Beauty Vs. Sublimnity

From Michaelangelo & the Pope's Ceiling, by Ross King, a note that I'm quoting to remember for later:

One way to understand the differing styles of the two artists is through a pair of aesthetic categories developed two and a half centuries later by the Irish statesman and writer Edmund Burke in his Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, published in 1756. For Burke, those things we call beautiful have the properties of smoothness, delicacy, softness of color, and elegance of movement. The sublime, on the other hand, comprehends the vast, the obscure, the powerful, the rugged, the difficult- attributes which produce in the spectator a kind of astonished wonder and even terror. For the people of Rome in 1511, Raphael was beautiful but Michaelangelo sublime.


The best part of reading is when one book leads me on to another.