Associated Institutes

Institutes and projects related to the Art, Agency and Living Presence project.

• Prehistories of the sublime (Leiden, Ghent, York, Scuola Normale Pisa)
• Gemca (Louvain-la-Neuve)
• Consecration Rituals in the Low Countries and Britain (Ghent FWO and BOF, Leiden)

Prehistories of the sublime (Leiden, Ghent, York, Scuola Normale Pisa)

The history of the sublime is easy to write; but not so its prehistory, that is its development from the first editions and translations in the 16th century until its codification as an aesthetic concept by Burke and Kant after 1750. In the treatise Peri Hupsous or 'On the Sublime' the 1st-century orator Longinus described the experience of the sublime as one which sweeps readers or viewers along, robs them of rational control over their feelings, and opens hitherto unknown vistas of the infinite, the horrendous, or the incomprehensible. Longinus' description continues to raise many questions, not the least what kind of experience this is: amazement or wonder, aesthetic enjoyment, religious or mystical rapture. It seems easy to say the sublime experience is related to all these sensations at the same time, but this in itself is the very issue we seek to address. How exactly did this complex notion function in the period before its codification, with which meanings was it endowed, and what is its relationship to the 'neighbouring' experiences that we just mentioned?

After the codification of the sublime by Burke and Kant the term came to stand for an aesthetic concept; but before 1750, it escaped easy disciplinary classification. Contrary to a widely held belief, many Greek editions and translations were made from the 1550s onwards, but very few of them have been studied.

The discipline that wrote the history of the sublime after 1750 is that of aesthetics; but that discipline itself evolved only in the course of the 18th century. As a result, aesthetics imposed a conceptual grid on the sublime as described by Longinus and others that made it very difficult to reconstruct its pre-modern genealogy. To study the history of the sublime before 1750, therefore, raises two problems: on the one hand, its meaning cannot be located in a monodisciplinary way (e.g. as an aesthetic concept, on a par with the beautiful or the ugly); on the other hand, in early modern Europe experiences that after 1750 would be characterized as 'sublime' did occur, but were labelled differently: as experiences of wonder and amazement, as mystical experiences of rapture, as horror or fear. As a consequence, any nvestigation in the pre-history of the sublime has to be multi-disciplinary, drawing on rhetoric, art history, history of philosophy and religion, literary studies and anthropology.

This programme starts at the origins of such a prehistory: to investigate early editions of Longinus.

Gemca (Louvain-la-Neuve)

For further information see the project website here.

Consecration Rituals in the Low Countries and Britain (Ghent FWO and BOF, Leiden)

Consecrationrituals are a neglected, but very rich source of the meanings attributed to churches, city halls and other public buildings by their patrons, users and the public in general. To mark the important occasions of laying the first stone, consecration or completion a wide variety of textual and visual material was produced: sermons, emblems, medals, prints and even small models of the building. The inauguration of the City Hall in Amsterdam for instance was marked by a substantial poem by Vondel, a medal, and numerous prints. Such documents offer important clues for the ways in which those involved in the building wanted to project a public image, construct and control its meaning, and defend the use of large amounts of public funding. Consecration documents thus can be read as virtual, multi-media constructions of architectural meaning, and serve as important foundations for a history of architecture written not from the perspective of the architect, but from that of the public: the users, patrons and spectators.  In two projects, funded by the Bijzonder Onderzoeksfonds of Ghent University (BOF) and the Flemish fund for scientif research FWO, and located at the Department of Architecture and Urbanism of Ghent University (Bart Verschaffel, Maarten Delbeke), a series of important 17th-century consecrations are studied, in collaboration with the Central Library of Ghent University (Sylvia Van Peteghem), which holds an important collection of primary sources.