Abstract

Nature is central to all the major treatises on the sublime, yet one aspect is curiously absent: animals. Encounters with dangerous animals can produce some of the most intense and unsettling experiences of the sublime, marked by deep cognitive and existential confusion. However, the animal sublime, has rarely been theorized as such. This article asks when it first emerged in art and aesthetics and why it came to full expression around 1800. It presents two episodes in the history of the animal sublime in the visual arts to throw some light on its much-increased presence around 1800. The first part considers the works of Rubens, because he transformed the depiction of animal combat, and was a huge influence on subsequent depictions of savage animals, but also because of his explorations of the borders between humans and other animals in his depictions of satyrs and Bacchus. They make something visible of the implicit drivers of the animal sublime, which operate largely outside, beyond, or in parallel to, artistic theory. In the second part, I will turn to developments around 1800 to argue that the renewal of theories of the sublime by Kant and his successors did not address the animal sublime because it concentrated on human, cognitive, and metaphysical self-preservation. Instead, I argue that the emergence of an animal sublime is due to developments in the life sciences, and was created by artists, not artistic theory or aesthetics.