The Great Beauty; the effects of presentation size and height of photographs on sublimity perception

The sublime remains one of the most enduring aesthetic concepts in Western aesthetic discourse, and is portrayed often – most notably in Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful from 1759 – as an aesthetic delight that evokes emotions of fear and shock. In two studies (Ns = 32 & 39), we explored the role of three physical characteristics often attributed central to an object that elicits feelings of sublimity, namely size (large vs. small), height (high vs. central) and colour (in colour vs. in black and white), in influencing ratings of sublimity in a large number of photographs (60 stimuli in each study). We report that after controlling for by-subject and by-item variations, as well as ratings of beauty, i.e. pleasure, the increase of size and height of presented objects were associated with significant increases of their sublimity ratings. Colour, while it did not influence ratings of sublimity, influenced ratings of beauty. Based on these results, we propose the selective influence of physical presentation forms on aesthetic perception. Burke, E. (2009). A philosophical inquiry into the origins of our ideas of the sublime and beautiful. Oxon, UK: Routledge Classics. (Original work published 1759).