Abstract

The essay traces the early history of a phenomenon with a long career—the emergence of an acute sensitivity towards the real as a unique tool for the reenergization of images and viewers. Starting from the middle of the eighteenth century, this appetite for ever stronger reality effects pushed discussions about the unique force of details to the forefront of visual practices and criticism. Such discussions did not only underline the extreme vitality of great numbers and profusion of details. They also developed firmly dynamic frameworks within which antithetical orders of detail opposed one another in single or various artworks and artistic styles, producing unusual levels and kinds of sensory intensity stressed by contemporaries. I suggest that Burke’s theory of the sublime is the earliest instance of this singular synergy, which I have thus called the sublime real. Through a series of art historical benchmarks—from Joseph Wright of Derby and panoramas to the Parthenon sculptures and Turner—this essay explores the opposite yet increasingly forceful models of processing and distributing details to reanimate the reality of viewing, as inextricable part of antinomian modernity and its contradictory art tactics.