian sublime, which affirms our “capacity for imaginative control of nature.” Goedde, Tempest and Shipwreck, p. 4. 14 Lucretius, De Rerum Naturae, Book II; line 1. 15 For these seventeenth-century models of the sublime, see Marc Fumaroli, L’Ecole du silence, pp. 96–97. St. Jerome as cited in Chris Fitter, Poetry, Space, and Landscape, p. 116. 17 Fitter, p. 119. 16 42 should be inspired by them to imagine the pains of hell. 18 By the late seventeenth century, when Passeri described Lanfranco’s earlier hermit frescoes and paintings in Odoardo Farnese’s Camerino, which is found in a building adjacent to the Palazzetto Farnese, he evokes a blend of savage wildness and beauty. 19 Passeri writes that Lanfranco painted “some holy hermits living in solitary and savage places, and he represented those deserts as being so mountainous, horrid, and disastrous, that they contained in this horridness so much loveliness that in looking at them, the viewers would be invited to transport themselves to this slope to enjoy such charming loneliness.”20 These landscapes offered the pleasure of art, the “taste and flavour” on which the writer later comments, and at the same time they invite the viewer to enter imaginatively into the world of the hermits and pray with them. This description echoes St. Basil’s pleasure in contrasts, and to the viewer the painted landscapes created a tension between an ascetic and an aesthetic response to nature. Here, the soul might rise to God, as seen in St. Mary Magdalene where Mary— naked, ethereal, freed from earthly snares—is transported beyond “the boundaries by which we are circumscribed.”21 From the early years of the century a vogue for stories of hermit lives flourished. Paolo Bozzi’s Sacred Thebaid, a colorful tale of hermits gathered in the desert, with its evocation of craggy solitudes, ravines, and wind-swept mountain heights, is in a sense a popular version of the Christian sublime.22 Nicolas Poussin’s Landscape with Three Monks (La Solitude) shows three friars enjoying the deep solitude and tranquility of nature. 23 Here, Poussin has created a harmony of contrasts; a shaded plain with still water and luxuriant grass is set against forbidding mou ntains. Poussin was perhaps consciously evoking the magnificent forested gorge of the Vale of Tempe, an ideal landscape described by ancient writers, after which this landscape of contrasts had been named.24 In sharp contrast, Genoese artist Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione sets his St. Francis in Ecstasy on the rugged peaks of Mount La Verna, a summit reached through the chaotic brambles and thistles of an inhospitable world. 25 This is an emblematic landscape, where St. Francis ascends through tiers of stony darkness to a bright circle of light, a symbol of his union with God. Yet it also has a strong affective power. The low viewpoint, the restless torsion of the body,and the cord which snakes downwards involve the worshipper in the drama, so that the viewer experiences, along with St. Francis, the very moment at which the light breaks through the clouds. “Of Antres Vast and Deserts Idle / Rough Quarries, Rocks, Hills Whose Heads Touch Heaven” (Othello, I. iii. 143–44) The Christian sublime was triggered by mysticism and rapture, but increasingly there developed a sense of sublimity as inherent in the natural world. Before the mysteries of a new cosmos the writer and artist experienced stupore, the excitement of the mind of man soaring through the 18 Girolamo Angelitta, L’Historia della traslatione, p. 95. For the location of the Camerino, see Arnold Witte, The Artful Hermitage, pp. 10–11. See also Fabio Barry, “‘Pray to thy Father which is in secret’,” pp. 191–221. 20 Passeri as cited in Witte, p. 126. 21 For an interpretation of this passage, and a discussion of the purpose of these landscapes, see Witte, p. 125. The painting referenced here is Giovanni Lanfranco, Ascension of Mary Magdalene, ca. 1616, oil on canvas, 109 × 78 cm, Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte, Naples. 22 See Paolo Bozzi, Tebaide Sacra. Witte quotes from Bozzi a poem describing the spiritual renewal of St. Paul, the first hermit, amid “horrid cliffs, ancient stones, and broken demolished mountains.” Witte, p. 123. 23 Nicolas Poussin, Landscape with Three Monks (La Solitude), ca. 1648–50, Beli Dvor, Belgrade. [Q: give size and other details?] 19 24 For more on the Vale of Tempe, see Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature, pp. 198–99. Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione, St. Francis in Ecstasy, ca. 1650, oil on canvas, 195.6 × 135.3 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. 25 43 universe. The Ecstatic Heavenly Journey, the Jesuit scientist Athanasius Kircher’s imaginary tour of the cosmos, conveys the excitement of new advancements in science, so much so that Kircher describes this imaginary tour as “a fictitious rapture.” 26 In conversation with his friend Gasper Schott, Kircher claims he “dreamed a remarkable dream. I saw myself led by my guardian angel to the Moon, to the Sun, to Venus, to the rest of the planets […] to the outermost boundaries of the universe.” 27 Throughout the book Kircher wanders through an imaginary, heavenly world. In the middle years of the seventeenth century, another Jesuit scientist, Daniello Bartoli, articulated more fully an aesthetic of the sublime. In his early career Bartoli had taught rhetoric, and in his popular treatise The Man of Letters he defines the sublime style as something that seizes the souls of those who “hear” it through the power of images and words. It is “wide ranging, eloquent, magnificent. A torrent, but most clear; a flash of lightning, but moderate.”28 A grand variety of figures and changing passions should be mixed without disorder. In this emphasis on balance and moderation, Bartoli is closer to Horace than to Longinus, for Horace believed that great thoughts and strong emotions must be subordinated to “the discernment and use of appropriateness, propriety, proportion and unity in the arts.” 29 Bartoli was also a scientist, enthralled by the discoveries of Galileo, and in his later writings Bartoli increasingly articulated an aesthetic that envisaged the vast theater of nature as a stimulus for experiences of sublimity. In the early seventeenth century, the ideal nature which moved painters and poets had been idyllically pastoral, both sweet and serene. But Bartoli was drawn to the spectacular and overwhelming, and attracted to the rough and irregular. Immense forests, cliffs, the Sun, waterfalls, shipwrecks, caves, the Nile, and Etna permeate the writings of Bartoli, to which, under the direct influence of Galileo’s Starry Messenger, Bartoli added images of the mountains of the Moon and the Milky Way. The Man of Letters opens with praise for the unconfined mind, beginning with a lengthy quotation from Seneca’s Natural Questions, in which Seneca had urged humanity to look upward; to rise above the confines of the universe; and, from the starry skies, to look down on the puniness of humans and their petty concerns on earth. 30 In his later Recreation of the Wiseman, Bartoli describes the noble mind of humanity, which “is born, goes all around, sinks down, journeys with the stars, dances with the planets, and at the end is mirrored in the heights of heaven.” 31 In this, Bartoli shares with Seneca the belief that humanity as a whole aspires to the divine, to “thoughts which burst through the ramparts of the sky.”32 Very often Bartoli plays on the union of horror and delight, a topos rooted in ancient writing and in the imaginative writings of the poet Torquato Tasso. Bartoli’s description of the Nile, a topos celebrated by both Longinus and Lucretius, is an exhilarating set piece on this union. Bartoli describes how the cascades of the Nile, “frightening and delightful” cause “awe and horror, mixed with an equal pleasure.” He elaborates on an image of the waterfalls, and the rising rhythms of his repeated staccato chains of verbs—the water “foams, rages, threatens”—itself suggests the play of water on rock, its final headlong crash from the heights terrifying the viewer. 33 Bartoli is using the Nile as a symbol, but nonetheless this passage suggests observatio n, and a tension between restraint and danger that is associated with the sublime. His writing is throughout intensely visual, and his splendid prose gains resonance from his blending of scientific curiosity with the nature poetry of late antiquity and the writings of the Church Fathers. 26 See Rowland, pp. 76–77. See Rowland, pp. 76–77. 28 Daniello Bartoli, L’Uomo di lettere, p. 392. 29 Philip Shaw, The Sublime, p. 14. 30 Bartoli, L’Uomo di lettere, p. 29. 31 Daniello Bartoli, La Ricreatione del savio, p. 11. 27 32 Seneca, De Otium, lines 5–6 [Q: need to add to refs]. See also Lucretius, De Rerum Naturae, lines 70–73. Lucretius describes Epicurus as “advanced far beyond the flaming bulwarks of the sky.” 33 Daniello Bartoli, Della Geografia trasportata al morale, p. 103. 44 Lyric poets, throughout the seventeenth century and particularly in Naples, had written of wild and fearful landscapes, but as the century progressed the enjoyment of mountain horror grew, and pilgrimages to the monasteries of Mount La Verna and Camaldoli were enjoyed. Emotion is increasingly secularized throughout this period, and roughness and the violence of the elements present new aesthetic pleasures. Carlo de’ Dottori wrote of an earthquake in Constantinople, and of a storm that he observed while walking in the mountain heights; the ruggedness of the Apennines became a common topos.34 The painter Salvator Rosa himself traveled through the Apennines in 1662, apparently with no other end than for the search for new motifs, and he described this journey in a particularly interesting letter. Rosa’s response is visual; he enjoys the contrasts of the wild and the domestic, and he takes pleasure in the colors of the mountain. But in his last few sentences Rosa describes the celebrated Falls of Terni: “An object to satisfy the boldest imagination by its wild beauty [orrida bellezza], a river dashing down a mountainous precipice of nearly a mile in height, and then throwing up its foam to nearly an equal altitude.” 35 Here, Rosa responds to the cascades in language very close to that of Bartoli. “[Apelles] Also Painted the Unpaintable, Thunder, for example, Lightning, and Thunderbolts” 36 In 1651, Leonardo da Vinci’s Treatise on Painting, published in both Italian and French, gave new impetus to the interest in Longinus, which was growing among Barberini letterati (“scholars”).37 This brought to fresh prominence da Vinci’s aesthetic of the sublime that was articulated, over a century earlier, in a highly expressive and literary language. In the Treatise, da Vinci had written of the pleasure of the painter in their godlike power to create a diverse world: “Places fearful and frightful, which bring terror to those who view them; and also pleasant places, soft and delightful with flowery meadows in various colours […] rivers that descend from the high mountains with the impetus of great deluges.” 38 He evokes the challenge to the artist presented by the storm, of such motifs as “the clouds, torn and rent, swept along by the course of the wind […] trees and grass bent against the earth […] their branches twisted out of their natural direction, their leaves battered and turned upside down [… men] with their hands before their eyes because of the dust, are bent down to the earth, and their garments and hair stream in the direction of the wind.” 39 Figure 2.1: Nicolas Poussin, Stormy Landscape with Pyramus and Thisbe, 1651, 192 × 273 cm, Städel Museum,Frankfurt The observations of da Vinci, as well as new scientific discoveries, stimulated the creation of new models of landscape. By the 1650s, Poussin, Gaspard Dughet, Rosa, and Claude Lorrain were all painting rocky mountain ridges; vast sceneries of lakes and forests; and skies flooded with sunlight or ominous with dark clouds. In 1651, Poussin painted his Landscape with Pyramus and Thisbe (figure 2.1), and a detailed description of this painting that he sent to a friend makes it very 34 For these and other examples of mountain horror, see Giovanni Getto, Barocco in prosa e in poesia, pp. 302–4. 35 For a literary appreciation of this letter, see Getto, p. 303. 36 Pliny the Elder, Natural History as cited in The Elder Pliny’s Chapters on the History of Art, p. 133. 37 Gustave Costa, “Appunti sulla fortuna del Pseudo-Longino,” pp. 123–43. Leonardo Da Vinci, Treatise on Painting, p. 113. 39 Da Vinci, p. 114. 38 45 clear that he was pitting himself against both Leonardo and Apelles, who, as the title of this section of my essay makes clear, painted the unpaintable. 40 Here, the vast landscape is dominated by the horror and fear of death mingled with extreme grief and love, as Thisbe’s pallor, so sharp in the dark foreground, seizes the viewer’s attention, and her cry echoes through the painting. A profusion of subsidiary subjects take up the theme: a lion attacks a horse, a dog barks, and shepherds and horsemen flee before the wind. Beyond, the violence of the elements mirrors human passion, as lightning and torrential rain threaten, twisting the trees, and creating haunting and uncanny effects of light. And yet the painting does not disorientate the viewer. It remains clear and classically balanced, while the astonishing stillness of the lake in the center reminds us that the sublime must be, in Bartoli’s words, “a lightning flash, but regulated.” 41 Poussin’s landscape remains a tragic drama centered on human destiny and fortune. In the next decade, Gaspard Dughet and Salvator Rosa, equally responsive to da Vinci, painted nature as a spectacle beyond the human, its violence only just under control, with humans tiny and insignificant before its immensity. In the vast landscape collection and frescoed rooms that Lorenzo Onofrio Colonna assembled and commissioned in the Palazzo Colonna in Rome, the splendor of seventeenth-century landscape unfolded before the viewer. Great decorative works, rich in the effects of chiaroscuro and moving patterns of light and air, evoke an illusory and theatrical world. They present nature as spectacle, a “theatre of innumerable marvels” through which humans journey, caught between exaltation at nature’s grandeur, and fear at its power. Figure 2.2 Gaspard Dughet, Landscape with Elijah and the Angel, 1663, oil on canvas, 201.8 × 154 cm, National Gallery of London. Photo © National Gallery, London Dughet’s Landscape with Elijah and the Angel (figure 2.2), part of Colonna’s original collection, shows the moment when the angel declares to the prophet, “Go forth and stand upon the Mount with before the Lord. And, behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks before the Lord.” 42 The composition, unlike that of Pyramus and Thisbe (figure 2.1), is open to the viewer, and a twisting path leads the eye to the heart of the drama. It seems that Dughet too was attempting to rival da Vinci, so precisely does he seem to follow da Vinci’s instructions on the arrangement of a storm and winds: The trees bend to earth, with the leaves turned inside out on the bent branches, which seem as though they would fly away, as if frightened by the blasts of the horrible and terrifying wind, amid which is diffused the vertiginous course of the turbulent dust and sand from the seashore. The obscure horizon of the sky makes a background of smoky clouds, which, struck by the sun’s rays, penetrating through openings in the clouds opposite, descend to the earth, lighting it up with their beams. 43 40 Nicolas Poussin, Landscape with Pyramus and Thisbe, 1651, oil on canvas, 192.5 × 273.5 cm, Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt. On Poussin and Leonardo, see Bätschmann, Nicolas Poussin, pp. 95–100, and Nova, The Book of the Wind, p. 106. 41 Clélia Nau, Le temps du sublime, p. 190. Alain Mérot draws attention to an interesting passage in Andre Félibien’s Entre sur les vies des plus excellents peintres anciens et moderne where Félibien speaks of the necessity for moderation in violent subjects. See Alain Mérot, Du paysage en peinture dans l’Occident moderne, pp. 304–5. 42 I Kings 19:11. Gaspard Dughet, Landscape with Elijah and the Angel, ca. 1663, oil on canvas, 201.8 × 154 cm, National Gallery, London. For more on Colonna’s collection, see H. Wine, The Seventeenth Century French Paintings, pp. 164–67. 43 Da Vinci, pp. 198–99. 46 The grand effect of Dughet’s painting is sublime, and the abrupt asymmetry and the shock of the revelation of the divine have something of the Hebraic simplicity of the Fiat Lux of Genesis. On the town in the very center of the painting there falls a startling ray of light or lightning, an emblem of the sublime. Figure 2.3 Salvator Rosa, Landscape with Mercury and the Dishonest Woodman, ca. 1649, oil on canvas, 125.7 × 202.1 cm, National Gallery of London. Photo © National Gallery, London In the same collection assembled for the Palazzo Colonna, there hung two of Salvator Rosa’s landscapes: The Finding of Moses and Mercury and the Dishonest Woodman (figure 2.3). At the time these paintings were created, Dughet and Rosa were close friends, and in these works Rosa too suggests the maestoso orrore (“supreme horror”) which becomes a leitmotif in nature writing of the period. It is very likely that Rosa knew Seneca’s famous Letter to Lucilius, where Seneca describes the mysterious presence of divinity in landscape: If ever you have come upon a grove that is full of ancient trees which have grown to an unusual height, shutting out a view of the sky by a veil of pleached and intertwining branches, then the loftiness of the forest, the seclusion of the spot, and your marvel at the thick unbroken shade in the midst of the open spaces, will prove to you the presence of deity. Or if a cave, made by the deep crumbling of the rocks, holds up a mountain on its arch, a place not built with hands, but hollowed out into such spaciousness by natural causes, your soul will be deeply moved by a certain intimation of the existence of God. 44 Rosa’s pictures echo the aesthetic and conceptual pairing put forward by Seneca. Rosa evokes a very ancient world, remote from civilization, wild and uncultivated, a landscape of crumbling rocks and awesome trees. The rock arch is based on an ancient painting well known in seventeenth-century Rome, and the sublimity of salvation resonates with this union of ancient and biblical worlds. The magical fable of Mercury and the Dishonest Woodman forms a surprising contrast, but both paintings show revelations that are startling and dramatic. 45 The numinous depths of Rosa’s forest creates the mood of chivalric romance, as in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, where Angelica fled through “fearful dark woods […] wild, desolate and deserted places.”46 The fallen trunks seem animated, thrusting towards the heavens. Throughout Rosa’s works, tree trunks, dripping with Spanish moss and splintered by lightning and dwarfing all that surrounds them with their jagged vastness, are sublime. 47 No other landscapes so movingly evoke a seventeenth-century sense of nature as a theater of marvels, of the wonder and astonishment aroused by the grandeur of the universe. As Marjorie Nicholson has so precisely written, “awe, once reserved for God, passed over in the seventeenth century first to an expanded cosmos, then from the macrocosm to the greatest objects in the geocosm—mountains, ocean, desert.”48 The sublimity of trees is a recurring topos in Bartoli’s prose, who, in a remarkable description of a “forest in the air,” evokes imitations 44 Seneca, Epistulae Morales, p. 273. Salvator Rosa, Landscape with Mercury and the Dishonest Woodman, 1649 (after) [Q: ca. in caption], oil on canvas, 125.7 × 202.1 cm, National Gallery, London. 46 Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, pp. 4–5. 45 47 Edmund Burke comments that the robust trees of the forest are not beautiful; they are “awful and majestic; they inspire a sort of reverence.” Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry, p. 116. 48 Marjorie Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory, p. 143. 47 of infinity as the “shadows over shadows of trees over trees” aspire to an eternal silence. 49 In the Palazzo Colonna, the viewer is led through rooms frescoed by Dughet, and these panoramic scenes evoke, through daring formal devices, a sense of infinite space. One would move on to the continuous seascapes created by Pieter Mulier, where, in an illusionistic space, stormy seas are followed by pastoral scenes and beyond to calm seas enjoying a sunlit tranquility. 50 For their emotional effect, Mulier’s frescoes depend on the contrast between terror and delight, and the viewer would perhaps have read the frescoed journey throughout this palace as a journey through all the grand spectacles of nature. They suggest the diverse world described by da Vinci, echoed in a remarkable passage in Bartoli’s L’Uomo in punto di morte. Bartoli, who surely knew da Vinci’s Treatise, describes journeys through every kind of landscape, through grassy meadows scattered with flowers, small valleys and fields, and on to forests, “bare and solitary […] an earth that is dead and desolate, with opposite mountain crags and rocky alps.” Here, torrents of water create “a delightful horror.” 51 “A New and Marvellous and Horrible Subject” 52 Longinus had cited Etna as an icon of the sublime, and in the seventeenth century the smoking volcano was established as a type of landscape. The subject was topical. In 1631, Vesuvius had erupted, with a violence matched only by that of the eruption of 79 CE, and the volcano was to erupt again in 1660. The terror of the spectacle—the “new and marvellous and horrible subject”— was described with an attempt at scientific coolness by the Neapolitan intellectual Giovan Battista Manso. In contrast, many lyric poets saw in the flames and boulders the crushing anger of God. 53 In 1637–38, Kircher, in tribute to Virgil and to Lucretius, journeyed through the seismic zones of southern Italy, and there witnessed an earthquake, and the eruptions of Etna and Stromboli. Kircher looked into the fiery crater of Vesuvius, which was “terrible to behold […] It was just like Hell, lacking only demons to complete the picture.” 54 His lavishly illustrated works of straightforward science made such experiences popular. Etna was a landscape of myth and poetry, long associated with the forge of Vulcan; with the rape of Proserpina; and with that one-eyed giant, the lovesick Cyclops. At Etna, the philosopher Empedocles had embraced his fiery destruction, anticipating the death of the curious Pliny in the eruption of Vesuvius. In ancient literature, the terror of the volcano is set against the charm of the locus amoenus, and Pietro Bembo, in his poem Etna, continues this trope. In conscious homage to Pliny, Bembo’s passion for knowledge dominating his fear, the poet climbed the mountainside, and contrasts the bleakness of his ascent with the lovely fertility of the surrounding countryside. 55 The volcano had all the ambivalence of the sublime; as the entrance to the Underworld, it seemed to link heaven and hell. It was the creator of life and of death; the source of passion and fear; and it was both the subject of scientific inquiry and a spur to human folly. In the seventeenth century, landscape artists responded to this ambivalence. In 1649, Poussin 49 Daniello Bartoli, De Simboli trasportati al morale, pp. 348–49. On Bartoli and Leonardo da Vinci, see Ezio Raimondi, Il Colore eloquente. 50 For more on Dughet’s frescoes, see Marie-Nicole Boisclair, Gaspard Dughet, p. 62, cat. 305–8. 51 Daniello Bartoli, L’Uomo in punto di morte, p. 64. 52 Giovan Battista Manso as cited in Leonardo di Mauro, “L’Eruzione del Vesuvio nel 1631,” p. 37. 53 Alwyn Scarth has suggested that Manso discussed the great eruption with John Milton, and may have inspired some of his descriptions of Hell in Paradise Lost. Alwyn Scarth, Vesuvius, p. 167. For poems on Vesuvius, see Giancarlo Alfano, Marcello Barbaro, and Andrea Mazzucchi, Tre catastrofi. 54 Tara E. Nummedal, “Kircher’s Subterranean World,” p. 38. See Pietro Bembo, Lyric Poetry, p. 225. In answer to his father, who mentioned Pliny’s tragic enthusiasm for investigating Vesuvius, Bembo said, “we were so delighted with the spectacle, and filled with such amazement at the phenomenon, that none of us gave a thought of himself.” 55 48 painted Landscape with Polyphemus; this was followed eight years later by Lorrain’s Landscape with Acis and Galatea.56 Both artists, following the source in Ovid’s Metamorphoses closely, create a glittering Sicilian landscape; the harshness of Etna, found in Bembo’s p oem, is set against the riches of the landscape. Here, with the volcano smoking in the background, the one -eyed giant pipes of his love for the nymph. He seems to embody the violence of nature, his one eye “the size of a huge shield” resembling “the great sun in heaven.” 57 Poussin shows the giant with his face averted; the moment is still but terror will follow, and nature “seems to hold its breath in expectation of some impending explosion,” and from the volcanic peaks black smoke ascends the sky.58 Lorrain, too, creates a sense of imminent violence. He sets the beauty of the setting Sun and the play of light on water against the dark clouds of smoke which roll from Etna’s summit, creating a haunting sense of menace within a setting of idyllic beauty, so that, for the viewer, joy and terror mingle. Both these landscapes play on the imagination to create a sense of fear and danger that triggers the sublime. 59 The sublimity of Etna is most dramatically conveyed by Rosa’s The Death of Empedocles.60 Here, Rosa shows the heroic philosopher fearlessly plunging into Etna’s boiling craters. Rosa abandons the restraint of the Bartolian sublime, as well as the classical structure of Mercury and the Dishonest Woodman. Boundaries completely disappear, and the viewer stares at the tiny figure, plunged into the midst of danger in a deeply disorientating composition. Clouds, smoke, and fire mix and blend across the surface of the entire composition, with no hint of a foreground foothold. Man becomes one with the immensity of nature, engulfed by elemental powers. No seventeenthcentury landscape more closely anticipates later versions of the sublime. Rosa would have appreciated Burke’s remark that the perpendicular forms the sublime, and that looking down into a precipice is more striking than looking upward. 61 Furthermore, Rosa’s rough and jagged surface anticipates the work of Clyfford Still. “For There Are Some Things that Distress Us When We See Them in Reality, but the Most Accurate Representations of These Same Things We View with Pleasure—as, for example, the Forms of the Most Despised Animals and Corpses”62 The volcanic landscape was followed by the other landscape of horror: one constituted by the Underworld and hellish scenes, and populated by monsters, dragons, snakes, and specters. Virgil 56 Nicolas Poussin, Landscape with Polyphemus, 1649, oil on canvas, 150 × 198 cm, The State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg; and Claude Lorrain, Landscape with Acis and Galatea, 1657, oil on canvas, Gemäldegalerie, Dresden. [Q size?] 57 Ovid, Metamorphoses, p. 308. 58 Willibald Sauerländer, “Nature through the Glass of Time,” p. 107. Sauerländer argues that the narrative of Ovid’s Metamorphoses fully explains this painting’s meaning. 59 This reading of Poussin here is indebted to Nau. “Les tempêtes allégoriques de Poussin, orages potentiels, ne sauraient davantage inspirer la terreur au premier coup d’oeil: leur ‘terribilité’ est à costruire […] L’orage, même seulement imminent, ne fait peur que si l’on peut s’en ‘representer’ concrètement ses effets” (“Poussin’s allegorical storms, with their threat of thunder, could not inspire more terror at first glance: their ‘simulation of terror’ constructs […] the storm, even if it is just impending, and can only create fear if one is able to concretely ‘represent’ its effects”). Nau, translation by Samuel Harvey, p. 240. [Q: which of the Nau refs is this – there are two?] [Le temps du sublime has been used Claude Lorrain hasn’t] 60 Salvator Rosa, The Death of Empedocles, ca. 1665–ca. 1670, oil on canvas, 135 × 99 cm, Eastnor Castle, Ledbury. For the influence of Kircher’s Mundus Subterraneus on Rosa’s work, see Helen Langdon, “A Theatre of Marvels,” pp. 179–92. 61 Burke, p. 72. 62 Aristotle, Poetics, p. 7. 49 describes Aeneas’s descent to Hades past the “many monstrous hybrid beasts’ 63 in a passage that remains iconic in traditions of the sublime. 64 Monsters had appeared on the stage since the early seventeenth century, and Filippo Napoletano had popularized small cabinet paintings of hellish scenes through the use of special effects. A little later, Kircher imaginatively populated his subterranean world with fire-breathing dragons. Plate 4: Salvator Rosa, Prometheus, 1648–50, oil on canvas, 220 × 176 cm, National Gallery of London. Perhaps the most repulsive painting of the seventeenth century is Rosa’s Prometheus (plate 4).65 In Naples, Giambattista Marino’s celebrated dictum that “for often horror goes with delight” had breathed life into a fascination with pain, and Rosa, the pupil of Jusepe de Ribera, painted the sufferings of the titan Prometheus with unbearable crudeness, showing the eagle ferociously ripping out spirals of intestines observed with gory pleasure heightened by a strivin g for anatomical accuracy. 66 A letter by Paolo Vendramin, praising Rosa, is a set piece of responses to the sublime culled from classical sources. Before writing, Vendramin begins that he had to forget the terror of looking at this painting, so overwhelming was the bloody vision before him. This terror, he continues, echoing Aristotle’s thoughts on the pleasure of distressing images, is overwhelming as it arises from the painter’s skill as creator. The viewer seems to touch a burning rock and to hear screams. Prometheus arouses emotion, and stimulates the senses of sight, touch, and sound, with the power of imitation that Aristotle accords to tragedy, and which creates pleasure from pain. The cries of Prometheus shake the viewer, and the eagle seems to attack their heart rather than the flesh of Prometheus. Here, Vendramin invokes the power of visualization, or phantasia, of which Longinus had written, and which sets the viewer at the heart of danger. In conclusion, Vendramin compares Rosa to Apelles, who could paint the unpaintable forms of thunder, for Rosa has painted the unseen cry of Prometheus, which we seem to hear echoing from the dark rocks before we see his torture. 67 An unidentified poet describes the painting in similar terms: “I am purged and afraid at the sight of such torture, astonishment and terror seize me, and I first pity such suffering, and then myself suffer.” 68 This poet sees the torn flesh and living tragedy with “reverent horror.” These descriptions privilege sound. The cry of Prometheus becomes a source of the sublime, anticipating Burke, who was later to write of the power of the sounds of men or animals in pain or danger, and the angry tones of wild beasts to convey great ideas. 69 Underlying Prometheus’s scream is the cry of the Laocoön, the ancient sculptural group, which was, throughout the seventeenth century, the exemplum doloris. Rosa’s Prometheus echoes many of the period’s great horror pictures, such as Ribera’s Prometheus/Tityus or Rembrandt’s The Blinding of Samson. The tradition was particularly strong in Naples, and Mattia Preti painted an extraordinary hellish landscape, with underground rivers and rocks where the three titans suffer endlessly in the darkness and solitude of the great deep. Landscape painters soon began to see the possibility of including such horror in landscape, 63 Virgil, The Aeneid, p. 155. Burke comments that Virgil “seems to be seized with a religious horror, and to retire astonished at the boldness of his own design.” Burke, p. 71. 65 Salvator Rosa, Prometheus, ca. 1648–1650 [Q: cf. above – no ca.], oil on canvas, 344 x 214 [Q: cf. above – different size], cm, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica di Palazzo Corsini, Rome. 66 Giambattista Marino, La Galleria, p. 56. For an interesting discussion of the aesthetics of paintings of Prometheus and the Furias, see Miguel Falomir, “The Artistic Challenge,” pp. 176–87. 67 Caterina Volpi, “Salvator Rosa,” pp. 91–92. 64 68 This poem is published in Leandro Ozzola, Vita e opera di Salvator Rosa, p. 249, and in Walter Regel and Hartmut Köhler, Hochgerühmt, fast vergessen, neu gesehen, p. 140. 69 Burke, pp. 82–84. 50 creating fear with the inclusion of monsters and the suggestion of sound. In Poussin’s Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake the spectator sees first the dead man, his flesh of a ghastly pallor, snared in the coils of a monstrous python. 70 Our eyes then take in the sequence of emotions: the different effects of horror and fear that zigzag across the landscape to culminate in the tiny touches of bright red on the bank. The landscape is bright and serene, with the horizontal and vertical planes carefully balanced, the reflections crystalline and smooth. But death and tragedy threaten this tranquility, and horror blends with beauty. Poussin, in painting this corpse and snake, surely remembered Aristotle’s description of the power of representation to render the repellent beautiful.71 T. J. Clark has commented that “a painting-like snake puts the viewer at a distance.” 72 The viewer is immediately aware of the terrifying spectacle, to which the figures respond in different ways across a far spreading countryside. It has been suggested that Poussin’s painting shows Cadmus.73 Perhaps, in response to Poussin, Rosa became interested in the dark side of Ovid, as well as interested in such descriptions as Cadmus and the serpent of Mars: “A dark gleaming serpent [… which] coiled its scaly loops in writhing circles, then with a spring shot up in a huge arc, raising more than half its length into the insubstantial air, till it looked down upon the whole expanse of the forest.”74 In a series of Ovidian scenes, Rosa invited a participatory response by sharply contrasting means, assaulting the spectator with a threat of horror and danger. On a desolate seashore, the scaly body of Glaucus, his tail thrashing, erupts with horri fying menace from the waves, his hand clutching the pale flesh of Scylla. Jason drips poison onto the head of a dragon, “with its crest and three forked tongue and curving fangs,” and all the heaving muscular weight of its repulsive body tense and threatening.75 And, in Rosa’s Cadmus Killing the Dragon, Cadmus, whose pose has something of the taut violence of the Borghese Gladiator, towers over the dragon, and seems to move into the viewer’s space, involving them in the immediacy of the moment. The grouping of the dragon and the shrieking boy, wrapped in the monster’s coils, is a homage to the Laocoön, and is used to deepen the resonance of the expression of fear and terror. The landscape is dark, almost monochrome, and its darkness and obscurity underline its sublimity. In the eighteenth century, with the writings of Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant, the sublime was codified, and came to stand for an aesthetic concept. 76 Kant in particular was to distinguish between three forms of the sublime: the terrible, the noble, and the magnificent. I have concentrated, in this essay, almost entirely on the terrible, highlighting the most popular aspects of the sublime, such as the storm, the grandeur of a wild nature, and the fragility of humanity before it. I have said little, through want of space, of the magnificent sublimity of the ocean, the setting sun, and the infinity of vast and spreading plains, all of which formed the subject matter of Claude Lorrain. 77 But, in suggesting the fluidity of the concept of the sublime in the seventeenth century, 70 Nicolas Poussin, Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake, ca. 1648, oil on canvas, 118.2 × 197.8 cm, National Gallery, London. 71 For an Aristotelian interpretation of this picture, see Nau, 206. [Q: which Nau ref is this?]See also Maria Loh, “Outscreaming the Laocoön,” pp. 393–414. Loh comments, “this painting taught its historical viewer ‘how to scream’ in front of the painting.” Loh, p. 411. 72 T. J. Clark, The Sight of Death, p. 134. In Greek mythology, Cadmus was the founder and the first king of Thebes, a position that he claimed after killing a dragon. 73 Guy de Tervarent, “Le veritable sujet,” pp. 343–50. 74 Ovid, Metamorphoses, p. 75. 75 Ovid, Metamorphoses, p. 159. The painting is currently housed in a private collection, but details of the painting can be found in Salvator Rosa, p. 156. [Q: is this the Cassani ref.?]The painting is catalogued as Cadmus Killing the Dragon but some oddities—the crossbow, the child—suggest that this may be a mistake. I have not been able to find an alternative so have left this title. Rosa was interested in the Cadmus story. 76 77 Caroline van Eck et al., eds., Translations of the Sublime, p. 2. On Lorrain and the sublime, see Nau, Claude Lorrain. 51 and expressing the need for an interdisciplinary approach that draws on both ancient and modern literature, rhetoric, and religion, I hope that I shall have opened up new areas of study. 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