ABSTRACT
The nineteenth-century sublime may be the experience of nature filtered through the medium of paint, but a medium does not have to be ground pigment. It can be a ski jump—its apparent danger tempered by a skier's apparent skill. In art, the sublime is a distancing act: horror that becomes real as it is filtered through the pleasure of aesthetic experience. In 1790 Immanuel Kant published his Critique of Judgment. Its first section, the "Critique of Aesthetic Judgment", distinguished between beauty and the sublime by assigning genders. Gender classifications—masculine and feminine—primarily applied to nouns in Romance languages. There are no gendered nouns in English. In speaking of gender, one cannot ignore elements of style, particularly the way articles of clothing are used to signify it. In making the experience of the sublime into a communicable aesthetic experience, style cannot be ignored.
