‘Great and Noble Ideas of the Moral Kind’: Wright of Derby and the Scientific Sublime
2010; Oxford University Press; Volume: 33; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/j.1467-8365.2010.00779.x
ISSN1467-8365
Autores Tópico(s)History of Science and Natural History
ResumoDetail from The Alchymist, (plate 7). Joseph Wright of Derby, The Alchymist, 1770. Oil on canvas, 80.2 × 106 cm. Derby: Derby Museum and Art Gallery. Photo: The Bridgeman Art Library. From the point of view of tracing the development of the sublime in eighteenth-century art and thought it is unsurprising that many of the greatest minds of the century should associate the concept with the inexpressible grandeur of the cosmos. Immanuel Kant, in a passage from his youthful treatise, Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens (1755), remarks in wonder that ‘the grandeur of a planetary world in which the earth, as a grain of sand, is scarcely perceived’, is as nothing when compared with ‘the infinite multitude of worlds and systems which fill the extension of the Milky Way’, a galaxy that is itself but part of ‘immense orders of star-worlds . . . a system inconceivably vast’.1 In almost identical language Edmund Burke, in the section on ‘Magnificence’ in A Philosophical Enquiry into our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757), opines ‘The starry heaven, though it occurs so frequently to our view, never fails to excite an idea of grandeur’,2 while Joseph Addison, in ‘The Pleasures of the Imagination’, enthused: ‘When we survey the whole Earth at once, and the several Planets that lye within its Neighbourhood, we are filled with a pleasing Astonishment, to see so many Worlds hanging one above another, and sliding round their Axles in such an amazing Pomp and Solemnity’.3 And Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, notes in the Characteristics of 1714: ‘How narrow then must [our world] appear, compared with the capacious system of its own sun? And how narrow, or as nothing, in respect of those innumerable systems of other apparent suns?’4 Not all commentators chose these or similar cosmological terms. Many sought to locate the sublime, in the manner of the picturesque traveller, in an appreciation of the grander aspects of nature. Even so, almost all eighteenth-century commentators had rejected the equation of the sublime with the outmoded idea of elevation in speech and writing that had become a commonplace following Nicolas Boileau’s 1674 translation of Peri Hypsous [On Sublimity], a classical treatise on rhetoric traditionally but erroneously attributed to the Greek first-century CE writer Dionysius Longinus.5 Rather, with the advent of the eighteenth century, the sublime came to be understood less as a rhetorical trope than as an aesthetic category in its own right, characterized by what has been called ‘cognitive failure’ on the part of the subject, when our ability to express thoughts or feelings is overwhelmed, and when the limits – of reason, of understanding, of rules – are paralysed in the face of an overpowering, opposing, and as it were, oppressive force.6 What that force consisted of was the theme of innumerable commentaries and treatises on the sublime produced throughout the century. For Thomas Ashton it was the ‘unbounded Prospects’ of nature;7 for Joseph Addison, writing early in the century, it was ‘an Object, or … any thing that is too big for [the imagination’s] Capacity’.8 For Burke it was the unbounded spaces of the universe: ‘Infinity has a tendency to fill the mind with that sort of delightful horror, which is the most genuine effect, and truest test of the sublime.’9 For Hugh Blair, writing in 1783, it was to be found in ‘the vast and boundless prospects presented to us by nature; such as wide and extended plains to which the eye can set no limits [or] the firmament of heaven’.10 And for the theologian Thomas Burnet it was ‘whatever hath but the Shadow and Appearance of the INFINITE, as all Things have that are too big for our Comprehension, they fill and overbear the Mind with their Excess, and cast it into a pleasing kind of Stupor and Admiration’.11 Given the importance of the concept in eighteenth-century aesthetic discourse, it is more than a little odd that the sublime has found so little application in the study of the century’s pictorial arts. With few exceptions, the visual arts of the period have until recently been characterized by a plethora of labels – the picturesque, the neo-classic, the rococo, proto-romantic, and so on – indeed, almost anything but sublime, and there has been a marked reluctance on the part of some art historians to analyse the visual arts in terms of this most slippery of labels. Happily the situation is rapidly improving. In the work of Peter de Bolla, Ronald Paulson, and David H. Solkin, among others, the sublime is seen as a vibrant category of aesthetic experience and a privileged site of art-historical discourse.12 Even so, works that seem to demand that we analyse them through the concept of the sublime, or that can only be fully understood if we take the century’s abiding interest in the sublime seriously, remain relatively untouched by the discourse on sublimity. In order to begin to redress the balance, I want to consider two such paintings by Joseph Wright of Derby (plate 1). In considering two of his so-called ‘scientific’ subjects, A Philosopher giving that Lecture on the Orrery, in which a Lamp is put in the place of the Sun of 1766, and An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump of 1768, I hope to show that, far from being merely ‘scientific’ topics that reveal more about the mores of their provincial audiences than about issues concerned with Enlightenment values, they are highly aesthetic history paintings, moral commentaries on the nature of art and science, on society, on the scope of pictorial representation in eighteenth-century England and, as the choice of subject suggests, commentaries on the human condition, at least insofar as it reveals itself through contemplation of the absolutes of life, death, and infinity. It is my contention, then, that studying these paintings from the point of view of their participation in the discourse on the sublime offers a series of perspectives on the period’s art and culture that no other approach can adequately supply. Joseph Wright of Derby, Self Portrait at the age of about Forty, c. 1772–3. Oil on canvas, 76.2 × 63.5 cm. Private Collection. Photo: The Bridgeman Art Library. In a lecture on the ‘uses of history’ of 1761, the English Unitarian minister and polymath Joseph Priestley contrasted ‘true’ history with ‘works of fiction’. While the former, Priestley wrote, ‘is an inexhaustible mine of the most valuable knowledge’, the latter was limited to the use ‘the authors of them had in view’. Pursuing the contrast into the realm of science, Priestley illustrates his point with reference to the kinds of apparatus that were the stock in trade of the itinerant lecturers or ‘natural philosophers’ who toured the English provinces at this time: Works of fiction resemble those machines which we contrive to illustrate the principles of [natural] philosophy, such as globes and orreries, the use of which extend no further than the views of human ingenuity; whereas real history resembles the experiments by the air pump, the condensing engine and electrical machine, which exhibit the operations of nature, and the God of nature himself, whose works are the noblest subject of contemplation to the human mind, and are the ground-work and the materials of the most extensive and useful theories.13 Priestley’s examples – the orrery, the air pump, the electrical machine and the condensing engine – serve his argument well, but they seem particularly striking, even prescient, given the appearance of an orrery and an air pump in Wright’s two paintings. On the face of it, the paintings share a similar theme – that of a scientific lecture presented to a small but attentive audience of men, women, and children. Yet if the paintings are similar in composition and theme, they are less easy to compare when considered from the point of view of what I shall argue constitutes their central aesthetic interest – their relationship to the increasingly important discourse on the sublime in eighteenth-century art and thought. Priestley’s distinction between the use of ‘globes and orreries’ in the demonstration of geophysical and astronomical phenomena and what might be called the ‘hard’ science of ‘the air pump, the electrical machine and the condensing engine’ points to an important difference in Wright’s choice of subjects. Seen from Priestley’s perspective, an orrery is both the facilitator and inhibitor of knowledge. Facilitator in that it visualizes the solar system within the span of a tabletop; inhibitor in that it challenges us to relate its schematic planetary motion to the actual heavens, testing our powers of imagination to see the universe in a mechanical contrivance. This has direct relevance to the standing of experimental science in eighteenth-century Britain. As Priestley’s comments suggest, orreries were dependent upon ‘human ingenuity’ which Priestley regards – no doubt correctly – as highly circumscribed. At best they were teaching aids that served to schematize that which was in itself unviewable as a whole, at worst they might be regarded as playthings for the amusement of polite society; in either case they possess no scientific credibility. From this point of view the demonstrative aspects of science, particularly when manifested in an apparatus such as the orrery, had the potential to be little more than entertainment for the well-to-do. While Priestley was known to Wright and was a member of the group of provincial manufacturers, scientists and philosophers known as the Lunar Society that included Josiah Wedgwood, Matthew Boulton, James Watt and Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of the evolutionist Charles Darwin), Wright’s choice of subject is unlikely to be the result of his having read Priestley, or because he was acquainted with the luminaries of the Lunar Society. More plausibly he was responding to a general surge in interest in popular science – particularly chemistry, physics, and astronomy – among his wealthy provincial clientele. It was to this group that the figure of the itinerant lecturer, who discoursed on the principles of science and demonstrated advances in technology to audiences across the country, addressed his attentions.14 Indeed, one of this group, Washington Shirley, 5th Earl Ferrers, an amateur astronomer who owned an orrery and lived close by at Staunton Harold Hall in Leicestershire, was the purchaser of the painting.15 Furthermore, Derby was on the scientific lecture circuit. The Scottish astronomer and instrument maker James Ferguson had lectured in the city in 1762, and while it is not known whether he demonstrated the orrery and air pump there, he certainly did so at other venues, making the alluring prospect that Wright witnessed the operation of these apparatuses in his home town some years before he embarked on the paintings a distinct possibility.16 These observations open up a different perspective on Wright’s two paintings. But are they in fact only about science; or are they group portraits in the manner of Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson, conversation pieces, contemporary history paintings, records of scientific demonstrations, an affirmation of Enlightenment values, examples of an as-yet-unnamed genre, or merely an opportunity for the artist to demonstrate his mastery of the effects of candlelight?17 No doubt the fact that none of these labels may be considered categorically wrong says something about Wright’s melding of the genres, and certainly to label the paintings ‘candlelights’ is pre-emptively to deny them any claim to importance, but while none of these labels is necessarily inaccurate, they all serve to distract attention from what is surely key to an adequate explanation of the Orrery and the Air Pump– the sublime as the core element in eighteenth-century aesthetic thought and a paradigm-creating quality in the work of Wright of Derby. Perhaps my point has been anticipated. Benedict Nicolson, in his catalogue raisonné of 1968, attempts to avoid adding to the confusion by including the Orrery under the seemingly neutral rubric ‘Early Subject Pieces and Genre’, but that seems rather like labelling Robert Campin’s Mérode Altarpiece a ‘Domestic Interior’.18 More usefully, David Solkin, without venturing an epithet, has remarked that the Orrery shows ‘human actors engaged in the contemplation of natural and divine law’– a remark which has equal application to the Air Pump– thereby emphasizing the paintings’ social and philosophical context without adding to the ever-growing list of unhelpful labels.19 Of course, this is not to argue for an oppositional relationship between science and the sublime. Science, as a ‘frontier’ of inquiry, seems almost predisposed to address the realm of the sublime. As Priestley explicitly argues his essay ‘Of the Sublime’ of 1777: ‘The sublime of science consists in general and comprehensive theorems, which, by means of very great and extensive consequences, present the idea of vastness to the mind. A person of true taste may perceive many instances of the genuine sublime in geometry, and even in algebra; and the sciences of natural philosophy and astronomy, exhibit the noblest fields of the sublime that the mind of man was ever introduced to.’20 Indeed both scientists and non-scientists saw in scientific investigation intimations of beauty, awe and terror (and often the deity) that served not to undermine, but to validate, their conclusions.21 From Newton’s observation in the Opticks that ‘this most beautiful system of the sun, planets and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being’,22 through to Lord Byron’s wry conclusion in 1811 on viewing the stars through a telescope built by royal astronomer William Herschel that ‘our pretensions to eternity might be …over-rated’,23 science was if anything a privileged source of the aesthetic. (Even so, few make the connection as clearly as Humphry Davy who, after inhaling copious quantities of nitrous oxide (laughing gas) during an experiment in 1799, recounted: ‘I seemed to be a sublime being, newly created and superior to other mortals, I … stalked majestically out of the laboratory to inform Dr Kinglake privately that nothing existed but thoughts.’)24 In 1766 Wright included the Orrery at the Society of Artists exhibition at Spring Garden, London (plate 2). Named for the patron of a particularly splendid example, Charles Boyle, 4th Earl of Orrery, an orrery is a mechanical model of the solar system that demonstrates the movement of the planets around the sun. They feature in popular scientific treatises, such as John Harris’Astronomical Dialogues between a Gentleman and a Lady of 1729.25 An example, very similar to the one depicted by Wright, appears in an engraving that served as frontispiece to A New Universal History of Arts and Sciences of 1759 (plate 3).26 In reality, however, an orrery, even one as elaborate as that depicted by Wright, was never able to represent the movement, scale and position of the planets with any accuracy, nor could the illumination –‘in which a lamp is put in place of the sun’– provide sufficient light to replicate the diurnal changes or periodic effects represented. Likewise the armillary sphere – the metal hoops that span the orrery’s frame in both Wright’s painting and the 1759 engraving – serve little purpose other than enhancing the spectacle.27 In other words orreries offered the spectator a graspable approximation of the solar system while inevitably misrepresenting the complex reality of the heavens. Joseph Wright of Derby, A Philosopher giving that Lecture on the Orrery, in which a Lamp is put in the place of the Sun, exhibited 1766. Oil on canvas, 147.3 × 203.2 cm. Derby: Derby Museum and Art Gallery. Photo: The Bridgeman Art Library. Frontispiece from A New Universal History of Arts and Sciences, shewing their origin, progress, theory, use and practice..., 2 vols, London: J. Coote, 1759. Photo: James R. Voelkel/Roy G. Neville Historical Chemical Library, Chemical Heritage Foundation, Philadelphia, PA. How all this might relate to Wright’s painting becomes clearer when we consider the rather over-wrought verse devoted to the painting by the critic ‘Impartial Hand’, published on the occasion of the painting’s exhibition in Spring Garden, London, in 1766: What bright phenomenon there strikes my eyes? What new rais’d constellations in those skies? … Were ever Truth and Fallacy so joined? Such graceful truth with such deceit combined; Inchanting group, strong magic hide the wall! Some more than human hand hath wrought it all! What mighty wonders by his art are done’ The glorious Orrery without a sun Illuminates with all magic mimic blaze, And fills the wide expanse with borrow’d rays: … Without a rival let this ‘Wright’ be known, For this amazing province is his own.28 ‘Impartial Hand’s’ language evokes those qualities in the Orrery that make the painting such a fertile site for an inquiry into eighteenth-century aesthetics. The critic emphasizes the painting’s magical qualities, dwelling on its ‘inchantment’ and ‘wonders’. Little in the description is open to the kind of contemplation that the painting itself invites; rather ‘Impartial Hand’ draws us into a description that is part a ‘world of wonders’ fairground pitch, part the poetizing of the popular interest in astronomy, transforming the Orrery from an emblem of Enlightenment rationalism into the site, and image, of spectacle. In a darkened room, a man with his hand to his forehead at right listens to the lecture while following the movement of the planets with his eyes; in a similar manner the lady at left seems to be translating the mechanical model before her eyes into the infinite distances of interstellar space, while the man at extreme right follows the lecture but looks into the distance, as if considering what he hears without reference to the physical display. To the right of the lecturer, a young man, plausibly identified as Wright’s friend Peter Perez Burdett, is taking notes. Another figure, of an adolescent, is seen from the back, looking down into the orrery. Only the two young children, eagerly looking over the rim of the orrery, their faces illuminated by the glow of the concealed lamp, and thus in a manner contained within the spectacle, may be supposed to experience Addison’s ‘pleasing Astonishment’, and then not as a result of the lecturer’s discourse but through an understandable child-like wonder at the workings of the marvellous machine. Indeed, the Orrey (like the Air Pump), is so infused with what Peter de Bolla has called the ‘taxonomy of looks’ that it is possible to consider the painting as an essay in scopophilia.29 It is worth pausing to ask ourselves just what role the orrery is playing in Wright’s painting. Far from being a mere contrivance – a kind of deus ex machina bringing together this diverse audience – it is symbolic of the progress achieved across the physical sciences following the Copernican Revolution. The Newtonian natural philosopher is able to demonstrate the invisible forces of nature that, as Stefan Forrester has argued, ‘imbued nature itself with a new kind of intrinsic worth as a subject of study’.30 (It has been plausibly argued that the lecturer is in fact a portrait of Sir Isaac Newton himself, whose Three Laws of Motion were credited with organizing the apparent chaos of the universe into an harmonious and regulated clockwork.)31 In this climate of scientific inquiry, the natural world was no longer merely the setting for human activity, but rather a living organism that was complex, ordered, yet independent of human volition. Yet while the audience gazes intently at the model’s clockwork the orrery fails to translate the tiny revolving spheres into the immensity of the heavens. It is for this reason, perhaps, that only the children exhibit a sense of wonder and excitement. They are absorbed by the wonderful toy before their eyes. The adult members of the audience, however, have long since lost this child-like vision. They are able to experience a ‘pleasing Astonishment’ only insofar as they succeed in translating the metaphor hidden in the orrery into the sublime reality of the universe. The hidden light source illuminates nothing that would aid our understanding. The tiny spherical balls representing the planets, insofar as they are visible at all, are dwarfed by the superfluous armillary sphere that forms no part of the scientific demonstration. Instead it is the audience which is illuminated; but there too the light conceals as much as it reveals, throwing into sharp relief the visages of the children and the lecturer, but progressively occluding the rest of the audience, while the interior itself is little more than suggested – a bookshelf, a blank rear wall, and what might be a curtain or canopy of some kind. A reading of the Orrery that suggests depths commensurate with history painting, if not the sublime, is evinced by Wright’s probable use of Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia as a source for the painting’s imagery. Plate 196 of the 1758–60 Hertel edition of this celebrated handbook shows ‘Astrologia’ (here synonymous with Astronomy) as a winged woman who holds a sceptre and points upward to the heavens (plate 4).32 In her left hand she holds a book; on the table is an armillary sphere; astronomical apparatus surround her. If we compare this illustration to Wright’s painting, we see the lecturer likewise points to the orrery; he too is surrounded by books and astronomical apparatus; and just as Astrologia’s wings evoke her elevated thoughts, his academic gown recalls the intellectual character of his undertaking. The younger man taking notes grasps a gold-topped walking cane strongly reminiscent of Astrologia’s septre. Have the group just viewed, or are about to view, the stars? The lecturer appears to have a cloak draped over his left arm. Their apparel suggests they are dressed for the outdoors. If so, the spectators are interestingly positioned between the model and first-hand experience. Cesare Ripa, ‘Astrologia’, from the 1758–60 Hertel Edition of Ripa’s Iconologia (Cesare Ripa, Baroque and Rococo Pictorial Imagery, trans. Edward A. Maser, New York, 1971). Photo: Reproduced with permission from Dover Publications. The task of evaluation imposed on the audience by the orrery is highly relevant to Kant’s understanding of what he calls the ‘mathematically sublime’, which he defines in the Critique of Judgment (1790) as ‘that which is absolutely large’ or ‘large beyond all comparison’. Unlike the estimation of a finite object (the work of the imagination), contemplation of an infinite magnitude cannot by definition be so estimated; as a result of this failure of sense perception, the faculty of reason is prompted to grasp that which cannot be estimated in any other way.33 How this might apply to the audience in the Orrery is not hard to grasp. Denied the experience, as we all are, of estimating the span of the heavens when confronted with the real thing, the orrery serves as a model to measure the infinite expanse of the universe. But in fact the orrery signally fails to elicit the kind of sense perception associated with the work of the imagination. The model in no way prompts us to estimate distance; rather it does the opposite in reminding us that what we see on the tabletop is just that – a schematic and highly unrealistic model that misrepresents the solar system in several important ways. (This is perhaps the reason why John Martin’s paintings, however much they seem to challenge our perception of magnitude, tend to appear so irredeemably – and laughably – literal. For Martin mountains can never be high enough, storms never violent enough, disasters never catastrophic enough, yet they fail absolutely to carry the viewer beyond the limits of the represented.) Further examination of the Orrery in the light of these observations suggests that Wright was acutely aware of the potential of his subject to raise questions of representation, perception, and reality. Indeed, the painting positions itself between its audience’s understanding of contemporary science and our expectations of what the reactions of such an audience might be. As such the Orrery is much less a straightforward depiction of middle-class life, or an exercise in trompe l’oeil painting, than it is a study of the limits of representation.34 In any case it must be considered as much more than a bravura essay into lighting effects that aligns the painting with the amusements of the magic lantern, or the drawing room manners of contemporary society. Indeed, pointing to an altogether more serious purpose Elizabeth E. Barker has remarked that the painting ‘appears deeply engaged in the discourses of its age involving representation, replication, and spectacle’. Referring to the painting’s ‘plausible fictions’ she notes that its ‘breathtaking verisimilitude’ is challenged by aporias of composition and ‘disjointed perspective … creating a mood of fractured intimacy [that] destabilizes any lingering illusions of reality’.35 This seems exactly right, but it may be that this is precisely the effect Wright aims to evoke. In this sense, the orrery, seemingly so self-evidently the focus of the painting, turns out to be hardly there at all. Just as the model solar system carries its audience to the brink of enlightenment only to leave them in the dark about the true nature of infinity, so too the Orrery teases us with its apparently transparent presence, only to deny us the possibility of reconciling truth and appearances. The painting, which appears so present in all its almost photographic realism, leaves us guessing as to its ultimate purpose, a point understood by ‘Impartial Hand’ when he rhetorically exclaims, ‘Were ever Truth and Fallacy so joined?’ Yet if the Orrery refuses to give up its secrets easily, we should not despair of finding answers, not only to the questions of representation, reality, illusionism, and spectacle, but also parallels with the most profound philosophical reflections. In a celebrated passage from the Critique of Practical Reason (1788), Immanuel Kant associates the feelings resulting from the contemplation of the universe with the moral imperatives that bear down on the individual: Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me. The former, Kant ruminates, situates him in relation to the ‘external world of sense’ and onward to the ‘unbounded magnitude’ of the universe from which his insignificant physical being is derived and to which it must return. But the latter (‘the moral law within me’) ‘exhibits me in a world which has true infinity’, raising him above his animal nature to reveal ‘a life independent of all animality and even the whole world of sense … reach[ing] into the infinite’.36 The passage could have been written to describe the activity of the audience in the Orrery, an activity that ‘allow[s] us’, as Kant observes elsewhere, ‘to discover in ourselves an ability to resist which is of a quite different kind, and which gives us the courage [to believe] that we could be a match for nature’s seeming omnipotence’37– a point anticipated by John Baillie in 1747 in his Essay on the Sublime‘[an] object can only justly be called the sublime, which in some degree disposes the mind to this enlargement of itself, and gives her a lofty conception of her own powers.’38 The painting is, in short, the site of a confrontation between the constraints of the human condition and the reality of unbounded space and time. The audience of the Orrery is reminded of its mortality in contemplating the model universe, just as we are reminded of ours when we ‘put ourselves in the picture’. The orrery, a model solar system is – like the painting itself – likewise the site of representation and perception, understanding and insight. As representation, the Orrery’s audience gains from the model an intimation of infinity: the orrery as starry heavens offers a space without limit reduced to a mechanical contrivance. As painting, it presents a world where all is not what it seems, where light works toward obscurity and what appears to be there isn’t present at all. The audience is on the outside, looking in, alienated from an event they can observe, but not participate in (unless they are children). Wright’s message is that the world existed before human life, and will continue to exist after it. As Karen Lang has argued in relation to Kantian aesthetics, while the subject is thus ‘annihilated’ by being reminded of his/her mortality (‘a mere speck in the universe’), he/she is nevertheless awakened to the ‘universal and necessary’ connection to the whole. In the freedom and obligation this implies, the subject finds an autonomy, not only from ‘a life independent of all animality’, but more importantly, what Lang calls ‘an orientation in thinking through the point of view of reflective judgment’.39 This seems exactly right, and it is not unreasonable to consider the audience in the Orrery undergoing a similar ‘orientation in thinking’, when seen from the point of view of the ‘starry heavens above’ and ‘the moral law within’. In 1768, Wright again exhibited with the Society of Artists, this time showing An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump (plate 5).40 The ‘experiment’ of the title involved the use of an air pump attached to a glass receiver in order to demonstrate the effects of a vacuum. James Ferguson, who used an air pump in his lectures on pneumatics, published a description of the operation: Joseph Wright of Derby, An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, 1768. Oil on canvas, 183 × 244 cm. London: National Gallery. Photo: The Bridgeman Art Library. If a fowl, a cat, rat, mouse or bird be
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