Abstract

Around 1800, artists began to challenge the certainties of visual perception by employing new aesthetic means such as fog and steam, which obscured the subject matter. This interest in the relationship between seeing and not seeing coincided with the emergence of the aesthetic category of the sublime and with contemporary debates on sensory perception. The aesthetics of blindness becomes particularly evident in Ossianic landscapes, where opacity functioned as a central pictorial motif. Given that the sublime was largely tied to poetry in philosophical discourse, this paper transfers the notion of this aesthetic category to pictorial art and examines evocations of the sublime by analyzing selected Ossianic artworks by J. M. W. Turner, John Sell Cotman, and Thomas Girtin. I ultimately argue that the discourse on blindness, along with the attempt to visualize the absence of sight, contributed to the development of new artistic strategies for representing the sublime in the visual arts.