Turner’s Vortex Vision & the Apocalyptic Sublime
Turner’s engagement with the sublime was more complex than Martin’s, largely because he drew on a variety of influences and sources to create his apocalyptic works. From classical history Turner took accounts of Hannibal’s trek across the Alps, but imbued it with a sense of imminent catastrophe conveyed by the whirling vortex of the composition as well as the colour black blotting out the sky. And Turner yoked his apocalyptic colour paintings to events in his own society with such paintings as Slavers Throwing the Dead Overboard, as did Danby with his allusion to slavery in his Sixth Seal painted for Beckford who was also Turner’s patron for a time.[1] What Jack Lindsay calls the “vortex vision” adumbrated in Hannibal and other vertiginous works becomes intensified and transposed to the realm of colour theory in the 1840s.[2] Turner also studied the ideas of Goethe through Goethe’s Theory of Colour (Zen Farbenlehre) available through an English translation by his friend Charles Eastlake in 1840. This resulted in Turner’s Light and Colour, a pendant to another canvas called Shade and Darkness. Light and Colour (above) put into practice through its technique Goethe’s claim that different colours of the spectrum were associated with varying emotions, though Turner firmly rejected Goethe’s anti-Newtonian views. Despite this painting dwelling on the morning after the Biblical Deluge, it has not been read as “a celebration of God’s salvation but a sceptical comment on it.” The “prismatic refractions of colour” are seen by one commentator as a subversion of the rainbow which is a symbol of God’s promise. As Vaughan states, Goethe saw the power of light as benevolent, but Turner saw it as indifferent, unsurprising for the man who wrote The Fallacies of Hope.[3]
[1] Francis Danby 1793-1861, Tate and Bristol, 1988, no. 26. Anti- slavery campaigners regularly used apocalyptic imagery.
[2] Jack Lindsay, Turner: His Life and Work, (Granada, 1966), 266.
[3] William Vaughan, Romanticism and Art, (Thames and Hudson, 1978, 1994), 171.
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