ABSTRACT
Several Dutch artists, including Aelbert Cuyp, Jan Luyken, Rembrandt, Hans Savery, Willem van de Velde the Younger, and Alart van Everdingen, depicted impressive landscapes and seascapes in which seventeenth-century viewers could recognize an awe-inspiring display of God's power. Images of mountains and thunderstorms, but also of calm seas, play an important role in this. However, in Dutch visual culture there is a complex relationship between the recognition of divine sublimity in nature and the focus on depicting the overwhelming power that nature contains as convincingly as possible. Here, we see the sublime balancing between the religious idea of the fear of God and the terrific powers of nature itself.
