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Daniel Puzzo's avatar

In his book 'Mountains of the Mind', Robert MacFarlane talks about our changing attitudes to mountains over the centuries, and how they went from eyesores to an example of sublime beauty. They used to be considered ghastly, wretched monstrosities and people couldn't fathom how anyone could see beauty in them. There's that lovely Thomas Hobbes poem: 'Behind a ruin’d mountain does appear/Swelling into two parts, which turgent are/As when we bend our bodies to the ground,/The buttocks amply sticking out are found.'

There's a great book called 'The Accidental Masterpiece: On the Art of Life and Vice Versa' (Michael Kimmelman) and he has this passage: "In fact, our modern attitude toward mountains – to what we consider their natural beauty – is a matter of conditioned learning, inherited through literature and theology, which has evolved during the last few centuries to encompass a notion of the sublime in nature: we have been trained what to see and how to feel."

I love that idea of being trained what to see and how to feel and obviously your friend Friedrich had a big part in that.

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Mark Canada, Ph.D.'s avatar

Thank you for this enlightening article. As a literary scholar, I am familiar with the notion of the sublime, but I don’t know as much about painting, particularly Friedrich’s work. I specialize in American writers, including Poe. I have to think that the notion of the sublime inspired the conclusion of his only complete novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.

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