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The Sublime and the “Beholder’s Share”: Junius, Rubens, Rembrandt

2016; Volume: 8; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5092/jhna.2016.8.2.2

2473-1404

Thijs Weststeijn,

Historical Art and Culture Studies

beholders-share-junius-rubens-rembrandt/ It is noteworthy, first of all, that Junius's mention of Longinus signals a characteristic of his theory of art: he is the first to pay systematic attention to "the beholder's share" in art theory.He uses a body of ancient literature, which had not been read by earlier authors, to make this possible.Longinus is, in fact, only a minor figure in his treatise, which draws particularly heavily on two other ancients, Philostratus the Elder and Philostratus the Younger (fig.1).Junius made extensive notes to their work "when [he] was writing de Pictura veterum (in which treatise the elder and younger Philostratus are everie where quoted)." 6 In order to locate Longinus in the larger framework of The Painting of the Ancients, it is the Philostrati who deserve our attention.This article will explore Junius's statement on the sublime in regard to the principles that guided his selection of ancient sources.The book is, after all, an attempt to reconstruct the ancients' theory of painting that had not survived: "to collect the rules, which were, so to say, separated from their own corpus and scattered diffusely . . .and to arrange them in the frame of true art." 7 The following analysis begins with some general statements on the viewer's reaction in seventeenth-century art theory that emphasize a generic lack of words (the aesthetic experience is apparently a pre-predicative one).Then, we will look more closely into the specific context that Junius provides for the sublime, connecting it closely to the faculty of the imagination: he differentiaties the artistic imagination from the poetic one.The painterly imagination aims at the artist's becoming present at the evoked scence, which is the only guarantee that the viewer may also become present at the same scene.Ideally, this presence happens in a synaesthetic atmosphere involving all senses.Even more strongly, states Junius, painting is fully performative: looking at a painting means willingly or unwillingly acting out the evoked scene.The experience is corporeal rather than merely sensual.In the end, the painting leaves the viewer in physical pain.Is this the "true magnificence" of art? Too Marvelous for WordsJunius's treatise is the first in the tradition of art theory to give pride of place to the viewer's reaction, which is construed as a-perhaps the-constitutive element of the artistic experience.