Mediating the Sublime
As if accepting Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant’s rejection of the visual arts as carriers of the experience of the sublime as a productive challenge, artists and craftsmen already in the eighteenth century started to experiment with media technological innovations that would give more dynamic, greater and overwhelming images of sublime disaster events. More precisely, such innovations sought to overcome the spatial and temporal limitations of easel painting, aiming to provide experiences of illusionistic immersion and of sensory, affective, and emotional intensity. The media discussed in this chapter range from the moving images of the Eidophusikon and the Diorama to the large-scale pictures of the Panorama, John Martin’s disaster motifs, and American landscape painting. Moreover, these various media participated in broader popularization processes, as pictorial experiences shifted from being viewed as elite activities toward phenomena of middle class leisure entertainment.