SUB - LIMEN

The proposal presented here intends to offer a critical reading on the relationship between Nature and Art. The aspect that we want to investigate is linked to that precise condition that we call "Sublime", a state of mind that goes beyond rational understanding. And which, however, man feels as instinctive, innate. “And this is why nature prompts us to admire, not the clearness and usefulness of a little stream, but the Nile, the Danube, the Rhine, and far beyond all the Ocean; not to turn our wandering eyes from the heavenly fires, though often darkened, to the little flame kindled by human hands, however pure and steady its light; not to think that tiny lamp more wondrous than the caverns of Aetna, from whose raging depths are hurled up stones and whole masses of rock, and torrents sometimes come pouring from earth’s centre of pure and living fire. To sum the whole: whatever is useful or needful lies easily within man’s reach; but he keeps his homage for what is astounding.” When the Anonymous, On the Sublime, in paragraph 35, lists the greatest writers of all time, he compares their effect to those manifestations of Nature that arouse in us an immediate and irrational transport, equal only to an evaluation of "Sublime". Sublime as what penetrates our deepest emotional chords. The representations of the great natural phenomena arouse in us conflicting feelings, we are frightened and, at the same time, inexorably attracted. Making this state of mind manifest has a cathartic action for man like the fulfillment of a Greek tragedy. The Sublime can be presented in two forms: one as a physical reality, the other as an interior motion. On the one hand, the manifestation (or the representation of the manifestation!) of a natural phenomenon that produces the loss of control of man, aware of his impotence; on the other, the reproduction of a motion of the soul, which projects, in the representation of a natural phenomenon out of scale, the inner turmoil. In both cases, the human tension towards the Sublime has studded the history of art with infinite representations, which have tried to give shape to a captivating terror, to an emotion that cannot be measured.