The sublime in the visual culture of the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic

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 and decorative art, architecture, and theater. By looking at different visualizations of exceptional heights, divine presence, overwhelming natural phenomena, political grandeur, extreme violence, and extraordinary artifacts, the authors demonstrate how viewers were confronted with the sublime, which evoked in them a combination of contra... Mehr ...