In the Age of Enlightenment, the reign of reason, a new worldview emerged – Romanticism. A philosophical movement that privileged the desire to experience over the desire to know. The importance of nature and its magnificence is inherent to the Romantics. Therefore, there is also a desire to capture that feeling we all know… the sublime. The sublime is not beauty, it is an aesthetic quality of nature different from beauty. Part of the perception of the sublime is a sense of horror emerging from the irregular, the wild and the uncontrollable. It gives rise to a sense of delight, a delight stronger than ordinary joy.
Defining sublimity is not easy, and it can only be understood by experiencing it.
The video above is a combination of an excerpt from Otto’s encyclopedia and romantic landscape paintings referencing the philosophy of “the sublime”. The paintings are divided into slices creating a parallax effect. This creates an interpretation of the romanticism art by means of digital tools.
