Sublime in the Visual Culture of the Seventeenth-Century Dutch Republic

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A01=Bram Van Oostveldt
A01=Stijn Bussels
Aelbert Cuyp
affect theory
Amsterdam
architecture
art history
artist
attraction
Author_Bram Van Oostveldt
Author_Stijn Bussels
awe
Baroque aesthetics
Category=AB
Category=AGA
Category=N
Category=NHD
Category=NHTB
Category=QDTN
Christianity
cultural semiotics
divine presence representation
drawing
early modern visuality
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Franciscus Junius
God
horror
humanism
humanist
Jacob van Campen
landscape
Longinus
Netherlands
painting
Phaethon
politics
prints
religion
Rembrandt
Rubens
sculpture
seascape
sensory perception in art
sublime experience in Dutch art
terror
theater
theatre

Product details

  • ISBN 9781032375885
  • Weight: 380g
  • Dimensions: 174 x 246mm
  • Publication Date: 30 Jul 2025
  • Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
  • Publication City/Country: GB
  • Product Form: Paperback
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Contrary to what Kant believed about the Dutch (and their visual culture) as “being of an orderly and diligent position” and thus having no feeling for the sublime, this book argues that the sublime played an important role in seventeenth-century Dutch visual culture.

By looking at different visualizations of exceptional heights, divine presence, political grandeur, extreme violence, and extraordinary artifacts, the authors demonstrate how viewers were confronted with the sublime, which evoked in them a combination of contrasting feelings of awe and fear, attraction and repulsion. In studying seventeenth-century Dutch visual culture through the lens of notions of the sublime, we can move beyond the traditional and still widespread views on Dutch art as the ultimate representation of everyday life and the expression of a prosperous society in terms of calmness, neatness, and order.

The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual culture, architectural history, and cultural history.

The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0) 4.0 International license. Funded by Ghent University.

Stijn P.M. Bussels is Professor of Art History and Head of the Department of Art History at Leiden University Centre of the Arts in Society.

Bram Van Oostveldt is Associate Professor at the Department of Art, Music and Theatre Studies at Ghent University.

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