sublime, the

In the arts, the quality of being awe-inspiring or possessing grandeur. In the 18th century it became an aesthetic category, when ‘beautiful’ no longer seemed adequate to express the spiritual and emotional impact of art or nature. The search for the sublime was apparent in a predilection for wild landscapes in painting, for example, Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg's (1740–1812) An Avalanche in the Alps (1803), and in the new genre of the gothic novel, such as Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764).