Historically, the sublime was an idea that had obvious reference in nature. Edmund Burke (1729 - 1797) wrote of the sublime as that which is vast, rugged, terrifying, massive and masculine. These very European and colonial attitudes are easily identifiable in the romantic landscape paintings of both New Zealand and American settlers. At the heart of these paintings was a sense of awe at the grandeur of God's masterpiece. Now we see these once noble and endearing concepts as quaint and humourous, as we are now more familiar with their representations as graphic hyperbole advertisers use for the manufacture of desire. Today the road less traveled has been paved and turned into an eight-lane information highway. Yet we still climb mountains and seek to understand the world we see; despite all of its apparent redundancies painters still take that perilous journey of pilgrimage through historical spaces and sensual attractions, embracing the "medium based particularities, its strengths and nuances... its primitive physical realities." These works have taken a way of seeing, understanding and depicting the world, and have removed what was the focus and replaced it either with space or with something that would have made the romantics shudder. The "Alba Madonna Landscape" is my study of Raphael's Alba Madonna, but Mary is absent, all we are left with is her backdrop, divinity has left the picture and all we have is the framework. The car and the body-builder are 20 th century perversions of the sublime; they are present icons of the unattainable, sign-points of achievement as we attempt to scale the wondrous mountain of social status.
Storr, R. (2003). http://www.findarticles.com/