Resumen de 'Great and noble ideas of the moral kind': wright of Derby and the scientific sublime
In the 1760s Joseph Wright of Derby produced two important paintings – the Orrery, and the Air Pump – that show lecturers demonstrating the laws of science to a small audience of men, women, and children. While Wright’s paintings have been widely and variously discussed in terms of their representation of science, as images of the Industrial Revolution, their use of artifi cial light, and what they tell us about gender relations, they have hitherto not been specifi cally considered from the point of view of the eighteenth century’s interest in the aesthetic category of the sublime. This article seeks to redress the balance through exploration of the paintings’ relationship to the sublime, particularly as it is represented in the writings of Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant, and to further consider Wright’s paintings as a commentary on contemporary society’s fascination with art, science, and the Enlightenment ideal of human perfectibility.
