Sublime fragments: the Romantic path to knowledge
Sublime fragments: the Romantic path to knowledge

Summary/Abstract: In the following article an attempt will be made to look at a famous painting – An Artist Overwhelmed by the Grandeur of Antique Ruins by Henry Fuseli, and two famous sonnets by Keats and Shelley, in the context of the chief aesthetic concept of the Romantic era – the sublime. I will try to elucidate how the idea of the sublime is inscribed into the notion of the fragment, ever-present in the Romantic aesthetics. The sublime encounter with the fragment, in turn, leads to a breathtaking moment of illumination, and conditions attainment of ultimate, yet not rational, knowledge.

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