This book explores the uncharted interactions between art and medicine during the 18th century in Britain, specifically how these mark a new phase of enhancement of artistic stimuli and visual culture.

It seeks the interdisciplinary genealogy of modern art's fundamental pursuit for more reality, energy, power, nerve intensity, and life, finding the roots of this history in the radical redefinition of the sublime by Edmund Burke.

This fully embodied and medically significant experience that is the Burkean sublime – the sublime in this book – centers on powerful emotions and a new maximalist economy of sensations, relying on pain, toil, violence, and extreme tensions.

The demands of the Burkean sublime for higher levels of stimulation and vitality of the senses will lead to a new call for more reality in art, for sharper and more realistic imitations.

The book thus brings together two concepts that have traditionally been viewed as irreconcilable and redefines the history of both – the supposedly ascetic and detached real on one hand, and the sublime, often perceived as a disembodied, non-representational, iconoclastic, and abstract notion, on the other.

In this way, it identifies the plebeian, radical, and emotional roots of the various realisms of modern art and aspires to contribute to the redefinition of its genealogy from the 18th century onward.

This phenomenon that the book calls the sublime real is examined across a range of areas – from anatomy, physiology, philosophy, artistic criticism and theory to painting, sculpture, scientific illustration, academies, and artistic education – and addresses historians of medicine, science, philosophy, and art as well as scholars and readers interested in art theory and the history of culture and ideas.

Contents

Foreword

Introduction

The Struggle of the Senses and the Sublime: A Rude Example for the Fine Arts

Gentle Feelings and Noble Economies of Well-Being: The Rise and Fall of the Beautiful in the Fine Arts

Anatomical Critique and Noble Art History: Abstract Health, Morbid Details

The Sublime of Imitation: Vital Details and the Anatomy of Taste in Burke

The Anatomical Sublime of William Hunter: Extreme Imitations and the "Quiet Inert Manner"

The Anatomy of the Horse by George Stubbs and the Expressiveness of "Homotypy"

The Magic of Hard Imitation: Scientific Illustration and the Constrictiveness of Simulation

Catalog of Works (English Titles)

Bibliography

Index of Names