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The Sublime and the Picturesque. In this extract from Art and the Industrial Revolution, Francis D. Klingender relates the aesthetic theories of the sublime, the picturesque and Romanticism, to the various representations of industrial activity in 18th and 19th century England, including technological designs, naive expressions of local pride in technology, and the works of confirmed artists. Reference to the aesthetic of the picturesque, formulated by William Gilpin and Uvedale Price, enabled artists and their patrons to represent industrial activity while divesting it of its most sinister aspects : machines and mines were allowed in as elements of decor so long as they presented all the signs of age and dilapidation. Through the example of Coalbrookdale, a centre of the industrial revolution and a major source of inspiration for artists, it can be seen how Edmund Burke's theories of the sublime are at work in the depiction of a romantic nature invaded by industrial "horrors". Finally, the transmission of the sublime to Romanticism can be seen in the transformation of images of industrial labour, which now hinge on the harmonious alliance between past and present, nature and technology.

In Search of the Renaissance. Analysis of post-Tridentine changes occurring in Rome in the relations between the Church and the painters suggests that the mostobviously heteronomous constraints (such as the accelerating rhythm of work, under Sextus V, which tended to reduce the painter's role to that of a contractor deprived of any conceptual initiative ; or, under Cardinal Paleotti, the iconographie control of religious imagery) were not necessarily such a paralysing handicap for the artist as the traditionally modernist fable of the "stranglehold of the authorities" would have it. Indeed, these heteronomous constraints, precisely because they were heteronomous, may paradoxically have left that much more freedom to the painters' formal autonomy the more they sought to die ta te content. Likewise they helped the formulation of intellectualist demands, developed in the framework of the Academy of St. Luke, at the very end of the 16th century, in relation to a lost "Renaissance" - which, like all golden ages, was perhaps never more than a founding myth.

The Shadow of Islam. This article seeks to explain the failure of Orientalist painting to give an adequate account of Islamic religious feeling. Firstly, the European sensibility approaches the question in a spirit of agnosticism ; and secondly, Islamic societies forbid the representation of living creatures, especially in the mosque. With the coming of the European imperial era, the same blindness was perpetuated, despite some methodical attempts to do better. Among the most remarkable are those by Jean-Leon Gerome, one of the masters of academicism, and Etienne Dinet, who, in his effort to sympathize and understand, converted to Islam. The failure of these endeavours seems to stem from the inability of Orientalism to grasp Islam as an object of history rather than as the attribute of an immemorial essence, destined to remain alien and primitive.