In the late-eighteenth century writers and artists began to explore the aesthetic and emotional qualities of immensity, darkness and terror. The word ‘Sublime’ was used to describe the sensations derived from the representation of such qualities in art. In particular, the dramatic potential of landscape was explored, so that by the early-nineteenth century the land and the sea were no longer employed merely as attractive backdrops but had themselves taken a leading role in the narrative of the painting. JMW Turner emphasised the monumental power of nature compared with the helplessness of mankind, and used landscape to evoke heightened emotional states.

Turner’s ideas were developed and exaggerated by John Martin and Francis Danby, who were rivals in the production of spectacular ‘showstoppers’ of cataclysmic events. The Bible, packed with powerful stories of the Deluge, the Apocalypse and the Last Judgement, proved to be highly fertile ground. Martin’s paintings were dismissed as vulgar by the Royal Academy, but were nonetheless extremely popular with the public. The climax of this success was the trilogy of huge canvases called the Judgement Series, completed in 1853 and exhibited in public halls across Britain and the United States for twenty years after Martin’s death.

A very different interpretation of biblical subject matter is also shown here in the work of Frederic Leighton and GF Watts. Whereas Martin and Danby miniaturised human beings to emphasise their powerlessness in the face of God and Nature, both Leighton and Watts expressed their sense of the Sublime through the human body. Both were inspired by the monumental work of the Renaissance artist Michelangelo, and in particular his fresco cycles of biblical subjects in the Sistine Chapel, Rome. Watts was convinced that art had the power to appeal to the human soul, and produced images of intense spirituality, often in an attempt to visualise the purely psychological.

This display has been devised by curator Christine Riding

British Art Displays 1500-2004