Translations of the Sublime: The Early Modern Reception and Dissemination of Longinus' Peri Hupsous in Rhetoric, the Visual Arts, Architecture and the Theatre

Contrary to widely held assumptions, the early modern revival of ps-Longinus' On the Sublime did not begin with the adaptation published by Boileau in 1674; it was not connected solely with the Greek editions that began to appear from 1554; nor was its impact limited to rhetoric and literature. Manuscript copies began to circulate in Quattrocento Italy, but very few have been studied. Neither have the ways the sublime was used, in rhetoric and literature, but also in the arts, architecture and the theatre been studied in any systematic way. The present volume is a first attempt to chart the early modern translations of Peri hupsous, both in the literal sense of the history of its dissemination by means of editions, versions and translations in Latin and vernacular languages, but also in the figurative sense of its uses and transformations in the visual arts in the period from the first early modern editions of Longinus until its popularization by Boileau.

Contributors include Francis Goyet, Hana Gründler, Lydia Hamlett, Sigrid de Jong, Helen Langdon, Bram Van Oostveldt, Eugenio Refini, Paul Smith, and Dietmar Till.

Caroline van Eck is Professor of architectural history and theory at Leiden University. Recent publications include Classical Rhetoric and the Arts in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge 2007); Inigo Jones Reconstructs Stonehenge: Architectural History between Memory and Narration (Amsterdam: Architectura & Natura Press 2009) and ‘Living Statues: Living Presence Response, Agency and the Sublime’, Art History (2010) vol. 33/4, pp. 642-660.

Stijn Bussels is Lecturer in Theatre Studies at the University of Groningen. His monograph The Antwerp Entry of 1549: Rhetoric, Performance and Power in the Early Modern Netherlands will be published in 2011 by Rodopi in the Ludus-series. Together with Caroline van Eck he has edited a special issue of Art History on the relations between the arts and the theatre in early modern Europe: ‘Theatricality and the Early Modern Visual Arts’, in: Art History, March 2010, vol. 33, nr. 2.

Maarten Delbeke is Associate Professor at the department of Architecture and Urban Planning of Ghent University. Currently he leads the project The Quest for the Legitimacy of Architecture in Europe 1750-1850 at Leiden University, funded by a Vidi-grant from the Dutch Science Foundation (N.W.O.). With Evonne Levy and Steven Ostrow he has edited Bernini’s Biographies. Critical Essays (Penn State UP, 2006) and his monograph Sforza Pallavicino and Art Theory in Bernini’s Rome is forthcoming with As