Axis 3 of twelve · HYP
Does the work reach elevation — beauty, terror, transport, grandeur — and how often? Both height and frequency count. A single summit moment in an otherwise flat work scores below a work that rises repeatedly. Elevation may be cold or warm, uplifting or dreadful; the axis is indifferent to which.
Ungated. A work may be great without being elevated, and several on the bench are.
1754 works · ungated · the rubric
Dante Alighieri · Literature
9.7 · Tier V
Height and frequency stand near the ceiling. In Hell terror returns every few cantos: the gate, the hurricane of lovers, Ulysses’ last voyage, Ugolino in the tower, Lucifer weeping from six eyes. On the mountain beauty takes over: the “Sweet colour of the oriental sapphire” (Purg. I), the evening bell of Purg. VIII, Beatrice under the green mantle, Virgil named three times in one tercet as he vanishes (Purg. XXX). The last canticle climbs by light to a mind failing before what it sees: “A l’alta fantasia qui mancò possa”
“Here vigour failed the lofty fantasy” (Par. XXXIII.142). Held from the top by doctrinal cantos that argue for elevation rather than reach it. The music of the verse is beyond this reading, neither credited nor charged.
Homer · Literature
9.6 · Tier V
Height and frequency are both very high, and the elevation comes in every kind: dread in the nod with which Zeus “made great Olympus quake” (1.530); serenity in the watchfires, where “all stars are seen, and the shepherd joyeth in his heart” (8.559); terror in Achilles’ voice at the trench, clear as a trumpet (18.219–221); grief in Achilles lying in the dust megas megalōsti, “mighty in his mightiness” (18.26), in the words used of a corpse (16.776). On the shield a golden field grows black behind the plough: “herein was the great marvel of the work” (18.549). The flats are the Catalogue and stretches of XIII, and they hold it off the ceiling. Nothing is credited for the sound of the verse.
Anonymous · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
Height reaches the ceiling, and it is sustained in Job’s own voice: the curse that would uncreate a day, “hayyom hahu yehi ḥoshekh”
“Let that day be darkness” (3:4); the grave where “the weary be at rest” (3:17); “O earth, cover not thou my blood” (16:18); a God who “hangeth the earth upon nothing” (26:7). Then the storm, through 123 verses: “When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?” (38:7); the war-horse (39:19–25); the eagle’s young, “where the slain are” (39:30); Leviathan. The flats are Elihu, the friends’ set pieces on the wicked and the confusion of 24–27. The sound of the Hebrew is beyond this reading and is not credited.
William Shakespeare · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
Height at the ceiling, and frequency near it from 2.4 onward. Terror in the storm, “Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!” (3.2), and in the blinding, “Out, vile jelly!” (3.7); grandeur turned to pity in “Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are” (3.4); vertigo at a cliff that is not there, “The crows and choughs that wing the midway air / Show scarce so gross as beetles” (4.6); beauty in “I am a very foolish fond old man” (4.7). Then Lear’s last speech, fifty of its fifty-seven words of one syllable. Held a step off the top by ground-level stretches: the plotting of Acts I and II, the heralds before the duel in 5.3.
Richard Wagner · Music
9.5 · Tier V
Height and frequency are both at the ceiling, across four evenings. The Rheingold prelude is the sublime of origin: 136 bars of one chord, a low E flat, a fifth, horns entering one by one, until the river moves and the curtain rises on it. Then the gods’ entry into Valhalla over the rainbow; “Winterstürme”; the annunciation of death; the ride of the Valkyries; Wotan’s farewell and the magic fire; the forest murmurs; Wotan and Erda; Brünnhilde’s waking, “Heil dir, Sonne! Heil dir, Licht!”
“Hail to you, sun! Hail to you, light!”; the Rhine journey; Hagen’s watch; the funeral march; the immolation. Off the top: Siegfried Act I and the riddle scene sit long at a low register, and the Gibichung wedding choruses are loud rather than high.
Richard Wagner · Music
9.4 · Tier V
Height and frequency are both at the ceiling. The Prelude. The drink, the Prelude returning while the two stand and look. “O sink hernieder, / Nacht der Liebe”
“O sink down, night of love”. Brangäne’s watch from the tower, one voice floated over the duet. The climax cut off by a scream. The Act III prelude over a dead sea; the cor anglais alone; Tristan asking whether he hears the light; “Mild und leise”. The terror is as high as the beauty: Isolde’s curse in Act I, the delirium’s second wave, the bandage torn off. Off the top because Marke’s monologue, Kurwenal’s cheer and the Act I exposition are ground level by design, and the elevation is of one colour.
Ludwig van Beethoven · Music
9.3 · Tier V
Height and frequency stand at the ceiling. The opening is the sublime of origin: open fifths, pianissimo, a theme assembling itself from falling fragments until the unison D minor tutti breaks in. The recapitulation brings it back as catastrophe, fortissimo on D major with F sharp in the bass. The first movement ends over a chromatic ground, a lament; the Adagio rises by beauty. The finale climbs repeatedly: the bare theme in the basses, “vor Gott” held on a fortissimo A major chord, “Seid umschlungen, Millionen!” with trombones, the hush at “Über Sternen”, the double fugue. Held from the top by the Turkish march, a deliberate drop, and a Prestissimo close that can be made noise.
Johann Sebastian Bach · Music
9.2 · Tier V
Height stands at the ceiling, and the frequency is the highest the desk has read. The first Kyrie opens with a four-bar cry in five voices before the fugue begins. The Gloria’s 3/8 with trumpets is grandeur; the Gratias rises by accumulation until the trumpets enter; the Qui tollis is beauty under grief. The Credo’s chant over a walking bass is cold elevation; the Crucifixus sinks and turns to G major, and the Et resurrexit erupts; the Confiteor’s Adagio is dread. The Sanctus is six voices in triplets over the whole orchestra, and the last half-hour rises four times. Off the top: the Laudamus te, the Quoniam and the Et in Spiritum are splendour and charm, and the Osanna’s return is the same height twice.
Virgil · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
Height and frequency stand near the ceiling. Terror and grandeur come in the sack: Hector’s ghost, Priam “A headless carcass, and a nameless thing” (2.558), the gods themselves pulling the city down (2.602–623). Dido’s book rises from her first confession to the curse and “My life is done.” (4.653). The sixth holds it whole: the dead reaching out “In passionate yearning for its distant shore” (6.314), Dido silent (6.469–471), Marcellus (6.883). The second half rises at Nisus and Euryalus (9.427–449), Lausus (10.821–832), Camilla (11.816–831) and the dream simile before the end (12.908–914). The flats hold it a step off the top: Book III between Buthrotum and Achaemenides, the regatta’s comedy (5.114–285), the catalogues, the battle-rolls of IX–XII. Nothing is credited for the sound of the verse.
Sophocles · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
The height reaches the ceiling at Tiresias’ entrance (300), and the play seldom falls from it. Terror comes first, in the seer’s list: “at once brother and father of the children with whom he consorts” (457–460). Dread is held in two lines: “oimoi, pros autōi g’ eimi tōi deinōi legein.” “kagōg’ akouein; all’ homōs akousteon.”
“Alas! I am on the brink of speaking the dreaded words.” “And I of hearing: I must hear nevertheless.” (1169–1170). Then, in sequence, the farewell to light (1183), the generations counted as nothing (1187), the rain of blood (1278–1279), the three roads (1398–1401), and pity at the close (1480–1485). Held off the top by Creon’s cool defence of second place (583–615) and the bargaining of 1515–1523.
John Milton · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
Height and frequency both stand near the ceiling, and the music is the poet’s own. Terror and grandeur: “darkness visible” (I.63); Pandaemonium rising “like an exhalation” (I.711); Mulciber falling “from morn / To noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve” (I.742–743); the anarchy of Chaos (II.890–1033). Beauty: a blind man’s “there plant eyes” (III.53); Eve’s “Sweet is the breath of Morn” (IV.641); the lion “pawing to get free / His hinder parts” (VII.464–465). Dread: “Earth felt the wound” (IX.782). Held off the top by a God who argues in Book III where he should awe, a war whose second day turns to slapstick, and a last book with no “As when” simile.
Michelangelo · Visual art
9.5 · Tier V
Height and frequency are both near the ceiling, and elevation recurs bay by bay: God dividing light from darkness, one twisting body filling the field (Gen 1:4); God shown twice in the Creation of the Sun and Moon, the second time from behind, rushing away; the gap between two forefingers in the Creation of Adam; Jonah thrown back across a surface that in fact curves toward the viewer; the Libyan Sibyl turning to set down a book nearly the size of her torso. Terror enters with the Flood and the Brazen Serpent. Held from the top by the first scenes painted, whose small figures cannot be read from twenty metres, and by the lunettes, muted by design.
Aeschylus · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
Height and frequency stand near the ceiling, and the elevation is mostly dread. The first play rises again and again: Aulis and the Hymn to Zeus, the king walking in on purple, Cassandra breaking almost three hundred lines of silence, the two cries behind the door (Ag. 1343, 1345), Clytemnestra over the bodies. In Cassandra’s scene the elders are drawn from spoken verse into her lyric: “epi de kardian edrame krokobaphēs / stagōn”
“Back to my heart surge the drops of my pallid blood” (1121–1122). The second play rises at the tomb and at the Furies no one else sees. Held below the top by the trial (Eum. 566–777), a fifth of the third play, flat by design.
Fyodor Dostoevsky · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
It rises often, and in every register: the elder’s prostration; the frozen pane, “the ice burnt my forehead like fire” (Pt. I, Bk. III, ch. 4); the stone under thirty kites; the returned ticket; the kiss on “bloodless aged lips” (Pt. II, Bk. V, ch. 5); Cana and the earth; the pestle and the rule; the babe and the pillow; the stocking; the devil’s withheld hosannah; “Yes, guilty!”; the boot, “where are your little feet?” (Epilogue, ch. 3). It is held a step down by flats in proportion to the scale: the Hohlakov chapters, the procedural summary of the alarm, the trial’s level middle. A hostile reader will call the closing cheer sweetness. The music of the Russian is beyond this reading, neither credited nor charged.
William Shakespeare · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
Height near the ceiling; frequency high but broken. Terror opens the play, “Who’s there?” (1.1), and peaks in “I could a tale unfold whose lightest word / Would harrow up thy soul” (1.5). Grandeur turns to ash in “What a piece of work is man!” and “what is this quintessence of dust?” (2.2). Then the meditation of 3.1, the Ghost in the closet (3.4), the willow (4.7), Yorick (5.1), “the readiness is all” and “flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!” (5.2). Held below King Lear on frequency: the stretches at ground level are longer and more numerous — Reynaldo, the embassy, the boy players, 4.1–4.3, Osric.
Leo Tolstoy · Literature
9.4 · Tier V
Height reaches the top, and it comes in every register. The transcendent: “All is vanity, all falsehood, except that infinite sky” (III.XVI), and “It entered, and it was death, and Prince Andrew died” (XII.XVI). The dreadful: the factory lad at the execution who “himself adjusted the knot which hurt the back of his head” (XII.XI). The lyric: the oak “rapt and slightly trembling in the rays of the evening sun” (VI.III). The domestic: Lise’s dead face, Natasha’s dance. The battle’s own: the rain at Borodino, “Enough, men! Enough! Cease... bethink yourselves! What are you doing?” (X.XXXIX). The flat stretches are long, and they are meant: the salons, the Bergs, the middle of the Second Epilogue. Frequency, not height, holds it a step from the top.
Anthemius of Tralles and Isidore of Miletus · Architecture
9.4 · Tier V
Height and frequency are both near the top, and the elevation is built to recur: at the entry through the Imperial Door, when the space opens upward and outward at once; in the dome on its ring of forty windows, which seems to float above the piers that carry it; in the cascade, exedra into semidome into dome, by which the eye climbs to the crown; in the book-matched marble, by which walls read as surface rather than weight; in the view from the galleries down into the nave. Held from the top by frequency: the aisles and the closed cross-axis do not rise, and the exterior, a stepped mass of brick, has none of its own; the later buttresses that add to it are not charged.
Herman Melville · Literature
9.4 · Tier V
Height at the ceiling, in every register: the sermon’s “Delight is to him” (ch. 9); Ahab “like a man cut away from the stake” (ch. 28); the “murderous chalices” (ch. 36); “a colorless, all-color of atheism” (ch. 42); the nursing calves gazing “as if we were but a bit of Gulfweed in their new-born sight” (ch. 87); Pip, who “saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom” (ch. 93); the tear richer than “all the Pacific” (ch. 132); the shroud of the sea at the close. Frequency holds it short of the summit. The plan deflates on purpose, and the cetological runs (chs. 53, 56, 62–63, 77, 83, 88–90, 101, 103) neither rise nor try to.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · Literature
9.4 · Tier V
Height at the ceiling; frequency high in Part One and in Acts III and V, lower elsewhere. In Part One: the archangels’ hymn, the Earth Spirit, the Easter bells, the spinning wheel (3374–3377), the prayer at the town wall, the Dies irae, and the prison, the work’s most terrible stretch, to “Heinrich! Heinrich!” (4612). In Part Two: the waking at sunrise (4727), the Mothers, the sirens’ hymn to Eros, Helen’s entrance in trimeter, Euphorion’s fall, the warden’s song, the blinding, the death and the Chorus Mysticus. Held from the top by frequency: the Walpurgis Night’s Dream, much of the masquerade, the freckle scene and most of Act IV rise little or not at all.
Roman, under Hadrian · Architecture
9.3 · Tier V
Height is near the top, and the building answers the question of frequency with the sun. Elevation comes at the threshold, from the porch’s shade through the bronze doors into the open room, where the eye goes straight up; in the dome, broken by no rib or window, closing at a height equal to its width; in the oculus, the sky as a disc seen from the centre of a sphere; in rain falling to the floor. And it recurs: the sun’s disc crosses the coffers and walls through the day, renewing the elevation hour by hour, at first sight and for everyone. Held from the top because it is one register, grand and calm, never terrible.
Anonymous · Architecture
9.3 · Tier V
Height and frequency are both near the top, and elevation recurs at every scale: the two spires seen from far across the flat Beauce; the column-figures of the Royal Portal, drawn out into the shafts, calm and remote; the nave, 37 metres high and dim, its walls given over to coloured light; the Virgin of the Belle Verrière in her blue; the south rose burning in the sun, the north cold; the labyrinth under the Judgment of the west rose. Terror is present and held as order, in the Last Judgment of the south portal and the west rose. Held off the top because the elevation depends on the light, which dims on a grey day, and because the triforium and aisle walls are plain beside the rest.
Michelangelo · Visual art
9.3 · Tier V
Elevation here is dreadful rather than beautiful, and it recurs across the wall: Christ’s raised arm, with the whole field turning on it; the trumpeting angels, cheeks swollen, in the empty blue at the centre; the damned man with his hand over his eye; Charon raising his oar over the crowd in his boat; the dead at the lower left climbing out of the earth, some still skeletons. In the upper ring grandeur is achieved by mass, bodies heaped like a weather system. What holds it from the top is the frequency of beauty: there is no single moment of grace, and the upper crowds, seen from far below, flatten at the edges into a wall of muscle.
William Shakespeare · Literature
9.3 · Tier V
Height is reached often, and the register is dread. The ceiling: the soliloquy of 1.7, with pity “like a naked new-born babe, / Striding the blast”; the dagger (2.1); the murder, its whispered half-lines and the knocking, and the hand that will “The multitudinous seas incarnadine, / Making the green one red” (2.2); “Light thickens, and the crow / Makes wing to th’ rooky wood” (3.2); the ghost in Macbeth’s own seat (3.4); Macduff’s “All my pretty ones? / Did you say all?” (4.3); the sleepwalking (5.1); and “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” (5.5), ending in “a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing”. Almost every scene of the first three acts is elevated. Held a step below the very top because the testing of Macduff in 4.3 runs long and flat before Ross brings his news, the marching scenes of the fifth act are functional, and the cauldron of 4.1 risks the spectacular in place of the sublime.
Iktinos and Kallikrates · Architecture
9.3 · Tier V
Judged on what survives, as the makers made it. Height is very high, and it recurs across the work’s kinds: the colonnade against the sky, seen first obliquely and from below, as the approach up the rock compels; Helios’ horses rising out of the floor of the east pediment, and at its other corner Selene’s horse sinking, its head worn to the bone with exhaustion; the reclining goddesses, their drapery carved as wet, moving cloth over weight; the cavalry of the frieze, horse overlapping horse in a few centimetres of relief; centaur and Lapith locked in one block. Held below the top: the elevation is calm by temper, repeated rather than climactic, and the south metopes are uneven.
Johann Sebastian Bach · Music
9.3 · Tier V
Height stands at the ceiling and returns across three hours. The opening chorus is grandeur and lament at once: two choirs crossing over a 12/8 pulse in E minor, the ripieno chorale in G major above them. “Sind Blitze, sind Donner” breaks out of the arrest duet as fury. “Erbarme dich” is beauty under grief; “Barrabam!” is terror in one chord; “Aus Liebe” rises by taking the bass away. Part II’s last stretch brings the torn veil, the centurion’s two bars, “Am Abend, da es kühle war” and the closing chorus in close succession. Held from the top by long stretches of secco recitative, and by arias, such as “Ich will dir mein Herze schenken”, that charm rather than elevate.
Gustav Mahler · Music
9.2 · Tier V
Height is at the ceiling and frequency high. The first movement’s opening is the sublime of something assembling itself out of almost nothing; its climax, “Mit höchster Gewalt” (“with utmost force”), and the funeral procession after it are terror; its coda is beauty at the edge of inaudibility. The Rondo’s episode is transport breaking through noise. The Adagio’s first strophe, full strings after one bar of violins alone, is grandeur; its climax is dread; the Adagissimo is the sublime of extinction, and nothing on this desk is quieter that is also this high. Held off the top because frequency drops for a third of the running time, and the Ländler’s coarseness can be heard as dullness.
Ancient Egyptian, under Khufu · Architecture
9.1 · Tier V
Height is at the desk’s ceiling, and the elevation is the cold kind. Its forms: the approach across the plateau, when the thing refuses to resolve into a building; the base, where a block comes to the chest and the face goes up out of sight; the passages, forcing the body to stoop for forty metres at 26°; the Grand Gallery, where the roof lifts to 8.6 m and the dark rises away; the King’s Chamber, the empty box with the weight above it felt; the pyramid at distance, and at night. Frequency is good: one register sustained from every distance outside, two further summits inside. The shining casing, the capstone and the steps the ruin added are not credited; the figure rests on mass, which the core still produces.
Li Bai · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The body’s summit and its signature, at the top in height and in frequency. Shu dao nan opens on a cry, “噫吁嚱，危乎高哉！蜀道之難，難於上青天”
(Ah! how perilous, how high! The road to Shu is harder than climbing the blue sky). Jiang jin jiu opens on a river falling from heaven and ends by selling the horse and the fur coat for wine, to dissolve “萬古愁”
(the sorrow of ten thousand ages). The Lushan waterfall falls “三千尺”
(three thousand feet) and might be the Milky Way. The dream of Tianmu climbs into the halls of the immortals and wakes on a pillow. The quiet heights come as often: the sail at the Yellow Crane Tower vanishing into blue sky, the mountain that does not tire. Held off the very top because the hyperbole, met a hundred times, sometimes becomes manner.
Sophocles · Literature
9.2 · Tier V
Height is reached often, and in every register the form allows. The parodos opens on the sun over the seven gates, “aktis aeliou”, “beam of the sun” (100), and the routed army. The Ode to Man climbs through sea, plough, hunt, speech and city to its one limit: “Haida monon pheuxin ouk epaxetai”
“From Hades alone he will bring no escape” (361 to 362). Then Eros “unconquered in battle” (781); the bride walking to her tomb; Teiresias’ birds tearing one another and the sacrifice that will not burn; the joyous call to the god “of many names” (1115), set just before the news of the deaths; and Eurydice’s silence. The dreadful and the exalted alternate to the end. Held off the top because the metres are not heard here and the music is lost: the height credited is of action, image and situation.
Igor Stravinsky · Music
9.2 · Tier V
Height reaches the top in the sublime of terror and force, and it comes often. The Introduction is the sublime of origin: the bassoon alone, then woodwinds crowding in until polyphony is growth. The Augurs’ chord is force made physical. The Dance of the Earth is a whirl that stops. Part II’s Introduction and the Mystic Circles reach a still, cold beauty, which the fortissimo strokes turn to dread; the Evocation’s blocks of tutti and timpani are grandeur; the Danse sacrale is a convulsion held for some four minutes. Held below the top because the Abduction and the Rival Tribes are vigour more than height and, lightly, because the elevation is narrow in kind.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart · Music
9.2 · Tier V
The statue scene stands at the ceiling. The overture’s D minor chords return with trombones as the stone guest keeps the invitation to supper; he commands repentance, Giovanni answers no, and a chorus sounds from below. Other summits: the overture’s opening; the death trio in F minor for three basses; the cemetery, where the statue answers Giovanni’s laughter with trombones; the masks’ trio, “Protegga il giusto cielo” (“May just heaven protect”). Beauty is frequent too: “Là ci darem la mano”, “Dalla sua pace”, “Deh vieni alla finestra”, “Non mi dir”. Held off the top by frequency: the secco recitative is ground level by design, and so is much of the Act II disguise plot.
Euripides · Literature
9.2 · Tier V
Height and frequency both. The parodos rises at once into the cult’s ecstasy, “eis oros, eis oros”
“to the mountain, to the mountain”; the god’s voice sounds from within the palace, fire leaps on Semele’s tomb and the house falls; the herdsman’s idyll turns to slaughter; the third stasimon’s fawn escapes the hunters’ nets. Then terror: the dressed king seeing two suns and the god as a bull; the fir bent to the earth and let go with the king on top; Pentheus tearing off his headband to show his mother his face; Agave entering with his head on her thyrsus. The last two hundred lines hold dread without relief. Held from the top because the lost passage takes part of the lament where the height would come to rest.
Charles Baudelaire · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Height and frequency both. The elevations come warm: “Le Balcon”, “Mère des souvenirs, maîtresse des maîtresses”, “Mother of memories, mistress of mistresses”; “L’Invitation au voyage”, with its refrain of order and beauty, luxury, calm and pleasure. They come dreadful: the fourth “Spleen”, where the low and heavy sky weighs “comme un couvercle”, “like a lid”, and Hope weeps while Anguish plants its black flag in the bowed skull. “Une Charogne” reaches terror and tenderness at once in the turn to the beloved, “Et pourtant vous serez semblable à cette ordure”, “And yet you will be like this filth”. “Les Phares”, “Harmonie du soir”, “Les Sept Vieillards”, “Le Cygne” and the close of “Le Voyage” rise in turn. Few lyric bodies in any language rise this often. Held from the very top by the flatter stretches of “Spleen et Idéal” and by “Le Vin”.
Emily Brontë · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Height is reached often, in terror and in grandeur, and in the cold register more than the warm. The ghost at the window, where Lockwood rubs the child’s wrist on the broken glass: “Terror made me cruel” (ch. 3). Catherine’s dream of being flung out of heaven by angry angels “into the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights” (ch. 9), where she wakes sobbing for joy. Her delirium, pulling the feathers from the pillow and naming the birds (ch. 12). The last meeting (ch. 15). Heathcliff at dawn: “I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!” (ch. 16). The opened coffin (ch. 29), the open lattice and the dead man’s face (ch. 34), and the quiet height of the last sentence. Held below the summit only because the Linton chapters fall flat for a stretch.
Stanley Kubrick · Film
9.1 · Tier V
Height and frequency are both near the ceiling, and the elevation is cold. It recurs in every part: the Sun clearing the Earth’s limb on the Zarathustra fanfare; the blows with the bone intercut with a falling tapir, the bone thrown and turned into a satellite; the descent to TMA-1 under Ligeti’s Requiem, and the shriek at sunrise; Poole’s body turning away into black, in silence; HAL’s voice slowing through “Daisy Bell”; the Star Gate cut with Bowman’s frozen face; the Star Child turning toward the camera above the Earth. Held from the top by design: the Floyd section and the routine of Discovery are flat and long, spacing the rises widely, and the room is uncanny rather than high.
Claudio Monteverdi · Music
9.1 · Tier V
Height is at the ceiling and returns often. The first number is the most abrupt elevation in the sacred music of its century: a theatre fanfare, six voices on one chord and an Alleluia in triple time. “Surge, amica mea, et veni”
“Arise, my love, and come” rises out of a tenor’s murmur; the sopranos of Pulchra es turn from sweetness to an army in battle array. Duo Seraphim is three voices in written ornament collapsing to one note. Nisi Dominus is ten voices and one chant, a wall. The echo answers “Maria”. The Sonata is a dance with a prayer laid across it eleven times, and the Magnificat’s Gloria Patri and Sicut erat close everything. Off the top: the falsobordone recitations are declamation, splendid and level, and Nigra sum’s charm is charm.
Matthias Grünewald · Visual art
9.1 · Tier V
Height and frequency are both high, in terror and in radiance, and in every opening: the Crucifixion’s night, the bowed crossbeam, the hands clawed against the dark; the Virgin in white falling back into John’s arms; the body rising into a disc of red and yellow light while the soldiers are thrown down; light breaking from the upper sky onto the Virgin and Child; Anthony dragged by the hair through a storm of beasts. The terror is held by the night, the scale and the Baptist’s calm, so the dread is grand rather than lurid. Held below the top by the stretches between: the Annunciation, the Visit to Paul, calm by design, and the shrine, whose gilded dignity elevates nothing. Of ten painted subjects, about half reach the summit.
Friedrich Hölderlin · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
The charge is monotony: the register is high from first to last, and in the late drafts syntax so wrenched that transport gives way to puzzle. But height and frequency are both present, and of several kinds. “Brod und Wein” rises in eighteen lines from a town at evening to the night as a goddess. “Patmos” opens on the sentence that is the body’s motto: “Nah ist / Und schwer zu fassen der Gott. / Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst / Das Rettende auch”
(Near is / and hard to grasp the god. / But where danger is, grows / the saving power also). “Der Ister” begins “Jetzt komme, Feuer!”
(Now come, fire!). “Hälfte des Lebens” turns in fourteen lines from swans in holy-sober water to walls that stand speechless and cold. The elevation is terrible and serene by turns.
Cormac McCarthy · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
The dreadful sublime, at height and at frequency. The Comanche come out of the dust in their plundered finery, “a legion of horribles”, and the sentence that carries them runs on until White’s company is destroyed. Then the judge alone on his rock in the desert; the powder made from a mountain’s guano; a lone tree burning at night with the desert’s creatures gathered to its light; a dead woman kneeling in a niche of rock; a dancing bear shot in a saloon; the judge dancing naked at the close, “like an enormous infant”; fire struck from the rock in the epilogue. Held a step below the summit because the frequency carries its own cost: the elevated register is so constant that in the middle stretches it ceases to elevate, and the reader rides through sublimity as the company rides through country.
Richard Wagner · Music
9.0 · Tier V
Height reaches the ceiling, and often. The Prelude, the unaccompanied Communion theme rising out of silence and answered in harmony, is the sublime of stillness. The first transformation swells into the bells and the hall, and the ceremony builds downward from the boys’ voices in the dome. Amfortas’s lament is pain at full force. In Act II Parsifal’s cry of “Amfortas!” after the kiss turns erotic music into horror. The Good Friday music is beauty in its plainest diatonic form, the meadow in flower after the mourning. The second transformation, darker and with a funeral tread, and the last ceremony, ending on the Grail’s motif in A flat, close at the summit. Held below the top by frequency: Gurnemanz’s long narrations in both outer acts are exposition, not elevation, and the flower maidens are charm.
Fan Kuan · Visual art
9.0 · Tier V
Height first. The wall rises from the mist with no visible base, almost to the top edge, so the eye meets it face on and must tilt up the whole length of the silk: what Guo Xi called high distance, 高遠, gāoyuǎn. Then frequency. The climb is a sequence of elevations met in order: the weight of the boulders, the shock of scale at the travellers, the temple roofs, the break of the mist, the wall, the waterfall’s thread, and the summit scrub, drawn as if close at hand though it is the farthest thing in the picture. One register, grave awe, and one view hold the axis at 9.4.
Ludwig van Beethoven · Music
9.0 · Tier V
Elevation is the work’s element, and it returns in every movement. The sublime of grandeur: the Gloria’s opening rush and its Presto return after the fugue; the double fugue on Et vitam venturi saeculi and its last, slow ascent. The sublime of mystery: the Et incarnatus in the Dorian mode, a flute fluttering above the tenor’s line, heard as the dove; then Et homo factus est, warm and human. The sublime of dread: the sobbing accents of the Crucifixus, the drums of the Agnus Dei. The sublime of beauty: the Benedictus, where a solo violin descends from the top of its register and sings over the whole movement. Held from the top where the Gloria’s density overwhelms height with force, and where parts of the Sanctus are short and formal.
Gustav Mahler · Music
9.0 · Tier V
Height reaches the ceiling and returns. The first song’s opening horn cry, and the refrain rising a semitone at each return, are the sublime of terror. The second song is beauty at its most withdrawn: muted violins in a slow ostinato, the oboe’s line over them, a tired voice. “Der Abschied” is the summit: the low C and tam-tam of its opening, the flute’s birdlike arabesques over a voice in near recitative, the long funeral march between the poems, and the close, where one word is repeated over a chord that does not resolve while celesta, harps and mandolin hang over it. Held off the top on frequency, by design: about a quarter of the time is light.
Rainer Maria Rilke · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Elevation is the cycle’s mode, and it comes often. The opening reaches the dreadful sublime at once, and then defines the axis: “Denn das Schöne ist nichts / als des Schrecklichen Anfang, den wir noch grad ertragen” (“For beauty is nothing / but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to bear”, I). The Second’s angels are mirrors drawing their beauty back into themselves; the Seventh exults; the Ninth lists the things to be said. The whole of the Tenth rises: the city of pain, the land of the Laments, the Sphinx, the constellations, and the youth climbing alone into the mountains of primal pain. Then the cycle closes on a falling. Held below the top only because the height thins in the Third and in parts of the Fifth.
Giuseppe Verdi · Music
8.9 · Tier IV
The opening is the sublime of terror: no prelude, a fortissimo tutti, an organ cluster held under the whole storm, lightning in the woodwinds, a chorus praying, and the hero’s call rising out of it. The love duet, opened by divided cellos, closes on the kiss theme, “Un bacio… un bacio ancora”
“A kiss… another kiss”. The Credo is the sublime of dread, and the oath duet a vow at full force. The Act III finale piles the whole company over a collapsing hero. Act IV rises by quiet: the cor anglais, the Willow Song, the Ave Maria, the double basses alone, the kiss theme over the dying man. Held off the top by the homage and bonfire choruses, which are charm, not height.
George Frideric Handel · Music
8.9 · Tier IV
Height and frequency are both high. The Sinfony’s E minor gives way to E major and “Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God”, comfort before anything has been suffered. “Wonderful, Counsellor” breaks out in block chords from the running counterpoint of “For unto us”. The trumpets of “Glory to God” sound from a distance, and the angels withdraw quietly. “He was despised” is grief at length, “Surely” grief in dotted rhythm. The “Hallelujah” sets “King of Kings, and Lord of Lords” on rising repeated notes over the trumpets; “Since by man came death” sets a Grave, nearly unaccompanied, against an Allegro with the orchestra; the Amen ends the work. Held off the top by plain stretches: the ascension run of Part II, and the arias of Part III after the trumpet.
Jalal al-Din Rumi · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Elevation without relief cloys, and a severe reader finds many ghazals at a stock pitch of rapture. But the axis asks height and frequency, and here both are as high as anything in lyric. The resurrection ghazal climbs in a single metre from death to laughter and from the grave to the sky; the Hajj ghazal turns the whole pilgrimage inside out in two lines; the poems of the turning, of the reed and the drum and the sun rising in the heart, rise again and again, and the dread side is there in the poems of absence and of the lover burned. The repeated close on khamush makes silence itself the summit: the poem lifts to the point of what cannot be said, and stops. Few bodies in any language rise so often or so high.
Giuseppe Verdi · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Height and frequency are both near the ceiling. The opening, muted cellos and a whispered chorus, is the sublime of hush. The Dies irae is the sublime of terror: hammered tutti chords, the bass drum struck off the beat, rushing scales in the strings. The Tuba mirum brings trumpet calls from a distance into the hall until the chorus enters; then “Mors stupebit”
“Death will be astonished” cuts everything to a bass stammering over a few soft strokes. The Lacrymosa, the two women of the Agnus Dei, the tremolo light of the Lux aeterna and the soprano’s high pianissimo in the reprised Requiem aeternam rise by beauty. Off the top: the Offertorio and the Sanctus fugue fly lower, and the Rex tremendae can sound built rather than struck.
Anton Bruckner · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
The axis the work exists for, in height and frequency together. The sublime of terror: the brass outburst near the end of the first movement and the collapse into the death clock. The sublime of grandeur: the Adagio’s climax, prepared over more than twenty minutes and reached with cymbals; the Finale’s fanfares over striding strings; the coda, where the themes sound together in C major. The sublime of beauty: the Adagio’s opening theme over its syncopated accompaniment, and the harps in the trio and the Adagio. Elevation recurs in every movement. Held below the top because the Scherzo’s main body is weight more than height, and because the Finale’s development and recapitulation lose altitude between the summits.
Franz Schubert · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Height at the ceiling, and frequent. The Adagio is an elevation by stillness, sustained for minutes, which the F minor section turns to terror before the return. The first movement’s second theme, the two cellos in thirds in E flat, rises by beauty at the point where a sonata usually only contrasts,. The Trio is a second, darker stillness inside the Scherzo’s energy, and the Scherzo’s horn calls and open strings are grandeur of force. Held short of the top on frequency: the Finale is vivid and witty rather than elevated for most of its length, and only its last bars rise again, by violence. A tenth above Op. 131 and Winterreise, both at 9.3, for less time spent in comedy.
Anonymous · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Height first. The Hall of the Bulls is a white rotunda with black bulls five metres long, lit from below, and is called overwhelming by people with no stake in saying so. Then frequency, chamber by chamber: the Chinese Horses, the gentlest thing in the cave; the Falling Horse at the dead end; the Great Black Cow stepping over her frieze of horses; the Swimming Stags, five heads above a river that is not drawn; the Crossed Bison, animal mass in motion. Terror enters once, in the Shaft, and it is cold. Held below the top because the register is narrow, without delight or human tenderness, and the Passage and the Apse rise for no one but the surveyor.
Homer · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
Height comes often and in every register. In terror: the Cyclops’ eye hissing round the stake like quenched iron (IX.389–394); Scylla’s six men calling Odysseus by name for the last time (XII.245–259); Theoclymenus seeing the walls sprinkled with blood while the suitors laugh (XX.345–357). The Greek tells these plainly, and the plainness is the force: Elpenor’s neck breaks from the spine and his spirit goes down to Hades (X.559–560). In beauty and grief: the seed of fire under the leaves, the mother slipping three times from her son’s arms, the dog that dies on seeing him. Frequency drops at Pylos and Sparta and in the beggar books, XIV–XVIII, low on purpose, and that holds the axis below the top.
Marcel Proust · Literature
9.4 · Tier V
The heights reach the ceiling, and they come often. In the first volume: the father on the stair “like Abraham in the engraving after Benozzo Gozzoli”, and the sobs whose “echo has never ceased” (Combray I); the madeleine; the pink hawthorn; the steeples of Martinville “like three birds perched upon the plain” (Combray II); the little phrase at Saint-Euverte, where Swann pities a figure he does not know: “It was himself.” (Un amour de Swann). Later: the grandmother’s death and its return, Bergotte’s, the septet, the last party. Held below the top because long stretches are built as social comedy, not elevation, and because the method deflates its own heights: after the steeples the boy sings “as though I myself were a hen and had just laid an egg” (Combray II).
Anonymous (the Yahwist and the other sources) · Literature
9.3 · Tier V
The heights are frequent and of every kind. The opening is the most cited instance of the sublime in antiquity: Longinus, in On the Sublime (9.9), quotes the lawgiver of the Jews for it, three Hebrew words and three more, “yehi or, wayehi or”
“Let there be light: and there was light” (1:3). Terror at the flood. Transport at Bethel: “Surely the LORD is in this place; and I knew it not” (28:16). Dread and tenderness at once on the way to Moriah: “Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest” (22:2). The night at Peniel; the recognition, “I am Joseph; doth my father yet live?” (45:3). The rises come every few chapters. Held below the top by the flats between them: the genealogies, the chiefs of Edom, the haggle over Machpelah (23).
Giotto di Bondone · Visual art
9.3 · Tier V
Elevation is grave rather than grand, and it recurs scene by scene: the Lamentation, where the rock runs down to the two heads, John’s arms fly back and the angels in the blue are torn with grief; the Kiss of Judas, a yellow cloak closing round Christ; an old couple kissing on a bridge at the Golden Gate; Christ turning from the Magdalene’s reach; the Judgment’s corners, where angels roll the sky back like a scroll (Rev 6:14); the vault of stars over everything. Height is high and frequency very high. Held from the top by register and scale: the elevation is weight, not transport, the figures are under life size, and the Hell’s terror is the cycle’s weakest painting.
Augustine of Hippo · Literature
9.2 · Tier V
Elevation is reached often, cold and warm. The opening: “Magnus es, domine, et laudabilis valde” (I.1.1), and the heart restless “donec requiescat in te”, until it rests in you. The friend’s death, when everything the young man looked on was death to him and his home town a torment. The child’s voice in the garden. Ostia, where mother and son reach for a moment the wisdom above all things, “toto ictu cordis”, with the whole beat of the heart (IX.10.24), and come back down to the noise of speech. Her death, his dry eyes, and the tears that came only at night. Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new (X.27.38). Held below the top because elevation thins in the long exegesis of the twelfth book.
Franz Schubert · Music
9.2 · Tier V
Height reaches the ceiling, in a cold register. The sublime of dread: the climb and collapse that close no. 7; the leaf of no. 16 falling through off-beat notes that give no key; the monotone over a creeping bass in no. 20; the drone of no. 24 under a voice that barely moves. The sublime of beauty: the linden’s E major and its rustle; the May dream of no. 11; the chorale of no. 21, written for a graveyard. At least ten of the twenty-four rise, at both ends and in the middle. Held below the Ninth and the Passion on height of forces, and because nos. 14, 18, 19 and 22 are flat by design.
Du Fu · Literature
9.2 · Tier V
Elevation comes often and in more than one key. The young man’s grandeur closes “Gazing at the Mountain”: “會當凌絕頂，一覽眾山小”
“one day I will stand on the topmost peak and see all the mountains made small at a glance”. The late grandeur is of desolation. “Climbing High” has the falling leaves and the long river, carried by doubled sounds; “Writing My Feelings Travelling at Night” sets stars over a wide plain and the moon surging on the great river before the self shrinks to one sand gull; on Yueyang Tower heaven and earth float day and night on the lake. Height and frequency are both there. Held below the very top because much of the body is low by design, plain occasion and domestic record: a peak range, not a plateau.
Ludwig van Beethoven · Music
9.2 · Tier V
Height reaches the ceiling of the symphonic repertory of its age, and often. The two opening chords; the development’s sforzando hemiolas grinding on a dissonance of E against F until the music seems to break; the pianissimo horn of the false recapitulation, in the tonic over the dominant; the coda’s trumpets. In the march, the muffled C minor opening with the basses’ growling ornament, the fugato rising to a fortissimo of a whole city’s mourning, and the last page, the theme in pieces between silences. The horn trio reaches a pastoral grandeur, and the Poco andante turns a contredanse into a hymn. Held from the top by the scherzo’s opening and much of the finale’s variation work, brilliant rather than elevated, and by forces smaller than the Ninth’s.
Jan van Eyck · Visual art
9.2 · Tier V
Elevation here is radiant rather than dreadful, and it recurs from panel to panel: the open view, a wall of colour after the grey; the enthroned figure of the Deësis, the crown at his feet and the jewelled hem; Adam and Eve at near life size, flesh among brocades; the singing angels, faces strained with different notes; the Lamb under the dove’s rays, the meadow running back to the city. The empty room of the Annunciation has its own quiet height. Terror enters only in the small grisaille of Abel’s murder. Held from the top by the scale of the lower figures: the Adoration elevates by clarity and plenty, not by mass.
Sailendra · Architecture
9.2 · Tier V
Elevation recurs, and the building stages it in a fixed order: the first sight across the plain, a grey hill of stone under the volcanoes; the east stair, steep, through the monster’s mouth of its gate into a corridor with no view; the galleries, ten circuits if one reads, the relief running ahead at the pace of a walk; the Great Departure, the horse’s hooves lifted by gods so that no one wakes; the last gate, when the walls end and the whole Kedu plain opens at once; the 72 Buddhas in their lattices, seen and not seen, and the central stupa against the sky. The register is warm throughout, serenity and release rather than terror. Held below the top because the massing is squat and does not rise as a tower does, and because the galleries, between their summits, are long.
Byzantine · Visual art
9.2 · Tier V
Elevation is cold and radiant, and continuous rather than recurrent: the sanctuary is one field of it, and it moves with the light. A young Christ in purple on a blue globe against gold, under coloured clouds; Theodora’s pendilia of pearls, the chalice, the shell over her head; Justinian’s stare; the Chi-Rho on the guard’s shield; the Lamb among gold stars on blue, held by four white angels; three identical young men at Abraham’s table; the gold itself, lit from below when the sun is in the apse windows. Height is high. Held from the top by register and scale: one radiance, with no terror but a raised sword; one bay; an elevation that stops at the arch, where a painted dome begins.
Ferdowsi · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
The heights reach the ceiling, and in the heroic age they come often: Zal in the Simorgh’s nest; Rudabeh’s hair let down from the tower; the token found on Sohrab’s arm; Siyavash riding unburnt out of the fire, and his blood over the basin; Kay Khosrow walking into the snow; the dying Esfandiyar, who forgives his killer and blames his father; Rostam in the pit, shooting through the tree; Yazdegerd in the mill. Two things hold it down: long stretches of chronicle and counsel, with the Sasanian reigns rising less often than the heroic; and the battle and the dawn, the poem’s means of rising, recurring until some recurrences are routine. The sound of the verse is neither credited nor charged.
Walt Whitman · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Height and frequency are both high. The warm sublime: the grass as “the beautiful uncut hair of graves” (§6); the night earth, “Smile O voluptuous cool-breath’d earth!” (§21); the twenty-eight young men bathing and the woman behind the blinds (§11). The cosmic: “I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars” (§31), and the close, “I stop somewhere waiting for you” (§52). The mourning sublime, sustained across whole poems: the boy on the Paumanok shore given the word death, the hermit thrush’s carol in “Lilacs”, the ferry crossing in which a reader long after is addressed face to face. The dreadful: the sea-fight (§35) and the vigil over a dead soldier. Held off the top because elevation flattens in the long public poems and the annexes, and the weakest catalogues accumulate without lifting.
T. S. Eliot · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Height is reached often, and in every register. The dreadful: “I will show you fear in a handful of dust” (30); the crowd of the dead on the Bridge; the woman’s nerves and the wind under the door; the burning at the close of the Fire Sermon. The visionary: the hyacinth girl, after which the speaker was “Looking into the heart of light, the silence” (41). The elegiac: Phlebas, drowned, passing the stages of his age and youth in the whirlpool. The sustained height is the fifth part: the dry mountains, the water-dripping song of the hermit-thrush, “Who is the third who walks always beside you?” (359), the falling towers of Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria, Vienna and London, the empty chapel, the thunder. Held off the very top because the pub and parts of the Fire Sermon keep a deliberately low register, and the close disperses into fragments rather than rising.
Mimar Sinan · Architecture
9.1 · Tier V
Height is near the top, and the elevation is built to recur: in the approach, a pyramid of lead and stone stepping up through the semidomes to the dome, between four minarets far higher than the dome itself; in the court, the hall’s façade and dome rising over the arcade; in the hall, the dome entire, eight piers slender for their load, light from the drum and from every wall, no dark anywhere; in the mihrab apse, lit from three sides; in the view from the galleries to the tribune under the crown. The register is lucid rather than mysterious. Held below the top for frequency: the interior is one sustained state rather than a sequence of risings, the court is a good court of its kind and no more, and the galleries are quiet.
Ludwig van Beethoven · Music
9.1 · Tier V
Height reaches the ceiling; frequency is high but chosen. The fugue is the sublime of lament: four voices entering from the top down, the weight of the subject falling on a sforzando A. The variation theme, Andante ma non troppo e molto cantabile, is beauty in its plainest form, and the variation marked Adagio ma non troppo e semplice rises by simplicity to something like a hymn. No. 6, in G sharp minor, is grief compressed; the finale’s drive is grandeur of force. Held below the top on frequency, and by design: no. 2 and the Presto are wit, grace and play. Their grace counts, so they are not flat, but they are play, not height.
Jean Racine · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Height and frequency are both high, and in a play of some sixteen hundred lines the frequency is the striking thing. The confession of I.3, from “Mon mal vient de plus loin”
“My sickness comes from further back” to Venus at her prey. The declaration of II.5, which begins as a widow speaking of her husband and turns, through the labyrinth imagined, into open avowal, ending at the seized sword. The jealousy of IV.6, where horror at herself rises to the Sun her ancestor and to her father judging the dead. Théramène’s récit of the monster. The death, where her eyes give the day back its purity. Held off the very top only because the gallant scenes of Act II and the plotting of III.3 sit at a lower pitch.
Ludwig van Beethoven · Music
9.0 · Tier IV
Height is reached often, and in more than one register. The sublime of grandeur: the opening fanfare, the left hand’s leap to a full chord, forte, and the first movement’s massed climaxes. The sublime of grief and beauty: the Adagio throughout, its long first theme in F sharp minor, the turn to G major that opens the movement’s light, the coda’s return to the opening phrase at its quietest. The sublime of the unknown: the Largo, groping through keys with silences between. The sublime of terror and energy: the fugue’s trills and its subject driven in augmentation against the other voices, then a still episode in D major before the storm resumes. Held from the top because the Scherzo is flat by design and parts of the fugue are force more than elevation.
Giacomo Leopardi · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Height is reached often and in several kinds. The visionary, in the fifteen lines of L’infinito. The cold sublime of the Canto notturno: “Che fai tu, luna, in ciel? dimmi, che fai, / silenziosa luna?”
“What do you do, moon, in the sky? tell me, what do you do, silent moon?” The elegiac close of A Silvia, where hope points from afar to “la fredda morte ed una tomba ignuda”, cold death and a naked tomb. The dreadful height of La ginestra, on the lava of “sterminator Vesevo”, exterminating Vesuvius, under stars to whose scale the earth is a point. The bare height of A se stesso, which ends on “l’infinita vanità del tutto”, the infinite vanity of all. Held below the top because the height comes in some fifteen poems, not forty-one: the civic canzoni are oratory, the Aspasia poems run in places to self-pity, and the Palinodia is satire.
Hafez · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Height is reached constantly, and in more than one key. The dreadful: the opening ghazal’s dark night, the fear of the wave and the whirlpool, and the lightly laden of the shores who cannot know it. The cosmic: the angels at the tavern door kneading Adam’s clay and casting it into the measure. The defiant: the call to split the roof of heaven and lay down a new design. The consoling: lost Joseph who will come back to Canaan. The quiet: the new moon as a sickle over the green field of the sky, recalling the poet’s own harvest. Held at 9.3 because elevation in the ghazal comes couplet by couplet, and few poems sustain a single rising arc.
W. B. Yeats · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Height and frequency both, and in every register. The transport of “Sailing to Byzantium”, up to the sages “standing in God’s holy fire”. The dreadful: the drunken soldiery and the murdered mother of “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen”, the evil figure of Robert Artisson, and the phantoms that close the “Meditations”. The violent: “A sudden blow: the great wings beating still”, and the leap from one act to “The broken wall, the burning roof and tower / And Agamemnon dead”. The plain: “Come build in the empty house of the stare.” The warm and grave close of “Among School Children”, “O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer”. What holds it off the top is the level middle of the book, where the slight pieces do not rise, and a few heights reached for rather than reached: the bequest of pride in the third part of “The Tower”, the apostrophes of “All Souls’ Night”.
Sophocles · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Height comes often in the second half and twice in the first. The Colonus ode, “euippou, xene, tasde chōras”
“Of this land of fine horses, stranger, you have come to the best of dwellings” (668), praises nightingale, ivy, narcissus and crocus, the olive no enemy can destroy and Poseidon’s gifts of bit and oar, sung by old men to a dying man about the place where he will lie. Its dreadful twin is the third ode: “mē phynai ton hapanta nikai logon”
“not to be born surpasses every reckoning” (1224 to 1225). Then the thunder; the blind man rising to lead the sighted out without a hand; the voice that calls him; and Theseus seen afterwards shading his eyes. Held below the top because the middle third, Creon and the battle ode, runs flat.
Robert de Luzarches, Thomas and Renaud de Cormont · Architecture
8.9 · Tier IV
Elevation is the building’s chief register, and it comes again and again. The nave first: a vault about 42 metres high over a span of about 14.6, the arcade alone rising half that height, so that the aisles open into the central space and the whole reads as one upward field of shafts. The crossing opens it sideways into transepts of the same height; the apse closes it in one wall of tracery. Outside, the deep portals and the Beau Dieu at the door give an elevation of another kind, grave and close at hand. Held off the very top because the coloured glass that once darkened and kindled the interior is mostly gone, leaving the height in an even, pale light, grandeur more than transport; and the stacked upper stages of the west front lower the exterior.
Victor Hugo · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Height is reached often, and in every register. The ceiling: the bishop buying a soul with silver (I.2); the night of decision and the walk into the courtroom at Arras (I.7); the child Cosette alone in the dark wood with the bucket, and the hand that takes the bucket from her (II.3); the sunken road at Waterloo (II.1); Gavroche singing between the bullets until he is shot (V.1); the sewer (V.2 and V.3); Javert at the parapet over the Seine (V.4); the death by lamplight beside the candlesticks (V.9). The dreadful is as high: the ambush in the Gorbeau house (III.8), the last stand at the barricade. These are dramatic heights, not rhetorical ones. Held below the top by the sentimental idyll of the fourth part, and by a rhetoric that sometimes inflates what it means to elevate.
John Keats · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Height is reached often and in a short space. Nightingale rises in nearly every stanza and peaks twice: “Now more than ever seems it rich to die, / To cease upon the midnight with no pain”, and the seventh stanza, where the voice heard by “the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home, / She stood in tears amid the alien corn” opens “Charm’d magic casements”. The next word, “Forlorn!”, is a bell that tolls the listener back to his sole self, and the fall is as high as the flight. The Urn’s little town, silent for evermore, is elevation of the dreadful kind; To Autumn reaches a calm grandeur without raising its voice. Held below the top only by Psyche and Indolence, whose heights are local.
Led Zeppelin · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent and twice reaches grandeur. Stairway to Heaven climbs from recorders and acoustic guitar through electric twelve-string to the entry of the drums and Jimmy Page’s solo, and then Robert Plant’s last, highest section: a rise built over eight minutes and earned at each step. When the Levee Breaks is the terrible summit: John Bonham’s drums, huge in a stairwell’s echo, harmonica through a delay, the slowed riff descending as the water rises, transport and dread at once. The Battle of Evermore has a cold, ancient height in Sandy Denny’s voice answering Plant’s over mandolin, and Going to California is small, exact beauty. Black Dog and Rock and Roll have force rather than height, and two tracks stay level.
Terrence Malick · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Elevation is almost continuous: the crocodile sliding into green water under the first notes; the children swimming and the hymn in the village; the grass of the hill moving in wind as the company climbs, John Toll’s camera low in it with the men; the light in the canopy, shot upward, the film’s refrain; Keck dying on the slope among the men who hold him; the bunker taken in dust and slow steps; Bell’s wife in the blue of a memory; Witt in the clearing raising his rifle, and the cut to the water where he swam. Hans Zimmer’s long lines hold the film near height between them. Two things hold it a step from the top: some passages in the camp are flat, and the elevation is so continuous that the viewer can stop feeling it.
Fyodor Dostoevsky · Literature
9.3 · Tier V
Elevation here is mostly dread, and it rises often. The mare beaten to death, and the boy who “kissed the eyes and kissed the lips” of the dead head (I.5). The setting sun in the pawnbroker’s room (I.1). Lizaveta lifting her empty hand (I.7). Marmeladov’s Last Judgment of the drunkards, “but come ye also!” (I.2). The candle-end over “the murderer and the harlot who had so strangely been reading together the eternal book” (IV.4), the most rhetorical sentence in the novel, which the chapter around it has earned. Sonia’s face becoming Lizaveta’s at the confession (V.4). Svidrigaïlov’s night of dreams, the mist and the man in the Achilles helmet (VI.6). The steppe seen from the river bank (Epilogue, II). Held below the top because long stretches sit at ground level among landladies, clerks and the comedy of Luzhin, and grandeur is rare beside terror.
Murasaki Shikibu · Literature
9.3 · Tier V
Elevation here is almost always beauty and grief, and it rises often: the Kiritsubo consort’s dying poem (ch. 1); the deserted villa where Yūgao dies in the night (ch. 4); Genji dancing “Waves of the Blue Sea” before the court, Fujitsubo watching (ch. 7); the autumn farewell at the Nonomiya shrine (ch. 10); the storm at Suma and the dead Emperor in a dream (ch. 12, 13); the Akashi lady giving up her daughter in the snow (ch. 19); Murasaki’s death after her poem on the dew (ch. 40); Ukifune and Niou crossing the Uji river by night (ch. 51). Terror comes, and strongly, in the spirit possessions (ch. 4, 9, 35). Held below the top because the register rarely opens to grandeur or dread, and the ceremonial chapters of the first part sit long at ground level.
Cao Xueqin · Literature
9.3 · Tier V
The heights are lyrical and elegiac, and in the garden chapters they come often: Daiyu burying the fallen flowers and singing over them, and Baoyu, hearing her on the hillside, falling to the ground (ch. 27); Yuanchun’s visit home, the house at its grandest and the consort in tears (ch. 18); Qingwen mending the peacock cloak through the night (ch. 52), and Qingwen dying (ch. 77); Xiangyun asleep drunk among peony petals (ch. 62); at the Mid-Autumn feast a sigh from the ancestral hall, and by the pond a linked verse that ends on the chill moon burying the flower’s soul (ch. 75, 76). Held below the top because long stretches are social texture rather than elevation, by design, and the scenes the novel is best remembered by, Daiyu burning her poems and Baoyu’s bow in the snow, are the completion’s and are not counted.
Leo Tolstoy · Literature
9.3 · Tier V
Height is reached often, in a plain register. The ceiling: Anna’s childbed and Karenin’s forgiveness (IV.17); Nikolay’s death and Kitty’s nursing (V.18–20); the birth, “a new sphere of liability to pain” (VII.16); and the death, in the light that “flared up more brightly than ever before, lighted up for her all that had been in darkness, flickered, began to grow dim, and was quenched forever” (VII.31). The warm heights: the scythe “mowing of itself” (III.5); the morning after the proposal, which “he never saw again after” (IV.15); Levin under the stars. The dreadful: Frou-Frou “like a shot bird” (II.25), and Seryozha’s birthday (V.30). Held below the top because the elevation thins in the sixth part and in the argued chapters of the eighth.
Pablo Picasso · Visual art
9.1 · Tier V
The register is dreadful, and it recurs across the frieze: the mother’s head thrown back over the dead child, her tongue a blade; the horse’s open mouth at the exact centre, with the same blade; the burning figure at the right, arms up, in flames cut like paper; the lamp-bearer’s arm coming in through the window across half the field; the lunging woman’s face lifted toward the light. The grandeur is in the scale, bodies the size of the viewer at a frieze’s length. Held below the top because there is no beauty here and no relief, by design; some distortions read as caricature before they read as terror; and one canvas seen whole gives one long blow, not a sequence of them.
Ludwig van Beethoven · Music
9.1 · Tier V
Height in both registers, and often. The sublime of dread: the opening under its fermatas; the development whittled to soft single chords before the hammer returns; the scherzo’s rising arpeggio in the basses, pianissimo, and its return as pizzicato with a bassoon’s ghost. The sublime of grandeur: the Andante’s sudden turns to C major with trumpets and timpani, and the transition, where a held timpani C and a held chord of A flat sit under a violin figure that climbs until it breaks into C major with the trombones heard for the first time. Held a tenth below Winterreise, at 9.3, because the Andante is mostly gracious, and the finale’s last pages are grandeur by accumulation.
Claude Debussy · Music
9.1 · Tier V
Beauty is nearly continuous; height in the stronger sense comes less often than in Tristan or the Ninth, by design. The summits: the first interlude, the forest theme given to the full orchestra; the tower, where the hair falls and strings and harps are let rise for the one stretch of open lyricism in three acts; the vaults, terror made of whole-tone darkness; the terrace after them, “Ah! je respire enfin!”
“Ah! at last I breathe!”; the “Je t’aime” in silence; the gates and the murder; and the whole of Act V, elevation at a whisper. Terror is as present as beauty: the child at the window, the hair in Golaud’s fist. Held here because the work refuses grandeur for two and a half hours, and its elevation is of two colours, hushed beauty and sudden dread.
Filippo Brunelleschi · Architecture
9.1 · Tier V
Elevation is frequent and civic. The dome closes street after street, and from San Miniato, Bellosguardo and Fiesole it is the one object that gathers the valley. Its colour carries at every distance: red tile between eight white ribs, closing on a white lantern. The climb between the shells adds a register: the inner shell curving beside the stair, the herringbone at arm’s length, the city under the lantern. Inside, the vault lit by eight round windows and the eye reads as a sky closed by hand, but it is less than the exterior, a deep octagonal well at the end of a nave that is not his. The grandeur is sustained rather than varied; terror and beauty enter only as height.
William Shakespeare · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
The elevation is frequent and of two kinds. The first is Othello’s own music: the wooing told to the Senate, “She loved me for the dangers I had passed, / And I loved her that she did pity them” (1.3); the reunion after the storm, “If it were now to die, / ’Twere now to be most happy” (2.1); the farewell to his trade that ends “Othello’s occupation’s gone” (3.3); the Pontic sea of the Folio; “It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul” (5.2) over the sleeping Desdemona. The second is terror: the trance in 4.1, the blow struck before the Venetian envoy, the Willow Song sung as she prepares for bed. The last scene rises twice more, at “Nobody; I myself” and in the final speech. Held a step down because the middle is meant to sink, and because the play sets its own sublime in question: the grand style is the hero’s, and the hero is deceived.
Teotihuacano · Architecture
9.1 · Tier V
Elevation recurs along two kilometres, and the plan is built to produce it: from the Ciudadela looking north, the Avenue rising in terraces to the Moon, with Cerro Gordo’s profile repeated in the pyramid’s; the Sun from its plaza, a mass nothing in Mesoamerica approached; the Plaza of the Moon, a room of platforms before the last stair; the Feathered Serpent’s west face, heads in rows and serpents between them. Vastness, succession, uniformity. The height is the outdoors’. No interior at Teotihuacan rises: the pyramids are solids, the temples on them are gone and not credited, the compounds are single-storey and inward, and the red plaster that once made the city one colour is lost and not credited. Held below the top for that: a sublime of mass, distance and the mountain, with no room in it.
Alban Berg · Music
9.1 · Tier V
Height reaches near the ceiling and recurs, mostly as dread: the open field in Act I, where Wozzeck sees the sky burn; the two crescendos on B after the murder; the drowning, with the orchestra’s rising chromatic slides as the moon rises red. Beauty comes in Marie’s lullaby, in her Bible scene, and in the D minor interlude, where the whole orchestra mourns in the key it has refused for most of the evening. The ending is elevation by withdrawal. Held below the top on frequency: the Captain’s and the Doctor’s scenes are grotesque satire, and the tavern scenes are deliberately coarse. Terror counts as height; caricature does not.
Virgil · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Height is reached often, and in both registers. The storm of the first book, Jupiter hurling the thunderbolt in the night of cloud (1.316 to 334); the portents after Caesar’s death, ending in the farmer who will plough up great bones, “grandiaque effossis mirabitur ossa sepulcris” (1.497), and the chariot that runs away. The praise of Italy, “Salve, magna parens frugum, Saturnia tellus” (2.173). The mares driven by love over mountains; the plague that kills the ox at the plough (3.515 to 525). And the Orpheus, which closes on the severed head still calling Eurydice as the life flees (4.525 to 526). Every book rises at least twice, a high frequency for a didactic poem. It stands at 9.2 because the precepts between the summits are kept deliberately low.
Virginia Woolf · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Height comes often, and in a sustained register. Mrs Ramsay, alone with her knitting, watches the long third stroke of the lighthouse beam and takes it as her own. The dinner is the summit of the first part: the candles lit, the windows turning the dark outside into a rippling reflection, and her sense that “Of such moments, she thought, the thing is made that endures”. The middle part is a sustained sublime of absence: darkness, airs moving through an empty house, the shawl loosening from the boar’s skull, the sea and the war heard far off. The dreadful arrives inside a subordinate clause, Andrew’s death “mercifully” instantaneous. At the close come the landing and Lily’s last line. Held a little below the highest figures because the boat’s passages in the last part run lower than the lawn’s, and some of the first part’s elevation rests on sentences that reach for it.
Vyasa (attributed) · Literature
9.1 · Tier IV
The heights are among the highest anywhere, and in the narrative books they recur: the theophany of the Gītā’s eleventh chapter, where Kṛṣṇa shows Arjuna the universal form devouring the armies; Draupadī dragged into the hall; Bhīṣma lying for weeks on his bed of arrows; Kuntī telling Karṇa he is her son, and Karṇa refusing to change sides; Aśvatthāman’s massacre of the sleeping camp, which is pure terror; Gāndhārī walking the field of the dead; the last climb, the brothers and Draupadī falling one by one, and Yudhiṣṭhira refusing heaven without the dog that followed him. Frequency is the charge. Between these the epic runs long stretches at the level of plain report, genealogy, catalogue and duel after duel, and the didactic books are mostly level ground. A work that rises this high this often still stands below one that rarely descends.
Michelangelo · Architecture
9.0 · Tier V
Height and frequency are both high, and the elevation recurs by stages: the dome over the city, from the Janiculum, the river and the roads into Rome; Michelangelo’s apse walls from the Vatican Gardens, the giant order rising sheer into the drum; the crossing, where light from sixteen windows falls past the frieze onto the bronze of the baldacchino; the view west through its twisted columns to the gilded glory and the alabaster window; the climb between the shells to the lantern. Held below the top by two failures of effect. Everything inside is enlarged to one colossal scale, so the size does not register on entry and must be learned. And from the square, Maderno’s front hides the drum.
Alexander Pushkin · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Elevation in a short poem might be one great scene, and the Introduction’s grandeur might be the convention of the ode. Here height and frequency are both present. The opening is the grand sublime in two lines, “На берегу пустынных волн / Стоял он, дум великих полн”
(On the shore of the desolate waves / he stood, full of great thoughts). The flood rises in a sequence of figures: the Neva tossing like a sick man in his bed, the waves climbing into windows like thieves, the city standing in the water like a Triton to the waist, coffins from the washed-out cemetery floating in the streets. Evgeny on the marble lion, the idol on the bronze horse above the water with its back to him, is the dreadful sublime fixed in an image. Part Two rises twice more, at the statue in the dark and in the chase. Few poems of its length rise so often, and the close lands the height downward, in a burial.
Khmer, under Suryavarman II · Architecture
9.0 · Tier V
Elevation recurs along the processional axis, and it is the building’s method: the first sight from the western causeway, the five towers lifting over the entrance pavilion across the water; the raised causeway between its naga balustrades, the towers resolving with each step; the third gallery in half-light, the reliefs running ahead with no end in view; the Churning, gods and demons hauling the serpent across the panel’s whole length; the stairs to the summit, so steep the body must crouch, and the forest below. Grandeur is massing and sequence. Held from the top because the corbel allows no great volume: no room inside equals the exterior, and the sublime is the approach and the ascent, never a space entered.
John Milton · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Height and frequency are both great for so short a poem: it rises in nearly every paragraph, from the tender to the terrible. The terrible: the Fury’s shears; St Peter’s “two massy keys” and “that two-handed engine at the door / Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more”; the body that “Visit’st the bottom of the monstrous world”. The grand: “the great vision of the guarded mount” and “Look homeward, Angel, now, and melt with ruth”. The transport of the close, where King hears “the unexpressive nuptial song”, and then the calm of the coda, which is itself an elevation. Held below the top because the poem’s scale gives each height a few lines only, and its loveliest passage, the flowers, is deliberately low.
Modest Mussorgsky · Music
8.9 · Tier IV
Height is reached often, and in more than one kind. The coronation is grandeur: the bells, the chorus of praise, and Boris’s prayer entering in foreboding. Pimen’s narration is a calm of great age. The monologue and the clock scene are the sublime of dread: the chimes, the halting declamation, the child seen in the corner. The death is grandeur turned to collapse, with the monks’ chant heard as Boris dies. Kromy rises by force and falls to the Holy Fool alone; the work’s last height is a single quiet voice. Held off the top by the Polish act, where the polonaise and the fountain duet are charm, and by the inn and the nursery.
Vincent van Gogh · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
The elevation is the sublime’s own subject, the night sky, and in one small field it rises in several places rather than once: the spiral at the centre, two rolls of light turning into each other; the morning star, too large, blazing low at the left in a halo wider than the moon’s; the moon in its disc of yellow, sun and moon at once; the cypress, a black flame across the whole height of the sky; and each star’s halo, a small system of rings. The register is cold and warm together, the terror of a sky in motion and the warmth of a lit village. Height is at the top of the medium, and the eye is passed from one burning to the next without rest. Held below the ceiling because grandeur of scale is not available to 0.68 square metres, and part of the sublime is size.
Katsushika Hokusai · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Height first. The crest hangs over the second boat with its foam broken into fingers, and the eye reads them as claws in the instant before it reads them as water. Then the registers: terror in the crest, delight in the blue and the spray, calm in the small white mountain in the trough. Then frequency, which a single sheet earns with difficulty. The eye is thrown three times, boat by boat, and twice more, from the crest to Fuji and from Fuji to the swell that repeats it, so the picture rises and settles and rises again in the space of a page. What holds it below the top is that size and the single instant: a sheet seen whole at arm’s length gives one blow, however many parts it has.
John Coltrane · Music
8.9 · Tier IV
Elevation is the record’s element, and it comes in every part and at more than one temperature. A gong and a falling tenor fanfare open it, grandeur before a beat of time is kept. In Acknowledgement the four-note bass figure enters, the saxophone takes it up and carries it through a cycle of keys, and then voices chant the title: transport reached by insistence and then by the human voice. Pursuance opens on Jones alone and reaches the fiercest height on the record in Coltrane’s solo, a terrible sublime of effort. Psalm is the warm height, rubato over timpani rolls and Tyner’s rolling chords. Resolution’s middle and the bass solo keep time between summits and hold it below the top, a tenth above OK Computer and Kid A.
Carl Theodor Dreyer · Film
8.9 · Tier IV
The elevation is constant, repeated and mostly dreadful. The face carries it from the first close-up: Falconetti’s eyes raised past the frame, tears held and falling, the mouth slack with exhaustion. The summits are many. The leaded window throws a cross of shadow on the cell floor. The straw crown pressed on her head by the soldiers returns, after the shaving, swept out with her hair. The spikes of the wheel turn. A gravedigger’s spade turns up a skull as she signs. The shorn head leaves the face naked of everything. The burning is cut against birds wheeling over the church, a mother nursing, the smoke rising. Height and frequency are both high. Held from the very top only because the long interrogation keeps the film at one pitch for a stretch before the cell gives it a first release.
Johannes Brahms · Music
8.9 · Tier IV
Height is reached in every movement, by different means. The first rises by restraint: no violins, the lower strings divided, the chorus quiet, the harps arriving at the close on the promise of comfort. The second is the sublime of dread, a march in triple time sung softly, then with full force and timpani, until it breaks into B flat major: “Aber des Herrn Wort bleibet in Ewigkeit”
“But the word of the Lord endures in eternity”. The third gathers to a fugue over an unmoving D; the fourth is beauty without strain; the sixth carries the last trumpet into praise. Held from the top: the register is mostly inward, and the sixth movement’s fugue can sound like a duty discharged.
T. S. Eliot · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Height is reached often and in more than one register. The warm: the rose garden, where “the leaves were full of children, / Hidden excitedly, containing laughter” (Burnt Norton I). The still: “At the still point of the turning world”. The dreadful: the dawn street of Little Gidding II, “After the dark dove with the flickering tongue / Had passed below the horizon of his homing”, where the bomber and the Holy Spirit share a line, and the dove of IV, descending in “incandescent terror”. The cold grandeur of the river as “a strong brown god” and the sea’s “many gods and many voices”. The close, “And the fire and the rose are one”. Held off the very top because the flat passages, which the design requires, lower the frequency: elevation is the rule in two poems and the exception in The Dry Salvages.
Igor Stravinsky · Music
8.9 · Tier IV
Height reaches near the ceiling, and for a short work the rises are frequent. The opening chord is a shock of hard light; the chorus’s first chant is elevation by restraint. The double fugue rises by accumulation to the choral entry and the held new song. The last movement gives three summits: the hushed first Laudate Dominum; the Allegro’s grandeur of force; and the coda, slow, in E flat, over a four-note ostinato, praise as stillness, a sublime of awe rather than exaltation and one of the great passages of the century’s music. Held below the top because the first movement and the fugue are austere by design, rising by severity rather than transport, and because in so short a work the summits stand close together.
Ustad Ahmad Lahauri · Architecture
8.9 · Tier IV
Height is at the top, and the register is beauty more than terror. Elevation comes at the reveal, when the dark passage of the gateway frames the white tomb at the far end of the garden; in the tomb against open sky, with nothing behind it but the river; in its reflection, doubled in the long channel on the axis; and in the marble passing through rose, white and grey from dawn to dusk and under the moon. It recurs from the gate, the garden, the plinth and the river. Held below the top because the interior does not rise as the exterior does: the chamber is small beside the outer volume, and its elevation is of stillness rather than of reach.
Guo Xi · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Elevation is high and recurs at every stage of the ascent. The summit massif, its upper ridges bending like a body turning, stands over bands of mist with nothing beneath it to hold it up. The right-hand cleft opens on a waterfall and roofs far inside the mountain, a second world within the first. The left opens on level distance over water to a far horizon, the one place the eye is released. The bare, twisted trees of the foreground are grand at their own scale. The register is awe more than delight, a grandeur that is never static. The height is of one kind and one temperature, with no terror and no tenderness, and that holds the axis a step below the top.
Fyodor Dostoevsky · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The novel rises often and very high. The end of the first part: the packet of money in the fire, Ganya fainting rather than reach for it, Rogozhin’s crowd carrying her off. The execution, told by Myshkin to the Epanchin women. The aura on the stair, the moment of highest harmony in which, he recalls, “времени больше не будет”
(there shall be time no longer), broken by Rogozhin’s knife. Ippolit at Pavlovsk, condemned by illness, seeing himself the one outcast at the feast of nature. The vase falling. The meeting of the two women, and Myshkin’s hesitation. Above all the vigil: Rogozhin and Myshkin lying beside the body behind the curtain, the oilcloth, the fly, the morning. Held a step below the summit because between these heights the novel runs flat for long stretches.
William Wordsworth · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The ceiling is among the highest in English, and the dreadful stands as high as the elevating. The stolen boat, when a cliff rises behind the boy “As if with voluntary power instinct” and leaves in his mind “unknown modes of being”; the skating, the earth turning “With visible motion her diurnal round”; the Boy of Winander and his grave; the drowned man rising from Esthwaite; the Simplon, where the poet learns after the fact “that we had crossed the Alps”, and the gorge below, its “woods decaying, never to be decayed”, “Characters of the great Apocalypse”; Snowdon, the moon over a sea of mist and the roar of waters through a rift. Height is beyond question. Frequency is the charge that holds the axis a step from the top: Books III, VIII, IX and X, and much of VII, rise rarely.
Rashtrakuta, under Krishna I · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Height near the top, and frequency high, because the work offers many stations. At the threshold the low gateway gives on to the court and the whole mass appears at once, closed in by cliffs taller than itself. In the circuit of the court the temple is seen whole from every side and from below, the pillars and elephants its measure. In the Ravana recess, the one place of dread, the many arms heave in shadow beneath the seated god. On the bridges the visitor crosses in air between shrine and temple; from the cliff top the work lies in the quarry it made. Held below the top because hall and sanctum are dark and close, and much of the elevation is the mass seen from without.
Anna Akhmatova · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Height comes again and again, and in a work this short the frequency is the striking fact. The Dedication opens on the sublime of scale: “Перед этим горем гнутся горы, / Не течет великая река”
(Mountains bow before this grief, the great river does not flow). The Prelude’s dread is a time “когда улыбался / Только мертвый, спокойствию рад”
(when only the dead smiled, glad of their rest). In The Sentence the stone word falls on a breast still living. The summit is Crucifixion, where no one dared to look at the place the Mother stood, and the Epilogue closes at height, the melting snow running like tears from bronze eyelids and the ships going quietly along the Neva. Held off the very top only because VI and IX are low.
W. B. Yeats · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Height and frequency both. “Byzantium” is among the highest flights in modern English: the dome that disdains all that man is, “The fury and the mire of human veins”, the flames that cannot singe a sleeve, and the last line’s “That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea”. The book rises again in the fourth part of “Vacillation”, where a man of fifty sitting in a London shop finds his body blaze with happiness for twenty minutes; in the close of the “Dialogue”; in the elegy for the Gore-Booth sisters, from “Two girls in silk kimonos, both / Beautiful, one a gazelle” to “The innocent and the beautiful / Have no enemy but time”; and in the swan of “Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931”. The register is often dreadful or bitter, Swift’s “Savage indignation” among it, and the axis is indifferent to that. What holds it from the top band is the second and third parts, which rise less often: the songs are sharp rather than elevated.
David Lynch · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent and dreadful: the man at Winkie’s describing the face behind the diner and then meeting it in daylight; the Cowboy’s corral, the lamp coming on without a hand; Betty’s audition, where a flat scene turns charged and the room goes quiet; Rita in the blonde wig beside Betty in the mirror; and Club Silencio entire, the magician saying there is no band while the trumpet plays, Rebekah Del Rio falling while the voice goes on, Betty shaking. The two old people crawling under the door is terror at the pitch of a nightmare. Badalamenti’s low strings keep the film near height between these. What holds it down is weighed: the pilot’s comic business, the paint in the jewellery box and the pool man, is at ground level by design.
Anonymous · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Height and frequency are both near the top, and the work rises in sequence: the silhouette across miles of sand or water, a pyramid ending in a needle; the tide closing round it; the gate, the climbing street, the stairs; the Grand Degré rising like a gorge between church and lodgings; the western terrace opening on the whole bay; the church at the summit; then the Merveille, where the cloister hangs open over the sea. Elevation is cold and warm by turns, weight and dark in the crypt of the Great Pillars, air in the cloister. What holds it is the church itself, of high but not supreme order inside: the height lives in approach and passage more than in any one room.
Olivier Messiaen · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Height reaches the top and frequency is high. The Louange à l’Éternité is the sublime of stasis, a line moving as slowly as a line can. The Louange à l’Immortalité climbs to a high E: the sublime as ascent. The Abîme’s swells from nothing are terror and transport in one voice; the Vocalise’s middle is cold, distant beauty; the Danse de la fureur is force, and its augmented return is dreadful grandeur; the Fouillis’s climaxes are the whirl the preface describes. Six of eight movements rise. Held below the top because the Intermède does not aim at height, the Liturgie keeps its beauty small by design, and the Danse’s elevation is weight more than height for stretches.
Francis Ford Coppola · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
The elevation is dreadful, and it returns. The treeline erupting in silent slow motion under “The End”, the rotor dissolving into the ceiling fan, Willard’s face upside down over the jungle. The helicopters coming in over the sea with the Wagner from their loudspeakers, cut against the schoolyard below. Kilgore on the beach with the treeline still burning. The tiger out of the green; the Playmates’ helicopter rising from a lit stage; Do Lung in flares and tracer; the faces in the reeds and the bodies on the steps; Willard rising from black water, and the killing cut with the sacrifice. Held a step from the top by the middle of the compound, where the height falls into long stasis.
Arthur Rimbaud · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Height and frequency both, and the frequency is the startling thing: almost every piece rises. “Aube” is transport itself, the goddess pursued through the city and wrapped in her veils at the edge of a wood. “Phrases” reaches it in one sentence, ropes stretched from steeple to steeple, garlands from window to window, “des chaînes d’or d’étoile à étoile, et je danse”, chains of gold from star to star, and I dance. “Mystique” tilts a whole landscape into a vision of angels and fires. “Barbare” is sublime of terror, its refrain the flag of bleeding meat over the silk of seas. “Génie” ends in adoration, and “Matinée d’ivresse” turns elevation dreadful. The height is cold and warm by turns and recurs on nearly every page. It is held below the top only because some of the cityscapes trade height for glitter.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Height and frequency are both very great. The opening, bassoons and then basset horns entering in turn over the strings before the trombones bring in the chorus, is among the most recognisable elevations in the repertoire. The Kyrie’s double fugue is grandeur in counterpoint; the Dies irae is terror at speed; the Tuba mirum opens on a solo trombone; the Rex tremendae is majesty broken into supplication. The Confutatis reaches a cold, vertiginous height in the descent of “Oro supplex”, and the Lacrimosa’s line rising by semitones is a summit, its first eight bars Mozart’s and its arc carried on by Süssmayr. The Domine Jesu is dread again. Frequency falls in the last third, where the Sanctus and Benedictus rarely rise: nine numbers of fourteen reach real height.
Claude Debussy · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Height is reached often and in more than one register. The sublime of origin: the opening, a low pedal and fragments not yet a theme, the sea before light. The sublime of beauty: the divided cellos of the first sketch, a sound without precedent, warm and many-voiced. The sublime of grandeur: the noon climax and the brass chorale in D flat that close the first sketch, the work’s first summit and among the great endings of its century’s orchestral music. Jeux de vagues rises by brilliance and delight, lower by design. The third sketch climbs twice, through the storm against the woodwind’s lyrical theme, then to the chorale’s return, fortissimo, dawn become a force. Held here because the middle panel stays in a lighter register throughout.
Safavid, under Shah Abbas I · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Elevation here is beauty, colour and the sudden opening of space: in the portal from the square, mosaic and muqarnas, blue against brick; in the passage, the dim vestibule, the turn, the court breaking open, white light, blue walls, water; in the qibla iwan between its minarets, the dome rising behind it and doubled in the pool; in the sanctuary, the inner dome’s pattern narrowing to a medallion at the apex; and in the dome from outside, turquoise against the sky and the mountains, the one thing in Isfahan seen from everywhere. Frequency is near the top. Height is held below it because the register is beauty and colour, not terror or vastness, and because haft-rangi, painted and fired in one, is flatter in colour and coarser in drawing than the mosaic of the portal; an eye that has stood under the Lotfollah’s dome knows what this interior forgoes.
Titian · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
The whole field is elevation, and it rises in stages: the apostles in shadow against the band of sky, arms thrown up; the apostle in red at the left reaching with both hands; the Virgin, face turned up and arms open, crossing from the dark half into the gold; the gold itself, denser toward God, where the heads of further angels dissolve; God arriving head first out of the top of the arch. From the west door, through the choir screen, the gold is the brightest thing in the church, set among the real daylight of the apse windows, so the rise is renewed at every entry. Held below the top by its single key: one movement, upward, with no terror or stillness beside it, and God’s register, where the rise should crest, the least intense of the three.
Anonymous · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Elevation is the chapel’s whole register, and its height is near the top. The passage makes it: from the lower chapel, low, dim and crowded with columns, up a narrow stair into the upper chapel, where the wall has become coloured light. At full sun the blues and reds fall on floor and piers, and the stone is reduced to a frame. The apse closes round the tribune; the room darkens and kindles as the sun goes round; near at hand the windows resolve into scenes. What holds it is frequency and scale: one great room and one passage into it, glass that reads dark on a dull day, and no grandeur of size.
Terrence Malick · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Height stands near the ceiling, frequency is high, and the elevation is warm: the creation, under Preisner’s Lacrimosa, with the whispered questions over the forming galaxies; the predator placing its foot on the wounded animal’s head and then walking away; the infant’s foot held in the father’s hand, and the mother turning in the air above the lawn; the drowned boy carried from the pool and Jack’s whispered reproach to God; the father’s confession among the packed boxes; the shore, under the Agnus Dei of Berlioz’s Requiem. What holds it down is the frame. Adult Jack’s Houston scenes are flat by design, and the shore is the least sure of the summits: the door frame in the desert and the walk across the flats state elevation rather than reach it.
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Height is real, and it comes often, across both parts. The falsetto climax of Spinning Song lifts within the album’s first five minutes. Bright Horses rises from its admission into the vision it has chosen. Ghosteen Speaks is elevation by stillness, the voice of the dead as a chorus over a slow pulse. The title track’s turn into its fable lifts again, and so does the close of Hollywood. The kind is one kind, hushed and luminous, with almost no terror or force in it, and the axis is indifferent to kind. Frequency is what holds it off the top: Night Raid and Galleon Ship sustain a mood without rising, and the middle of the first part thins.
Inca, under Pachacuti · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Elevation here is grandeur and terror at once, and it recurs: the first sight from the Intipunku, the whole ridge laid out below, the peak beyond and the river’s loop far down on either hand; the view from the Guardhouse, the site composed in one picture with Huayna Picchu behind it; the main gate, which frames the peak in a trapezoid as one passes through; the Torreón’s curve of ashlar growing out of its boulder, and the cave under it; the carved stone against sky at the top of the Intihuatana’s stairs; the terraces falling away over the cliff, and cloud filling the valley and clearing. Held below the top because part of the height is the mountain’s, which the makers chose and did not make, and because the buildings are small, roofless and low. The sublime is the site composed, not any room entered.
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Height and frequency are both high. The sublime of dread: the development’s crash after the six p’s, the trombones’ chant inside the storm, the finale’s climax breaking off, the tam-tam stroke. The sublime of beauty: the D major second theme of the first movement in muted strings, and its return; the B major brass chorale over a falling pizzicato scale. The sublime of energy: the march, which elevates by force before it is undone. The finale’s close is a rarer kind, elevation by disappearance, an orchestra withdrawn to its basses. Held below Otello (9.4) and Mahler’s Ninth (9.5): the waltz rises by grace, not height, and the march’s repetitions spend its height before the movement ends.
Andrei Tarkovsky · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent and high, and of several kinds. The wind that bends the whole field after the stranger turns back; the barn burning in a downpour while the boy watches from the house; the ceiling coming down in a slow fall of water and plaster as the mother rinses her hair; the soldiers wading Sivash as if without end, under Arseny Tarkovsky’s poem; the boy on the snowy hill and the bird that settles on his head; the mother lifted above a bed; breath fading from a polished table; and the last field, the young woman in the grass, the old woman with the children, the St John Passion rising. Few films rise so often or so far. Held from the very top by the flat ground between the summits, the Spanish household and the Pushkin reading.
J. M. W. Turner · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
This is the axis’s own subject: the sublime of terror, of the kind Burke described, given with less mediation than painting had given it. The elevation is not a moment within the picture; it is the picture, the whole field in motion round a point of danger. It rises in more than one place: in the vortex itself, the white of snow and foam spun out from the centre; in the dark wedge of the hull, small and alone; in the pale light breaking above, which turns dread toward something like grace; in the warm spark of the signal, the human at its smallest. The viewer is not on a shore watching a wreck but in the storm. It is held below the ceiling because the register is one, and because at about a square metre grandeur of scale is partly withheld.
Richard Strauss · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Height is reached often in a hundred minutes, in the register of dread and of a terrible beauty. The opening clarinet run and Narraboth’s “Wie schön ist”
“How beautiful is” set a beauty already unstable. Jochanaan’s voice from the cistern, diatonic and hymnic, stands against it. Salome’s three addresses to his body, his hair and his mouth climb by turns. The wait for the execution is the sublime of terror reached through near-silence: a solo double bass pinched on a high note, the orchestra holding its breath. The final scene rises without a break to the chord at the kiss and the close in C minor. Off the top: the quintet, the Nazarenes and stretches of Herodes’s babble drop into the grotesque by design, and the Dance stands lower than the music around it.
Nasrid, under Yusuf I and Muhammad V · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Elevation here is beauty, sustained and recurring, more than grandeur or terror, and it returns in almost every room: the Comares Tower standing twice, in stone and in a pool kept at the brim; the Hall of the Ambassadors, dark at the floor, lit from deep window bays, rising to a ceiling of interlaced stars; the Court of the Lions, entered at a corner, a forest of columns resolving into order as one moves; the dome of the Two Sisters, dissolved into thousands of cells and lit from its base, so that the roof seems to turn and hang; the star of the Abencerrajes, the same at a sharper pitch. Held from the top by its register: vastness and dread are absent, and the scale never overwhelms.
Ancient Egyptian · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Height is among the highest a building reaches. The Hypostyle Hall is the measure: 134 columns too massive and too close to be seen as a room, the nave standing over the aisles, the eye unable to find a wall. Elevation recurs along the axis: the avenue of rams and the unfinished First Pylon; the hall; Hatshepsut’s obelisk, a single granite shaft rising out of a narrow hall; the Akh-menu’s inverted columns; the Sacred Lake, flat water beside the stone. Vastness, succession, uniformity and difficulty are all present. The sun in the roofless hall is the ruin’s and is not credited. Frequency holds it: between the summits lie fields of foundations and stacked blocks, and the lesser temples and the crowded First Court rise little in their own right.
Bureau of Reclamation, with Gordon Kaufmann · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Height is very high and frequency high. Elevation comes from the crest, where the curved wall drops more than 700 feet into the shadowed canyon and the eye cannot find its foot; from below, where the face rises as a concave wall filling the sky between two cliffs; from the bridge downstream, where towers, wall, powerhouse and lake are one view; in the intake towers standing out of the water like campaniles; in the generator halls, long rooms of machinery under a travelling crane; and, rarely, in a spillway in flood. The register is the technological sublime, awe with dread in it, the weight felt on the body at the parapet. What holds it from the very top: the interiors rise less than the exterior, and the elevation is of scale and force, with little of beauty’s warmth.
David Lean · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Elevation is the film’s mode, and it recurs from the first reel to the last. Lawrence blows out a match and the cut gives a desert sunrise. Ali comes out of the mirage, a speck for a long minute before he is a man. The Nefud by day, the sun’s anvil, and Lawrence riding back out of the heat haze with Gasim to Jarre’s theme. The long pan at Aqaba from the charge to the guns that face only the sea. Lawrence in white robes walking on the roof of a wrecked train, his shadow beside him, to the cheers of the tribes. The dread is as high: Daud in the quicksand, Tafas with its smoke and its column of the dead. This is the film’s highest axis with The Made. Held a step from the top because the middle of Part Two has stretches of level talk, and some of the height is grandeur of place more than of feeling.
My Bloody Valentine · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Elevation is the record’s purpose, and it comes on nearly every track, in both temperatures. Only Shallow opens with a few snare strokes and then a wall that bends as it arrives. To Here Knows When is the height: a slow, seasick wash in which the voice and a high line float without a floor, transport sustained. When You Sleep rises by melody through the noise; Sometimes becomes tender and enormous at once; Soon ends the record in ecstasy, and Blown a Wish is beauty at a whisper. Touched and Loomer stay lower, and What You Want and Come in Alone repeat heights already reached.
Godspeed You! Black Emperor · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Height reaches the top of the medium, on every side. Storm opens at a summit, the rising major-key theme of its first movement, and builds a second in Gathering Storm. Static rises once, in World Police and Friendly Fire, out of the darkest material on the record. Sleep holds the greatest elevation: after the old man’s voice, Monheim builds from near silence over many minutes to a climax of the whole ensemble, and the last movement rises again. The final side climbs in She Dreamt She Was a Bulldozer. Dread counts too, in Deathkamp Drone. Static’s middle and the collage of the last side hold it off the top.
Anonymous · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Here the building is at its height, and often. Entering from the transept, the eye is drawn up a vessel more than three times as high as it is wide, to vaults that seem to float on glass; the hemicycle’s narrow bays close round the altar in a curtain of light some forty metres high. The elevation is dreadful as much as beautiful: the thinness of the supports is felt, and the knowledge of what fell is present in the stone. Outside, the chevet’s forest of flyers and uprights is among the great spectacles of Gothic building, and the transept facades rise sheer and lace-worked to the full height of the choir. What holds it below the very top is the crossing, ending the ascent against a blank wall to the west, and the inserted piers that thicken the rhythm the hemicycle keeps pure.
Michelangelo · Visual art
9.2 · Tier V
Elevation here is grandeur and beauty at once. There is the scale, a figure nearly three times life size, met at the end of a long gallery under a skylit dome. There is the body, the ideal male nude of the antique carried to colossal size. And there is the head, which from the figure’s left becomes another work: an alert, threatened face over a body that has not yet moved. Frequency is the limit: one figure gives one summit, sustained, not a sequence of rises. The statue changes as one walks round it, and the summit recurs from several sides, but not every view rises: the side views show how thin the block was, and the back is less resolved.
Leonardo da Vinci · Visual art
9.2 · Tier V
The elevation is classical rather than terrible, grandeur held in measure, and it rises in a few places: Christ against the open window, head inclined, the body a pyramid with the light behind it; the double wave of the apostles, breaking toward the centre and turning back at the ends; James the Greater’s flung arms beside Christ, the widest gesture in the picture; the depth of the room, running out to the landscape and the sky. There is one register, and no terror beyond Judas’s shadow. Frequency is limited by the form: one image, one instant. The losses of surface are not charged here, but nothing is credited that cannot now be seen, such as the modelling of the faces the early copies record.
Plato · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Height is reached at both ends and several times between. Phaedo confesses an unfamiliar mixture of pleasure and pain at the death (58e to 59a); Socrates, his leg freed from the fetter, rubs it and muses that pleasure and pain are joined at the head (60b to c); the swan sings best when it is about to die, because it goes to the god it serves (84e to 85b); after the objections he strokes Phaedo’s hair and says they should cut theirs if the argument dies (89b to c). Seen from above, men live around the sea “hōsper peri telma murmēkas ē batrachous”
“like ants or frogs around a pond” (109b). The death is told without one raised word. The middle arguments do not rise, and that holds it a few tenths below the summit.
William Faulkner · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Height comes often and in more than one key. The first section rises in flashes: Caddy in the branch with her muddy drawers, the children at the window on the night of their grandmother’s death, Benjy’s bellowing at the wedding. Quentin’s last day is a sustained dread, the more terrible for its calm: the shadow of the sash, the watch, the flatirons, the bridge, the careful brushing before he goes out. The fourth section has the book’s summit, the Easter sermon of the Reverend Shegog, a small man whose voice becomes his congregation’s, “de ricklickshun en de blood of de Lamb”, and Dilsey weeping openly on the road home. The close turns height to horror: Benjy’s bellow in the square until the carriage swings right and the world returns, “each in its ordered place.” Held below the top because Jason’s section, a quarter of the book, is flat by design, a comedy of grievance with no rise in it.
Euripides · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Height comes often in a short play, and in the dreadful register most. The cries from within before Medea is seen; the first stasimon’s reversal of nature, “anō potamōn hierōn chōrousi pagai”
“upward flow the streams of the holy rivers”; the monologue, its back and forth over the children’s faces among the summits of the stage; the Messenger on the crown’s fire, the robe eating the flesh, the father clinging to the corpse and unable to rise; the children’s cries from inside the house while the chorus stands outside; and the last image, Medea above with the bodies and Jason below unable to touch them. Held from the top because the middle, the Aegeus scene and the false reconciliation, is necessarily plain, its height suspense rather than elevation.
Alfred Hitchcock · Film
9.0 · Tier V
Elevation is frequent, and warm, erotic and dreadful by turns: Madeleine in profile against the red wall at Ernie’s; the Legion of Honor, the spiral of her hair matched to the portrait; the rings of the cut redwood; the kiss by the sea as the wave breaks; the first fall from the tower; Judy stepping into the green neon, and the circling kiss in which the hotel room turns into the mission stable; the nun rising from the dark. Herrmann’s score keeps the film near height between them. What holds it down is weighed fully: the inquest, the sanatorium and the first dates with Judy are flat by design, the animated nightmare reads as a device of its decade, and the falling figure is visibly a dummy.
Fyodor Dostoevsky · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Height is reached often, and in Part Three almost continuously, in the dreadful register more than the warm. The dreadful: Kirillov’s last night with Pyotr waiting, the candle, the figure standing motionless in the corner, and the shot; the fire across the river and the bodies of the Lebyadkins; Liza killed by the crowd at the fire; Shatov’s murder in the park by the pond, with Erkel’s calm. The warm: Shatov and Marie through the night of the birth, where the narrator’s gossip falls silent; and Stepan Trofimovich’s last wandering on the high road with the Gospel-seller, his asking her to read the Gadarene passage, and his death in a peasant hut. Held a step below the top because Part One rises only in flashes, Shatov’s blow and Marya Timofeevna in Varvara Petrovna’s drawing room, while its comic register holds long.
Emily Dickinson · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Height is reached in many poems and in more than one key. The dreadful: “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain” (J280), its drum and its plunge; “Zero at the Bone” (J986), at the snake; the Loaded Gun (J754), violent power with no stated object. The cold: the slant of winter light (J258); “This is the Hour of Lead” (J341); the fly’s “Blue”, its “uncertain stumbling Buzz” (J465), set between the dying eyes and the light. Transport: “Wild Nights” (J249) and “Further in Summer than the Birds”. And the calm height of “Because I could not stop for Death” (J712), whose carriage passes the setting sun to “A Swelling of the Ground”, and whose last stanza opens the centuries: “I first surmised the Horses’ Heads / Were toward Eternity”. Across the great run the poems that rise number in the scores. What holds the axis below the top is the breath: the height comes in a flash, a quatrain or two, never sustained, and the low register of wit, riddle and diminutive fills a large part of the body.
Anonymous, under King Lalibela · Architecture
8.9 · Tier IV
Height and frequency both. The first elevation is at the rim: the ground opens and Bete Giyorgis stands below, a cross in a pit, seen first from above. The second is in the descent, down cut stairs and through passages, some of them tunnels walked in the dark, into courts where a whole church stands free in the living rock. Inside Medhane Alem, a forest of pillars in the half-dark; in Golgotha, carved saints in their niches; in Bete Maryam, a painted ceiling and cross-shaped windows. It recurs church by church, and in the year: at Genna the rims and courts fill with pilgrims in white. Held from the top because the interiors are small, dark and cramped, and the shelters now roof the view of several courts from the rim.
Michelangelo · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
The elevation is constant, not a single moment. It is in the surface first: the high polish of the dead body against the deep-cut shadow of the mantle, so that the dead flesh reads as light. It is in the slack of the body, the head fallen back, the right arm hanging, the feet left free past the edge of the cloth, weight rendered in stone so that the eye feels it settle. It is in the face of the mother, the coldest and most composed point of the group and the one that moves most. Held below the top because the sublime here is entirely of the beautiful: it never reaches terror, and the frontal design gives one great view rather than many.
Virginia Woolf · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Elevation is the book’s normal register, and the risk is that height so constant flattens. It does not, because the interludes reset the scale each time and the soliloquies rise from small particulars: the sponge squeezed over Bernard in the bath, the boot boy, the lady writing at Elvedon while the gardeners sweep. The summits are many. The opening interlude, “The sun had not yet risen.”, with the sea wrinkled like a cloth. Neville’s and Bernard’s answers to Percival’s death. Rhoda’s last descent toward the sea. And the close of the summing up: “Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!”, answered only by the waves. Held a step from the top because the soliloquies keep one pitch through the middle sections, and some heights there sound like the ones before them.
Giuseppe Verdi · Music
8.9 · Tier IV
Height is reached often, and in more than one register. The sublime of dread opens the work: divided violins, pianissimo, in B minor, a death heard before a life. The sublime of the self divided: “Ah, fors’è lui” with “croce e delizia” (“cross and delight”) rising in it, then the coloratura of “Sempre libera” broken by a voice from outside. “Amami, Alfredo”, the prelude’s theme at full voice as farewell. The concertato that ends Act II. Then all of Act III: the prelude again, the letter spoken, “È tardi!”, “Addio, del passato” and the last false surge of “Oh gioia!”. Held below the top on frequency: the Act I introduction and brindisi, Flora’s choruses and most of Germont’s music rise by charm or warmth, not elevation.
The Beatles · Music
8.9 · Tier IV
Height comes on eight of fourteen tracks, and once it is transport proper. In “Tomorrow Never Knows” the loops wheel over the drone and the voice comes from a great distance. “Eleanor Rigby” reaches a grave, cold beauty, its two refrains sung against each other at the close. Civil’s horn lifts “For No One” into elegy. “Here, There and Everywhere” rises on line alone, “She Said She Said” touches dread, “Got to Get You into My Life” exults, and “I’m Only Sleeping” and “Love You To” shimmer. Held from the top: outside the closer the heights are beauties of line, and the form keeps each one short.
Gian Lorenzo Bernini · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Height is near the top. Seen from the crossing in daylight the group is an apparition: marble that seems to weigh nothing, lit from nowhere, before a fall of gold. Teresa’s face, lids lowered and lips parted, is among the summits of European sculpture, and the angel’s smile is its cold note, sweet and unreadable. The vault adds a second register, heaven breaking its frame in stucco cloud; the floor a dreadful one, the dead under the vision. Frequency holds it. Every height rises toward one: vault and floor support the group, the boxes are low in pitch, the vault is of a lesser hand, and out of its hour the group is a fine marble in a niche.
Ming, under the Yongle Emperor · Architecture
8.9 · Tier IV
Elevation recurs along the axis, and it is the building’s method: the Meridian Gate from its forecourt, walls rising on three sides and five pavilions above, built to make the one who approaches small; the deep central passage, and the light beyond it, with the Golden Water River bowed across the court; the great court, an emptiness of stone, and the hall above it on three tiers of marble; the throne seen through the open doors in the dark of the hall; and from the northern wall the yellow roofs, one law to the horizon. Grandeur is horizontal: expanse, repetition and withheld height. Held below the top because the elevation is concentrated on the axis and in one register. The halls are not high, the interiors are dim, and the Inner Court by design does not rise.
Insular · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Height and frequency are both high. The Chi-Rho is a field of spirals, trumpet patterns and knotwork so dense that it reads as light, with the Chi sweeping across the page. The cross page gives the order of the cosmos in geometry. The Virgin and Child is a hieratic icon framed in interlace, the Virgin’s chair ending in a beast’s head. The first words of John stand as a monument. And the elevation recurs: an ordinary page carries an initial rising out of the column into a coiled beast. It is the sublime of the very small, transport by detail that does not run out. Held below the highest marks by scale: the book is seen an opening at a time, at the size of a page, and terror is almost absent.
Le Corbusier · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
The building rises often and in different keys. On the approach the roof’s dark prow lifts against the sky above the white walls, and the mass reads differently from each side, so that the ascent is a sequence of shocks. Inside, after the turning door, the eye adjusts to dimness; then the south wall becomes a field of coloured points at varying depths, the roof hovers on its strip of light, and the tall tower drops a column of light onto its altar. The floor’s fall toward the altar makes the body take part. Approach, threshold, nave, side chapels and outdoor choir each carry a moment. Held below the top by scale: the transport is intimate, and the grandeur of the largest sacred interiors is beyond it.
Tintoretto · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Elevation is high, and it recurs across the wall in three forms. The first and highest is the Christ: a pale body on a raised cross against a burst of light in a dark, stormy sky, above everyone’s reach, the head bowed, the arms spanning the upper field. The second is scale: in the small Albergo the crowd stands at life size round the end of the room and the crucified figure above the viewer’s head, so that the picture is stood in rather than looked at. The third is the light, which falls in streaks across crowd and ground and leaves whole passages in dusk, as if under an eclipse. The register is grave and terrible together, grandeur and dread in one. Held just below the top because some of the outer passages are crowd rather than height.
Louis Kahn · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
The building rises often and to great height. Seen across the lake, the mass of concrete banded with marble, pierced by great circles and triangles and doubled in the water, is grand in the oldest sense, a citadel. Inside, the ambulatory between ring and chamber is a tall street of concrete in which light falls from above and through the cut openings in shafts and pools that change with the hour; the chamber, lit from its roof, is the last and most enclosed of these. The elevation is cold and severe, a sublime of mass and light, and it rises at the approach, the exterior, the ambulatory and the chamber in turn. Held from the top because the chamber is reported less resolved than the ambulatory.
Hector Berlioz · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Height comes often, in several kinds. The sublime of dread: the march in the low brass, its crowd, and the chord that cuts the beloved off; the finale’s bells and the Dies irae in ophicleides and bassoons, then in diminution, then set against the Ronde, the grotesque turned to grandeur. The sublime of solitude: the end of the Scène aux champs, the cor anglais calling and only four timpani answering, with few equals in its century for emptiness. Beauty: the idée fixe’s first long arch, and the waltz with its harps. Four of the five movements rise. Held below Otello (9.4) and Winterreise (9.3) because the first Allegro is more agitation than elevation, and some of the finale’s height is effect.
The Beach Boys · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Height and frequency are both high, and the elevation is warm. God Only Knows is the summit: French horn, sleigh bells and harpsichord under a single voice, then a closing round of voices entering one on another. Wouldn’t It Be Nice opens on a harp-like guitar figure and lifts at once. You Still Believe in Me climbs in its multitracked vocal over a plucked piano. Don’t Talk rises by withholding, strings swelling where words stop. Let’s Go Away for Awhile is transport without a voice. I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times rises over the Electro-Theremin, and Caroline, No ends in a hush that is itself elevation. That’s Not Me, Sloop John B and the title instrumental stay level, and terror is absent.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Height comes often and in many kinds: the overture’s three chords and its fugato; Tamino’s portrait aria, the sublime of a first feeling; the Queen’s grief in No. 4 and her fury in No. 14, rising four times to the high F through staccato figuration that makes the voice an instrument of rage; Sarastro’s two arias, calm made grand by the bass voice and the low winds; Pamina’s G minor aria; the Speaker scene, half arioso; the Armed Men’s chorale over counterpoint in C minor; the flute alone against muted brass and timpani in the trials. Held below Otello’s 9.4 because the opera means its comic register: the padlock quintet, the Papagena business and Monostatos are charm and play. It rises often and descends as often, on purpose.
Miles Davis · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Height comes on four of five tracks, and in “So What” twice. Its rubato opening sets piano and bass in a space that has not yet become a tune, and Davis’s solo, on open horn, is few notes, each placed. The whole of “Blue in Green” holds at height: Evans’s voicings, the trumpet over them, Coltrane’s solo in the middle of the cycle. In “Flamenco Sketches” the Phrygian section darkens the record for a moment, and the close settles rather than ends. For forty-six minutes the frequency is very high. Held from the top by its kind: the height is beauty held, never grandeur or terror, and “Freddie Freeloader” swings without rising.
U2 · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Height and frequency are both high, and elevation comes on eight of eleven tracks. The opening holds a swell before the delayed guitar figure enters. The second track lifts as gospel; the third withholds its release until a wordless cry over the bass; Bullet the Blue Sky reaches terror in slide guitar and feedback; Running to Stand Still is quiet transport. On side two One Tree Hill climbs in its last vocal, Exit tips from hush into violence, and Mothers of the Disappeared closes in an elevation of grief. Red Hill Mining Town, In God’s Country and Trip Through Your Wires sag, three in a row, and hold it off the top.
Mimar Sinan · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
The building rises repeatedly. From the Golden Horn and the far shore the cascade of domes, buttresses and four minarets stands on its hill as the crown of the city’s skyline, and has for four and a half centuries. Inside, the central dome sits on a ring of windows, so that it seems to hang above its light; the tympana, pierced in tiers, flood the hall from the sides; the qibla wall glows with glass and tile. The court under its domed porticoes is a second, open elevation, and the garden of tombs a third, quieter one. The register is grave and lucid: the hall is clearer and more evenly lit than Hagia Sophia’s, order made visible rather than a vault dissolving overhead. That restraint holds it short of the top.
Radiohead · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Height and frequency are both high, and elevation, cold and warm, comes on nine of twelve tracks. The second track turns from a sneer to a slow choral plea and back into the guitar storm. The fourth keeps to voice and acoustic guitar until a distorted bass enters under its curse. The fifth stacks its last vocal over the arpeggios until the wish for wings lifts free; the sixth ends with its guitar breaking into decaying delay; the ninth reaches terror in massed string clusters and a scream. The eleventh carries the record’s one triumphal sound. The flat third, seventh and eighth tracks hold it off the top.
Steven Spielberg · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
The elevation is dreadful, and it recurs: the Sabbath candle burning down to the smoke of a train; the night search of the ghetto, a soldier at a piano while others fire, and the red coat moving through the crowd as Schindler watches from the hill; Goeth on the balcony, the rifle on the rail; ash falling on Schindler’s car, and the coat on the cart; the women in the shower room, and the water; the walk across the field and the turn into colour. Height is high, frequent and varied in kind, from the stillness of the candle to the chaos of the liquidation, and it returns across the whole length of the film rather than in one stretch. The figure is for what camera and cutting make of the events, not for the events. Held a step from the top by the score, which often tells the viewer what to feel when the image has already done it.
Percy Bysshe Shelley · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Height is reached often and in several registers. Terror: the Furies’ torment, their vision of the Revolution and the Cross, and Jupiter sinking from his throne as the elements refuse him. Transport: Asia transfigured, and her song, “My soul is an enchanted boat, / Which, like a sleeping swan, doth float / Upon the silver waves of thy sweet singing”, with its companion lyric, “Life of Life! thy lips enkindle”. Grandeur: the Earth’s first speech, “I am the Earth, / Thy mother”; the Magus Zoroaster meeting his own image in the garden; the cosmic dance of Act IV; and Demogorgon’s closing stanzas, among the highest single passages in English Romantic verse. Held below the top because in Act III and in long reaches of Act IV the elevation becomes a sustained shimmer that dulls by its constancy.
U2 · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Height comes on eight of twelve tracks. “Zoo Station” opens on shock, a lurching beat and a distorted voice. “One” reaches a grave, plain grief, its last verse lifting with no change of form. “Until the End of the World” ends in a break in which the guitar seems to drown with its speaker, and “Love Is Blindness” is dreadful in the old sense: organ, a slow pulse, a solo that breaks rather than resolves. “So Cruel” has a cold, suspended beauty, “Mysterious Ways” a bodily transport; “Ultraviolet” rises in plea, “Acrobat” in anger. The height of “One”, “Until the End of the World” and “Love Is Blindness” offsets the four tracks that stay lower.
Giovanni Battista Piranesi · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Height and frequency both. Burke’s treatise on the sublime had appeared in 1757, and the second state is the sublime of terror and infinity made visible plate by plate: the stair in VII climbing to a bridge that climbs again past the frame, the wheel in IX too large for any use, ropes and pulleys hanging into darkness, the Gothic arch of XIV opening on further arches, the shaft of light down the piers of XVI. It recurs on nearly every sheet. The figures, a few millimetres high, often in pairs, gesturing at nothing, give the vastness its terror. The limit is one register, dread, without warmth or transport, and in a few plates the dark turns to texture rather than depth.
John A. Roebling and Washington Roebling · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Height is very high and frequency high, because the elevation comes with every crossing. It comes from the water, the two towers standing over the river with the cables slung between them; on the promenade, as the walker climbs toward midspan and the cables and stays close round in a converging web; at the towers, where the path passes beneath the pointed arches; and at midspan, where the harbour, the river and lower Manhattan open at once. The register is grand and buoyant, with an edge of vertigo; at night the web becomes lines of light over black water. Held off the top because the roadway, which now carries most of the crossing, gives a driver little of this; the approaches are plain; and the elevation is of one family, height and line, repeated.
Anonymous · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Height and frequency both. The elevation comes at the west door, where the whole width of the church opens at once: not a nave seen down a tunnel but a forest of piers five deep, the inner aisles as tall as many naves, and the central vessel over them. It recurs in movement, because every diagonal view across the aisles is a new composition of tiers and light; in the double ambulatory, where the piers turn and the glass of about 1215 burns at eye level; and outside at the east, where the chevet climbs in steps with its flyers like a ladder. Held below the top by its single register, grand and serene rather than vertiginous, and by a west front that does not rise to the interior.
Bruce Springsteen · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Elevation comes on nearly every track, and at four summits. Thunder Road begins on harmonica and piano and climbs until its coda, the band and the saxophone carrying the car out of town. Born to Run is the record’s highest single height: a wall of guitars, glockenspiel and strings, a breakdown, a count of four, and the last verse at the top of the voice. Backstreets reaches grief at full volume in its long final passage. Jungleland’s saxophone solo, held over the whole band in the middle of the song, is grandeur and elegy at once, and the song ends in a wordless howl. Lower but real: the horns of Tenth Avenue, the drive of Night, Meeting’s hush. Held off the top because the register is often melodrama.
Vasily Grossman · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Height is reached often, and in a plain register. The ceiling is two chapters. Anna Semyonovna’s letter from the ghetto, written to a son who will read it after her death, ends: “Живи, живи, живи вечно... Мама”
(Live, live, live forever... Mama). And Sofya Levinton, a childless woman, takes the boy David in her arms in the gas chamber and in the last moment becomes a mother. The dreadful: Krymov under interrogation; Lyudmila at her son Tolya’s grave in Saratov, speaking to him through the night. The heroic and the human at once: Novikov delaying the tank attack by eight minutes against orders so that fewer men die, and the book holding that delay as one of the great acts of the war; Zhenya at the Lubyanka window with her parcel, and Krymov in his cell knowing it came from her. Held below the top because the height thins in the institute chapters and the essays.
Albrecht Altdorfer · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Elevation is the work’s nature, and it recurs everywhere. The sky is one of the great heights of European painting: the sun bursting through a rent in banked cloud at the right, its light spilling over the sea, the pale crescent moon opposite, the clouds wheeling between as if the heavens were the battle. The curved horizon and the Mediterranean seen from above give the vertigo of a god’s view. Below, the forest of lances and the flood of horsemen give the sublime of number, terror and grandeur together. The tablet hanging from nothing has its own strangeness, a document suspended over the world. Held a step below the top by its single register: no tenderness or quiet stands against the grandeur, and the battle half works by accumulation rather than by any one moment of transport.
The Cure · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Height and frequency are both high, and elevation comes on eight of twelve tracks. “Plainsong” opens with wind chimes, then a held wall of synthesised strings, guitars and drums, very loud and very slow, under a small, late voice. “Pictures of You” rises by beauty, “Closedown” by mass, “Prayers for Rain” by suffocating dread. “The Same Deep Water as You” holds one mood for nine minutes and earns it by not breaking it. The title track reaches panic, and “Homesick” and “Untitled” carry the height to the end. The four central songs, from “Lovesong” to “Fascination Street”, are good songs that do not rise, and they hold it from the top.
Stanley Kubrick · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Elevation here is cold, and its frequency carries the axis. The British line marches in step to “The British Grenadiers” into French volleys, the camera tracking beside it as men drop from the ranks and the rank does not break. At the gaming table by candlelight the Schubert trio enters as Barry and Lady Lyndon exchange looks without a word, a beauty the medium had not shown in this kind before. The reverse zooms that end on a landscape after the manner of Gainsborough recur throughout, each a small grandeur. Bryan’s deathbed and funeral, the Sarabande slowed to a dirge, rise to grief; the barn, birds in the rafters and Bullingdon sick with fear, rises to dread. The controlled distance damps transport where a warmer work would carry the viewer further.
Radiohead · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Elevation comes often and in both temperatures. The cold sublime opens the record: synthesiser chords with the voice cut into syllables beneath. Terror comes in the third track, where hired brass players leave the riff and tip into free playing under a distorted voice repeating its fear. Transport comes in the fourth, where the ondes Martenot, played by Jonny Greenwood, and the strings swell past the voice until the song is almost all sky. The eighth is dread to dance to, and the closing song lifts its farewell on harp and pump organ, a sentimental height made strange by its machinery. The sixth, seventh and ninth stay lower.
José Clemente Orozco · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Here the work is strongest. Standing in the crossing and looking up, the viewer meets a vortex: the figure foreshortened from below so that he seems to rush away into the apex and also to fall toward the floor, the flame wrapping and making his body, the whole dome turning. The register is dreadful elevation, terror and transport together, the two poles of the axis in one image; it is not beauty. Frequency is answered by the structure of the dome: the eye cannot rest, and every return along the curve brings it back to the summit, so that the elevation is sustained rather than struck once. The chapel prepares it, the descent through conquest, the iron horse and the faceless crowds earning the heat at the top. Held at 9.1 because the register is one register, terror and transport and no other key, a tenth below The Starry Night.
Cormac McCarthy · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Height is reached often and at the extremity. The wolf’s capture and the long night watches with her; the pit at the fiesta and Billy’s shot; the burial, where the prose rises into the wolf’s world after her death, the high country of her running; the ruined church at Huisiachepic; and the close, where a light whiter than day stands in the wrong quarter and goes out, and then “the right and godmade sun” rises “for all and without distinction”. Terror, grief and transport come together, and they recur in every part but the third. The landscape writing is elevated in itself and kept level for long stretches without collapse. Held below the very top because some passages strain for the cadence, and the third part and the middle of the second run flat for many pages between the heights.
Mohammad Reza Isfahani, under Shah Abbas I · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Elevation is the building’s purpose, and it comes at the height the axis asks. The approach makes it: from the glare of the square through a portal under a stalactite vault, into a low dim passage that turns and turns again, then into the chamber, where the walls are cut tile and the dome rises in medallions of diminishing size to a sunburst at the crown, lit through the grilles of the drum so that the light seems to come from the surface itself. The turquoise cable mouldings carry the eye up every arch to the ring of the drum. From the square the pale dome takes the colour of the hour. It rises more than once: at the portal, at the turn, at the threshold, under the dome, and again outside. Held below the very top by its scale: one room of moderate size, its transport rapture and calm, not grandeur or terror.
Joy Division · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Height and frequency are both high, and the elevation is cold and dreadful. “Atrocity Exhibition” reaches terror: the drum pattern circles, the guitar sounds torn, and the voice stays level over it. “Heart and Soul” holds a desolate suspension, the bass ringing high over a pulse that never resolves. “Twenty Four Hours” rises by force when its slow sections break into fast ones. “The Eternal” is the record’s height, a procession at funeral pace in which almost nothing moves, and “Decades” ends in a grave, slow grandeur. Five of nine tracks rise, and they hold more than half the running time. “Isolation”, “Colony” and “A Means to an End” are urgent rather than elevated.
Arcade Fire · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Elevation comes often, and nearly all of it is one kind: the warm transport of a crowd singing. Tunnels climbs from a near-silent opening to a shouted close; Power Out drives a bright figure into frenzy. Wake Up is the summit, a wordless chant sung by every voice in the room over a slow, heavy beat, which then breaks into a quick shuffle, the height turned into a run. Rebellion (Lies) rises on a pulse that never lets go. In the Backseat ends the record on a swelling string coda under Régine Chassagne’s voice, the one height that is grief rather than release. Seven of ten tracks rise. The limit is temperature: the heights are mostly of one warmth, and at the crest the strain in the voices sometimes stands in for height.
Radiohead · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Height and frequency are both high, and the heights are of beauty and release, which count as fully as terror. Weird Fishes/Arpeggi circles for minutes and then tips forward into its descent, the voice falling to “hit the bottom” and escaping. All I Need builds from a bass pulse to a crash in which piano, cymbals and strings break together. Nude rises on falsetto over the bass; the bridge of Reckoner, where the strings enter, is among the purest moments on the record; Videotape rises by withholding, grave and plain. House of Cards sustains a haze that makes a sixth. 15 Step, Bodysnatchers, Faust Arp and Jigsaw Falling into Place stay level, and hold it off the top.
Hart Crane · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Height and frequency both, and here they are among the highest in American verse. The Proem rises in nearly every quatrain, “O harp and altar, of the fury fused”, to the prayer that the bridge “of the curveship lend a myth to God”. Ave Maria gives Columbus on the homeward sea, the Atlantic rising round a man who carries the news of a world. The Dance is a sustained transport, a burning at the stake told from inside a vision: “I could not pick the arrows from my side”. The Tunnel is the dreadful counterpart, an elevation of terror. Atlantis holds the summit for eight octaves. The slack songs and the bombast of parts of Cape Hatteras pull the frequency down; but no long American poem of its century rises so often or so far.
Talk Talk · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Elevation is the record’s chief good, and it comes on every track. The Rainbow climbs out of silence to a harmonica and a guitar that breaks in like weather. Eden swells into a full-band surge after long withholding. Desire is the dreadful sublime: quiet for minutes, then a burst of distortion and drums closer to terror than to rock. I Believe in You reaches the record’s height when the choir enters behind the voice, grief and hope at once. Wealth is quiet transport on organ to the end. The heights are the higher for the silence around them. Inheritance rises least, and the long approaches leave some minutes on every side waiting rather than rising; that holds it a tenth from the top.
Hasegawa Tōhaku · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Elevation is constant across both screens and of one cold kind, the sublime of withdrawal. The near pines at the right stand dark and wet, their needles struck in fast diagonal strokes; behind them other trees go grey and then nearly vanish, and the eye goes into the mist and does not come back with anything. In the left screen the faint peak, given only by the white of the paper and a breath of wash, raises the whole field into height and distance. The emptiness between groves is not rest between summits: there the elevation is greatest, since there the mind supplies a forest the brush did not. It recurs at every grove. What holds it a step below The Starry Night (9.2) is range: one register, hush and awe, with no terror and no warmth.
Hellenistic · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
The figure stands at the instant of landing: the right foot down, the left leg still trailing, the torso pitched into a wind off the sea, the wings swept back and lifted. The chiton over the belly, thin as wet cloth, is beauty; the mass of wing and stride, seen from below, is grandeur. In a statue frequency is the number of views from which it rises, and here that is nearly all: from the front left, the whole diagonal; from the side, the depth of the stride; close to, the cloth. Held below the top for one register, with no terror and no tenderness, and because the ruin’s drama, the plaster wing and the staging of the stair are credited to no one.
Plato · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Elevation of more than one kind, and repeated. The ascent (210a to 212a) is among the highest passages of Greek prose: the lover turned toward “to polu pelagos tou kalou”
“the great sea of the beautiful” (210d), and then, “exaiphnēs”
“suddenly” (210e), the sight of a beauty that neither comes to be nor passes away. Aristophanes rises from farce to pathos when Hephaestus offers to weld the lovers into one and neither would refuse (192d to e). Alcibiades gives Socrates standing in thought through a day and a night at Potidaea and praying to the sun at dawn (220c to d), and walking calmly in the retreat from Delium. Frequency holds it at 9.0: Phaedrus, Pausanias and Eryximachus are witty, learned and level, and the first third does not rise.
Raphael · Visual art
9.1 · Tier V
The elevation is architectural and serene, reached in a few places: the coffered vaults running back over the crowd to an arch that opens on sky; the two central figures stepping forward out of that light; the marble gods calm in their niches above the talk; the whole, read at once from the door. There is no terror, and no second summit of the kind a vault holds bay by bay. The register is one register, grandeur held in measure. Below the steps the passages are humane rather than high: the cynic and the geometer’s pupils move the viewer to recognition, not transport. Frequency is limited by the form, one image in one hour, and height by a temperament that refuses the overwhelming.
William Faulkner · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Elevation is frequent and dreadful. Sutpen fights his slaves naked in the stable while Judith watches from the loft and Henry vomits. Rosa is stopped on the stairs by Clytie’s hand after the shot. Bon writes to Judith in stove polish on paper looted from a ruined house. On the Haitian estate under siege, Sutpen walks out into the dark to put down the revolt. Wash Jones stands with the scythe at the fishing camp. In 1909 a wasted man in a bed says he has come home “To die”, and in December the house burns, with Jim Bond howling in the ruins. Held below the higher reaches because the voice is pitched at elevation almost throughout, and a pitch sustained for nine chapters flattens its own heights: at times the reader is exhausted before the summit rather than lifted to it.
James Joyce · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Height reaches the ceiling often. The close of I.8, where the washerwomen go deaf in the dusk: “Can’t hear with the waters of. The chittering waters of.” Nuvoletta at the end of the Mookse and the Gripes: “She climbed over the bannistars; she gave a childy cloudy cry: Nuée! Nuée! A lightdress fluttered. She was gone.” (I.6). The children’s prayer that ends II.1; the dawn call of IV; Anna Livia’s last pages, “My leaves have drifted from me. All. But one clings still.” (IV). Held below the top by frequency: II.2, II.3 and III.3 run for tens of thousands of words of comic density where the voice seldom lifts.
Francisco Goya · Visual art
9.0 · Tier V
The elevation is dreadful, and at its height it is as high as anything in painting. Its centres: the man in white, eyes wide, arms flung up into the lantern’s light; the muzzles almost at his chest, the gap the measure of the moment; the dead man in the foreground, face down in his blood, arms spread like the living man’s; the men in the file with their hands over their eyes. Frequency holds it down. A single canvas cannot rise and rise again as a vault or a symphony can: its elevation is one moment, seen at once, gathered at the left of centre, while the hill, the sky and the back of the file are dark and flat by design.
Leo Tolstoy · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
The height is at the ceiling in the last chapters. Three days of screaming, which began as “Не хочу!”, I won’t, and held on the vowel; the black sack he is being thrust into and cannot get through; the sense, as in a railway carriage, of going backward while he believes he goes forward. Then the turn: “Кончена смерть”, death is finished, and in place of death there was light. Elevation comes before that: Gerasim holding his master’s legs on his shoulders, the prunes of childhood in chapter IX, the cry to God. Frequency is held down by design: the first three chapters stay at ground level, in comedy and satire, because the life they record has no height in it.
Lucretius · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Height is plainly summit: the hymn to Venus, with Mars lying in her lap; Epicurus going in mind beyond “flammantia moenia mundi”, the flaming walls of the world (1.73); Iphigenia at the altar; the cow searching the fields for her calf, killed at the shrine; the spear thrown at the supposed edge of the universe, which flies on; Nature’s rebuke to the man who will not die; the plague of Athens. It is chiefly the sublime of scale and terror, a mind looking into the void without flinching, and it is reached book after book, in every proem and close and at the great similes. Held at 9.0 because it is not continuous: between the heights run long stretches of patient proof.
Charles Dickens · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Height is reached often and in several keys, and the best of it is earned by the matter. The comic and the cosmic together: “Fog everywhere. Fog up the river” (chapter 1), and a city sunk in a primeval mud where “it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill”. The dreadful: Krook’s end, “Spontaneous Combustion, and none other of all the deaths that can be died” (chapter 32). The raised voice over Jo’s death (chapter 47), earned by forty chapters of a boy moved on. The flight through the snow to the gate of the paupers’ burial ground; Sir Leicester struck down and forgiving his wife. Held at the foot of the summit by the sentiment: Esther’s raptures, and tears the rhetoric asks for.
Chola, under Rajaraja I · Architecture
9.0 · Tier V
Height near the top, frequency good rather than constant. Over a flat delta the tower’s grandeur is renewed at each stage of the approach: across the town; framed in the outer gateway; framed again, larger, in the inner; then whole across the court, the granite turning from grey to gold with the hour. The colossal doorkeepers give the god’s scale before the god is seen. Grandeur meets terror in the sanctum, where the linga stands in darkness under a mass of stone the visitor cannot see. What holds it is that the elevation is one idea, the mountain, met many times; the halls are ordinary, and the painted passages are closed to most who come.
Valmiki · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Height recurs in many keys, and the poem’s mode, karuṇā, is founded at the start: the krauñca’s mate crying over the dead bird, and grief made into metre. Then Daśaratha’s death, remembering the ascetic boy he shot by a river at night; Sītā’s insistence on going to the forest; the golden deer and the cry in Rāma’s voice; Jaṭāyu’s fight in the air; Rāma’s laments in the monsoon and the autumn, where nature becomes the measure of absence; Hanumān’s leap; his first sight of Sītā in the aśoka grove; the burning of Laṅkā; the death of Rāvaṇa; the fire; Sītā entering the earth. Flat stretches of catalogue and repeated battle space the heights and hold the figure at 9.0.
Jalal al-Din Rumi · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The heights are very great, and they come in every book. The Song of the Reed sets one at the threshold. In Book III the soul dies from the mineral into the growing thing and climbs through animal, man and angel to what imagination cannot enter; Daquqi sees seven candles become one, then seven trees, then seven men at prayer. A lover walks back to Bukhara, the city that will kill him. In Book V there is Ayaz in his chamber with his sheepskin and his shoes, and a peacock tears out the feathers that are its danger. But the poem is long and level for much of its length, in exposition, gloss and homily, and many readers know its peaks from anthologies rather than from the books. These are peaks over plains, not a height sustained: frequency holds it here.
Anonymous · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The heights, where they come, are of the first order and of every kind. The dreadful: Enkidu’s dream of the house of dust, where the dead are clothed like birds in feathers, eat clay and sit in darkness, with crowned kings among them stripped of their crowns. The grief: Gilgamesh calling on the forest paths, the rivers and the beasts to mourn, veiling his friend like a bride and pacing like a lioness robbed of her cubs. The uncanny: the twelve double-hours under Mount Mashu, counted one by one in total darkness until light breaks on a garden of jewelled trees. The cosmic: the Flood, the gods cowering like dogs, the goddess crying out like a woman in labour, all mankind turned to clay, Uta-napishti weeping as he opens the hatch, and then the gods gathering like flies over the offering. The bitter: the snake that takes the plant and sheds its skin as it goes. What holds the figure there is frequency. The heights are separated by long plains of formula and by breaks in the clay: the preparation and the road to the forest rise little, the episode of Ishtar is satire, and much of the forest itself is lost, so that its grandeur is known only in parts.
William Shakespeare · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The play rises often and in more than one register. The storm of 1.1 is terror in prose, a ship splitting and the court useless on deck. “Full fathom five thy father lies” (1.2) is the beauty of death transfigured into “something rich and strange”. Caliban’s “Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises” (3.2), ending “I cried to dream again”, is the highest lyric in the play, given to the monster. Ariel as a harpy in 3.3 is dread. Then come the two summits: “We are such stuff / As dreams are made on” (4.1) and the abjuration of 5.1. The flats are 2.1 and stretches of the clowning. Height is near the top; frequency is high but not constant.
Jorge Luis Borges · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Height is frequent and mostly cold: the sublime of vertigo and of the infinite. The vision in the cellar of “El Aleph”, a single sequence of sentences that passes from the teeming sea to Beatriz’s obscene letters and the narrator’s own viscera, and ends on the inconceivable universe. The City of the Immortals, a palace of senseless stairs and inverted doors, built by the mad. Tzinacán reading the god’s sentence on the jaguar’s skin, and the Wheel in which all causes are visible, and then declining to speak it. Asterión waiting gladly for his redeemer. Cruz’s recognition at night in the grass. Warm height is rarer: the end of “Historia del guerrero y de la cautiva”, the barbarian who crosses into Ravenna. Held off the top because several of the later pieces, “La espera” and “El hombre en el umbral”, rise only at the turn, and the comic frame of “El Aleph” is meant to cool the heat it gives.
Umayyad, under Abd al-Malik · Architecture
8.9 · Tier IV
Elevation is beauty and splendour, rising at its height to awe. It comes from afar, in the gilded dome over the octagon on its raised platform, the image by which the city is known from the Mount of Olives. It comes at the threshold, from the glare of the platform into a dim interior where gold mosaic and marble take the light from the drum’s windows. It comes at the centre, where the rough rock lies under the dome, the most precious surfaces in the building set round the least made thing in it. It comes often: the dome holds every view of the city, and the interior is one field of glittering surface. Held from the top because the register is one, splendour, and seldom terror.
William Faulkner · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Height is reached often and in more than one register. The dreadful: the night at the Burden house; McEachern struck down at the dance; the kitchen of Hightower’s house, where Christmas is castrated and the blood rushes from him “like the rush of sparks from a rising rocket”, and he rises into the men’s memories for good. The still: Lena’s first chapter, the wagon on the road and her patience; Christmas’s week in hiding, when he loses count of the days and walks among the Black cabins as if into the depth he has fled. The visionary: Hightower at his window as a wheel of faces turns and the cavalry passes at dusk. Held a step below the top because the visionary passages are sometimes rhetorical, and the height of chapter 20 is reached by insistence as much as by event.
J. R. R. Tolkien · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Height is reached often, in every book after the first, cold and warm. The terror: the Black Riders on the road, the Balrog on the bridge and “Fly, you fools!”, the Dead Marshes, Shelob, the Nazgûl over the Pelennor. The grandeur: a cock crowing at the broken gate of Minas Tirith, and the horns behind it, “Rohan had come at last” (Book V); Éowyn unhelmed before the Witch-king; the elegy of Rohan. The quiet heights: Lothlórien; Sam in Mordor seeing a star; the last walk to the Havens and a homecoming whose plainness is the height. Held below the top because the first book rises seldom, and the high style of Gondor sometimes reaches for an elevation the scene has not earned.
Anonymous · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Height is frequent and comes in every key. The dreadful: Kiyomori’s death in Book 6, his fever so great that water poured on him turns to steam, his last wish that Yoritomo’s head be hung before his grave. The heroic: Nasu no Yoichi’s arrow through the fan on the boat at Yashima, both armies watching. The tragic: Kiso Yoshinaka’s last ride with Imai Kanehira at Awazu, the horse sunk in a frozen paddy; Tomomori at Dan-no-ura going into the sea weighted with armour. The highest: Lady Nii taking the child emperor in her arms and telling him that beneath the waves too there is a capital, and the sea taking them. Then the stilled height of Ōhara. Held off the top by the flats between, the temple disputes and court procedure of the early books.
Arthur Rimbaud · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Height is reached often, and in more than one key. The dreadful: “Nuit de l’enfer”, a mind in the fire, with its hallucinations and its broken cries to God and to Satan. The lyric: the songs of “Alchimie du verbe”, eternity found again, and “Ô saisons, ô châteaux”. The dawning: “Matin”, with its Christmas on earth, and the close of “Adieu”, where at dawn, armed with an ardent patience, they will enter the splendid cities. The first sentence of the prologue, a life that was a feast where all the wines flowed, is a summit in its first line. Held a step from the top because the elevation is broken by design into sarcasm and stammer, and parts of “Mauvais sang” and “L’Impossible” run on argument rather than height.
Louis Le Vau, Jules Hardouin-Mansart and André Le Nôtre · Architecture
8.9 · Tier IV
Height and frequency both. The first elevation is at the head of the garden steps, where the axis falls away over Latona and the Tapis Vert to Apollo and the canal and runs on to the sky; it recurs at every return to the terrace and changes with the light on the water. The second is the Hall of Mirrors, garden light entering on one side and thrown back from the other. The third is the chapel: white stone, a Corinthian colonnade at the level of the king’s tribune, Coypel’s painted vault. The fountains in play and the Orangerie’s vaulted gallery add to these. Held at 9.0: the register is magnificence, which tires, and the long façades and gilded rooms flatten as often as they lift.
Rogier van der Weyden · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Elevation is high and frequent, and its register is dread held in stillness. It recurs across the whole width of the frieze: the Virgin’s face, grey and slack, with clear tears running from her eyes; the Magdalene’s locked hands and turned body at the right edge, the most contorted figure in the panel; the pale dead weight of Christ, whose hanging arm comes down toward the Virgin’s hand without touching it; the tears on the old faces, each painted as a separate bead of light. The gold ground and the box give the scene the stillness of a carved altar, and the stillness makes the weeping louder. Held below the ceiling by its single key: there is no transport out of grief, and no light breaks in.
Raphael · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
The elevation is high, of two kinds, and it recurs. Above: Christ floating free of the ground, arms opened, garments blown white into the light, the prophets drawn up toward him as by one wind, the radiance making a sphere of the cloud. This is transport, and the classical altarpiece rarely reaches it so completely. Below: terror and agitation, the boy’s convulsion, the father’s strain, hands thrown out across the dark. The sublime is in their contact, the glory above a tumult it does not yet touch, and the light and the dark recur across the field. Held at 9.0, below The Starry Night at 9.2: the lower zone is in places theatrical rather than awful, and its darkened shadows take some height from it.
Toni Morrison · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The heights come often, warm and dreadful. Baby Suggs’s sermon in the Clearing, “Here, in this here place, we flesh”, with its command to love the flesh because “yonder they do not love your flesh”. Sethe’s flight, pregnant, her feet ruined, and Denver’s birth in a boat with Amy Denver, a white runaway girl, who calls the scarred back a “chokecherry tree”. Paul D with the bit in his mouth, envying the rooster Mister. The shed, told first by the men who came to take her back. The unpunctuated voice from the ship. The thirty women at the gate, and their sound. Paul D’s last words to Sethe, “You your best thing”. Held a step below the highest because some of the lyric peaks are reached by insistence, and the middle of the first part moves on the level for long stretches.
Francis Ford Coppola · Film
8.9 · Tier IV
The elevation is cold, and it recurs. The boy on deck seeing the Statue of Liberty, then alone in quarantine looking out at it. Vito on the rooftops above the festa procession, and the killing in the stairwell. Havana’s New Year, the kiss, and “I know it was you, Fredo. You broke my heart. You broke my heart.” Fredo on the lake with his Hail Mary, and the single shot heard from the boathouse. The 1941 table emptying round Michael. Held from the top: the hearings and the Roth negotiations are long procedure with no lift, and the register seldom leaves the grave. The height is real and narrow in kind.
Sappho · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Height is reached often for so small a remnant. Fragment 31 is the passage the treatise On the Sublime chose to illustrate sublimity in the choice and joining of particulars (chapter 10). Fragment 2 opens a precinct of apple boughs and roses where trance comes down from the shaking leaves. In fragment 96 the absent friend outshines the women of Lydia as the “brododaktylos selanna”
“rosy-fingered moon” outshines the stars, and the simile spreads into dew, roses and flowering clover. Eros shakes the mind like a wind falling on mountain oaks; the apple reddens “akron ep’ akrotatōi”
“high on the highest”. The dreadful too: “tethnakēn d’ adolōs thelō”
“I honestly wish to be dead”. Held below the top for frequency across a body that is largely scraps.
Anonymous · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The poem rises often, from different directions. Terror: Grendel’s approach in three movements, Com on wanre niht / scriðan sceadugenga, there came in the dark night the shadow-walker, the line tightening each time. Dread of place: Hrothgar’s mere, where fire burns on the water at night and the hunted hart would rather die on the bank than enter. Grandeur: the giant sword in the cavern, and the light that flares when Grendel’s mother falls. Elegy, its highest register: the Last Survivor giving the treasure to the earth, the old father whose son hangs on the gallows, the pyre and the closing praise. The frequency is high, and the height is the summit of its tradition’s verse; the highest elevation lies above it.
Umayyad, under Abd al-Rahman I · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Elevation here is of two kinds, and both recur. The first is the field: the diagonal view across the aisles, where the columns fall into ranks and out of them as one moves, a sublime of number and succession with no end in view; and down any aisle the doubled arches in red and white, one rhythm laid over another. The second is gathered in al-Hakam II’s bays: the Villaviciosa dome, its lobed arches interlaced below and ribs crossing above; the screens and domes of the maqsura; the mihrab arch, gold round a horseshoe opening into a lit room. Held below the top because the hall is low for its extent and its register constant rather than rising, and because the walled arcades darken the field and the cathedral at its centre breaks its succession.
Kenji Mizoguchi · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent and reaches the top. The crossing of Lake Biwa: the boat sliding out of mist, Ohama singing at the pole, a drifting boat with a dying man in it who warns of pirates, among the most transporting passages in the cinema. Wakasa’s song, and her dead father’s voice sounding from the armour. The bath and the picnic by the water, joined by a pan across the landscape that carries the lovers out of time. Miyagi struck down on the road, her child crying on her back. The homecoming, where the dead wife is made present in one movement and is gone by morning. The final crane rising from the grave to the fields. Held from the very top by Tōbei’s strand, which runs level and broad between these heights.
Andrei Tarkovsky · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Height is reached often for so slow a film. The crossing: three heads in profile on the trolley, the wheels growing into music, until the screen turns to colour and the grass is silent. The dream: the camera over shallow water in which lie a syringe, coins, a painted icon, a gun and a calendar leaf, while a woman’s voice reads from the Revelation. The threshold, rain falling into the Room and stopping. The ending: the glasses moving under Monkey’s gaze, a train passing and the Ode to Joy heard through its noise. Held below the top because the elevation is mostly of one temperature, still and grave, and the bickering of the first part keeps it level.
Dionysus Flambouras · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent, cold and warm, and mostly compressive. A woman corrected into a forty-eight-inch square of sidewalk; a mother dragging something by the ear out of her son’s room; the last sentence a boy ever spoke going past five friends on a field lit by procedure; the graves of two cats under a flood, What the water took was the fact of where they were; a corridor spending its alphabet; a building unwinding, its glass landing whole; a receiving officer emptied of himself in the order a file closes; the Nail drawn out of a desk and falling into an open hand as a three-inch nail. The interludes rise without any raised voice, a girl of twelve buying a sweater she could afford and a home she could not. Held a tenth lower than before because the method spends long stretches flat by design, the night-register’s inventories and the fourth volume’s apparatus between the heights.
The Velvet Underground · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Height comes on seven of eleven tracks, and twice it is sustained for six minutes or more, which the short form of 1967 rarely allowed. “Heroin” is transport proper: the accelerations carry the listener into the rush, and the viola’s scream at the peak is terror and ecstasy at once. “Venus in Furs” reaches a ritual dread over the drone, “All Tomorrow’s Parties” a cold grandeur by repetition, “The Black Angel’s Death Song” a shriek, and “European Son” the sublime of noise for those who stay inside it. The beauties are fewer and real: the celesta of “Sunday Morning”, the tenderness of “I’ll Be Your Mirror”. Four cool, driven or level tracks hold it from the top.
El Greco · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent, and of two kinds. Below, it rises in gold: the dalmatics of the two saints, painted with scenes, against the black of the frieze; the count’s armour, dark and holding reflections; the line of white ruffs, one band of light across the canvas. Above, it is transport: the cloud parting like a channel, the angel pressing the pale soul through it, the drawn-out bodies of the blessed rising toward a Christ in white at the apex. The meeting of the two, the priest’s lifted face and the angel’s ascent directly above the body, is the summit, prepared and answered across the whole height. Held below the top because the upper crowd is at its margins more agitated than elevated, and the frieze, magnificent as a band, is one held note.
Kalidasa · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent and high, nearly all of it beauty and tender pathos. The first act opens with the hunted deer looking back over its shoulder at the chariot, and turns to Shakuntala in her bark dress, of whom the king says “kim iva hi madhurāṇāṃ maṇḍanaṃ nākṛtīnām”
“what is not an ornament to lovely forms?”. The fourth act is the summit the tradition itself named: Kaṇva’s “yāsyaty adya śakuntaleti”
“Shakuntala goes today”, the trees giving her ornaments, the cuckoo’s call taken as the forest’s leave, the fawn she reared holding her hem. The fifth rises to the king’s unexplained longing and to Shakuntala’s anger; the seventh to the descent from Indra’s heaven and the boy dragging a lion cub by its mane. Held below the top: there is little dread, and the elevation thins in the second act and in the jester’s business.
Jean d'Orbais, Jean le Loup, Gaucher de Reims and Bernard de Soissons · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Height and frequency together. The nave, its vault about 38 metres high, rises long and steep without the darkness of Chartres. The inner west wall, faced with figures in niches and opened by the rose and the glazed portals, is the façade seen from inside as a wall of light and people, one of the great interior moments of Gothic. Outside, elevation returns at every approach: the west front at evening, the angels on the buttresses against the sky, the chevet from the east. The cost is the glass. Most of the medieval glass is lost, the nave stands in a paler light than its makers intended, and the interior rises by proportion and stone more than by colour.
Sergei Eisenstein · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
The elevation is high and grows act by act. The quiet heights come first: fog over Odessa harbour at dawn, masts and sails in grey, mourning the dead sailor before a single mourner appears; the candle in the tent on the pier. Then the dreadful heights of the steps, which are the summit: the mother walking up toward the rifles with her dead son in her arms, the woman in pince-nez shot through the eye, the pram tipping down. Then the three stone lions, sleeping, waking and rising, as the ship’s guns answer; and in the last act the engines and the cry of brotherhood carried across the squadron. Frequency holds the figure where it stands: the first act rises only through anger, and the summits gather in the second half of the film.
Nirvana · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Elevation comes on half the record, and at its height it is among the great arrivals in recorded rock. In the first chorus of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” the thin, chorused guitar of the verse gives way to the full band, and the record is built for that moment. “Lithium” lifts from a quiet verse into a chorus half hymn and half scream. “Drain You” opens into a noise breakdown that reaches the sublime of terror, “On a Plain” rises by melody and harmony, and “Something in the Way” reaches a bleak stillness. Held from the top: the releases come by one method, which by the second side is known and lifts less.
Ming, under the Yongle Emperor · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
The elevation is grandeur in calm, and it rises more than once. The Circular Mound is the strongest: three white rings open to the sky with nothing above them, the sky made the roof, and at the centre the stone where a voice comes back. The Vault is intimate, a small round temple inside its curved wall. The raised way gives the long rising walk between them, lifted to the height of the cypress, toward the blue hall. The hall itself, three blue roofs climbing on a white terrace, is among the most perfect silhouettes in architecture; inside, red and gold columns rise to a coffered dome. What holds it: the register is one, solemn and serene, without terror, and the interiors are few; the elevation lives chiefly in the open.
Benjamin Britten · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Height is reached often, in both registers. The sublime of dread: the fanfares of the Dies irae, and the climax of the Libera me, where a slow march gathers the whole orchestra and breaks off into the chamber group and the tenor’s first words in hell. The sublime of stillness: the bells under “Requiem aeternam”; the soprano’s Lacrimosa above “Futility”; the soprano over tuned percussion at the head of the Sanctus; the tenor’s “Dona nobis pacem”; and the close, where the soldiers’ lullaby and In paradisum sound together. Every movement rises at least once. Held off the ceiling because some stretches are rhetorical rather than elevated: the choral writing of the Dies irae repeats its gestures, and the fugue’s outer statements are bright where they need to be terrible.
Anonymous · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Height is high and the summits recur, inside and out: the nave from the west door, the incised cylinders marching in pairs toward the crossing under zigzagged ribs and pointed arches; the crossing under the lantern of the central tower; the Nine Altars, its floor sunk to give height, its shafts of dark marble and its rose window; the Galilee, five aisles of slender shafts under chevron arches, light in place of mass; and the church seen from the riverbanks, above the trees and the gorge, placed on the rock to be seen. The register of the Romanesque church is grandeur through mass, not transport. It does not dissolve the wall as the Gothic does, and the axis is held there.
Béla Bartók · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Height is reached three times. The fugue’s climax, the strings unmuted on E flat at the far point of the fan, is the sublime of something long contained breaking open, and the collapse after it, the subject inverted and drawing back toward A, is as strong. The Adagio is the sublime of dread: the xylophone’s repeated F sharp quickening and slowing, timpani glissandi beneath it, the strings’ slow line in the dark. It is among the most frightening pages in orchestral music. The finale’s broadening of the fugue subject, now diatonic, is transport. Held below the top on frequency: the second movement is energy and wit rather than elevation, and much of the finale is exhilaration.
Johannes Brahms · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Height is reached, and it recurs. The first movement’s coda drives its theme into canon and a stamping close, grandeur of force. The Andante’s horn call, on E without harmony, is beauty from an older world, and its long theme in the cellos is the warmest page in the work. The finale reaches height again and again: the trombones’ first entry, with the chords of the ground, after three movements of silence; the flute alone at half the pace, a lament over the ground; the trombone chorale in E major; the return of the ground at full force; the coda’s drive to the last chords. Held below the top on frequency: the Allegro giocoso rises by energy and wit, not elevation.
Sultan Muhammad · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Elevation of the radiant kind, recurring across the whole field rather than arriving once. The gold sky above the mountain; the mountain itself, a heaped and glowing mass of coloured stone in pinks, blues, greens and mauves; the king in the light at its top, set apart and still within the press; the courtiers’ faces, each its own, ranged around him; the stream and flowering trees below; and wherever the eye stays, another small world opening in the rock or the grass. It is transport by plenitude, a painting that cannot be exhausted at one sitting, and it holds its height from the whole page down to the brushstroke. Held below the top by register: a luminous wonder without dread or grandeur of size, and the coming div is outside the frame.
Krzysztof Kieślowski · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent in Blue and Red, rarer in White. The fades to black in Blue, each with the concerto’s brass breaking in, stop time as grief does. Julie folds under the water of the night pool as the music returns. The bitten blue lollipop is the one moment the dead child is touched. The last sequence of Blue passes over the faces to Julie’s tears behind glass. Karol laughs on the snow of the tip and weeps beneath the prison window. In Red, the judge confesses in an empty theatre in a storm. The height is warm, tending to the lyrical, and it is reached in all three registers, grief, farce and romance, across the whole of the trilogy. What holds it at the figure: White rises twice, the middle of Red is level by design, and the music sometimes supplies a height the image would earn alone.
Francisco Goya · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The elevation is terror, the sublime’s oldest register, at the highest pitch the medium reaches, and it rises in more than one place: the eyes, first and last seen; the mouth, open to the shoulder and dark with blood; the red of the stump, the only warm colour of any force against grey flesh and black; the fingers sunk into the pale back; the giant against the small body, so that dread comes from proportion as well as act. The register never changes. It is one instant at one temperature, with no relief and no second key, and at about 1.4 metres the size is a room’s, not a vault’s. Against works that rise again and again across a field or a cycle, it scores a step lower.
Ingmar Bergman · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
The elevation is stark, and it rises often for so short a film: Death standing on the shore where a moment before there was no one; the confessor turning at the grille to show the white face; the flagellants breaking the players’ song; the strawberries and the knight’s face at rest; the tree sawn down in the dark, comic until it is not; the girl’s face at the burning; Death at the castle door; the dead led over the hill in silhouette against a pale sky. The rises run from the first frame to the last, and the last image is among the most widely known in cinema, and earns it. Held from the top because the comic stretches are flat by design and the studio forest at night is plainly a set.
Rainer Maria Rilke · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Elevation is the sequence’s native register, and it rises often. The first lines are among the great openings in German verse: “Da stieg ein Baum. O reine Übersteigung! / O Orpheus singt! O hoher Baum im Ohr!” (I.1). Then I.3, where true singing is a breath about nothing; the dread of the god torn by the Maenads in I.26; the breath as “unsichtbares Gedicht” (“invisible poem”, II.1); the unicorn of II.4, made real by being loved; and the close of II.29. Held at 9.0 and not higher because in some of the lesser sonnets the height is sustained by exclamation, and because the frequency thins in the middle of Part II.
Sylvia Plath · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Height is reached often, and in several kinds. The ride of “Ariel” goes from “Stasis in darkness” into a run in which the speaker becomes “the arrow, / The dew that flies / Suicidal”, and on into “the red / Eye, the cauldron of morning”: one of the great transports in the century’s verse. “The Moon and the Yew Tree” gives the cold, planetary sublime: “This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary”. “Edge” gives a dreadful stillness, its moon “Staring from her hood of bone”. “Lady Lazarus” rises at its close: “Out of the ash / I rise with my red hair / And I eat men like air”. The charge: a register of extremity held this constantly flattens in places, and some poems strain for the shock image.
Andrei Tarkovsky · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent and comes in every kind. The ceiling is reached three times: the prologue’s flight, the earth falling away under a hide balloon; the bell raised from its pit and struck before a crowd, a prince and a foreign embassy; and the camera passing over the cracked surfaces of the icons in colour after three hours of grey. The dreadful comes in the raid, a horse falling from a stair, Patrikey’s torture; the quiet in a Calvary in snow and torches on a river at night. Held off the top because the Theophanes episode and stretches of the famine are flat, and the grimness sometimes lowers the eye instead of raising it.
Gustave Eiffel · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Height is very high and frequency high. Elevation comes from below, standing between the legs and looking up the converging lattice into the sky, the most overwhelming of its views; from across the river at the Trocadéro, the whole figure rising on the axis; in the ascent, the lift climbing the curve of a leg while the lattice falls away past the glass; from the top, Paris spread to its edges; and at night, lit, a figure over the city. The register is wonder and lightness, with dread at the edges for anyone who fears height. Held off the top because the elevation is of one kind, height and lightness, repeated; the stages, with their queues, shops and restaurants, bring it down; and the body meets a structure one rides and looks from, not a space one inhabits.
Antoni Gaudí · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Height is very high and frequency high. Elevation comes in the interior at the end of the day, when the glass on the setting side throws reds and oranges down the columns and the blues and greens of the other side darken; in the canopy of the vaults seen from the crossing, a forest held at a great height; in the Nativity’s portal of Charity, crowded upward to the cypress of the Tree of Life and its white doves; in the towers on the skyline across the Eixample, pierced and ending in their mosaic finials; and in the low dark of the crypt beneath. The register is joyful and dense, rising to awe. What holds it below the top: the Passion’s stark figures, and an exterior seen through cranes, rising in parts where the interior rises whole.
William of Sens and William the Englishman; nave by Henry Yevele · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Height and frequency are both high. The nave is one of the great Perpendicular interiors: tall, slender piers run without a break into a lierne vault, and the walls read as lines of rising stone. From the west end the view climbs: the nave, the steps and the screen, the choir above them, and beyond it the Trinity Chapel higher still. The crypt gives the opposite register, low, broad and dim. Under Bell Harry the fan vault opens overhead, and round the Trinity Chapel glass of about 1200 sets deep blues and reds about the empty place of the shrine. Grandeur, darkness and light come in many spaces and are renewed along the whole route. A step below the single radiance of Sainte-Chapelle (8.8) in purity; above it in frequency.
Franz Liszt · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Height is reached, and it returns. The opening is the sublime of the void: scales falling into silence over a repeated low note. The Grandioso is grandeur of the plainest kind, a chorale at full force. The Andante sostenuto in F sharp major rises by beauty and is the quietest height in the work. The fugato’s return to the fortissimo octaves, and the Grandioso recapitulated in B major, are the sublime of force. The close goes deepest: the slow theme softly, the falling scales once more, a B major chord over a low B, where thunder was expected. Held below the top on frequency: the octave passages and the stretta are brilliance, and some listeners hear bombast in them, not elevation.
Venetian builders · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Elevation is high and it recurs. It comes at the threshold, from the low, dim narthex under the Creation cupola into the church; in the gold ground of domes and vaults, which changes with every hour’s light and every candle, so that the walls seem to dissolve; in the wave of the pavement underfoot; in the screen of the iconostasis and the Pala d’Oro beyond it. Outside, five lead domes over gold and coloured marble make the eastern wall of the Piazza. The register is wide, dim and dazzling, intimate and vast. Held from the top because the gloom that is the condition of the gold also flattens long stretches of it, and the exterior rises by richness more than by grandeur.
Federico García Lorca · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Height and frequency are both high. Nearly every poem has its moment of terror or transport: the moon at the forge, “La luna vino a la fragua / con su polisón de nardos”
(The moon came to the forge / in her bustle of spikenard); the girl rocking on the face of the cistern, held up on the water by “un carámbano de luna”
(an icicle of moon); the black horses and black horseshoes of the civil guard; the “piquetas de los gallos”
(the cocks’ pickaxes) that dig for the dawn. The elevation is cold more often than warm, and the axis does not mind which. Held at 9.0 and not higher: the height is lyric and lives inside short poems, and in a few of them, the archangels, it is ornament rising rather than the poem rising.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Height is reached, and more than once. The opening call has grandeur, a unison over trumpets and drums. The Andante rises by beauty under muted violins, and its development darkens into the work’s one sustained unease. The finale’s coda is among the highest moments in the classical symphony: five themes combined in fugue, heard as release and not as feat. The frequency is good and the register varied. Held off the top on register: the work is festive and brilliant far more than it is transported or dreadful. The Menuetto is grace, the first movement’s buffa tune is wit, and long stretches of the outer movements are energy and ceremony, which are elevation of a lower kind.
Jørn Utzon · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Height is very high; frequency is high outside and lower within. Elevation comes in the building seen from a ferry crossing in front of the point, the shells turning as the boat moves; in the tile at dusk and in changing weather, taking the colour of the sky; in the climb of the stair, the city behind and the roofs closing overhead; in the northern foyers, where the concrete ribs fan up like the ribs of a vault and the glass opens to the harbour; and from the bridge, where the building is a figure on the point. It is joyful and buoyant, never terrible, and recurs with every approach and every hour. Inside the halls, which are the purpose, the register falls to that of a good auditorium.
Frank Lloyd Wright · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Height is very high, and frequency is high, inside and out. Elevation comes at the entry, compressed under the low band of the ramp, then released into the void and the full height of the spiral to the glass; in looking up from the floor at the bands winding to the light; in looking down from the top of the ramp into the well, a vertigo held within a single shape; in the slow descent, the void always at the shoulder and the light changing with the hour; and outside, in the white bands stacked against the brownstones and apartment blocks of Fifth Avenue, a figure no street had prepared for. The register is exhilaration, buoyant and centripetal, never dreadful. It falls in the bays, where the art is seen close and low, and in the galleries of 1992, which are rooms like any rooms.
Erwin von Steinbach and others; spire by Johannes Hültz · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Elevation comes often and in more than one register. The approach by the narrow Rue Mercière, where the front fills the end of the street and the red stone climbs past what the eye can hold, is one of the great arrivals in European building. The rods make the front shimmer: the wall seen through a cage of stone becomes depth on depth. The spire, an octagonal pyramid of open tracery with stairs climbing its sides, is grandeur made delicate, the rare mode of the sublime. Inside, the breadth of the nave, its band of glass and the coloured gloom of the emperors in the north aisle give a second register; the Angel Pillar a third, intimate and vertical. The low east end and the heavy belfry stage hold it there.
Joseph Haydn · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Height reaches the top of the repertoire at least twice. The first is the light: after the Chaos has made the ear wait without a cadence and the chorus has sung pianissimo, the C major fortissimo on “Licht” is among the most famous elevations in music. The second is the sunrise of no. 12, one rising line in D major and a long crescendo. Frequency is high through Parts I and II: the storm of no. 3, the sea of Rollend in schäumenden Wellen, Die Himmel erzählen building through its trio to the full chorus, Mit Würd’ und Hoheit, the closing fugues. Off the top: the pictorial writing rises to delight by design, and Part III is pastoral beauty in a lower register. Below the Ninth’s 9.7 on height and on the share of time spent elevated.
J. M. W. Turner · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The elevation is the sublime of terror in Burke’s sense, at the top of its kind, and it rises in more than one place: the sun burning through the cloud at the centre, its colour bleeding down the water toward the viewer; the storm closing from the left and above, a wall of dark; the trough of the sea under the ship; and the red light lying on the waves where the bodies are, so that the beauty and the horror are one colour. The register is dreadful and gorgeous at once, which is the picture’s power and its offence. It is held at 9.0 and not above, because at the very place of the deed the fish and the monstrous mouths read as illustration and bring the eye down from the sublime into the grotesque.
The Smiths · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Height comes on six of ten tracks, and the best of it is very high. “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out” is transport: strings and flute lift a death wish into happiness, and the song ends on a repeated phrase that does not resolve. “I Know It’s Over” climbs for nearly six minutes to a held high note. The title track’s fury is also grandeur; “Never Had No One Ever” reaches dread by weight; “The Boy with the Thorn in His Side” rises on wordless falsetto; the faded opening of “Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others” is beauty of texture alone. The other four are jokes, level by design.
Norman builders, under William II · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Elevation is near the top and frequent. Entry from the west puts the whole nave in gold at once, and the light from the clerestory runs over the tesserae so that the walls shift with the hour. The summit is the apse: the Pantokrator in half figure, his arms spanning the conch, scaled so that he dominates the room from its far end, and as one walks the length of the nave he grows rather than shrinks. Below that height the frequency is real: bay after bay of narrative, the ascent through the crossing, the shade of the cloister. Held where it is because the timber roof and plain section lack the structural sublime of a great vault or dome, and the constant gold can flatten toward one tone.
Claude Monet · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Elevation is sustained and recurs wall by wall. The first oval closes round, and there is nowhere left to look that is not water. In Soleil couchant the setting sun burns yellow and orange in the water at the end of the room. In Les Nuages white cloud lies across the dark surface among the lilies, and the eye looks down into the sky. In the second room the willow trunks stand like columns before the water and the light goes green and dark, and in Les Deux Saules two trees open on a breadth of reflected light. It is warm elevation, transport and grandeur of colour, with no terror. Held below the top because the stretches between summits are beauty rather than height, and the darker walls read in places as worked rather than achieved.
Charles Mingus · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Height comes often and in more than one kind. “Solo Dancer” opens at height: a low, swaying chorale, the brass rearing up over it, then the alto bending and wailing at the top of its range, the record’s signature and one of the high moments of recorded jazz. The ballad passages of “Duet Solo Dancers” reach a tender beauty in Jaki Byard’s piano and the soft brass. Side two climbs again and again: the shouting ensemble over Richmond’s accelerations, the sudden quiet of the guitar, the last gathering of the lament. The height is terror and grief as much as beauty, a wider range than most records of its kind hold. Held from the top by the episodes of side two that link rather than rise, and by passages where the ensemble’s density blurs rather than lifts.
John Fowler and Benjamin Baker · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Height and frequency both high. The elevation comes from the shore at Queensferry, where the three towers advance across the water in a rhythm of diamonds; from a boat beneath, where the tubes rise like trunks; from the train, which runs inside the structure, the Firth opening below between the members for two minutes; at dusk and in haar, when the far tower fades and the near one stands out. The register is grandeur shading into dread, a scale set against wind and sea with the memory of the Tay under it: mass, difficulty and power. It recurs from every approach and at every distance. Held below the top because it opens no interior.
Mamluk, under Sultan an-Nasir Hasan · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
The elevation is built into the sequence and renewed in it. From the street the portal rises as a cliff of stone under its muqarnas hood. Inside, the vestibule is dim and domed, the passage turns, and the court opens at once: a square of sky held by four vaults, the qibla iwan one arch of a span few interiors anywhere had reached, its height doubled by the open court before it. It returns at each entry, with each hour of light across the court, and again in the mausoleum, high, dark and marble-lined. The outer mass, sheer stone below the Citadel with the minaret at its corner, is a second summit. Held at 9.0 for its single register.
Sergei Prokofiev · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Height is reached often, and at both ends of the axis. The sublime of terror: the Prince’s chords, and the hammered tutti blows of Tybalt’s death with the procession after it at the close of the second act. Grandeur in dread: the Montagues and Capulets, whose weight is felt as menace. The sublime of beauty: the balcony scene and the Love Dance closing the first act, the love theme climbing in the strings; the farewell before parting; Juliet’s lyrical theme for flute. The sublime of grief: her funeral and her death. Ten or more numbers rise. Held below Otello’s 9.4 because a fifth of the score is charm by design, and because some climaxes are reached by repetition and volume more than by growth.
Mark Rothko · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Elevation is dark and sustained, and it is the room’s whole register. Coming in from Houston daylight, the eye finds almost nothing, and the walls come up out of the dark over the following minutes. The apse triptych, taller than a person, fills the view from the benches. The black forms read as openings: a window onto nothing, a door, a void with a border. The head turns from wall to wall and finds the same dark at every angle, with no exit; a cloud crosses the skylight and the whole room shifts. Height is high. Frequency holds it: this is one sustained state, not recurring summits, and it depends on time, on the light and on the viewer. Many visitors report nothing.
Vladimir Nabokov · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Elevation is high and frequent. The opening sentence is a summit: “The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness”, and the chronophobiac who sees a home film from before his birth, with an empty pram on the porch, makes the terror concrete. The father tossed in the air by grateful peasants, seen through the window at the top of his rise like one of the “paradisiac personages” on a church ceiling, carries in its lines a foreshadowing of his coffin. The butterfly chapter reaches transport, a timelessness among rare butterflies and their food plants, and the ship’s funnel among the trees is a quiet height. It falls in the comic chapters of tutors and Cambridge.
Pink Floyd · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Elevation comes often and in both temperatures. Breathe floats on slide guitar and organ. On the Run is dread without a voice, the sequenced figure racing under footsteps until the crash. Time breaks from its alarms into the guitar solo, the first full rise. The Great Gig in the Sky is the summit: Clare Torry’s wordless voice over Richard Wright’s piano climbs from keening to a cry and falls back, grief and transport in one breath. Us and Them swells from hush to its massed chorus, and Eclipse gathers every line into one crescendo that the heartbeat empties. Money has force, not height; Any Colour You Like drifts; the scream of Speak to Me is a shock, not a summit. Seven of ten tracks rise, the highest as high as the medium reaches.
Franz Schubert · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Height is reached often in the first two movements. The opening hymn over its accompaniment, and then the trill, is among the best known moments of quiet terror in the piano literature; the first movement rises to grandeur by stillness rather than force. The Andante is the summit: the rocking left hand crossing over, the C sharp minor song, the breadth of the middle section in A major, and the close in C sharp major, which is beauty past grief. Held below Op. 131 and Winterreise on frequency and by design: the Scherzo is grace and wit, delicatezza by its own heading, and the finale, for all its energy, rises to brilliance and humour more than transport. Half the work’s time is sublime; the other half is beautiful.
Chandela builders · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Height is high and it recurs. From the ground the temple is a range of peaks, the roofs climbing from the porch to the spire, the clustered replicas carrying the eye up the whole as water runs up a ridge, and the platform sets it against the sky. The steep stair under the carved garland is a second elevation, and the interior a third: the halls darken by steps, the corbelled ceilings close overhead in carved rosettes, light comes sideways from the balconies across pillars and figures, and the sanctum is nearly dark. Held from the top because the interior is small and close: the height is a mass seen, not a space entered.
Pirro Ligorio · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent and of several kinds. The view from the palace terrace down the axis to the valley and the Campagna; the Organ, with the cascade below it falling into the long pools; the Hundred Fountains, a corridor of sound and moss where the water seems to stream along the hill rather than fall; the Oval, its sheet of water curving over a rock and a cave behind it, where one walks behind the falling water. Sound is half the effect, and its register changes as one moves. Each terrace renews the effect rather than spending it on one coup. What holds the figure at 9.0 is its kind: beauty and enchantment, rarely the terror or cosmic grandeur of the Pantheon (9.3).
Terrence Malick · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Elevation is the film’s ordinary condition, reached in both registers. The warm: the wheat moving under wind at sunset; the house alone against the sky; the threshers at dusk, lit from behind; Abby and the farmer on the roof against a darkening sky; the biplanes over the fields. The dreadful: the locusts, a few on a plate and then the whole sky; the fire at night, the farmer walking through it with a lantern while the crop goes up; Bill’s death seen from beneath the river’s surface. The score, set against the Saint-Saëns, holds a grave suspended key, and wind and insects elevate as much as the image. Held from the top because some of the height is beauty that does not change the drama, and repeats its means.
Van Morrison · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Height is frequent, and its kind is transport. The title track rises from guitar and bass into the voice’s first long ascent, and the strings lift it further. “Sweet Thing” is joy at near full height, the voice running ahead of the band. The close of “Cyprus Avenue”, the band slowing, the voice dropping out and returning, is a summit. “Madame George” builds for nearly ten minutes into its repeated farewell, the record’s highest point, and “Ballerina” rises once, late. Seven of eight tracks rise, and full height is reached four times. It is held from the top because the elevation is of one colour, ecstatic longing without terror or grandeur, and because two tracks swing or wander without rising. It stands level with Kind of Blue on frequency, a tenth below on purity.
Dominikus Zimmermann · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Elevation is the building’s whole aim, and it is reached again and again: on entering, where the plain exterior gives way at once to a white and gold room full of light; in the turn of the gaze upward, where the stucco frame lets the fresco open as sky; down the choir, where the colour deepens and galleries and altar rise in tiers toward the figure. The elevation is warm and festal rather than terrible, and it is sustained everywhere in the interior rather than spent on one point. Few interiors keep so constant a lift. What holds it at the summit’s edge is that its register is single, with little of dread or vastness in it, and the room is small.
Balthasar Neumann · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Height is near the top, and it recurs along the route. Elevation comes at the passage from the low vestibule into the stair hall, where the vault opens overhead; in the climb, as the ceiling shows itself in parts, one continent ahead and the others at the turns, the whole only from the upper landing; in the white hall, a cool pause in grey and white; and in the imperial hall, where stucco figures draw back stucco curtains on painted history and the light of the windows meets a painted sky. The Hofkirche gives it again at a smaller scale, in intersecting ovals of gilt and coloured marble. Held at 9.0 by frequency across the whole: the city front is long and even, many apartments are rooms like others, and the register is festive splendour, never dread or vastness.
Reginald Ely, John Wastell and others · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Elevation is the building’s register, and it is sustained. Enter at the west: the vessel rises straight to a vault that runs bay after bay with no transverse break, the fans opening from slender shafts to meet along the crown, the walls between the buttresses given over to coloured glass. Past the screen the choir closes round the stalls under the same vault, the east window over the altar. The building rises again in use, as sung voice in a stone vessel of that height. What holds it below the top: the screen and organ cut the length in two, so the vessel is never read whole from the floor, and the west window and the reordered east end fall below the rest.
Akira Kurosawa · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent and very high, and almost all of it dreadful. The hunt on green hills under moving clouds; the siege of the Third Castle, played with the battle’s own sound removed under Takemitsu’s lament until the shot that kills Taro brings the world’s noise back; the keep burning while Hidetora, white-haired and blank, comes down the steps and walks out through ranks that part for him; the storm on the plain; Kaede’s death, the blood thrown across the wall behind her; Saburo shot from the saddle; Tsurumaru at the edge of the ruined wall. The film rises again and again across its length. Held from the top by what lies between the summits: the scenes at Jiro’s court run flat, and the fool’s shrillness lowers the air.
Ming builders (and earlier dynasties) · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The sublime of magnitude, and frequent. The line seen along the ridges at Jinshanling or Simatai, tower after tower to the horizon, dropping into a saddle and climbing the next peak, is magnitude made physical: the eye cannot take in the end of it and knows that it continues. It recurs on every crest section, in mist and in snow, at Jiankou on knife-edged ridges, at Shanhaiguan where the wall enters the sea; in the west it turns to desolation, a worn earthen line across the Gobi and a fort alone at the corridor’s narrowest point. Terror is in it with the grandeur. Held from the top: much of it is the landscape’s, lent to the line, and the middle reaches are flat.
Joseph Strauss, Charles Ellis, Leon Moisseiff and Irving Morrow · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Height and frequency are both high, and the work holds them inside and out. From the Marin headlands and from the water the towers rise out of fog that pours through the strait under or over the deck, so that the bridge is half shown and half lost; the cables fall in one curve across the whole opening; the colour burns against grey water and green hills and changes through the day. On the deck, on foot, the wind, the drop of some 220 feet to the current, the towers passing overhead as portals and the open ocean on one side make elevation a lived passage of almost two miles. From a ship the bridge is crossed under, an arch of sky. The fog and the strait are not the work, and that holds it from the top; but the work is built to gather them.
Mark Rothko · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Elevation is the cycle’s strongest axis, and it recurs canvas by canvas. In the Tate room, in low light, the canvases first read as dark walls; then the rectangles emerge from them, red glowing through maroon, black opening in black, and the room becomes a set of thresholds. The scale is the body’s and above it; the dark is near total and the colour arrives slowly, so the elevation has duration as well as height. It is cold and grave, dread rather than transport, and the axis is indifferent to which. Held below the top because the register is one: the same grave dark, with no second kind of height, no breadth of light and no ecstasy set against the doom; and because the elevation is shown in full only where a room of the canvases stands. Level with The Rothko Chapel and Water Lilies (9.0).
James Joyce · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
The height reaches the ceiling. The frequency is held down by design, because the method is deflation. The rises are real: “I hear the ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry, and time one livid final flame” (Nestor, 2), fulfilled to the word in Circe; the mother’s ghost; the strand, “These heavy sands are language tide and wind have silted here” (Proteus, 3); Rudy at the wall; “The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit” (Ithaca, 17); Molly’s last page. Each is undercut, often within the page. Sirens ends on an Irish patriot’s last words broken by a fart, “Pprrpffrrppffff.” (Sirens, 11). Long stretches of Eumaeus and Ithaca are built not to rise.
Plato · Literature
9.2 · Tier V
Height is reached several times, and once at the summit of Greek prose. The good is “epekeina tēs ousias”
“beyond being” (509b), and Glaucon laughs and calls on Apollo at so daemonic an excess: transport and comedy together. The cave rises from image to terror, the freed man dazzled, dragged up the steep ascent, and returning to a darkness where the others would kill him if they could (517a). Er is the height: the spindle, the Sirens on the whorls, the Fates singing, the souls choosing lives. Held below 9.0 by frequency: long stretches of Books II to V and VIII run on assent, “panu men oun”
“certainly”, and the rise is gathered in VI, VII, IX and X.
Ralph Ellison · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Elevation comes often, and mostly as terror, grotesque comedy and oratory. The battle royal: the boys blindfolded, the naked blonde, the electrified rug, the speech given through a mouth full of blood. Trueblood’s tale of his dream and his daughter, told to a white trustee who listens transfixed. Barbee’s chapel sermon on the Founder, which lifts the hall until the preacher stumbles and is seen to be blind. The eviction, an old couple’s life laid out on the snow, down to their free papers. Clifton dancing the paper Sambo on the pavement and then dead, and the funeral oration in the park. The riot, and Ras on horseback with spear and shield. Held below the higher figures because the dominant register is rhetorical and satirical, which caps transport, and in the Brotherhood chapters the book runs level for long stretches between its heights.
Hieronymus Bosch · Visual art
9.0 · Tier V
Height comes in three temperatures. The closed exterior is the cold sublime: a transparent sphere in grisaille, the earth a flat disc under cloud, no animal and no person, and God small at the top left, so that creation dwarfs its maker. The opening is a second elevation, grey into colour, staged as an event. The Hell is the terrible: a city burning against black, the Tree Man’s cracked shell with a tavern inside, a skater going through the ice. The left wing has a stranger height, serenity with predation in it. Frequency drops in the centre, whose register is delight, pastel and comic, its wonder often that of the curiosity cabinet.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart · Music
9.0 · Tier V
Elevation is frequent, and mostly warm. “Porgi, amor” (“Grant, love”) opens Act II on a clarinet-and-bassoon introduction and a long line of grief kept private. “Voi che sapete” (“You who know”) is adolescence as song. “Dove sono” (“Where are they”) rises from recitative to the return of its own opening melody, hope breaking through memory. The letter duet floats two sopranos over oboe and bassoon, a dictation that becomes a love song. The summit is the pardon: after the Count’s plea, a slow phrase from the Countess, and the company’s answer, a moment as high as anything in opera. Held off the top because much of the work’s height is wit, not elevation: the Act II finale and the sextet are triumphs of comedy, and the moments of transport number four or five, not twenty.
Paul the Apostle · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The elevations are islands in argument: Romans 9 to 11 is dense scriptural exegesis, Galatians 3 and 4 a run of rabbinic proofs and an allegory of Hagar and Sarah, and the Corinthian letters argue about meat and veils. But the islands are many and of the first height. Romans 8 climbs from “the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now” (8:22) to the cascade of 8:38 to 39, “neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, Nor height, nor depth”. Romans 11 breaks its own argument with an exclamation at the depth of what it describes. 1 Corinthians 13 and 15, the Philippians hymn of the self emptied, the catalogue of shipwreck and stripes in 2 Corinthians 11: the height is level with the summit pages. The frequency is below Four Quartets’ 9.2, because the rises come in set pieces.
Attar · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Height is reached repeatedly and at the right places. Shaykh Ṣanʿān at the Christian girl’s door, the old master with his disciples watching him burn what he had taught, then herding swine, is dreadful and absurd at once. The valleys rise by stages, and the later ones, bewilderment and annihilation, are the summit of the poem. The arrival is the height: of the multitude only thirty come, broken and burnt, are rebuffed at the threshold, and are then shown the king, who is themselves. Held below the top because the middle runs long on a level didactic plane, and the axis counts frequency as well as height: the heights crowd the frame’s two ends, and come less often between.
Bob Dylan · Music
8.9 · Tier IV
Height and frequency are both high, and elevation comes on five of nine tracks. The opening snare hit of “Like a Rolling Stone” and its chorus, the organ climbing over the band, are among the highest moments the popular song had reached. “Ballad of a Thin Man” reaches the dreadful sublime: a slow piano figure over organ, and a voice that grows more menacing with each verse. “Queen Jane Approximately” rises by tenderness, “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” by a worn, late-night beauty, and “Desolation Row” by sheer extent, its harmonica breaks lifting between verses. Held off the top because three of those heights sit well under the first, and the middle of side one is energy, not elevation.
Plato · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Height and frequency both count, and the height here is gathered in one place. The procession of the gods round the vault of heaven, Zeus driving his winged chariot first and the souls straining after, trampling one another and losing their wings (246e to 248b), is among the heights of Greek prose; above it lies the “huperouranion topon”
“place beyond heaven” (247c), which no poet, Socrates says, has hymned worthily, elevation set as a challenge to poetry and met. The regrowth of the wing, an itching and swelling as in teething (251b to c), risks the absurd to set the sublime in the body. Lesser heights are real: the plane tree by the Ilissus, the cicadas, the short prayer to Pan. What holds it there is frequency. The palinode is about a quarter of the dialogue, and the long inquiry into rhetoric is level ground: the work rises once, greatly, and then reasons about rising.
Joseph Conrad · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The elevation is dreadful, and it comes often. Marlow’s first words on the darkening Thames, that “this also” has been “one of the dark places of the earth”, and the Romans coming up the same river. A man-of-war shelling a continent from the sea. The grove of death. The river journey as travel “back to the earliest beginnings of the world”. The fog and the attack, and the helmsman’s look as he dies. The heads on the posts, taken at first through the glass for ornaments. The woman on the shore raising her arms as the steamer leaves. Kurtz’s last cry, “The horror! The horror!”, and the manager’s boy putting his head in at the door with the news. Held below the top because the height is sometimes reached for rather than made, as in the adjectival passages, and because the scene with the Intended, its last height, is pitched at a melodrama the rest of the book refuses.
Dante Alighieri · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Height is reached often for so short a book, in a hushed register: the first sight, with three spirits crying out in Latin (II); the dream in which she eats the burning heart “dubitosamente” (fearfully, III); the stanza of Donne ch’avete in which God answers heaven that one below will say in hell “Io vidi la speranza de’ beati” (I saw the hope of the blessed, XIX); the delirium of XXIII, the sun darkened and the birds falling; Tanto gentile (XXVI); Jeremiah breaking the canzone (XXVIII); the sigh that passes beyond the widest sphere (XLI). Held below the top by frequency: the divisions keep to the ground by design, and the screen-lady chapters and the early double sonnets do not rise.
Euripides · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
It rises often and in several registers. Hippolytus’ prayer with the garland from “akēraton leimōna”
“the untouched meadow” (about 73 to 74), where only the reverent may cut; Phaedra’s delirium, longing for the mountain, the hunt and the meadow; the ode to Eros, with Semele and Iole as the god’s victims; the escape ode, wishing for the wings of a bird to the Adriatic, the Eridanus and the garden of the Hesperides, then turning back to the Cretan ship that brought Phaedra; the messenger’s bull rising from a wave that hides the Isthmus, and the horses’ panic. The height is the last scene, where the goddess must leave the dying man, “emoi gar ou themis phthitous horan”
“it is not lawful for me to look on the dead” (about 1437), and the son releases the father from blood-guilt: tender, cold and exact. Held below the top by the long level stretches in the middle of the play, the Nurse’s counsel, the tirade and the forensic dispute of father and son, where the argument keeps to the ground.
Fernando Pessoa · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The heights are real and come from all three poets, in different keys. Campos reaches the ecstatic and the dreadful sublime at length: the factory lamps and the fever that open the “Ode Triunfal”, and the whole of the “Ode Marítima”, from the deserted quay on a summer morning through the frenzy of the pirates to the slow return of the small boat and the wheel turning. “Tabacaria” rises from a room and a window to the stars and back to the tobacconist’s shop. “Aniversário” reaches a plain grief: “Eu era feliz e ninguém estava morto” (“I was happy and no one was dead”). Caeiro’s elevation is cold and clear, the clarity of XX. Held off the top by frequency: the methods of Caeiro and Reis forbid transport, and much of the Reis body is level and cool by design.
William Faulkner · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent and of two kinds. The wilderness kind: the boy who leaves the gun, then the watch and the compass, to be seen by the bear, and sees it; the bear’s death with Lion at its throat and Boon Hogganbeck’s knife; Sam Fathers dying the same day, and his burial on a platform. The grief kind: Rider shovelling a grave alone and lifting at the mill a log that two men could not, and, in the deputy’s report, sitting in the cell saying he cannot stop thinking. “Delta Autumn” rises to a dreadful height in the woman’s question to the old man, whether he has forgotten all he knew of love. Held below 9.0 because “Was” and much of “The Fire and the Hearth” are comic and earthbound by design, and the argument of the fourth section is a plateau.
Gabriel García Márquez · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Height reached often, and in more than one register. The first sentence, the firing squad and the ice in one breath. The world so new that things had no names. The thread of blood that runs from José Arcadio’s body through the streets, round corners and along walls, to reach Úrsula in the kitchen. The rain of tiny yellow flowers that falls on the night of the founder’s death. Remedios the Beauty rising into the air with the sheets she was folding. The train of the dead after the massacre, two hundred cars long, and the rain that follows for almost five years. The last pages, in which the last Aureliano deciphers his own life as the wind takes Macondo away. What holds the axis there is the coolness the design requires. The grandmother’s voice tells wonders as facts, and its effect is more often delight than transport: the yellow flowers are beautiful and comic and do not terrify. The dreadful comes seldom, and the long middle chronicle of the fourth and fifth generations runs level for chapters at a time.
Herman Melville · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The height comes at the summit of the action: the blow, “quick as the flame from a discharged cannon at night” (ch. XVII); Vere’s “Struck dead by an angel of God. Yet the angel must hang!”; the sailor in irons “like a patch of discoloured snow in early April lingering at some upland cave’s black mouth” (ch. XX); “Billy ascended; and ascending, took the full rose of the dawn.” (ch. XXII); the sea-fowl over the burial, with “the croaked requiem of their cries” (ch. XXIII); the ballad’s last line. The opening lifts too, the Handsome Sailor “tossed up as by the horns of Taurus against the thunderous sky” (ch. I). Held below the top on frequency: the first third stays at the level of portrait and argument, and the heights crowd into the last.
Leo Tolstoy · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Height near the top, and frequent for the book’s length. The summit is the last stand: Hadji Murat and his few men dug in behind their dead horses, the death song, the memories that flood the wounded man, his rising with the dagger, and the nightingales, silent during the firing, singing again after he dies. The raid on the aul is the dreadful sublime in a plain register; the first night at Sado’s, with its songs and the boy’s eyes, carries beauty; the escape at dawn carries terror; the thistle, broken and still upright in a ploughed field, is grandeur in a weed. Held below the higher reaches by the level stretches the design requires, Tiflis society, the war ministry and the cards at the fort, whose register is irony by intent.
Akira Kurosawa · Film
8.9 · Tier IV
The elevation is terrible more often than grand, and it recurs: the riders on the ridge against the sky; Kambei with his head shaved and the thief falling in slow motion from the barn; the slow fall in Kyūzō’s duel; Rikichi’s wife turning back into the fire; the funeral broken by the bandits and the banner run up onto a roof; the mill burning and the baby in the stream; mud and horses in the rain; the four mounds above the planting. What holds it down is frequency. The town, the recruitment and the training are comedy and procedure, and for long stretches of the first part the film engages rather than rises. The heights gather in the second part.
Charles Dickens · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Height is reached often and in several keys. The dreadful: the convict starting up among the graves, “Hold your noise!” (chapter 1); Satis House, its clocks stopped at twenty minutes to nine and the wedding feast rotting on the table (chapters 8 and 11); Miss Havisham in flames (chapter 49). The tender: the fingerpost, where tears are “rain upon the blinding dust of earth” (chapter 19); Joe’s leave-taking in London (chapter 27); Pip’s prayer at Magwitch’s death (chapter 56). The kinetic: the night river and the drowning of Compeyson (chapter 54). Held below the top because the London middle of the Second Stage, comic and social, rises less, and because the limekiln (chapter 53) is melodrama more than terror.
Chola bronze casters · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
The elevation is real and of a rare kind: grandeur held in stillness. The body is in full motion, the locks flung level, the sash flying, the leg swung high, and the face is serene, almost withdrawn, the eyes level; that contradiction is the height, calm at the centre of a world being made and burned. The ring of flame makes the figure an apparition in a frame of fire, and the raised foot, weightless, is the moment the dance seems to hold. Terror and beauty are one image: the end of the cosmos shown as grace. The height recurs from every side, because the figure is in the round and was carried, renewed in procession and by lamplight. Held below the top because it is one figure at one scale, and its register, however deep, is one.
F. Scott Fitzgerald · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Height is reached often in a short book, warm and dreadful by turns. Gatsby alone on his lawn at the end of chapter 1, stretching his arms toward “a single green light, minute and far away”; the valley of ashes, “a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat” (chapter 2), under the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg; the reunion in the rain and Daisy weeping into the shirts (chapter 5); the Louisville night when he “wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath” (chapter 6); Myrtle dead in the road; the pool; the funeral in the rain, the Christmas trains of the Middle West and the coda. Held below the top: the scale is small, the voice keeps much of the book satirical, and the high style is at moments reached for.
Johann Sebastian Bach · Music
8.9 · Tier IV
Height is reached, and it returns: Var. 25, slow and chromatic in G minor, the deepest grief in the cycle; Var. 15, the inverted canon that closes the first half; Var. 21, a canon over a chromatic descending bass; the Ouverture’s dotted grandeur; and the Aria’s return after the Quodlibet, the last and largest elevation, and quiet. The Aria and Var. 13 rise by beauty; Var. 28 and 29 are the sublime of energy, brilliance at the keyboard’s limit. Held below the top because the register is mostly delight: Var. 4, Var. 19 and the virtuoso pieces are wit, dance and display, elevated in craft more than in transport.
Friedrich Nietzsche · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Height is reached often, and in more than one key. The lyrical, in “Das Nachtlied”, one of the great lyric passages in German prose. The visionary and dreadful, at the gateway named Augenblick, with a dog howling under the full moon and a shepherd who bites off the head of the black snake in his throat and rises transformed, laughing. The ecstatic, in “Die sieben Siegel” and its refrain, “Denn ich liebe dich, oh Ewigkeit!”, for I love you, O eternity. Then the midnight song, and the close, Zarathustra leaving his cave “glühend und stark, wie eine Morgensonne”, glowing and strong, like a morning sun. Held below the top by frequency: between the heights run long flats of exhortation in one cadence, and the sublime register is sometimes insisted on rather than reached.
Euripides · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The elevation is frequent and mostly dreadful. Cassandra enters with torches and sings her own wedding hymn to Agamemnon, ecstasy and death in one figure; Andromache tells her son to embrace his mother for the last time; the child’s body comes back on Hector’s shield, which the soldiers did not take to Greece, and Hecuba laments over it as over a cradle and a coffin both; at the close Troy burns, the towers fall, the women strike the earth to call the dead, and the trumpet sounds for the ships. The first ode’s night of the Horse, festival turning to slaughter, is a height of its own. Held below the top by the Helen episode’s forensic register, and by an unbroken lament that risks numbness.
Pedro Calderón de la Barca · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
It rises often, and at the openings and closings of acts. The first soliloquy is a lament that becomes an indictment of the heavens, resolved in “pues el delito mayor / del hombre es haber nacido”
“for man’s greatest crime is to have been born” (I). The comparisons that follow, bird, beast, fish and stream, each born freer, close on the refrain “tengo menos libertad”
“I have less liberty” (I). The second jornada ends on the décimas that define life as a dream. The third has the father kneeling to the son. Between these the courtly and comic scenes keep to level ground, and the military action of the third jornada rises less than its stakes allow.
Giovanni Bellini · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
The elevation is the light, and it is not kept to one place in the panel. It strikes the saint’s face and hands and runs across the whole ground: the edges of the rock, the leaves of the bent tree, the flank of the donkey, the walls of the town, the clouds. Everything is touched at once, so the picture rises everywhere rather than at a single summit. The register is calm transport, with no storm, no seraph and no terror, which counts against the greatest height. But the fixedness of everything in the light, a stillness in which a heron and a hill town are equally attended, is elevation of a rare kind: a world briefly seen as it is meant to be.
Gustave Flaubert · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Height is reached in every tale, and at the close of each. Félicité dies in the heat of the Fête-Dieu with the censer smoke rising to her room, and sees, in the opening heavens, a gigantic parrot hovering above her head: grandeur and absurdity at one height. Julien’s great hunt goes on past reason, and the black stag curses him; at the end the leper on the river is warmed body against body, and the ascent follows. “Hérodias” rises at the dancer and falls to its plain last line. The dreadful stands as high as the warm: the parents in Julien’s bed. Held below the top because elevation is withheld by method for long stretches, most of all in the first half of “Hérodias”, and because the reader’s distance is part of the effect.
The Clash · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Elevation comes often, and mostly of one kind: a driven, defiant grandeur rather than beauty or terror. The title track is the height, the guitars chopping against a marching bass, Strummer’s howl, and the falling guitar figure at the end, a warning broadcast from a flooded city. The Card Cheat is the other summit, every part doubled into a wall of piano and horns, a gambler’s death given a grandeur out of all proportion to the anecdote, and earned. Clampdown rises in its long coda, Death or Glory at its chorus, and Train in Vain and Spanish Bombs reach a plain, singable height. Seven or eight of nineteen tracks rise, the highest very high for the kind; The Guns of Brixton has dread instead, and the slighter songs stay level.
Byzantine, under Bishop Ecclesius and Justinian · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Height and frequency are both high. Elevation comes at the turn from the askew narthex into the ambulatory, where the core rises through the exedrae; in the core itself, tall for its width, its upward pull made stronger by screens on every side; and most of all in the presbytery, where the green and gold of the vault, the blue globe of the apse and the two processions close round the altar. It recurs as one walks: each bay of the ambulatory opens a new section of screened core and lit drum. What holds it: the scale is modest; the dome, the summit of the section, carries eighteenth-century painting in another register, so the core is not crowned by the work that crowns the presbytery; and the exterior offers no elevation at all.
Sophocles · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Elevation comes often and at full height. The prologue is dreadful, a goddess parading a deranged man for his enemy’s instruction: “horais, Odysseu, tēn theōn ischyn hosē?”
“do you see, Odysseus, how great is the strength of the gods?” (118). The cry of woe turned into the hero’s own name (430 onward) is terror at the edge of the absurd. The speech on time is the height of the play and one of the heights of Greek verse, with winter yielding to summer and night to day. The suicide speech, the sword planted in Trojan earth, the farewell to the light, to Salamis and Athens and the rivers of Troy, is a second summit. The rate falls after it: the quarrel scenes do not rise, and that holds the axis off the top.
Anonymous (Neolithic and Bronze Age) · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
The elevation is grandeur and dread together: stones of some 25 tonnes standing on bare chalk under an open sky; the lintel ring lifting a level line into the air, where nothing in nature is level; the trilithons climbing toward the greatest of them in the south-west; and the axis, which brings the midsummer dawn and the midwinter dusk into line with the stones. It recurs with the passage of the day across the plain and with the solstices each year, still kept at the stones by crowds. Held below the top because the inside, where the horseshoe encloses the body and frames the sky, is no longer entered by most visitors, and because the ruin, which adds a terror of time, has broken the closed horizon that was the monument’s height.
Francesco Borromini · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Elevation is the building’s register, cool, white and upward, and its height is high. It comes at the threshold, where the visitor passes from the rectangle of the court into a room with no direction but up; in the pilasters, which carry the eye from floor to entablature without a break at any lobe; in the dome, where the lobes rise and contract, the stars climb, and the star becomes a circle at the light; and outside, in the spiral seen over the roofs of the old city, turning as one moves, a figure no other Roman skyline holds. Frequency is good: the interior repeats its ascent from every point, and the crown recurs across the city. Held below the top: one room of modest size, a single register, no terror and no vastness, and an exterior seen from the court only obliquely, the dome itself hidden by its drum.
Titian · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
The elevation is of terror and of a grave, almost liturgical beauty, and it recurs across the canvas. The inverted body glows in the half dark, a pale vertical of flesh against browns and smouldering reds, the most luminous thing in the picture and the thing being destroyed. The kneeling flayer’s absorbed face, close to the wound, is tender, which is the worst of it. The musician’s raised eyes and the bow on the strings add a second register, song over butchery. Midas’s bowed head closes the picture in silence. What limits it: one register at one temperature of dread and reverence, nothing of joy, no breadth of space, and passages so dissolved that they read as murk before awe.
Roman, under Vespasian and Titus · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Elevation here is grandeur and dread, seldom beauty. It comes from outside first: on the north, four storeys of travertine repeating round a curve too large to see whole, the shadows of eighty bays turning with the sun. It comes inside, from the upper levels, in the bowl’s fall to the open hypogeum, the radial walls stepping round like ribs; and in the knowledge that the floor was made for killing, which turns the grandeur into dread. It comes often, from every approach and every level. Held from the top because the register is one, of mass and multitude, and because most of what made the interior rise, the marble, the crowd, the awning, is gone: the present sublime is partly a ruin’s.
Johann Sebastian Bach · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Height reaches near the ceiling several times. The C sharp minor fugue, five voices on a subject of four notes laid down from the bass, rises to grandeur by accumulation. The E flat minor prelude is a lament of rare stillness. The B flat minor fugue, again in five voices, closes in stretto with a weight that has been called choral. The B minor fugue ends the book on a dark chromatic plain that resolves only at its close. Frequency is lower by design. A teaching book has many pieces whose virtue is grace, wit or clarity, the C sharp major and G major pairs, the two-voice E minor fugue, the F major fugue: beautiful, and not elevated. Perhaps nine or ten of the forty-eight rise to the summit.
Anonymous · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Height and frequency are both high: the west front from the parvis, three level registers held between two towers, grandeur by poise rather than thrust; the north rose from the crossing, thirteenth-century glass in violet and blue filling the wall above a glazed triforium, and the south rose facing it in the afternoon; the chevet from the Seine, its flyers vaulting about fifteen metres in single spans; the nave, unprecedented in height in 1163, pale since the cleaning of 2024; the spire, and the city seen from among the chimeras. Held below the top because the wide, banded interior rises less than Amiens or Beauvais, and the double aisles made the nave dim.
Ingmar Bergman · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent and varied in kind. Emilie’s cry over Oscar’s body, heard by Alexander from the doorway as a long animal sound, is terror without spectacle. The attic of the bishop’s house, where the drowned daughters of the boy’s lie come to him, is cold dread. In the puppet workshop a figure looms behind a door and Alexander takes it for God until Aron shows him a puppet: the uncanny turned to comedy and back. The height is Ismael’s locked room, where a wish is read and the bishop’s house burns at the same hour. Warm elevations answer these: the Christmas procession through the rooms, the red of the apartment by candlelight. Held from the top by the ordinary stretches: the height is gathered more than sustained.
Edvard Munch · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The elevation is dreadful, the sublime of terror, and it is not one moment inside a flatter whole: the whole field is at the pitch of the cry at once. The red bands are not a sunset; they are the sound made visible. Sky, water, figure and road all carry it, and the receding road pulls the eye away as fast as the figure pulls it in, so the height is sustained from edge to edge. Held below the top for range: one note, held, where the greatest pictures rise through more than one register. And part of the force is the shock of the face, which repetition has worn; the board still delivers it, but the effect is concentrated in one device.
Mikhail Bulgakov · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Elevation is reached often, and in every key. The dreadful: the execution on Bald Mountain under the storm, the darkness that covers Yershalaim, Judas killed in a garden at night. The grand: Pilate in his white cloak with the blood-red lining on the colonnade of Herod’s palace, the trial with its headache and its swallow. The wild: Margarita’s flight over Moscow and the wrecking of the critic Latunsky’s flat, and the Great Ball with its procession of the damned. The highest is the last flight, where the riders shed their Moscow shapes, Koroviev becoming a dark knight, and Pilate on his stone plateau with his dog under the moon is released down the path of light. The heights come oftener than in most tragic novels. Held off the very top only because the comic register of the Moscow chapters lowers the ceiling for long stretches.
Romanesque builders; Obradoiro facade by Fernando de Casas Novoa · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent and high. The Obradoiro rising over its plaza from the double stair, glass and granite climbing into towers, is one of the great arrivals in European building. Behind it the narthex is dim and close, and the Gloria, worn by hands and faces, is a crowd of figures alive in stone. The nave beyond is long, high and shadowed, lit sidelong from aisles and galleries, drawing the eye east to the gilded crossing. When the great censer swings across the transept on its rope, the space is measured by motion. The height is not continuous: the later chapels and the cloister are fine rather than elevated, and the crossing’s gilding is display more than transport.
Thomas Hardy · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Height recurs in several keys. The dreadful: Prince killed by the mail-cart shaft, Tess plugging the wound with her hand until she is splashed with blood (IV); the baptism of Sorrow by candlelight among her sleeping siblings (XIV); the stain on the ceiling at The Herons, “like a gigantic ace of hearts” (LVI). The warm: the dawns at Talbothays, in the “spectral, half-compounded, aqueous light” (XX), when Angel names her Artemis and Demeter; the weedy garden where she listens to his harp (XIX). The grand: Stonehenge at night, the wind humming in the stones, and the black flag over Wintoncester (LVIII to LIX). The sleepwalk to the abbey coffin (XXXVII) is among the strangest heights in the English novel. Held a step down because the sixth phase sags between its peaks.
Ingmar Bergman · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
The elevation is cold and frequent. The arc lamp and the nail of the prologue are terror in miniature. The night visitation, two faces moving in slow light and a hand drawing back hair, is beauty of a strange order, and the two profiles together are among the most reproduced images in cinema. The beach monologue rises by words alone: Andersson in a near-dark room, the camera holding on her, a memory of desire turning toward transport and toward shame. The film burning in the gate is dread made physical; the composite face is horror and revelation at once. Held from the top by register: the terror is intimate, kept to close-up and a small room, and the days at the summer house sit flat by design.
Simone Martini · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Elevation is high and recurs across the field. The gold itself, a ground that is not air but light, out of which the figures stand like inlay; Gabriel’s arrival, still in motion, his mantle lifting behind him as if the flight has not finished, his wings barred in gold and colour; the raised words in their line across the gold, which catch the light as the viewer moves; the Virgin’s deep blue against the gold and her shrinking contour, one of the great single lines in painting; the dove in its wheel of angels above. The register is grace and awe together. It holds below 9.0 because the range is narrow: one register, one instant, no grandeur of scale and no terror beyond the Virgin’s start, and the saints at the sides are at a lower pitch, upright and still.
Louis Kahn · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
The court is one of the great elevations in modern building. The approach through the grove gives no warning; the court opens between two walls of concrete and teak, the stone floor runs out to an edge, and the channel draws the eye to the sea and the sky over it. Height is not in doubt: cold and grand, a sublime of emptiness and horizon rather than of enclosure. Frequency holds it. The building rises most at one place, and the moment repeats with light, hour and season rather than with new spaces. The studies, with their angled teak and their view of the ocean, carry a smaller and warmer rise; the laboratories, by design, carry none.
Anonymous · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Elevation here is austere and frequent. “Halt sunt li pui e li val tenebrus”
“high are the hills and the valleys dark”: the line sets the rearguard in the pass and returns as a refrain of dread. The horn debate rises three times. The second horn scene is terror at full height: blood at Roland’s mouth, Charles hearing the horn thirty leagues off, Ganelon telling him it is only Roland hunting. Turpin, dying, goes for water for Roland and falls before he reaches the stream. Roland dies under a pine on a height, his face toward Spain, and holds out his glove to God. The sun stands still for Charles; Aude falls dead at the emperor’s feet. The Baligant battle runs lower, and that keeps the axis off the top.
Sophocles · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Height is reached often, and highest in three places. The urn speech: “ō philtatou mnēmeion anthrōpōn emoi”
“O memorial of the dearest of men to me” (1126), Electra holding what she believes are her brother’s ashes, a lament among the summits of Greek grief, for a man standing beside her; and the recognition duet rises from it. The dreadful height is the exodos: Clytemnestra’s cry within, “ōmoi peplēgmai”
“Ah, I am struck” (1415), Electra’s answer, and then Aegisthus lifting the shroud to find not Orestes but his wife. The opening monody and the lyric entry of the chorus, with Electra as the nightingale mourning Itys and as Niobe weeping in stone, make a third. Held a step from the top by the stretches of argument in the first episode.
Christopher Wren · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Height: the dome, seen from the river, from Fleet Street or from the City’s lanes, is one of the great skyline forms, serene and exact. Inside, arrival under the crossing is the summit: the long nave opens into a space as wide as nave and aisles together, and the eye rises past the Whispering Gallery to Thornhill’s painted drum and the light of the open crown. Frequency: the outer image has recurred across a city for three centuries, and the inner moment is renewed at each entry. Held below the highest marks because the register is single, majestic and cool, and the nave and choir are dignified rather than elevating; the crossing does the work for the whole.
Baldassare Longhena · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent and of two kinds. Outside, from the water, the white mass of dome, drum and scrolls rising out of the lagoon at the mouth of the canal is one of the great urban images of Europe, renewed at every approach: by boat from the Lido, from the Piazzetta, from the Accademia bridge, and at the festival, when the bridge of boats leads to it. Inside, the octagon is cool and bright, grey on white, lit from the drum, and the composed vistas, from the centre through each arch to a chapel altar and from the door through the sanctuary to the high altar and the choir behind it, give arrival a measured grandeur. Height is less than frequency: the interior is serene rather than overwhelming, and its grey and white restraint, Palladian in temper, holds the transport back.
Caspar David Friedrich · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The sublime in its coldest register and at very great height: a mass of broken ice rearing over the viewer, built by force and now perfectly still, the violence finished. The terror is not of a storm but of what remains after one. The picture rises in more than one place: at the apex, sharp against the pale sky; in the shadowed blue faces where the cold is seen; in the far bergs, where the same order repeats without end; and last and smallest in the hull, which turns grandeur to dread. Held just below 9.0: the rise is essentially one, the stack seen from one place, and part of the sublime is size, on a canvas under a metre high.
David Bowie · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Elevation comes often and is mostly dark. The title track is the first summit: a dirge over skittering drums turns into a soft, major-leaning middle section (“I’m a blackstar”) where the voice lifts toward a hymn before the dirge returns. Lazarus rises slowly on the saxophone and on a guitar that breaks in heavy and late, grief held at height. Dollar Days climbs from a ballad to its repeated close, and I Can’t Give Everything Away is the warmest height of the record, a harmonica, a long synthesiser line and a guitar solo carrying the last minutes out. Sue is a height of terror more than beauty. ’Tis a Pity and Girl Loves Me have force and menace but stay level, and every height is of one nocturnal kind.
Auguste Rodin · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Elevation here is dreadful, and it recurs across the whole surface: Ugolino crawling over his dying children on the left leaf; bodies dropping head first through the tympanum with no ground to land on; The Three Shades, heads bowed until the necks become a horizontal line, hands meeting at one point; The Thinker in absolute stillness above the fall. The sublime is the scale of it, a swarm of bodies some six metres high, each in its own extremity, read at once as one cataract, and the height never lapses. In bronze, under raking light, the terror deepens; in plaster it turns spectral. Held below 9.0 by saturation: the single summit is muffled, and at distance the leaves read as texture before figures.
Guarino Guarini · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Elevation is the building’s main event, and it is strange rather than serene. It comes in the first look up from the centre of the octagon, when the dome seems made of nothing but crossing bands with light in every gap; in the open octagon at its crown, where the star recurs smaller and higher in the lantern, so that the eye is drawn up through two heavens; in the contrast of dim, crowded marble below and pale, bright skeleton above. The dome is present from everywhere in the main space and changes with the hour. Held from the top because the lower church, dense and dark, is more often impressive than elevating, and the transport is concentrated in one place.
Pablo Neruda · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The elevation is almost uniformly dark and low-pitched, and in the weaker poems the sublime of dissolution becomes a manner, the same oceanic murk produced on demand. The height, when it comes, is very great, and it comes often. “Sólo la muerte” opens on solitary cemeteries, “tumbas llenas de huesos sin sonido”, tombs full of bones without sound, and climbs through death entering like a sound, a dress without a body, a broom licking the ground in search of the dead, to a terror as complete as any in modern lyric. “Entrada a la madera” descends into the dark of wood with a tenderness that becomes transport. “Tango del viudo” rises through grotesque domestic detail to real grief, and “Barcarola” and “El sur del océano” reach the oceanic sublime directly. Frequency and height set the figure just under the top of the scale; the uniformity of key keeps it there.
Stanley Kubrick · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent, and it is of the dreadful and the grand kind. The camera flies low over a mountain lake and follows one small car up a road under the Dies Irae. Danny’s tricycle runs the corridors, loud on wood and silent on carpet, to the twins at the end of a hall and the cut to their bodies. Blood floods from the lift doors toward the lens. The woman in Room 237 rises from the bath and rots in Jack’s arms. Jack stands over the model maze with his wife and son tiny inside it; the axe comes through the bathroom door; the maze is blue with night and snow; the camera moves slowly into the photograph of 1921 under Al Bowlly. Held below the top because some peaks tip into the comic, Nicholson’s line at the split door among them, and the lobby skeletons lift nothing.
Gislebertus · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent and of two registers at once, grandeur and dread. The grandeur is the Christ: a figure through the whole height of the field, arms opened, utterly still amid the movement around him. The dread is the right half: devils emaciated and spiky, taller than the angels they jostle, souls clutched and hung, the mouth of hell, and the two hands on the head, which strike every viewer and are terror reduced to one gesture. Between them run the long angels with trumpets at the corners and the souls on the lintel looking up. The height recurs across the field, not in one passage. Held short of the top because the means are one register of stylised line, repeated, and some of the left half, the city and the apostles, is ceremonial rather than transporting.
Tibetan, under the Fifth Dalai Lama · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Height is very high and, outside, constant. The palace is seen from everywhere in the Lhasa valley: a white and red mountain on a hill under a high-altitude sky, the white wings spreading low and wide, the crimson block rising at the centre, the gold roofs catching the sun. The approach makes it again: the zigzag stairs of the south face, climbed at altitude, slow the body and set the mass above it at every turn. Within, the register changes and holds: dark pillared halls, chapels lit by butter lamps, and stupas of gold rising through more than one storey, a sublime of accumulation, darkness and gold. What holds it: the interiors are low and close, a sequence of similar rooms, and the great height belongs to the outside.
The Beatles · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Elevation comes often, mostly warm, once dreadful. “Something” rises to a guitar solo of real height. “Here Comes the Sun” is lift itself, the guitar figure and the release after winter. “Because” is the stillest height on the record, three voices tripled over harpsichord and synthesiser, suspended. “I Want You” is the dreadful sublime: a riff repeated and thickened with white noise for minutes until the tape is cut and the silence is the summit. The medley climbs from the bells of “You Never Give Me Your Money” through the cry of “Golden Slumbers” to the trading of guitars in “The End” and the closing chord, as high a close as any rock record has. Against this, “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” and “Octopus’s Garden” have charm, not height. Ten or so of seventeen tracks rise.
Agesander, Athenodoros and Polydorus of Rhodes (attributed) · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Elevation is high and of one register, dread and grandeur at once, and it recurs across the whole surface rather than in one place. The father’s face, the brows drawn up and inward, the mouth open; the torso, every muscle at its limit, the chest lifted against the coil; the serpent’s head at the hip, the instant of the bite; the younger son’s head falling back; the father’s foot braced, the toes clenched. The scale and the whiteness make it a monument of agony rather than a scene of one, and Burke and the eighteenth century took it as a type of the sublime of pain. Held below the top for range: one register throughout, without the relief of any other.
F. W. Murnau · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent and of several kinds. Dread: the Man walking through the marsh under a full moon while the camera follows, overtakes him and finds the Woman waiting; his stalk across the boat toward his wife as she shrinks and prays. Transport: the trolley’s run from the lakeshore into the city, played as one movement, and a street of traffic dissolving into a meadow and back into horns. Grief: the church, where the Man falls into his wife’s lap as vows are spoken over another couple. Terror and rescue: the storm, the lanterns on black water, the dawn. Held below the top because the comic middle is long and level, and some height is pressed by music and set rather than earned by the action.
Balthasar Neumann · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Height and frequency. The elevation begins at the west door and holds through the whole room: white and gold under painted vaults, light from the outer wall entering behind the free arcade so that the structure seems to float, the eye led by curving cornices from oval to oval and down to the Altar of Mercy, rising in the middle of the floor like a lantern. It recurs at every step, as the interlocking ovals change their reading, and with the hour, as the light moves along the windows. The towers seen across the valley from Banz give a second, quieter elevation. Held below 9.0: the register is one, festive and serene, with no terror and little gravity, and its joy is of degree.
Titian · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Elevation here is warm, and it comes again and again. The leap is the summit: a god held in mid-air with nothing beneath his foot, the pink-crimson cloak opened behind him like a sail. Around it the colour rises repeatedly, the ultramarine of the sky and of Ariadne’s drapery, the vermilion of her sash answering the god’s cloak, the gold of the urn, the pale sea and the far blue hills, and the music of the rout, cymbals, tambourine and shouting, is made visible as rhythm. The sublime is of transport and joy, not of terror. What holds it below the top is the right half, whose revelry, loud and close, lowers the register toward the festive.
Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Height is reached often, in one register: the sublime of order and stillness, never of terror. The Kyrie’s opening imitation rises through the six voices into a full and luminous texture. In the Credo the clauses of incarnation and resurrection are where the setting gathers its weight. The second Agnus Dei, with its seventh voice, is the widest sound in the work, and its last dona nobis pacem, grant us peace, is the close. No movement lacks an elevation. Held below the top because the register is single, the warm sublime of consonance: there is no dread, no grief pressed to breaking, no contrast of sublimes such as Winterreise reaches, and the Gloria’s declamation is clarity more than transport.
Nabataean · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Height and frequency are both high. The approach is among the great moments of architecture: a cleft narrowing for about a kilometre, its walls closing overhead, and then, in a slot of light, al-Khazneh, its upper storey and tholos seen first. Elevation recurs: the Royal Tombs on al-Khubtha at evening, the Urn Tomb high on its arches; the Silk Tomb, its banded stone running through the orders like watered silk; ad-Deir after the climb, an unornamented giant on a plateau, with the Wadi Araba beyond; the altar of the High Place on its summit above the whole basin. Held below the top because part of the elevation is the stone’s and the cleft’s, chosen and used by the builders but not made, and because much of the necropolis is weathered routine at one pitch.
Anonymous · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The building rises often, and at more than one scale. From the lower town, or from the plain, the church holds the horizon over a wide flat country, three towers on a ridge: grandeur at the scale of a landscape. The west front is a cliff of arcading, overwhelming as a wall is rather than as a facade. Inside, the nave vault, its ribs fanning from the shafts to a continuous ridge, has a speed and spread the four-part vault does not; the Angel Choir, filled at its end by eight lights, is among the most luminous interiors of English Gothic; the chapter house vault sprays from one pier. What holds it short is the English elevation, long and low in proportion, and grandeur in many moments rather than one.
Khmer, under Jayavarman VII · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Height and frequency are both high, and the register is double. Elevation comes on the upper terrace, where the visitor finds a face at every turn and every height, close enough to touch and too large to take in. It recurs: the faces change with the light, grey at noon, warm at the ends of the day, and every passage of the cramped plan opens onto another. The register is serene and uncanny together, calm in such number that calm becomes pressure, the sense of being watched made architecture. Held from the top by what the plan does to the approach: the central tower is not tall for its kind, the courts are narrow, the inner gallery dark and broken, and from a distance the mass reads, to many, as a heap of stone before it resolves into faces.
Anonymous · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Height and frequency. The Panel of the Horses: four heads in charcoal, shaded by smudging, the nearest with its mouth open, in a beauty no later drawing of a horse surpasses. The Lion Panel in the End Chamber: a pride in profile, heads stacked and moving, the most sustained passage in the cave and among the most powerful images of predators in any art. The rhinoceros whose horn is drawn as repeated arcs. The red hand stencils and palm dots, the human mark in the dark. The setting adds terror to beauty: images met by moving flame, far underground, among the hollows and bones of bears. Held below 9.0 because between the great panels lies a field of lesser figures, and because part of the transport is the age and the dark, which belong to the circumstance more than to the image.
Built for Qabus ibn Wushmgir · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Height is near the top. The tower rises unbroken from its mound, one material without a horizontal division between the two bands, seen from far across the Gorgan plain. The flanges make it a building of light: through the day ten edges throw ten shadows round the shell, so that the elevation is renewed hour by hour and from every side, which answers the question of frequency. The sublime is cold, of terror and permanence rather than welcome. Held below the Pantheon’s 9.5 and Sainte-Chapelle’s 9.2 because the elevation is in one register and wholly outside: the room within, bare, offers no second height to set against the first.
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
The elevation is high and recurs. The ballet is the summit: the girl at the shop window, the shoemaker’s leap, the shoes put on and the dance that will not stop, the fairground, the partner made of paper, the cellophane sea, the church door barred, the death; colour, scale and movement beyond what a stage could hold, wonder turning to terror. It is not the only height. Vicky’s climb in evening dress and crown up the overgrown stair to the villa at dawn is transport of another kind; the rush up the gallery stairs at Covent Garden is joy; the company dancing round an empty spotlight is grief made formal. Held below the top by the love scenes, flat by the film’s own standard.
Charles Laughton · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
The elevation is frequent and of several kinds, terror and wonder in turn. Willa laid out under the pitched ceiling of the bedroom, lit like a chapel, his arm raised. Willa in the car under the river, her hair moving with the weed, beautiful and dreadful at once. Powell lunging up the cellar stairs with his arms out, a nightmare that is also comic; his howl at the river’s edge as the skiff drifts free. The river journey, with frog, web, rabbits and turtle in the near ground and the children small beyond them under a painted sky, Pearl singing. The rider on the horizon. The vigil and the duet of the hymn. Held from the top only because the town scenes between are level.
Frank Lloyd Wright · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Height and frequency. The elevation is concentrated but recurrent. The passage from the low, dark carport and lobby into the Great Workroom is one of the great releases in modern building: a forest of white stems rising to discs, light coming down between them through glass that diffuses it and hides the sky. It recurs at the mezzanine, where the pads are seen near at hand, and in the bands at the top of the walls, where the tubing turns daylight to a soft line above the brick. The tower adds a second height, lit from within at night as a column of glowing bands. Held below the top: much of the building outside the room, offices, corridors and court, is handsome rather than elevating, and the tower’s small, close interiors give little of the room’s release.
Yasunari Kawabata · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Elevation comes often and at height. The opening rises at once: the tunnel, the white ground of the night, the train stopping at the signal halt. In the train window Yoko’s face floats over the dark evening fields, and a light in the hills passes through her eye: one of the great images of the modern novel. The book returns to mirrors, Komako’s red cheeks in the morning glass against the snow, so that the height is a method and not an accident. Komako playing the shamisen alone, with the valley for audience, rises again; the chijimi linen bleached on the snow is a still beauty of another kind; and the close, with the Milky Way seeming to pour down into Shimamura as the warehouse burns, is cold terror and transport at once. Held below 9 because some of the middle, the inn conversations, is flat by design.
Talk Talk · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Elevation is the record’s first achievement, and it comes on every piece, in both temperatures. Myrrhman rises out of silence on string clusters and a few piano chords to a grave, suspended height. Ascension Day is the terrible kind: a stumbling, overdriven ensemble gathers to frenzy and is cut off in mid-gesture, the silence after it as overwhelming as the sound. After the Flood builds over nearly ten minutes to a long, distorted, sustained cry, transport by attrition. Taphead’s brass enters out of near-silence like a weight. New Grass is the summit of the warm register, a serenity that does not peak. What holds it a tenth from the top: the highest moments are sustained states more than summits, and the slowness can be heard as a plateau.
Ancient Egyptian, under Ramesses II · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Height near the top, and recurring. Elevation comes first at the front: four seated kings twenty metres high, cut out of a cliff and facing the sunrise across the water, a sight every account since Burckhardt’s records as overwhelming. It comes again inside, where the light from the door falls down the hall between the standing Osiris figures into a darkness that deepens toward the sanctuary. It comes at its height on the two mornings when the sun runs the axis and lights the seated gods, and in part at every dawn. The Small Temple adds a gentler register: the queen at full scale, the cow of Hathor out of the rock. Held below the top because the register is narrow, grandeur by mass and number, and the interiors are low and crowded beside the front: much of the elevation is spent in the first sight.
Johann Sebastian Bach · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Height is reached often, and in different kinds. The first Prelude is beauty in its plainest form, an arpeggio that becomes a rising pedal passage before the close. The Sarabandes of the second and fifth suites are grief at the height of the set, the second by renouncing chords. The fifth suite’s fugue is grandeur from one line. The sixth suite’s Prelude, high on five strings, is a peal, and its Sarabande, in chords throughout, the warm sublime. The third Prelude runs scale and arpeggio over a pedal into something near ecstasy. Held below the top by the plan: the galanteries and several courantes and gigues are wit and dance, beautiful but not elevated.
The Rolling Stones · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Elevation comes on about half the tracks, and where it comes it is high. Moonlight Mile is the summit: a modal guitar figure, strings rising late under the quietest singing on the record, the whole track lifting as it nears home. Wild Horses has a plain, aching height, two acoustic guitars and a voice that strains at the chorus. Sister Morphine is the dreadful height, a slide guitar under a voice that frays, the arrangement building to panic. The turn into the coda of Can’t You Hear Me Knocking, a saxophone and then Mick Taylor’s long solo over congas and organ, is a real transport. Brown Sugar and Bitch have force rather than height, and three tracks stay on the plain by design.
Cormac McCarthy · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Elevation comes often, dread above all, and tenderness at the height of the language. Terror: the locked cellar opened on the captives kept for food; the band marching on the road with its prisoners; a charred infant at an abandoned camp; the man showing the boy how to turn the pistol on himself. Grandeur in desolation: forests burning and falling in the night; the sea at last, grey, not the blue the man had promised. Tenderness: a dead man’s blood and brains washed out of the boy’s hair; the last talk as the father dies; “Each the other’s world entire.” Then the coda rises out of the grey into a living world and ends on what “hummed of mystery”. Held below the top because the long scavenging passages are level by design, and the heights, though frequent, keep to one narrow register.
Gerhard of Cologne and successors; completed by Ernst Friedrich Zwirner · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Height is near the top and frequency is high. From the square the west front is the largest twin-towered front in Christendom, two openwork spires climbing without a pause in the vertical, and at close range it overwhelms as few buildings do. Inside, the main vault at about 43 metres over a nave of slender clustered piers sends the eye up without arrest, and from the crossing the choir opens as a cage of glass round the gold of the shrine. It recurs: the towers from the Rhine bridges and the plain, the choir in the morning, the nave at a crowded service. What holds it: the nave’s nineteenth-century surfaces are dry and much of its glass later and lighter, so the interior rises more by scale than by radiance.
Dmitri Shostakovich · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Height is reached several times and in more than one register. The Largo is the summit of beauty: strings divided more finely than anywhere else in the work, oboe and clarinet over tremolo, one climax of naked force, and a close in F sharp major with harps and celesta. The first movement rises twice, when the opening returns in augmented canon at full force, the lyric made catastrophe, and when the celesta climbs over held D, the sublime of emptiness. The finale’s coda is the sublime of dread, if it is anything. Held below the top on height and frequency together: the scherzo is wit and grotesque, the finale’s march is drive more than transport, and the work rises less often and less far than Winterreise (9.3) or Otello (9.4).
Henry Purcell · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
The work reaches the top of the art once and nearly reaches it several times. The Lament is the summit: a voice sinking over a chromatic ground, its phrases set across the ground so that their cadences do not coincide, the repeated “Remember me” climbing to its high note, and the strings going on over the ground after the voice has stopped. “With drooping wings” makes the grief communal in falling lines and suspensions. “Ah! Belinda” is the sublime of dread in small; the echo chorus and the storm give a lower, theatrical terror. Frequency holds it below Otello at 9.4: the dances, the sailors and Belinda’s courtly airs are charm, and in an hour a large share is charm.
Anonymous; Octagon by William Hurley and Alan of Walsingham · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Elevation comes often and at more than one scale. From the fen the long body and the west tower rise out of flat land and are seen for miles. Within, the nave’s length and the steady repetition of its bays carry the eye east in a measured grandeur. Then the Octagon: after the narrow vessel the space opens on eight sides at once, and light falls from the lantern into the centre of the church, the lantern seeming to hang unsupported. The Lady Chapel gives a second height, wide and bright. Held below the whole-body transport of Sainte-Chapelle because the nave’s grandeur is steady rather than elevating, and the summit comes at one point.
Pérotin · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Height is reached at the first bar and held. The tenor’s F is laid down and held, a sustained four-voice consonance sounds over it, and then the upper voices break into rhythmic motion, so that the building seems to start ringing. The sublime here is of grandeur and brilliance: bright fifths and octaves, three upper voices in one range crossing and exchanging until the ear cannot follow one, and time suspended over a single pitch. It recurs at each new tenor note, and where the tenor itself begins to move and the whole texture is lifted. Held below the top for frequency of kind: the register is one, splendour throughout, with no terror, grief or quiet to rise from, and constancy flattens its peaks.
U2 · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Height comes often, and once it is sustained. A Sort of Homecoming opens on Larry Mullen’s rolling toms and rises like a march toward a light. Pride reaches exultation in its chorus. The title track reaches grandeur through strings and a slow surge, a city at night held at a distance. Bad is transport in the full sense: The Edge’s delayed figure repeats, the bass and drums hold back, and the voice climbs for six minutes into a litany of abstract nouns without releasing the tension into a chorus. MLK reaches the hush of a lullaby. Five of ten tracks rise, all of them warm; Elvis Presley and America wanders, and Indian Summer Sky pushes without lifting.
Aretha Franklin · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent and high. The title track rises from the electric piano’s opening figure into a vocal that climbs by pressure, held back through the verses and released on the turn. “Drown in My Own Tears” is a slow blues in which the voice lifts out of the band like a soloist out of a choir. “Do Right Woman” is the record’s most beautiful performance, piano, organ and the sisters’ voices under a lead that swells to its last plea without strain. “A Change Is Gonna Come” closes on a rising plainly of the church, and “Dr. Feelgood” is elevated in another register, the transport of desire. “Good Times”, “Soul Serenade” and “Don’t Let Me Lose This Dream” stay on the level.
Stevie Wonder · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Height comes often and from several directions. “As” is the summit: a vow of love built over a long gospel crescendo, the voice climbing over the choir, with “as around the sun” opening a list of impossible conditions that rises past the point where the song might end. “Love’s in Need of Love Today” begins in close a cappella harmony and holds a hushed gravity for seven minutes. “Sir Duke” lifts by its unison horn line, a single breath of joy; “I Wish” by its bass and its release; “Knocks Me Off My Feet” by the voice. “Pastime Paradise” reaches the dread side. Held below the top: the height is mostly warm, grandeur is rare outside “As”, and the long vamps and the extra disc sit level rather than rise.
Prince and the Revolution · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent, and both warm and dreadful. Purple Rain is the summit: a slow ballad that rises through its choruses to a guitar solo of long held notes and then a coda of wordless voice, strings and piano, a height sustained for minutes. The Beautiful Ones climbs from a hush to a scream of unwanted desire, the record’s most naked moment. When Doves Cry holds a cold, airless height, its keyboard figure and stacked voices hung over a drum machine, and Let’s Go Crazy rises at its end into a frantic solo. I Would Die 4 U has lift; Darling Nikki has menace, not height; Take Me with U and Computer Blue have force. Height on five of nine tracks, the highest as high as the medium reaches; the four that do not rise hold it a step from the top.
Walter De Maria · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
The work’s highest claim, and the axis it was built for: the sublime of the Romantic tradition, Burke’s terror at a safe remove, made literal by steel rods raised toward lightning on a high plain. The height is documented in every account of a visit: as the low sun catches them the poles ignite one row after another and go dark again, the grid appears and dissolves, and a storm over the field, when one comes, is spectacle on the scale of the sky. Frequency is answered well: dawn and dusk come in every visit, so the rise is repeated, not single, though lightning itself is rare and not promised. The figure rests on the daily event of light, not on photographs of storms.
Mon and Burmese builders · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Elevation is real and recurrent. The gold profile rising over the city, seen from far off across Yangon, is the first; the long, dim climb of a covered stairway opening onto the bright platform under the full height of the stupa is the second, and it is built. At sunset and after dark, the gold lit, lamps and candles along the base and the bells of the hti sounding in the wind, the platform reaches a transport that recurs daily. What holds it is that the elevation has one source: seen near, the stupa is a surface, with no interior to rise within as there is in the Pantheon (9.3) or the Sainte-Chapelle (8.8), and the crowded shrines break the view as often as they frame it.
Miguel de Cervantes · Literature
9.4 · Tier V
It rises in many registers. Marcela’s desires leave the mountains only “to contemplate the beauty of the heavens” (I.XIV); Zoraida’s father calls from the shore, “Come back, dear daughter, come back to shore; I forgive thee all” (I.XLI); Sancho speaks of Death, “no reaper that sleeps out the noontide” (II.XX), and kisses his ass as he leaves his government (II.LIII); the beaten knight speaks “as if he were speaking out of a tomb” (II.LXIV). The death reaches the ceiling. But most of the height is built to be punctured: the lion turns its hind-quarters (II.XVII), and the farce at the inns and in the ducal house is not meant to rise. Frequency holds the axis second lowest of the twelve.
Franz Kafka · Literature
9.2 · Tier V
The register is mostly comic and procedural, and the heights are cold, but they come, and the flatness around them is what sharpens them. The flogger, found in the lumber room a second evening exactly as on the first, as if time there did not move, is the book’s dreadful height. In the court offices K. grows faint in the stale air under the roof and must be helped out, the comedy turning to terror without a seam. The cathedral is the summit: the darkening nave, K. with his lamp, the priest calling his name from the small pulpit, and then the parable, the man from the country waiting before an open door until he is dying and sees a radiance streaming from it. The end, two men in frock coats and top hats walking K. to a quarry under the moon and a figure leaning from a window with arms stretched out, is the last. Held below the higher reaches because the summits gather in the last two chapters, and long stretches of the middle are flat by intent.
William Shakespeare · Literature
9.2 · Tier V
The elevation is frequent and of three kinds. Comic transport: the men in buckram multiplying from two to eleven, and the play extempore with a cushion for a crown, ending in “Banish plump Jack, and banish all the world” and the prince’s “I do, I will” (1 Henry IV, 2.4), the one line in which the whole end stands. Heroic grandeur: Hotspur’s “O, the blood more stirs / To rouse a lion than to start a hare!” (1.3), and his dying “thought’s the slave of life, and life time’s fool” (5.4). Elegiac height in the second part: “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown” (2 Henry IV, 3.1), the chimes at midnight (3.2), and “I know thee not, old man” (5.5). What holds the axis is design: each summit is cut short by the next scene, and the work denies itself sustained terror.
George Eliot · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
The register is plain and the height is moral, and it comes often. The ceiling: Dorothea weeping alone in Rome, and the narrator’s turn to “that roar which lies on the other side of silence” (ch. 20); her night of anguish and the dawn at the window, where she sees herself as “a part of that involuntary, palpitating life” (ch. 80); her visit to Rosamond the next day (ch. 81), where the rival is lifted out of herself for once; Harriet Bulstrode putting off her ornaments and going down to her disgraced husband (ch. 74); the Finale’s last sentence. The dreadful: Casaubon dead in the summer-house, and the night Bulstrode lets the brandy reach Raffles (ch. 70). Held below the top because the ground between the heights is comic, analytic or social, and the book chooses that.
Caravaggio · Visual art
9.0 · Tier V
The elevation is quiet, and it comes from light and timing: the beam crossing the dark wall above Christ’s head; his hand held in the gap between the groups; the boy’s face turned full into the light and the bearded man caught mid-gesture; the youth on the stool twisting, his hand still on the bench. The height is high: stillness at the moment of interruption is a transport few paintings reach, and the axis is indifferent to register. What holds it is frequency. This is one instant in one field, and it cannot rise again. The terror in the chapel, the scream across the room, belongs to the facing canvas and is not credited.
Jorge Luis Borges · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Elevation is cold and frequent. The Library’s hexagons, extending past any count, carry the mathematical sublime. The dreamer walking into the fire and finding that it does not burn him, that he too is dreamt, “con alivio, con humillación, con terror” (with relief, with humiliation, with terror), is the book’s highest single height. In “El milagro secreto” a year passes in the instant between the order and the volley, so that Hladík can finish his drama in his head before the bullets arrive. Lönnrot waits at Triste-le-Roy for a death he deduced. Funes lies in the dark at nineteen, holding every leaf of every tree. “El Sur” gives the book its one warm height: Dahlmann picking up the knife and going out to the plain. Held below the top because the register is uniformly calm and ironic, and some stories, “Herbert Quain” and “La secta del Fénix”, never rise.
William Blake · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
The ceiling is as high as English lyric reaches. The Tyger asks “What immortal hand or eye, / Could frame thy fearful symmetry?”, and rises to the hour “When the stars threw down their spears” and the question “Did he who made the Lamb make thee?”: terror and awe at creation in twenty-four lines. London ends in a curse that falls on birth and marriage together, “And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse”. The Introduction to Experience, “Hear the voice of the Bard! / Who Present, Past, & Future sees”, Earth’s Answer, the Holy Thursday of Experience, and Night with its lions weeping over the folded lambs are heights of a prophetic kind; The Little Black Boy and On Another’s Sorrow are heights of tenderness. Frequency is the limit. Innocence keeps much of its register low by design, in Spring, Laughing Song and The Blossom, and the low register is the state it shows, so it is recorded without being charged as a fault.
Virginia Woolf · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Height comes often, and in a quiet register. The first page rises at once, a June morning at Bourton remembered as a plunge: “What a lark! What a plunge!” Big Ben gives the book its recurring height, the hour struck and its sound spreading over the city. Septimus in Regent’s Park, where the trees are alive and the dead Evans walks behind the railings, is visionary and dreadful at once. The summit is the late afternoon in the Smiths’ room: Rezia trimming a hat, Septimus helping and laughing, sane for an hour, then Holmes on the stairs and the leap. At night Clarissa in the little room watches the old lady opposite going to bed while the clock strikes, and the close lands on Peter’s terror and ecstasy. Held below 9.0 because the middle of the book, from Peter’s walk to the luncheon, runs level.
Samuel Beckett · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
The elevation is cold and comic, and it comes in short charges. Nell’s “Nothing is funnier than unhappiness” is a summit in one line, and the scene between the two bins, the failing attempt to kiss, the memory of a boat on Lake Como, rises to a strange tenderness inside the dustbins. Hamm’s “Can there be misery… loftier than mine?” is mock-sublime and sublime at once. The prayer, broken off with “The bastard! He doesn’t exist!”, is the play’s funniest moment and its most dreadful. The close, Clov’s last speech and Hamm’s “Old stancher! … You… remain”, has real grandeur. Held here because the design flattens on purpose: long stretches are business made not to rise, and the height is never sustained.
Aeschylus · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The heights are many and of two kinds. The cosmic: the first words Prometheus speaks, alone, to sky, winds, rivers, earth and the “kymatōn anērithmon gelasma”
“countless laughter of the waves” (89 to 90), transport spoken by a man in chains; the Typhon passage, the monster pinned under Etna and the eruption to come; and the close, where the earth shakes “in deed and no longer in word” and the prisoner calls on the sky to witness how unjustly he suffers. The human: Io’s entry in frenzy, driven by the gadfly and the ghost of Argus, the play’s one body in motion. Frequency counts against it: the gifts are grand by argument, not by image, long stretches of the Io scene are itinerary, and the short, plain lyric rarely lifts on its own.
Plato · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The height is gathered in the last speech, and it is among the strongest endings in Greek prose. Death is either a dreamless sleep, which would be gain, or a journey to where one may question Homer and Hesiod, Palamedes and Ajax (40c to 41c); no evil comes to a good man, living or dead (41d); and then the close: “alla gar ēdē hōra apienai, emoi men apothanoumenōi, humin de biōsomenois”
“now it is time to go, I to die and you to live” (42a). Earlier heights recur once the stakes are named: Achilles choosing death over disgrace (28c to d), the refusal of an acquittal bought with silence (29c to d), the gadfly (30e), the refusal to bring three sons weeping before the court (34c to 35b), and the proposal of meals in the Prytaneum, a comic sublime. Held at 8.8 by frequency: for most of its length the work is argument at the pitch of conversation, the oracle story dry, the cross-examination comic, the public record testimony, and its elevation there is moral steadiness rather than transport.
Francisco Goya · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
The elevation is of one kind, terror and dread, and it recurs plate after plate, which is what earns the figure. The bodies on the tree against an empty sky in “Grande hazaña! Con muertos!” (39); the impaled torso in “Esto es peor” (37); the victims in “No se puede mirar” (26) before guns that enter from outside the frame; the famine dead carted and stacked in “Al cementerio” (56). The aquatint grounds make each scene a small theatre of the void. A second height is rarer: the light on Truth in the last plates, and “Qué valor!” (7), the one moment near grandeur. Held lower because the plates are small, monochrome and seen one at a time, and the series sets out to deny exaltation.
Andrea Palladio · Architecture
8.9 · Tier IV
Elevation here is beauty, serene and bright, and almost never terror or vastness. It comes in the villa seen from the lane as a complete object on its hill, the same from every side; in the climb of the steps, with the plain and the far hills rising into view behind; in the loggia, a room of columns open to the air, framing a quarter of the world; in the hall, round and tall, lit from the lantern, with four doors open to four views at once; and in the proportion itself, which many with no words for architecture feel as calm. Frequency is high, because the building repeats its own best moment four times and the circuit of the loggias renews it at each turn of the sun. Height is the limit: the sublime of measure and light at domestic scale, not the transport of the great vaults.
Juan Rulfo · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The elevation is frequent and of two kinds, dread and longing, and the book moves between them without a seam. Dread: the descent to Comala in the heat, to “la mera boca del infierno”
“the very mouth of hell”; the empty streets and the voices; the woman in the house of Donis dissolving into mud and sweat beside Juan Preciado; the murmurs that kill him. Longing: the green Comala of Dolores’s memory, smelling of alfalfa and bread; the boy Pedro dreaming of Susana and the kites they flew; Susana in her grave remembering the sea. Then the close, the old man crumbling, among the great endings of the century’s fiction. Held a step below the top because the quiet register and the brevity limit the summit moments, and some of Susana’s lyric passages rise less in the reading than in their reputation.
Alexander Pushkin · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The register is middle and the temper ironic, and height is reached often, the undercutting being part of how it is reached. Tatiana’s night with her nurse and her letter, which runs outside the stanza as feeling breaks the form; the dream of the fifth chapter, the winter wood, the bear, the monsters at the table and Onegin’s knife, dreadful and folk at once, which is the book’s terror; the duel in the snow and the stanzas after Lensky’s death, with the simile of the abandoned house; Tatiana alone in the empty study; the last interview, in her room, without witnesses; and the close, “Блажен, кто праздник жизни рано / Оставил”
(blessed is he who left the feast of life early), which lifts the narrator’s farewell into elegy. What holds it here is the irony that makes it: Pushkin undercuts nearly every height within a stanza, so that the duel is followed by speculation on what Lensky might have become, and the heights are local and brief, of grace more than of grandeur.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
The elevation is grandeur of the most literal kind, a made thing the size of a mountain with its top in cloud, and in one panel it rises more than once. First the mass, filling the field over a low horizon. Then the summit, the unfinished upper ring, where the cloud touches the building at the sky it was meant to reach. Then the scale: a ship in full sail at the base is a toy against the lowest arcade. Then the distance at the left, a lowland city and sea running out to the horizon, so that the tower stands over a world. The register is awe with dread beneath it. Held below the top because the light is even and the weather mild, and close looking turns the sublime into fascination with process, a lower register held for longer.
Andrei Rublev · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
The elevation is of one kind, a stillness that the long literature on the panel nearly always reports as the leading experience: the three inclined heads, the clear blue of the central and outer garments, the long unbroken contours of the seated figures. It rises at more than one point: the bowed head of the central angel against the tree, the right angel’s head inclined toward the table, the cup at the centre of the circle. It does not rise by scale, terror or drama. The loss of the gold has changed the key from radiance to the muted ochre of the bared ground, and what stands still reaches the height. Held below the summit by frequency and by range: one quiet register in a single panel.
William Blake · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Height near the ceiling; frequency uneven. Plate 4 sounds the whole theme at once, the sleep of Ulro, the passage through eternal death and the waking to eternal life. Plate 15’s wheels within wheels are terror made of ideas. Chapter 4 rises to Albion throwing himself into the furnaces and the furnaces becoming fountains (plate 96). The designs carry height the words need not state: Albion’s fibres drawn out by three women (plate 25); Albion cruciform before the crucified Christ, seen from behind (plate 76); Albion and Jerusalem embracing in flames (plate 99). Held from the top by frequency: the catalogues and circling laments of chapters 2 and 3 are long stretches at ground level, and the small, dense etched text works against height.
Jean Racine · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Racine’s elevation is restrained: no storm, no ghost, and long passages of argument in couplets. But the play rises, and higher as it goes. Andromaque’s night of Troy (III.8): “Songe, songe, Céphise, à cette nuit cruelle / Qui fut pour tout un peuple une nuit éternelle”
“Think, think, Céphise, of that cruel night / which was for a whole people an eternal night”, with Pyrrhus remembered “les yeux étincelants”
“eyes blazing” by the burning city. Hermione’s monologue at the opening of the fifth act, “Où suis-je ? Qu’ai-je fait ?”
“Where am I? What have I done?”, the soul arguing against itself as it speaks. Oreste’s madness at the close. Three summits, one in each late act, terror among them; the arguing scenes hold the axis off the top.
Bob Dylan · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent and of one kind, a nocturnal radiance more than grandeur or terror. Visions of Johanna is the height: the organ held under the voice, the harmonica entering at the ends of verses, the long song never resolving and never sagging. One of Us Must Know surges in its chorus on piano and organ. I Want You rises by sheer exuberance, and Just Like a Woman lifts in its bridge. Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands is transport by litany, held at one level for eleven minutes, the band rising at each refrain. The five blues and novelty numbers do not rise at all, and terror is absent. Height is high; frequency is about half the tracks.
Rembrandt van Rijn · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
The elevation is warm and grave, the sublime of tenderness in age, and it is concentrated. It rises in the father’s face, lit from the left, worn and inward; in his two hands spread on the son’s back; in the son’s bare and cracked sole, the most abject thing in the picture and its most moving; and in the red of the father’s cloak, spread around the son like a shelter. A second, cooler height is in the elder son’s lit face, standing in judgement. The register is one: stillness, the dark, a few warm lights. It rises often within the one event, but in one temperature. There is no grandeur of space and no terror; the dark is an enclosure, not an abyss. High in height, held by range.
Geoffrey Chaucer · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Height comes often, in two registers. The warm: Criseyde’s dream of the white eagle that takes her heart and leaves his own; the night of the consummation, with the rain on the roof and Troilus’s swoon; the hymn to Love after Boethius; the aubade at dawn. The dreadful: the news of the exchange; the empty house Troilus rides past; the vigil on the walls, where every cart on the road is her; Cassandra reading the boar. The cold summit is the ascent to “the eighthe spere” (V.1809), from which Troilus laughs at those who weep for his death. What holds it below the top is the long stretches of Book II, comedy and manoeuvre, deliberately unelevated.
Henry David Thoreau · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent and of several kinds. The morning bath in the pond, taken as a religious exercise; the loon’s laugh and dive in “Brute Neighbors”; the ant war, mock-heroic and appalling at once; the sounding of the pond in winter, which finds it one hundred and two feet deep and turns the figure into a parable of depth against the bottomless pond of local belief; the thaw in the railroad cut, where the flowing sand takes the forms of leaves, lobes and veins: “There is nothing inorganic” (“Spring”). The close lands after the parable of the bug that hatched from an apple-wood table: “There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star” (“Conclusion”). Held below the top because long stretches of “Economy” and “Visitors” are flat by design, and the height is lyric, not tragic.
Akira Kurosawa · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Elevation comes often and in several kinds. The woodcutter’s walk: the camera tracking above and beside him, sun broken through branches, the axe blade flashing, the score’s rhythm under it. The wife on horseback, the breeze lifting her veil, and the bandit waking under the tree. The medium’s possession, wind tearing at her robes and a man’s voice from a woman’s mouth, the dead husband speaking from the dark: the most frightening passage in the film. The wife facing a look of contempt she cannot bear, the dagger raised. The woodcutter’s version of the fight, two terrified men scrabbling in the brush, reaches the dreadful by refusing the heroic. The rain at the gate, heavy and grey, and its stopping. Held down a little: the frame is talk under a roof, and the coda’s height is sentiment rather than transport.
Samuel Beckett · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
One passage carries the height, and carries it as few passages in modern drama do: the punt on the upper lake, the girl’s eyes opening “to let me in”, the drift among the flags, “under us all moved, and moved us”, the lyric held in the recorded voice of a man thirty years dead to it. The play earns the height by repetition: the passage is heard, and heard again, and the second time it is grave. There are other rises: the blind going down in the house on the canal while the young man throws a ball for a dog, the vision on the jetty glimpsed and cut off, the closing silence. Held at 8.8 because the elevation is concentrated by design in one passage.
Isaac Babel · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent, and of a cold, terrible kind. The first story gives “Оранжевое солнце катится по небу, как отрубленная голова”
(The orange sun rolls across the sky like a severed head), and then its turn, when the narrator learns that he has slept beside a dead old man and the pregnant daughter asks her question about her father. “The Cemetery at Kozin” is a lament of great height built on a few repetitions. Pavlichenko’s account of trampling his old master for an hour rises to a terrible exultation in the man’s own voice. Pan Apolek’s icons, the townsfolk painted as saints, carry a heretical beauty. Height comes in most of the best stories; it stays below 9.0 because the mode is the abrupt flash, not the sustained ascent, and some campaign stories are level.
Michelangelo · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Height is high and of a rare kind: disquiet, not calm. The vestibule is a tall shaft lit from above, its walls pressing in with paired columns that seem caged, and the stair pours down through it, its middle steps rounding over their edges as if flowing; that first sight is among the strongest entries in Western building. Then release: from the stair’s head the hall runs away on its axis, even and luminous, a grandeur of order rather than of size. The elevation comes twice in one passage and returns at every entry. What holds it: the scale is small, the vestibule’s register is nearer tension than transport, and the hall’s beauty, once seen, is steady rather than rising.
Roberto Bolaño · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Elevation comes often, and it is the dreadful kind, built by accumulation more than by the single sentence. The crimes part reaches a sublime of quantity: case after case in the same flat words, until the flatness itself is terror. Against it stand the heights of the other parts: Amalfitano hanging Dieste’s Testamento geométrico on the clothesline and hearing a voice in the night; Fate’s night drive with Rosa out of the city; the Penitent who desecrates churches; the seer Florita Almada on television; Klaus Haas’s press conference from prison; Reiter as a child drawn to the sea floor; Ansky’s notebook read in a hiding place in the Ukraine; Reiter’s killing of Sammer. Held below the higher reaches because the prose is rarely lifted at the level of the line, by intent, and the critics’ part runs long in a comic, academic register that does not rise.
Anonymous · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Height is reached often, in the coldest register on the desk. Gunnarr’s horse stumbles on the way to exile and he looks back, Fögr er hlíðin, fair is the slope, and turns home to die. His last stand alone at Hlíðarendi, and Hallgerðr’s refusal of her hair for his bowstring, with the slap remembered. Gunnarr seen singing in his howe by moonlight. Skarpheðinn sliding across the ice of Markarfljót to split Þráinn’s head. Hildigunnr throwing her husband’s bloodied cloak over Flosi. Bergþóra refusing to leave the burning house, Njáll lying down under the ox hide with their grandson, Kári leaping out with his clothes and sword on fire. Held below the top because the heights stand among long flat runs of genealogy and procedure.
Johannes Vermeer · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
The register is one, a cool and calm beauty, not grandeur and not terror, and within it the height is as high as the medium reaches. The elevations recur as the eye crosses the field: the dark cloud over the near town and the break of blue above it; the sunlit roofs behind the shadowed gates, the picture’s one warm stroke across its cool width; the Nieuwe Kerk tower in sun, the only thing that rises; the beads of light on the boats; the reflections, broken and still at once; and the whole, which is air. Proust built a writer’s death on one lit passage of it. Held below the Sistine vault and Fan Kuan’s wall because range and frequency weigh with height, and this is one register, one moment and one view.
Edgar Allan Poe · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The elevation is of terror, and it is frequent. The fisherman’s descent into the whirlpool, looking up the wall of water at the moon, is the old natural sublime made exact. “The Pit and the Pendulum” opens “I was sick, sick unto death with that long agony” and moves by darkness, the edge of a pit felt with the hand and a blade lowering by fractions. “Usher” ends with the house splitting along its fissure and closing over the tarn; “The Masque” with the black clock stopped and illimitable dominion. And the cold height of the catacombs, the cry for the love of God answered in the same words. Held below the top because Poe’s heights are often announced before they are made, and in the lesser tales sensation stands in for elevation.
Charlotte Brontë · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Height is reached often and in more than one key. The dreadful: the red-room and the light on the wall (ch. 2); the laugh on the third storey; Rochester’s curtains on fire (ch. 15); Mason’s wound (ch. 20); the torn veil and the face in the glass (ch. 25); the stopped wedding and the creature “whether beast or human being, one could not, at first sight, tell” (ch. 26). The ecstatic: the proposal in the orchard and the chestnut split by lightning the same night (chs. 23 to 24). The desolate: the night of decision and the flight across the heath with nothing. The visionary: “Jane! Jane! Jane!” (ch. 35). And Helen’s death in Jane’s arms (ch. 9), told plainly. Held a step below the top because the register is sometimes pitched past what the scene holds, and Marsh End, apart from St John’s proposal, rises less.
D. H. Lawrence · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Height is reached often, more often in a dreadful key than a warm one. The ceiling: the lanterns on the lake and the drowned found at dawn, Diana Crich with her arms about the young doctor’s neck; Birkin stoning the moon’s reflection on Willey Water until the broken light gathers again; Gerald walking alone up the snow slope to his death. The violent heights: the mare at the crossing, the rabbit tearing Gudrun’s arm, the naked wrestling of “Gladiatorial”. The warm: “Excurse”, the night in Sherwood. Held below the summit because the heights are bought at a price in shrillness: where the prose strains for transport, in “Excurse” above all, it falls into incantation, and the elevation thins in the satiric chapters.
Émile Zola · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent and mostly dreadful. The Voreux at night in the opening, a red glow and a panting engine on the plain; the first descent in the cage, the water falling, the seam where Catherine and Étienne work on their sides; the march across the plain at sunset, the women in front and the men with axes, seen by the bourgeois through a barn door; the shooting, Maheu dead and la Maheude silent; the Voreux collapsing into itself and the canal pouring into the pit; the horse Bataille, who has not seen daylight in ten years and remembers a mill, drowning in the galleries; Catherine dying in Étienne’s arms in the dark. Then a spring morning, the earth heaving with seed. The register is grand and sometimes forced; the heights are real and they come often.
Théodore Géricault · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The elevation is of the dreadful kind, and it recurs across the surface. The wave rising at the left, darker than the sky, about to break over the raft. The sail, swollen and pulling the wrong way. The dead at the lower edge, one slipping head first into the water. The father’s face, the one fixed stare in a moving field. The climb itself, a surge the eye follows to the waving cloth, and then the drop of the eye to the horizon, where there is almost nothing. That last interval is the sublime proper: an immense effort aimed at a mark one can barely see. What limits the axis is the single register, terror tilting into hope in one instant and one brown light; the transport is strong and never changes key.
Wong Kar-wai · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent, and the method is to make it recur. Su goes down to the noodle stall with a thermos, in slow motion, under “Yumeji’s Theme”, and a routine is raised to ceremony; the two pass on a narrow stair, almost touching; rain falls on an awning while they wait for it to stop and do not want it to; smoke curls under a lamp in room 2046; a hand is reached for and withdrawn in a taxi; the farewell is rehearsed in an alley. The summit is the coda: Chow whispering into a hole in the stone at Angkor Wat and sealing it, watched by a young monk. Held below the top because frequency is bought partly by repetition, and the later returns of the theme lift less than the first.
Rainer Maria Rilke · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent, and of several kinds. The terror of the Torso’s last line; the Panther’s final image, going into the heart and ceasing there; Eurydice in the underworld, so full of her death that she no longer knows the man ahead of her, the one great tragic summit of the book; the cold beauty of “Die Flamingos” and the “Blaue Hortensie”; the fountain in Rome passing its water from basin to basin; and the comic, uncanny lift of the white elephant that comes round again on the carousel. Few books of lyric rise so often. Held below 9.0 because the heights are mostly of a held, sculptural kind, and the book seldom reaches the overwhelming scale of the greatest lyric sequences. It was Rilke’s own later work that went there.
Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Elevation here is dread, and it recurs. The fourth chapter is the summit of the first half: Gull drives Netley across London from church to monument, by Hawksmoor’s churches, Cleopatra’s Needle and Blake’s grave in Bunhill Fields, and lectures him on the gods buried under the streets until a known city turns into a diagram of power. The tenth chapter, the murder of Mary Kelly, is a long passage in small panels of near silence, in which Gull’s work is cut with his visions of the century to come; it is terrible and exalted at once, as Gull himself is exalted. The fourteenth rises again with Gull’s death and his passage through other decades. Between the summits lie flat stretches of procedure, and Campbell’s line refuses grandeur to the ordinary chapters by design. The height is high and frequent, not constant.
The Jimi Hendrix Experience · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent and of several kinds. Third Stone from the Sun is the grandest: a jazz-inflected theme, then the guitar thrown into space, feedback and treated speech, an ascent with no song to hold it. Are You Experienced? is a vertigo, the backward drums and guitar pulling against the voice until the ground moves. Red House reaches the blues sublime in its solo, a slow lament made huge. Manic Depression is height as fury; I Don’t Live Today is dread, the closing feedback a scream without a voice; May This Be Love is the warm height, a quiet guitar like falling water. Foxy Lady and Fire have force and lift, while Can You See Me, Love or Confusion and Remember stay level. Six or seven of eleven rise, the highest very high.
Auguste Rodin · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Elevation is the work’s whole register, grand and slightly dreadful. Its places: the silhouette, which at a distance reads as a standing stone or a tree trunk before it reads as a man; the backward lean, which makes the mass seem to rise against its own weight; the head thrown back and turned, the hair a mane, the eye sockets cut so deep that the gaze is shadow; and the scale of a single dark form made for a public place. Seen from below, as the bronze on the boulevard is seen, the figure looms, and the height recurs as one walks round it: from the side the lean becomes a surge, from the back the cloak is a cliff. What limits the axis: one register only, with no tenderness, and at close quarters parts of the robe read as a sack before they read as grandeur.
Claudio Monteverdi · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Height is real and recurs at the hinges. The Toccata, played three times before the curtain, is a ceremonial blaze unlike anything in the Florentine operas. The Messenger’s entry is the sublime of shock: the music turns from dance to lament in a few bars, and “Tu se’ morta” is grief in its plainest form. “Possente spirto” is the summit, a supplication whose strophes are answered in turn by violins, cornetts and harp, the ornament itself the elevation, until the plain line of the last strophe. Caronte’s sleep is held in a quiet sinfonia; Act V closes on a rising. Held below the top on frequency: Act I is charm, the spirit choruses are dignified rather than elevated, and the crisis of Act IV is too quick to rise.
Built for Fujiwara no Yorimichi · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Elevation is the hall’s register, and its kind is serenity. The first height is the view from the east bank: the whole outline doubled in the still pond, the wings lifted on posts so that they seem to float. It rises again at evening, when the light comes from behind the hall and the image sits in shadow at the centre of its house. Inside is the second summit: the gilt Amida under the canopy and, round the upper walls, the small bodhisattvas playing and dancing on clouds, a heaven arriving. The moments recur. What holds the axis is scale: the room is small and dark, and the paintings that carried the descent are now faint.
Caravaggio · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The elevation is grave, not ecstatic, and it rises more than once. First the body: the pale torso lit against the dark, the dead weight in the shoulders and the hanging arm, a beauty of the dead read as both lost and offered. Then the slab’s corner, which seems to come out at the viewer, so that the descent is felt as coming into one’s own space. Then the cascade of hands, from the raised arms at the top right down to the fingers that touch the stone, a fall read in one look. Then Nicodemus’s face, an old labourer’s face turned out at us, which gives the scene its terror of the ordinary. The height is held in one register throughout, not renewed in kind.
John Ford · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent and of both kinds, grand and dreadful. A door swings open from darkness onto the desert and a rider comes out of it. On the evening before the raid the light goes red, the family puts out the lamp, Lucy screams as she understands, and Scar’s shadow falls across Debbie at her grandmother’s grave. Ethan rides in to the burning ranch; he shoots out a dead man’s eyes; riders cross the buttes through the seasons and the snow; his face turns to the captives at the fort. Then the lift, and the last door. Held below the top by frequency: the summits are separated by long stretches of horseplay. When the height is reached, it is among the highest the Western has.
Gian Lorenzo Bernini · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The elevation is wonder, renewed at each step of a circuit. From behind Apollo: speed, a body in full stride caught in a stone that weighs tons. At the side: the bark climbing her thigh, closing over flesh like a sheath. At the front: the fingers splitting into leaves so thin that light passes through them, the hair blown back into foliage, the toes going down into the rock as roots. Then the face, the mouth open on a cry that has no sound. The terror is real but brief, a single instant of horror kept under the sweetness of the making. What holds it below the top is range: one register of astonishment, no grandeur of scale and no sustained dread. It is a marvel more than a transport.
Pontormo · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The elevation is real, strange and recurrent. It rises in the Virgin’s pale face, its gaze fixed on the body, at a scale that brings her nearer than she stands; in the crouching youth’s face turned out to the viewer, shocked or vacant, the most unsettling look in the panel; in the body, grey white and long, borne as if it weighed nothing; and in the colour, pinks, salmon, ice blue and acid green laid as cangiante, silks that change hue across a fold, under a light with no source. The empty centre is itself a height, a hole at the heart of a crowd. The register is one, a cold and dreamlike grief, neither terror nor grandeur, and some heads at the top are dutiful rather than raised.
Mexica · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Elevation of the dreadful kind, and recurring. The first height is the whole: a headless figure taller than a man, its face made of two serpents looking at each other, so that the gaze the viewer seeks is withheld and replaced. The second is the necklace at the level of one’s own face: hands, hearts, skull, laid on breasts. The third is the claws held forward, ready. The fourth is the hidden underside, which, once known, makes the whole statue a lid over the earth’s mouth. The terror is not theatrical; it comes from weight, symmetry and stillness, and it rises from every side. Held below the top because the register is single, dread without relief, and because some of its force on modern viewers is strangeness, which is not height.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The elevation is cold, quiet and sustained rather than struck. It comes from height: the viewer stands on the brow with the hunters, and the ground falls away into the valley and rises again to the peaks. It comes from silence: the scene is crowded and reads as hushed, the snow taking the sound. And it comes from one figure, the black bird gliding out over the drop, which gives the air its scale and its emptiness. For one panel the frequency is high, present wherever the eye rests: the tilt of the trees, the green of the ice, the skaters far below. Held below the summit because it reaches neither terror nor transport: this is the sublime of a world seen whole and steady, not of a revelation.
Piero della Francesca · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The elevation is of one kind and very high: the gaze. The face under the long hair and the beard, the eyes set level and open, meets the viewer from a height that the low view of the tomb has already made felt, and the effect, cold and fixed, is the one every account of the picture records. Around it: the dawn sky clearing behind the head; the raised leg, a stride arrested on the threshold; the pink of the mantle against grey stone; the slack heads below, which make the wakefulness above more terrible. Frequency limits it. One figure carries the height, and the lower half, the soldiers and the tomb front, is beautiful in its making rather than elevating. One register, grave and still, with no transport of scale.
Anonymous (the Gawain poet) · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Height comes often, and in more than one key. The dreadful: the green giant riding into the hall at the feast, and the severed head lifted by its hair, opening its eyes and speaking, while the body rides out. The grand and cold: the year passing in the seasons stanzas; the winter journey, Gawain sleeping in his armour among the rocks while the sleet freezes. The marvellous: the castle that rises after his prayer on Christmas Eve, as if “pared out of papure”, cut out of paper. The terror held back: at the Green Chapel the sound of a blade ground on a stone before anyone is seen, and the axe swung three times. The comic register rises too, in the bedroom and in the court’s laughter. Held a step below the summit because this is the height of a romance, transport and terror, not the tragic depth of the works above it.
Anonymous · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The second part rises again and again, and the rises grow. Hagen throws the chaplain overboard to test the water-sprites’ prophecy; when the priest reaches the bank alive he knows none of them will return, and smashes the boat. Hagen and Volker sit on the bench before Kriemhild and will not rise, Siegfried’s sword across Hagen’s knees. Volker keeps the night watch, fiddling the Burgundians to sleep. In the burning hall the thirsting men drink the blood of the dead at Hagen’s word. Rüdiger gives his shield to the man he must fight. The first part has the murder among the flowers and the bier that bleeds, and long stretches that do not rise: height near the summit, frequency held down by the first half.
Jacopo Barozzi da Vignola and Giacomo della Porta · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Height is high and comes in more than one place. The summit is the nave vault: Gaulli’s sky, its clouds and bodies spilling across the gilt frame onto Raggi’s stucco and casting painted shadows on the real vault, so that the roof seems to give way. The dome and apse carry it toward the altar. The altar of Ignatius, with its columns of lapis, its globe and the statue revealed behind a lowered painting, overwhelms by material and stagecraft. The walk down the nave is a rising approach to the light of the crossing. It falls at the edges: the front is dignified rather than elevating, the chapels are dim and uneven, and the richness of the whole can weigh as well as lift.
Eugène Delacroix · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Elevation of a hot register, sustained across the field. At the apex, Liberty against a sky opening out of smoke, the flag against light, the stride caught mid-step over the barricade, the head turned back. At the base, the dead, the stripped body thrust at the viewer along the picture’s lower edge, terror under the triumph. The boy, open-mouthed, pistols raised, gives the advance its speed; the wounded man’s gaze gives it its reverence. Transport and dread are present at once, and the eye climbs from one to the other; the picture rises in several places, not once. What limits it: the triumph is single-minded and the dread serves it, the elevation is rhetoric’s as much as vision’s, and the smoke and crowd behind are summary and give the height no depth. A great picture of the charge more than of the abyss.
Charles Dickens · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent and of several kinds. The early chapters reach a height of remembered perception that few English books equal: the garden at Blunderstone, the boat-house on the sands at Yarmouth, the mother at the window, the news of her death delivered at school. The comic sublime is Micawber’s, in the formula of income and expenditure and in the explosion of Heep. The dreadful sublime is the storm at Yarmouth, where Ham goes into the sea for a man on the wreck who proves to be Steerforth. Barkis going out with the tide is grave and exact. Held below the top by the sentimental heights that fall short, Agnes “pointing upward”, Emily’s letters, Martha by the river, which the book reaches for more than once.
Caspar David Friedrich · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The sublime is the subject, and it is the cold sublime of magnitude and void, Kant’s mathematical sublime made a picture. Height is at the top of the medium. The sky rises from the dark sea in a gradation from near black at the horizon through grey and mist to a pale clearing high up, so that the eye climbs the whole canvas without finding a resting point, and the monk’s smallness against it is the measure of terror. The register is single and held across the whole field. What keeps the axis below the top is frequency: there is one elevation, total and unbroken, and no second summit within the picture. It is one sublime instant, not a work that rises again and again.
Marvin Gaye · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Elevation is warm and frequent, and it is the record’s characteristic mode. The title song lifts at once: the alto saxophone over the party voices, then the voice entering low and climbing, counter-voices rising behind it. Flyin’ High reaches a dreamy, drugged height that is also dread. Save the Children is the strangest height, Gaye speaking a line in one voice while singing it in another, plea and lament at once. Wholy Holy, a slow hymn of stacked voices, is the summit of the warm kind; Inner City Blues reaches the cold kind. Right On stays level for most of its length, and God Is Love passes before it rises. Six or seven of nine tracks rise, in beauty and lament, seldom in grandeur.
Le Corbusier · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Elevation is high and frequent. At the High Court the three coloured piers rise through the whole height of the open entrance under the parasol, the scale of the law made bodily. Across the plain the Assembly’s portico lifts its upturned canopy against the sky, and the hyperboloid and the pyramid stand over the roof line against the Shivalik hills. Inside the Assembly the hypostyle forum is dim and tall, its columns rising into shadow, and the chamber takes its light from above. The pools double the High Court; the Open Hand turns against the sky. The register is grave and solar, never intimate. What holds it below the top: the plain also deadens, its glare and distance spending the elevation between buildings, and the Secretariat, seen whole, is long rather than lifted.
Gunnar Asplund and Sigurd Lewerentz · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Height and frequency both count. The height is at the entrance. From the wall the ground opens into a wide, almost empty slope of grass under a large sky; the dark cross stands at one side, the hill and its grove at the far edge, and the forest closes round all of it. It is one of the century’s great moments of elevation in built landscape, reached by subtraction. It recurs: on the grove’s stair, steepening as the trees close over; at the turn from the forest into the white domed room of the Woodland Chapel; along the Seven Wells; in the loggia, where the impluvium opens to the sky. Snow, low northern light and fog renew it. Held from the top because the register is one, calm and elegiac, never terrible, its grandeur quiet by design.
Wallace Stevens · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The heights are among the highest of the century in the English lyric. The close of “Sunday Morning”, “Downward to darkness, on extended wings”, is a summit of American verse. “The Snow Man” reaches a cold elevation by subtraction. “Peter Quince at the Clavier” rises from Susanna’s bath to “Beauty is momentary in the mind” and to the body, where “in the flesh it is immortal”. “Domination of Black” builds dread from leaves, fire and “the cry of the peacocks”, and “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon” has grandeur in a few lines: “I was the world in which I walked”. Frequency is the charge. The book’s other mode is comic and exquisite, and the comic poems, “Bantams in Pine-Woods” and “The Plot Against the Giant”, delight without lifting. Elevation is frequent for a collection, but it is not continuous.
Ernest Hemingway · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The heights are real and recur, and most are dreadful. Pilar’s tale is built in one long telling from the dawn in the square to the last man at the cliff. On Sordo’s hill the old man fights from a bare hilltop behind dead horses, the boy Joaquín says the Hail Mary as the planes come, and the heads are taken afterwards. Pilar describes the smell of death and unnerves Jordan. The bridge has its few minutes, and the close has Jordan, his leg broken, holding off pain and the wish to end it so as to wait for the officer. The warm height, the night when the earth moves, is famous and divides readers: the scene leans on its idiom. Held below the top for that lapse and for the level stretches of talk at the cave.
Ridley Scott · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent and of both kinds. The opening: a landscape of refinery flares, a spinner rising toward the Tyrell pyramid, an eye in close-up reflecting fire, under Vangelis’s swelling synthesisers. The owl crossing the Tyrell office in amber light; Rachael’s smoke in the sunset room; Zhora running through glass in slow motion while the score mourns her. Batty with Tyrell’s head in his hands, the kiss and the crushing. The rain on the roof, a white dove, a nail through a palm, the speech, the bowed head, the dove rising. The dread is as high: Leon’s hand on Deckard’s face, Pris’s scream, Batty howling in the corridors. Held below the top because the middle third, from Leon’s death to Sebastian’s flat, flattens into procedure and a cold love scene, and some of the height is design admired rather than feeling felt.
Sandro Botticelli · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The elevation is beauty in its cool form, sustained across the surface rather than placed in one moment, and it rises in four places. Venus’s face, inclined, melancholy and addressed to no one, is one of the best-known heights in painting. The hair, moving in strands the wind does not quite explain, is a second. The flight of the winds, mouth to mouth, their drapery and wings crossing, is a third and of another kind: velocity in a picture otherwise still. The attendant’s billowing cloak and stepping pose give a fourth. Height and frequency are both present. Held below 9.0 by register: the elevation is grace, not grandeur or terror, and a sea and sky given almost no depth leave the transport to the figures alone.
Robert Schumann · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Height is real and frequent for a work of twenty-eight minutes, and in a chosen register. The sublime of dread: no. 13, where the voice is left alone and two dry chords are the loudest silence in the Lied. Grandeur: no. 6, the cathedral rising in the Rhine, in an archaic dotted style that gives the image its stone. Bitter height: no. 7, the long climb of the denial. Beauty: the suspended opening of no. 1, and the postlude of no. 16, which is the work’s summit and arrives after the voice has finished. Held below Winterreise (9.3) on frequency and on scale of forces: nos. 2, 3, 4, 5, 11 and 14 are graceful or witty miniatures that do not rise, more than a third of the songs.
Peter Zumthor · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent and comes in many registers: in the first sight of the hall, the blocks standing in green water under lines of light; in the light at the roof joints, moving down the stone through the day; in the hot bath, small and enclosed, with the cold bath beside it; in the sound room, where a voice returns from the stone; in the outdoor pool in winter, steam over the water against snow and the mountainside across the valley; and in the openings toward the valley, where the mass of stone frames the land. Height is high but quiet, a grandeur of mass and depth rather than of vastness or dread, at the scale of rooms, not of a nave. Frequency is high, for the bather moves among such moments at will. Held a step below the top because the height never overwhelms.
Henry of Reyns and successors; Henry VII Chapel by Robert and William Vertue (attributed); west towers by Nicholas Hawksmoor · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Elevation is high and frequent inside. The nave gives it first: narrow and very tall, the Purbeck shafts drawing the eye to the vault, so that the vessel reads as height before it reads as length. It recurs at the crossing, where the four arms open round the pavement; in the dim ambulatory, close among the tombs, where the awe is of the dead rather than of space; and in the Lady Chapel, where the pendant vault hangs like lace over the banners of an order of knights. The register ranges from the grand to the funerary to the ornamental. What holds it: monuments obscure the elevation in many bays and break the sight lines, screen and organ cut the long view, and the refaced exterior is grand without transport.
Assyrian court sculptors · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent and of the dreadful kind. The lion that leaps at the back of the chariot, claws reaching for the wheel, as spearmen thrust at it. The lioness rising on her forelegs, mouth open, her hind quarters dragging. The lion vomiting blood as it sinks. The released lion bounding from the cage as the boy in his box above pulls the door. The king on foot, a lion rearing at him, held by the throat as the sword goes in. Grandeur and terror recur along the band and through the registers, and the open ground left round the dying beasts gives each death its space. The rite at the end, the king pouring over the lions to music, is a cooler height. Held below the summit because the human figures never reach the height of the animals.
W. G. Sebald · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The elevation is cold and frequent. The Ladies’ Waiting Room at Liverpool Street, where Austerlitz sees himself as a small boy waiting for his foster parents. Věra’s flat in Šporkova street, and her account of the child and his mother. The walk through the empty streets of Terezín and the window of its antique shop. The slowed copy of the Nazi film of Theresienstadt, in which he searches a woman’s face for his mother’s while the voices drop into a growl. The national library in Paris, vast and empty of readers. The narrator at Breendonk, descending into the casemates, and the close beside its moat. Held below the higher reaches because the register is one, a low steady grief, and its heights are reached by accumulation more than by a rise: the book rarely changes key, and transport needs a change.
Frédéric Chopin · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Height is reached often and in both registers. The sublime of dread: No. 2 over its grinding left hand; the middle of No. 15, where the repeated note becomes a tolling and the dynamics climb to fortissimo; the runs of No. 24 and its three low Ds; the octave fury of No. 22. The sublime of beauty: the lament of No. 4; the F sharp major nocturne of No. 13; the A flat return of No. 17; the cantabile of No. 21; and No. 20, whose chords move from grandeur to a whisper in a few bars. At least eight of the twenty-four rise. Held below the top by design: Nos. 3, 5, 10, 11, 14, 18 and 23 are brilliance, wit or play, beautiful and not elevated.
David Lynch and Mark Frost · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
The work rises to the top often, in terror and in beauty, and in all three parts. In the series: the Red Room dream of episode 2, its backward speech and dancing; the Giant in the Roadhouse over Julee Cruise while Leland kills Maddy; Cooper in the Lodge in the finale. In the film: the Pink Room’s noise and strobe, and the last scene, Laura in the Red Room seeing her angel. In The Return: Part 8, the descent into the atomic cloud to Penderecki’s Threnody and the Woodsman on the radio; and the last minutes of Part 18, the house, the name, the scream. Badalamenti’s themes carry elevation through weaker hours. Held below the top by frequency over forty-five hours: the second season’s middle is flat for long stretches, and the Las Vegas parts rise seldom.
Werner Herzog · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent, and of a kind few films reach. The opening: a column of soldiers, slaves, llamas and litter-bearers winding down a sheer green slope into cloud, held long, with Popol Vuh’s choral keyboard rising over it. The raft caught in the eddy, turning, unreachable, its men found dead the next morning. Inés in her court dress walking upright into the forest without looking back. The ship lodged high in a tree, which the men will not believe they see. The last shot, the camera circling a raft overrun by small monkeys while one man stands among the dead. Terror and grandeur are the mode, and the comedy of the emperor at his meal sharpens them. Held below the top by the flat stretches of the drift.
Francis Bacon · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Elevation of the dreadful kind, three times in about two square metres. The right panel is the summit: the mouth thrust out of the field on a neck stretched to its limit, teeth bared, a scream with no throat to come from. The centre is a second, colder height: a bound head on a plinth, blind and facing out, in the posture of a cult image. The left is the lowest register, a body turned away in what could be grief or digestion. The orange carries the elevation throughout, a colour of heat and alarm with no shadow, so the figures cannot recede. What holds it: one temperature, terror, with no relief or turn; panels under a metre high, so grandeur of size is not available; and a left panel weaker than the other two.
Paul Celan · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Height and frequency both. The height is “Todesfuge”, whose terror rises by repetition until its last lines set two heads of hair side by side, “dein goldenes Haar Margarete / dein aschenes Haar Sulamith”, “your golden hair Margarete / your ashen hair Shulamith”, with nothing said between them: one of the summits of dread in the century’s poetry. “Corona” rises in another register, a love poem that ends in a public, almost prophetic summons. “Espenbaum” reaches a plain and terrible elevation, and “Zähle die Mandeln” and “Kristall” rise again. The rises are frequent in the strong poems and absent from the weaker ones, and that keeps the figure below 9.
Jules Hardouin-Mansart · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Elevation is grandeur, warm outside and cold within, and it comes often. Outside: the gilt dome over the roofs of the Left Bank, seen down the long axis of the esplanade from the Seine and from the Place Vauban, a defining figure of the Paris skyline; the eye’s climb from the two orders of the front through drum, attic and lantern. Inside: the step into the crossing and the light falling from a source one cannot see, the painted heaven framed by the open ring of the lower cupola, so that the sky seems further than the building could hold. Then the descent of the gaze into the well, where the red sarcophagus lies in a ring of victories: a second summit, and a grave one. The corner chapels and much of the marble are rich rather than elevated.
T. S. Eliot · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Elevation is high and frequent for a poem of this length. “Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree / In the cool of the day” (II) opens the second section on a strange, cold grandeur, and the bones’ litany to the Lady rises into a chant. The stair of the third section, with the fiend twisted on the banister and then, through a window, the pastoral of “Lilac and brown hair” (III), is one of the great passages of temptation in the language, lifted by its own sensuousness. The sixth reaches a transport in “the lost lilac and the lost sea voices” (VI) that the poem then refuses, and lands on prayer with real height. Held below 9.0 because the fifth section, and stretches of the first, argue by incantation rather than ascend.
Hayao Miyazaki · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent, of several kinds, and placed at the joints. Nago coming out of the trees as a mass of writhing red and black worms is terror on the first page. The Forest Spirit at its pool, a deer with a face near human, flowers rising and dying in each print of its feet, is the sublime in the old sense, beauty and fear at once. The Night-walker, the same god as a translucent giant crossing the hills at dusk, is grandeur. San sucking the blood from Moro’s wound; the boar army in the mist; Moro’s severed head still closing its jaws on Eboshi’s arm. The summit is the headless god spreading death over the mountain and then life as it falls. Held below the top because the war of boars and men is action more than elevation, and the rise there is slower.
Burgundian Romanesque builders · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Elevation comes often and at three heights. First the threshold: the central tympanum seen in the half-light of the narthex, its elongated Christ, his drapery as if blown by wind, one of the summits of Romanesque carving. Then the nave from the inner door: ten bays of striped arches running in perspective, light from the clerestory falling across pale stone, a grandeur without darkness that is rare in Romanesque. Then the Gothic choir, lifted and lit, received as the goal of the walk. Between them the capitals give small elevations of terror and the grotesque. What holds it is height and kind: a moderate height, and the sublime of a sequence rather than of one overwhelming room.
Guru Arjan; rebuilt and gilded under Maharaja Ranjit Singh · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent and high, and the ensemble makes it rather than size. The gilt shrine stands small in a wide square of water, doubled by its reflection, so that it is seen first across distance and stillness; at dawn and at night, lit, it burns on the dark pool. The causeway narrows the approach to one line toward one door. The singing, carried over the water from within, from before dawn into the night, makes the place continuous in sound as in sight. The register is radiant, calm and devotional, never terrible. Held below the top: the interior is small, close and ornate rather than vast, the gold near at hand tends to richness more than grandeur, and the height belongs to the view across the water more than to any room.
Joni Mitchell · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Height comes often and is of one kind, beauty under strain. A Case of You rises in its chorus as the voice leaps and the dulcimer drones beneath. River opens and closes on a Jingle Bells figure on the piano, bent toward the minor, and the long-held line on “skate away on” lifts the record’s widest wish. The title song climbs into its upper register over slow piano chords, “songs are like tattoos”, and drops. Little Green holds its height through the last verse, and The Last Time I Saw Richard ends on a piano coda that turns a bar-room anecdote toward its “dark cafe days”. That is a high frequency for ten songs. Carey, All I Want and This Flight Tonight are vivid rather than elevated, and the height never reaches grandeur or terror.
Kate Bush · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Elevation comes often and in more than one kind. The opening of Running Up That Hill, a drum pattern and a cello figure on the Fairlight under a voice pitched between plea and threat, is height from the first bar. Cloudbusting builds on strings and a marching drum to a release that is plainly grand. On side two the height changes kind: the piano and single voice of And Dream of Sheep, “little light shining”, a lullaby sung to someone drowning; then Hello Earth opening into a chorus sung low and wordless over the world seen from above, the record’s summit. Under Ice and Waking the Witch reach terror. Mother Stands for Comfort and The Big Sky do not rise, and some of the height leans on a sound now heard as of its year.
David Bowie · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Elevation is real, cold, and concentrated on side two. Warszawa is the summit: a slow processional under synthesiser chords, then a voice in invented syllables rising like a choir in a foreign rite, grave and immense. Subterraneans ends the record in a lament, a saxophone over drifting synthesisers. Art Decade lifts in its quiet way. On side one Sound and Vision has a bright, suspended height in its long instrumental opening, and Speed of Life a manic lift. The rest of side one has force more than elevation: Breaking Glass is brittle, What in the World nervous, Be My Wife flat by intent, and Weeping Wall stays level. Height at the top is very high; it comes on five or six of eleven tracks, and that frequency holds the figure.
Kenzo Tange · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Elevation is very high, and it recurs. Outside, the roof falls from the mast heads in a long concave sweep to the ground, the ridge between the paired cables like the ridge of a great roof, and from the approach by Harajuku and the shrine forest the two halls read as one figure, the large and the small, the axis and the spiral. Inside the large hall the ceiling descends on either side from the lit ridge, so the whole hall hangs from a line of light. The small hall winds the same lift into one vortex round its mast. The register is buoyant and taut, never terrible. What holds it: the large hall, fitted for many uses, lowers the register at floor level, and inside, the small hall is closer and less exalted than its exterior.
Marilynne Robinson · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Elevation is the book’s ordinary pitch, and it comes often. The Fireball sliding off the bridge into the black lake at night, never recovered. The flood that fills the house, Sylvie and Ruth moving through rooms of standing water. The night on the lake in a borrowed rowboat, and the cold valley of the abandoned homestead where Ruth, left alone, imagines children at the edge of the trees. The crossing of the bridge in the dark. The close, Lucille in a Boston restaurant as Ruth imagines her, who “does not watch, does not listen, does not wait, does not hope, and always for me and Sylvie.” Between these, the meditations on Lot’s wife, the Flood and the resurrection rise in the sentence itself. Held below the top: the elevation keeps to one register, elegiac and luminous, and seldom reaches terror or grandeur outside it.
Octavio Paz · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Height and frequency both. The opening six lines are one of the great openings of the Spanish century: a water that is a tree, a tree that dances, a river that “arrives forever”, the movement of the whole poem enacted in one breath of syntax. The erotic movement rises as landscape and keeps rising. Madrid, 1937 is the summit: the bombardment, the couple stripping in the square, and the turn from terror to a grave tenderness in a few lines that do not raise their voice. The tribunal of the dead reaches a colder height. And the return, when the six lines come back after 578 others and are read as the arrival they promised, is an elevation only the form can give. What holds it short of 9 is the plateau between: the chains of image in the middle are lovely and level, so the height comes in waves with long troughs.
Sergio Leone · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent and of more than one kind, and it is reached in all three periods. Morricone’s score, with Deborah’s theme and the pan flute, lifts scene after scene without sweetening it. Deborah as a girl dances alone among the sacks while Noodles watches through a hole in the privy wall. Patsy sits on the stair with the charlotte russe he bought to pay Peggy and eats it himself, bite by bite, a comic sublime of appetite and childhood. Dominic falls in the street beneath the bridge. The boys walk toward the camera with the Manhattan Bridge closing the view. A telephone rings across the opening; an old man stands in an empty station; a young man smiles.
Senenmut (attributed), under Hatshepsut · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Height is high, and it comes at the approach. From the plain the long white horizontals of the terraces lie against the vertical, fluted face of the cliff, a made order set in the lap of the mountain: one of the great sights of architecture. It recurs on the climb, as at each ramp the cliff draws nearer and the next portico rises over the last, until the axis enters the rock. The chapels give a second register, of colour and enclosure. Frequency falls inside: the sanctuary is small and dark, the terraces are open courts, and much of the elevation is the cliff’s, claimed rather than made. The register is calm, never terrible. Held below Sainte-Chapelle, at 9.2, whose elevation is the interior itself.
Johann Sebastian Bach · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Height comes often. The sublime of brilliance: the trumpet of No. 2 entering at the top of its range, the violin’s runs in No. 4, the cadenza of No. 5. The sublime of beauty, where the set rises highest: the Affettuoso of No. 5, a trio in B minor; the Adagio ma non tanto of No. 6, the violas’ long imitative lines; the Andante of No. 2, three soloists in D minor over a walking bass; the oboe’s lament in No. 1. Held below the summit because there is no terror and almost no grandeur, and the fast movements, a large share of the time, are energy and delight more than elevation.
Wang Ximeng · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
The elevation is sustained and recurs across the length. The peaks rise in successive surges, each massif brighter at its crown, so that the eye climbs again and again; the mineral blue deepening toward the summits over green and ochre gives a luminous, unreal clarity that ink alone does not give. The open water between the ranges is a second kind of height, a breadth of calm under the silk’s own light, with tiny boats making the distance felt. The central rise is the summit, peaks crowded and towering over the water. It is warm elevation, grandeur and radiance without terror, and it never reaches the dread or the vast emptiness that ink landscape of its age could reach. One kind of height and a constant brightness keep the summits less set off, and hold the axis below 9.0.
Giacomo Puccini · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent, and almost all of it is the sublime of tenderness and loss. Act I rises three times in ten minutes: “Che gelida manina”
“What a cold little hand”, with its climb to the high C; “Sì, mi chiamano Mimì”
“Yes, they call me Mimì”, whose melody opens as she speaks of the first spring sun; and “O soave fanciulla”
“O sweet girl”, the lovers going out singing offstage. Act II rises in the ensemble built over Musetta’s waltz; Act III holds the winter dawn and the quartet. The death is a height of quiet that ends at full force on Rodolfo’s cry. Held below the top because the work never reaches the cold or the terrible, and charm fills the gaps.
Jackson Pollock · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Elevation is high and, unusually, everywhere. The all-over form means that the canvas does not rise to one summit and fall away, but holds one intensity across 5.3 metres, so that frequency is the form. The register is a sublime of number and energy: lines too many to follow, a field too wide to hold, the eye carried along a skein and handed to the next with no place to rest. From a few paces it reads as weather; close to, as single lines of great speed. What holds it is range: one temperature, one kind of transport, with no grandeur by contrast, no terror by event, none of the tenderness the Water Lilies reach. The sameness that is the work’s law caps its height.
Adam Lock and others · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The building rises often and in several keys. The chapter house is a single pier opening into a palm of ribs over an octagon lit on every side. The stair to it, worn into waves by centuries of feet, is an approach of real elevation. The scissor arches give the crossing a strange, almost alarming grandeur: a great inverted arch set on an arch, looking down the nave like a pair of eyes. The retrochoir is a forest of slender piers seen through one another, closed by the star vault of the Lady Chapel. The west front, seen across the green in raking light, is a cliff of figures. Against these the nave is calmer, its beauty one of rhythm more than height, not tall by French measure.
Oscar Niemeyer · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Height is high and frequency good. Elevation comes in the approach, where the crown of curved ribs rises off open ground against the plateau’s sky; in the passage, low and dark, where the body is pressed down before release; in the emergence into the nave, flooded with coloured light, the ribs sweeping up to the ring and the angels hanging overhead, one of the great thresholds of modern building; and at night, lit from within, a glowing crown. The register is transport, warm and buoyant, never dread. Held below the top because the interior is one moment: once entered, the room offers little further sequence, and the nave on a hot afternoon, and the colour of the later glass, are widely felt as less than the first sight.
Hayao Miyazaki · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
It rises often, and its heights are of more than one kind. The lamps of the bathhouse coming on at dusk as the spirits step off the ferry. The stink spirit’s cleansing, the rubbish drawn out on a rope by the whole staff, and an old face rising laughing from the water. Chihiro weeping as she eats the rice balls Haku gives her, a height made of nothing but hunger and kindness. The train across the flooded plain, its passengers silent and translucent, with Joe Hisaishi’s piano under it. The flight home, and the scales falling away. Terror too: Yubaba’s rooms, No-Face swollen in the corridors. Held below the top where the middle’s crossing plot, explained in haste, gives fewer heights than the passages around it.
Katsushika Hokusai · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The elevation is grandeur, and it is high. A mountain larger than its frame, set against a sky that recedes in rows of cloud, on a sheet that can be held in two hands: the print makes the vast present at the scale of a page, and the effect does not wear with familiarity. The red is the summit of it, the cone lit as if from within against a cold blue. It is one height, and it is the whole sheet: one image, one moment, one register of calm, so frequency is not what the axis can find here. Water Lilies (9.0) and The Starry Night (9.2), which rise again across a room or a sky, stand above it. The height depends in part on the early colour, which varies from sheet to sheet.
Caspar David Friedrich · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Elevation is the work’s subject, and it is reached in more than one place. The fog: a pale sea with wave-like crests where the mist breaks over the spurs, matter turned to weather. The far ranges at the left, fading by steps until mountain cannot be told from cloud. The great mass at the right, solid against the drift. And the figure, in whom the transport is placed: the viewer feels the height by standing where he stands, at his back, with the drop below the outcrop implied and unseen. The register is cold, grand and quiet, with terror held at the edge and not given. Held below the top: the field is small, the elevation is of one register and one instant, and between its summits the near rock is dark ground, not height.
Henryk Górecki · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Height is reached, and it returns. The first summit is the soprano’s entry at the centre of the first movement, after the canon has filled the whole string body and broken off: an arrival after a long climb. The second is the climax of the second movement, the voice rising on its invocation of the Queen of Heaven to a single high note over unmoving chords. The last minutes of the third are elevation by stillness, the ostinato thinning toward the final held chord. Elevation is the register throughout: no scherzo, no dance, nothing below the grave. Held below the top on frequency: the canon’s first minutes in the basses are approach, not yet height, and the finale’s middle strophes rock rather than rise. Beside Winterreise at 9.3, the height is of one colour.
Jakob Prandtauer · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Elevation is high and recurs. It comes first from outside: from the river or the road the ochre mass rides the rock, the two towers and the dome rising behind the curved terrace front, a sight held over kilometres of the valley and renewed at each bend. It comes on the terrace, where the town and the Danube fall away on one side and the church front fills the other; in the library, gilt and dark wood under Troger’s ceiling; in the Marble Hall; and in the church, a gilded nave under Rottmayr’s vault and dome, the high altar staged like a theatre. The register is triumph and splendour, seldom the dreadful. Held off the top: the church interior crowds its own elevation, and the long wings are flat between the heights.
Paul Valéry · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Height is reached often in the major pieces. “Le Cimetière marin” rises again and again: the opening stanza of the sea at noon; the stanza of the dead, “Ils ont fondu dans une absence épaisse”, “They have melted into a thick absence”; the last turn to the wind and the breaking waves. “La Pythie” reaches a frightened grandeur in the priestess’s possession, the body seized by the god’s speech, and closes on the elevation of sacred language. “Palme” is elevation in quiet, and “Les Pas” a smaller, intense height of expectation. The cold sublimity of the intellect is Valéry’s own register, and the book sustains it across its major poems. The charge: the slighter pieces are graceful rather than high.
Terrence Malick · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Elevation is the film’s ground, and it recurs in distinct summits: the ships coming upriver under the prelude to Das Rheingold, seen first from the shore; Smith walking through grass taller than he is into a village that receives him; the girl dancing in the shallows and on the meadow; snow on the fort and the starving men; the clipped English gardens after the forest; her last walk in a garden with her son; the river again under the prelude. Lubezki’s moving camera holds the pitch across two hours. The costs are weighed in full: rapture that never lowers loses contrast, so the frequency the axis credits is also its limit; some passages are lifted by Wagner and Mozart more than by the image; and the famine and fighting never reach the dread the wonder needs as counterweight.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The elevation is real and recurs. From the Potsdamer Straße the first sight is of a black plate hovering over a recessed glass hall, its corners carried out past the columns, the whole far lighter than its known weight, and the effect does not wear on the tenth approach. Inside, the hall is one volume under the dark coffered grid, with the city on four sides; at dusk, with the lights on, the glass disappears and the roof floats over a lit field. The descent to the lower floor and out into the walled garden gives a second, quieter register: stone, water, sculpture, sky. It falls short of the highest marks because its sublime is of one kind, a cool grandeur of suspension, without terror or transport, and because the lower floor gives little of it.
Cormac McCarthy · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Height is reached often and in more than one key. The dreadful: a drowned man brought up with a grappling hook before a watching crowd in the opening pages; the rockslide that kills Wanda in the rain at the Reese camp, and her father’s grief; the son’s grave. The grand: the passage alone in the Smoky Mountains, where hunger and solitude break into vision, and the river in flood and fog through every season. The comic sublime, rarer in literature, is here: Harrogate raises slapstick to a kind of grandeur, and his tunnel under the city toward a bank vault, ending in a burst of sewage, is a descent into the underworld played for laughs. The close rises again on the huntsman’s hounds that “tire not”. Held below 9.0 because the elevation is so constant in register that it sometimes flattens, and the prose reaches for height in passages that have not earned it.
The Smashing Pumpkins · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Elevation is the record’s chief gift, frequent and mostly warm, the transport of massed sound. Cherub Rock rises layer by layer to its first full blaze. Soma is the summit: a long, quiet opening that the band floods with distorted guitars at its middle, a slow heartbreak turned to grandeur, and a solo that climbs over it. Mayonaise is the other height, a tender melody lifted on a wall of guitars. Hummer rises and floats, Disarm has a strange, cold height in its bells and strings, Geek U.S.A. reaches a fierce height of force, and Luna closes in hushed beauty. Eight or nine of thirteen tracks rise. Rocket and Quiet are force without lift, Silverfuck’s vamp is level for long stretches, and Sweet Sweet is a sketch.
Massive Attack · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent and mostly dreadful, and it comes by accumulation. Angel is the first summit: a bass line, Horace Andy’s high voice over it like a prayer, and then the guitar that tears the track open, a terror held back for three minutes and released. Teardrop is the warm height, Elizabeth Fraser’s voice over a keyboard figure and a heartbeat pulse, beauty without sweetness. Dissolved Girl rises on its distorted guitar; Black Milk is suspended and cold. Group Four is the last and largest rise, two voices passed back and forth until the band crashes in for the record’s loudest minutes. Seven or eight of eleven tracks rise, the highest very high. Risingson and Inertia Creeps carry menace more than height, and the title track and Exchange stay level.
Interpol · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Elevation is real and cold, and it comes often. Untitled opens on a wash of guitars that hangs like fog. NYC rises slowly to its sung refrain, a height of exhaustion. The summit is PDA’s long coda, the guitars locking over a bass that keeps climbing, a release withheld through the body of the song and then sustained. Stella builds from a slow verse to an outburst and a long descent. The New turns in its second half from a slow ballad into a driving section that lifts the whole record, and Leif Erikson closes on a quiet height. Obstacle 1 and Say Hello to the Angels have drive rather than height; Hands Away and Roland stay level. The heights come in two temperatures, melancholy and dread; the limit is that their grandeur is reached by mood more than by transport.
Fritz Lang · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent and of every kind the axis names. The city itself, in Kettelhut’s and Hunte’s towers, bridges and air traffic, is grandeur sustained across the film rather than shown once. Terror: the M-Machine bursting and the Moloch’s mouth taking the files of men. Transport and dread together in the creation of the machine-woman, rings of light rising and falling around the seated figure. The Tower of Babel as a vision of thousands of shaven builders; Death with his scythe and the Seven Deadly Sins coming down from the cathedral to Freder’s sickbed; the flood rising through the workers’ city and the children’s arms raised to Maria at the gong. What holds it below the top: the height is chiefly of scale and design, and the human elevation, in Freder above all, is pitched high and often falls.
Sergio Leone · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Elevation comes often and from the first shot, a face filling the frame against a landscape, so that waiting itself is made grand. The desert under Tuco’s parasol rises to dread; the runaway coach of dead men arrives as a ghost image; the bridge charge and its explosion are a battle painting with sound. Above all Sad Hill: Tuco running among the graves to “The Ecstasy of Gold”, the camera turning with him until the stones blur, is pure transport, and the duel in the stone circle that follows, its cuts quickening from landscape to eyes to hands in time with the score, holds the height for minutes. The heights are cold, ironic rather than tragic, and some are earned by spectacle.
Lluís Domènech i Montaner · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
The elevation is real and repeated. From the stairs the room opens as a space of coloured light: glass on both sides, the inverted sun of the skylight hanging over the stalls, the ceramic roses spreading from it, the muses emerging half in relief and half in mosaic from the stage wall, the horses of the Valkyries bursting from the proscenium arch. It is a transport of colour and warmth, elated rather than awful, and it comes again and again: the foyer stair with its glass balusters, the mosaic columns on a narrow street, the skylight itself. Almost no surface is left unraised. What holds it below the summit is the same abundance: the excess that lifts the room also clutters it.
Arvo Pärt · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
Height is reached, and in Silentium it is sustained rather than struck: a whole movement of one descending, widening texture, the bell-tones of the prepared piano falling into it, and an ending in which the lowest voices touch bottom and stop. That is the sublime of stillness, and it is the work’s chief good. Ludus rises by force: the A’s struck out of silence, the general pauses that make each arrival a shock, the cadenza’s arpeggios. Frequency is moderate. The middle of Ludus is process heard working, energetic rather than elevated, and the work has essentially two kinds of height, one to a movement. It stands below the Quartet Op. 131 at 9.3, which rises by many means, and the Goldberg Variations at 8.9.
Björk · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
Height is frequent and of more than one kind. Jóga is the summit: string chords held like geology, the beat breaking in beneath them, the voice rising on the chorus over both, grandeur and dread at once. Bachelorette rises in a dramatic, almost operatic way, the strings swinging and the voice climbing to its peak. Hunter builds by insistence, the snare figure tightening under the strings. Unravel is beauty, quiet and near-still. Pluto is terror and exhilaration, the voice screaming over distortion. All Is Full of Love is the hush after, soft and sustained. Six or seven of ten tracks rise. What holds the figure below Kind of Blue’s 9.1 is two level tracks, Immature and Alarm Call, and All Neon Like, which glows more than it rises.
Portishead · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent, almost all of it dreadful, and some of it very high. The Rip is the warmest height: a fingerpicked guitar under the voice, then the same figure passing into an analogue synthesiser as the drums enter, a lift that is also a loss. Machine Gun is the harshest: a drum machine like gunfire, the voice exposed above it, and a closing synthesiser passage of cold grandeur. We Carry On holds a motorik pulse for six minutes until it becomes a trance of dread. Threads ends at the record’s heaviest, the voice at its rawest. Height comes on six or seven of eleven tracks; Nylon Smile, Plastic and Magic Doors stay level, and the temperature is mostly one.
The Who · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Elevation is the record’s strength, and it comes often. The opening of Baba O’Riley, a looped organ pattern rippling alone before the piano and drums come in, is one of the great arrivals of recorded rock, and its violin coda, accelerating against the drums into a reel, lifts again at the end of the same track. Bargain rises at each chorus and has a quiet height in its acoustic middle. The Song Is Over passes from a hushed ballad to a full swell and back. Behind Blue Eyes turns on the band’s entry. Won’t Get Fooled Again holds its height for eight minutes, falls to the machine alone, and releases it in the drums’ return and the scream. Three tracks stay level, and the heights are mostly of one kind, the exultant.
George Gilbert Scott and William Henry Barlow · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Elevation is high and comes often. It comes at the end of the platforms, where the shed opens as one undivided vault and its ribs run away in perspective to the hotel’s back; in the light falling through the reglazed roof onto the pale blue ribs; at the north end, looking back into the vault from under the flat roof of the extension, where the contrast does the work; on Euston Road, where the towers and gables rise in red brick against the sky; and on the hotel’s stair, climbing under its painted vault. The register is grandeur and exhilaration, with a Gothic gravity at the front. Held from the top because the vault’s elevation is one effect, repeated rather than varied, and the undercroft, where most passengers now spend their time, is a low arcade of shops.
Built for Rao Jodha and successors · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Height is very high and comes often. From the city the fort is a cliff that has become architecture, the wall continuing the rock so that it seems grown rather than built, and it stands over the blue houses at every turn of the street. The ascent is a sequence of compressions and releases, each gate a dark passage and each court above it a sudden opening onto the plain. At the summit the palace front, a long rank of carved jharokhas and screens over a sheer drop, gives beauty and terror at once. Inside, mirrored and gilded rooms give another elevation after the cliff. What holds it below the top: the interiors are rich rather than transporting, and the elevation is concentrated in the approach and the profile.
Master Enrique and Juan Pérez · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Elevation is the building’s register, and it is frequent. Above the arcade the wall is coloured light on three sides of every bay; the glazed triforium carries the colour down nearer the floor than in most cathedrals, so that one stands inside a lantern rather than below one. The light moves through the day, the colours fall on piers and floor, and the north and south roses face each other across the crossing. What holds it short of the top: the vault is low for its kind, so grandeur of height is moderate; the choir enclosure interrupts the long approach; and on a dull day glass of this density reads dark. A single moment comes close to Sainte-Chapelle (8.8), but in a larger and more interrupted room.
Egyptian (New Kingdom) · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Elevation of one kind, constant over the whole object: radiance and grandeur held still. The gold face under raking light seems to give off light rather than take it. The blue and gold bands of the nemes fall to the shoulders in a rhythm that makes a head of some fifty centimetres monumental. The eyes, white quartz and black obsidian set in lapis, hold the viewer with a gaze that looks past him. The height recurs as the eye moves, to the two creatures at the brow, the rows of colour in the collar, the curl of the beard. There is awe in it as well as beauty: the face was meant for the dark of the coffin, not for its viewers. Held below the top because the register is single, sustained rather than built through contrast, and a small object can rise only so many times.
Michel Virlogeux and Norman Foster · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Height is very high and frequent from outside. It comes in the view from the valley floor, the piers rising to about 245 metres and tapering into their split leaves; in the whole line seen from the plateau edges, eight spans drawn across the gorge with the masts at even intervals; and above all in weather, when cloud fills the valley and the deck and masts stand on it with the ground gone, an image of height and dread together that returns with the autumn mornings. The register is cold, airy and vertiginous. What holds the axis: the purpose, the crossing itself, is lived at motorway speed for under two minutes behind wind screens, and from the deck the bridge is felt more than seen. Its summit is almost wholly the bridge seen from elsewhere.
The Cure · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
Elevation is the record’s chief good, and it comes often. Alone builds from a slow drum and keyboard swell into a wall of guitars, and the voice’s entry over it is a true height, grandeur of a mournful kind. And Nothing Is Forever lifts on strings and piano toward the warm sublime of the band’s earlier slow epics. I Can Never Say Goodbye reaches the record’s summit by restraint: a piano figure, a held mass of keyboards and a voice near breaking. Endsong is the dreadful sublime by accumulation, its prelude a slow storm, its last minutes desolate. Four of eight tracks rise high and All I Ever Am partway. What holds it below Disintegration’s 9.1 is that the heights are one kind, reached by the same build each time, and that A Fragile Thing, Warsong and Drone:Nodrone stay level or merely loud.
Sigur Rós · Music
7.9 · Tier III
Elevation is the record’s chief good, and it comes on nearly every song. Svefn-g-englar rises from a pinging stillness into falsetto over bowed guitar, a slow and immense swell. Starálfur is the warmest height, lifted by its strings. Ný batterí climbs from a dark bowed opening to brass and drums at full weight, the one height with terror in it. Viðrar vel til loftárása is the summit: piano and strings, a long build, a release that opens wide. Olsen Olsen ends in a massed choral lift. What holds the figure under Kind of Blue at 9.1 is that the heights are mostly of one kind, the slow swell to release, and the method is legible by its third use.
Ovid · Literature
9.3 · Tier V
Elevation is frequent, in terror and in grandeur: the Flood, “omnia pontus erant; deerant quoque litora ponto” (1.292); Niobe turning to stone and weeping still (6.301 to 312); Marsyas flayed until nec quicquam nisi vulnus erat (6.388); Eurydice dying a second time without complaint (10.60 to 61); the house of Sleep (11.592 to 615); Pythagoras’ river of time (15.178 to 185); the epilogue. What holds it down is a deliberate habit. Ovid deflates: in the Flood “The wolf swims among the sheep” (1.304), and Pyramus’ blood spurts like water from a split lead pipe (4.121 to 124). The wit turns transport into wonder more often than it lets it stand, so height is checked where frequency is not.
Diego Velázquez · Visual art
9.2 · Tier V
Elevation is real and of one register, a cool wonder rather than grandeur or terror, and it recurs: the light on the infanta’s hair and pale silver dress against the dark; Nieto against the light on the steps of the open door, the deepest point of the picture and its brightest; the mirror, two faces dim under a red curtain, the king and queen as an afterimage; and the air itself, the sense every account reports of standing in the room. The height is high. What holds it is frequency and range: one still instant, one quiet register, nothing of transport by scale or dread. One room held at one temperature sits below works that rise again and again across a vault or an hour.
Samuel Beckett · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Height is reached rarely, and by design. The play keeps to ground level, in farce and cross-talk, and rises a handful of times: Pozzo’s twilight speech, ending “That’s how it is on this bitch of an earth.” (I); the moon given a line of Shelley, “Pale for weariness.” (I); the duet of the dead voices (II); “Let us do something, while we have the chance!” (II); “They give birth astride of a grave” (II); “Was I sleeping, while the others suffered?” (II). Lucky’s speech is terror played as comedy. These heights are as high as any in modern drama. Frequency is the charge: six or seven rises in a play whose method is deflation, each cut short by a joke or a fall.
Orson Welles · Film
9.0 · Tier V
Elevation recurs, and it is cold throughout. The approach to Xanadu through the fence and the lit window that goes out; the snow globe falling from the hand and the nurse seen through its glass; the boy in the snow framed in the window while his mother signs him away; the great poster of Kane’s face above the rally; the camera rising through the Chicago opera house to two stagehands, one holding his nose; Susan’s face by the lamp as the spoon lies in the glass; Kane between mirrors, repeated into the distance; the sled burning. Herrmann’s score keeps the film in a grave key. Held at the figure because the elevation is a brilliance that admires itself, and the comedy of the newsroom and the newsreel runs fast and low.
James Joyce · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Height is rationed by design, in a register chosen to be plain, and the book rises at its endings, though not at all of them. The ceiling is the last paragraph of “The Dead”, the snow “falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead”, among the summits of English prose. Below it stand Eveline at the barrier, where “All the seas of the world tumbled about her heart”; the boy in the darkened hall, “a creature driven and derided by vanity”; Mr Duffy on Magazine Hill watching a goods train “like a worm with a fiery head”; and the dreadful close of “Counterparts”, a child offering a Hail Mary for his father under the stick. Held below the top by frequency: “The Boarding House”, “A Mother” and “Grace” close in comedy by intention, and the plain style Joyce chose keeps whole stories at ground level.
Francesco Borromini · Architecture
9.0 · Tier V
Elevation here is intricate, white and quick, never vast: the façade from the street, its centre swelling toward the passer-by and its upper storey bending back; the first step into the oval, the wall in motion on every side under one unbroken entablature; the dome from beneath, its coffers shrinking toward the light so that a low vault seems to climb; the cloister, a still white court whose corners have been rounded away; the crypt, the same figure in shadow. Frequency is high for a building crossed in forty paces. Height is held below the great domes of this desk: everything is at the scale of a room, so there is no grandeur, no dread and no slow unfolding, and the register is one, delighted and nervous. Some who enter find a small plaster church and leave in minutes, and that is charged.
Francis Ford Coppola · Film
9.0 · Tier V
Elevation recurs, and it is grave rather than warm: the wedding seen from the dark of the study; the horse’s head under Woltz’s sheets; the Don falling among the spilt oranges; Michael’s steady hands on the hospital steps beside Enzo’s shaking ones; the train’s roar rising under Michael’s face in Louis Restaurant; Apollonia in the Sicilian field; Sonny at the toll booth; the Don dying among the tomato plants; the baptism cut against five murders; the door closing. Rota’s waltz and love theme hold the film near height between them. Held at the figure because the register seldom leaves the grave and much of the film is procedure: the councils, the Hollywood episode and the Five Families are conducted without lift, and the height is cold in kind.
Samuel Beckett · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The elevation is dreadful and comic at once, and it reaches great height. Mahood circles the rotunda while his family die inside, then tramples what is left of them, a grotesque terrible and funny in the same clause. The trunk in its jar stands under a tarpaulin, with the menu fixed to it and lanterns about it, abjection made civic and almost tender. Near the end the voice imagines itself as the partition between the inside and the outside, belonging to neither. The last sentence quickens over pages into its three clauses, one of the great endings in the novel. Frequency is the charge: the long middle is grey by design, monotony is its medium and its cost, and stretches pass without lift.
Nikolai Gogol · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Elevation comes in the lyrical digressions and in flashes inside the comedy: the opening of chapter 6, on the youth that saw the world freshly and the age that sees it coldly; Plyushkin’s overgrown garden, the one place in the book where decay is beautiful; the flicker that crosses Plyushkin’s face at the name of a schoolfellow, and fades; the opening of chapter 7 on the writer who shows the world “сквозь видный миру смех и незримые, неведомые ему слезы”
(through laughter visible to the world and tears invisible and unknown to it). The last chapter ends at speed, with the troika and its question to Rus, and there is terror too, in Plyushkin’s room. Frequency is the limit: most of the book is comedy, and its height is reached in the margins of the action.
Anton Chekhov · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Chekhov keeps the voice low, and the height comes by indirection. The ceiling: the breaking string in the second act, heard over a conversation that stops to wonder whether it was a bird or a bucket fallen in a mine shaft; Lopakhin’s speech over the purchase while Ranevskaya weeps; and the close, where Firs, forgotten and locked in, lies down, the string sounds again, and an axe is heard on the trees. Lesser heights: the dawn of the first act, blossom and frost together; Gaev’s address to the bookcase, ridiculous and moving at once. Frequency is held below the top by design: long stretches are comedy of embarrassment, and the play refuses to rise where melodrama would.
Thomas Pynchon · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The book rises often and from many directions. The opening, where the screaming of a rocket that arrives before its own sound becomes a dream of all London evacuated through glass and ruin, is grandeur and terror at once. The Advent evensong that closes the first part, with Roger Mexico and Jessica in wartime Kent, is its warmest height, the Preterite gathered in the dark. Tchitcherin’s pursuit of the Kirghiz Light on the steppe, Pökler’s yearly daughter and his refusal to know whether she is the same child, and Gottfried’s ascent in the 00000 are sublime each in a different key. Held down because the height is broken, deliberately and often, by slapstick, puns and vaudeville, and the breaks are not always earned: the frequency is high, the summit lower than the highest.
James Joyce · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Height is reached at the close of nearly every chapter, by design: the boy carried shoulder high after the rector has heard him; the hell sermons, the dreadful sublime sustained for pages; the strand at Dollymount, the girl in the water, and “Heavenly God! cried Stephen’s soul, in an outburst of profane joy.”; and the last pages, “Welcome, O life!” The Christmas dinner reaches a dreadful height of its own in a father’s grief: “Poor Parnell! he cried loudly. My dead king!” Frequency is high. What holds the axis below the top is that the book undercuts its heights on purpose: each chapter opens deflated after the last one’s climax, the villanelle is a lesser poem than the scene around it, and the transports of the fourth chapter are written in a prose whose ripeness the book half mocks. The irony is the design, and it also caps the elevation.
Thomas Mann · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The usual register is ironic comedy, and the narrator’s smile stands between the reader and most of the heights; the book does not lift sentence by sentence, but in set pieces. The heights are few, very high, and spread across it. The X-ray room, where Hans sees the bones of his own hand and knows he will die. “Schnee”: Hans lost in the storm, the vision of the sunlit people by the sea and, behind the temple, the two hags dismembering a child, the sublime in its dreadful form, and the sentence that follows; few pages of the century’s fiction rise higher. Joachim’s death, “als Soldat und brav”
“as a soldier and a good one”, where the narrator’s irony gives way. Peeperkorn’s end; the séance, where the dead cousin stands in the uniform of the coming war; and the close, Hans in the mud of Flanders singing “Der Lindenbaum”, lost from sight, with the question whether love will rise “aus diesem Weltfest des Todes”
“out of this worldwide festival of death”. Against these, the rest cures, the meals and the disputes run level by design, and the irony often deflates the lift it has built: height high, frequency held down by the comic middle.
William Faulkner · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Height is reached often, and mostly in Darl’s sections. The river crossing is the ceiling: the log rising out of the flood, the mules going under, Cash on the coffin, Jewel and his horse fighting the current. The barn fire is the second summit, Jewel carrying the coffin out alone through the flames. Addie’s section rises in another key, an anger that becomes a theory of language and the body. The dreadful heights are the buzzards over the wagon and Vardaman boring holes through the lid into his mother’s face; the plain ones are “My mother is a fish.” and Darl speaking of himself in the third person on the train to Jackson. Held below the top because the elevation is undercut on purpose: Anse’s whine, the cement on Cash’s leg and the drugstore comedy pull it back to the grotesque, so that the frequency is high and the sustained height less than in the greatest tragic novels.
Alessandro Manzoni · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Height is reached often, in a register that stays plain. The ceiling: Lucia’s farewell from the boat, “Addio, monti sorgenti dall’acque, ed elevati al cielo” (ch. 8); the Innominato’s night (ch. 21), a sleepless examination that ends in the bells of a feast; his meeting with Federigo (ch. 23); the mother of Cecilia laying her dead child on the cart in plague-struck Milan (ch. 34), the most quoted page of pity in Italian prose; the lazzaretto, where Renzo is brought to forgive Don Rodrigo dying (ch. 35); the rain that washes the plague away (ch. 37). The dreadful heights are the passage of the Landsknechts and the monatti. Held below Anna Karenina’s 9.2 because much of the book is ironic comedy at a low temperature, and the elevation thins across the flight to the Adda and the Bergamasco chapters.
Thomas Mann · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The narrating voice is built to damp. Zeitblom’s periods and scruples, his pleas for the reader’s patience, set every height at a distance, and a great deal of the book is irony and exposition; it rises less often than a Mann novel can. But it rises, and in more than one register. The dialogue of chapter XXV is cold, comic and frightening at once. The death of the child Nepomuk, “Echo”, is told without relief. The Lamentation is described to its end on one note that dies away, the one place where the book permits a light in the dark, and only conditionally. At the last gathering Adrian confesses to his guests in the chapbook’s German and falls at the piano. And the last sentence, where a lonely man folds his hands for “mein Freund, mein Vaterland”
“my friend, my fatherland”, joins the two times of the book in one elevation. The heights are repeated and cold; their frequency is held down by the narrator who stands between the reader and each of them.
Vladimir Nabokov · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Elevation comes often, and of a strange kind: lyric beauty bent by the knowledge of what it serves. The opening, “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.”, rises and is meant to repel. The true heights come late and are cold: Coalmont, where Humbert finds her “pale and polluted, and big with another’s child”, and the offer and refusal there; the concord of children’s voices above the mining town; the last sentence, with its “aurochs and angels”, which reaches grandeur. The dread under the comedy rises with them. Held below the top because much of the book works by farce and wit, which delight more often than they elevate.
Mark Twain · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Height in a plain register, reached often on the river and seldom after it. The warm heights are a pastoral sublime made of a boy’s grammar: the dawn at the opening of chapter 19, when the days and nights “swum by, they slid along so quiet and smooth and lovely”, and the nights on the raft arguing whether the stars “was made or only just happened”. The dreadful heights: pap in delirium with a knife, taking Huck for the Angel of Death (chapter 6); the floating house and the dead man Jim will not let Huck see (chapter 9); Buck’s death in the feud, which Huck will not tell in full (chapter 18); Boggs shot down in the street (chapter 21); the frauds on a rail. The highest is a decision made alone (chapter 31). Held here because the comedy that is the book’s ground caps its height, and the Phelps chapters have almost none.
Pablo Picasso · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Elevation of the dreadful kind, and it recurs across the canvas rather than once. Its places: the first sight, five figures at life size advancing out of a shallow space with no recession to rest in; the two central stares, large black eyes, wide and fixed; the upper right head, its nose a wedge of green and red hatching, a face become an object; the squatting figure, back and face shown together, the most violent single passage in the painting of its decade; the blue drapery breaking like ice between the bodies. Terror and fascination together, and the axis is indifferent to which. What holds it: no grandeur beyond the life-size body, no transport, no warmth; first sight gives shock before height, and the flatter, more archaic left side is quieter than the right.
Franz Kafka · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The elevation is dreadful and cold, and it comes often for so short a book. The title story’s ride takes no time at all, and the horses’ heads rise through the window of the sickroom; its close is the book’s summit, the old doctor naked in the frost of this most unhappy age, driven round the snow on an earthly cart with unearthly horses. The dying man before the Law sees a radiance break inextinguishably from its door. The imperial messenger’s palace is endless, courtyard behind courtyard for millennia. The two sentences of Auf der Galerie rise to the young visitor’s “Halt!” and fall to his weeping. Height and frequency both count, and both are high. Held below the high band because several pieces are dry comedy or report, where the height is wit and not transport.
Federico Fellini · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Elevation recurs, in more than one register. The first sequence is terror and transport together: the silent tunnel, the hands on the glass, the flight over the sea, the rope. The farmhouse is lyrical: children in sheets, firelight, a charm whispered at night. Saraghina’s rumba on the grey beach, the priests running across the sand, is grotesque and exalted at once. Claudia in white at the spa is beauty held at a distance. The final ring, with Rota’s march and the lights going down on the boy in white, is the summit of joy. Held off the top because the mode is the comic sublime more than the grand, and long stretches of the hotel world are satire at eye level.
Thomas Mann · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent and of both kinds. Dread: the stranger at the chapel, the vision of a tropical swamp with a crouching tiger’s eyes, the gondola black as a coffin, and the dream of the stranger god in the fifth chapter, with its flutes, its torches and its herd of revellers, the book’s height of terror. Beauty: the first sight of Tadzio, the sunrise passages of the fourth chapter raised toward hexameter, and the boy on the sand bar at the end, pointing out to sea. The death is quiet and grand at once. What holds the axis below 9 is that much of the transport is mediated by irony. The hymnic passages are a pastiche the narrator half mocks, and the elevation is often watched rather than undergone. That is the design, and it costs some height.
Herman Melville · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The register is dread, and it rises often, in a muted key. The opening is one of the great entrances in American prose, “Everything was mute and calm; everything gray”, and the gray is moral as well as a matter of weather: “Shadows present, foreshadowing deeper shadows to come.” The heights follow. Atufal, the giant in chains, refuses to ask pardon; the old sailor throws his knot with “Undo it, cut it, quick”; Babo shaves his master with the Spanish flag for a barber’s cloth and the razor at Cereno’s throat; Cereno leaps into the boat with Babo after him and a dagger; the canvas falls from the bow on a skeleton and the chalked “Follow your leader”. The close, Babo’s head on a pole, is cold terror. What holds the axis is not any failure of height: the elevation is almost never warm, and long stretches are kept low in pressure by design.
Don DeLillo · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The heights are high and they recur. The prologue is the summit: a crowd of tens of thousands made one body, the descent of paper from the upper deck, Bruegel’s Triumph of Death settling on Hoover while the Russians’ bomb is news in his ear. Then Sister Edgar among the crowds at a billboard in the Bronx, where the face of a murdered girl, Esmeralda, is seen when a train’s headlights cross an orange juice advertisement; the terraced mass of the Fresh Kills landfill seen whole; the bombers ranked in the desert under Klara’s paint; the waste destroyed underground in Kazakhstan; Lenny Bruce on stage during the missile crisis, his act becoming a cry of fear. Held below the higher reaches because the frequency is uneven across 827 pages: long stretches of the first two parts run level in the deadpan, so that the heights stand out of a plain rather than a range.
Martin Scorsese · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
The elevation is dreadful, and it is concentrated in the ring: the hooded figure of the titles, shadowboxing in slow motion behind the ropes to the intermezzo from Cavalleria rusticana; the Janiro beating, ending on a spray of blood over the ringside; the last Robinson bout, the approach slowed, the sound dropping out, blood dripping from the ropes; the cell, fists and head against the wall in the dark; the recitation of Brando to a mirror, flat and enormous at once. Height is near the top in each. Frequency is lower. The domestic scenes are kept deliberately ugly and unelevated, with long stretches between the rises. That is design, but frequency counts.
The Beatles · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Height is reached once at the summit of the form and several times below it. A Day in the Life is the ceiling: two orchestral ascents in which the players climb from their lowest notes to their highest, each at their own pace, then a chord struck on pianos and left to decay for about forty seconds. Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds lifts from its drifting verse into its chorus; She’s Leaving Home is warm beauty on harp and strings; Within You Without You is transport in its drone and bowed Indian strings. The title track’s fanfare is exhilaration rather than elevation, and five songs stay level, in charm and bustle. Five rises in thirteen tracks hold it below the top.
Sophocles · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Height comes at intervals, and from the body. A man who has hidden his pain to keep his rescuer breaks into cries that leave the metre, asks to have the foot cut off, hands over the bow and falls asleep. The chorus then sing to Sleep, “Hypn’ odynas adaēs”
“Sleep, who knows no pain” (827), the play’s still centre, while the bow lies in a stranger’s hand and the theft could be done. The waking, with Neoptolemus unable to go on lying, is the dreadful height, and it is quiet. The farewell to Lemnos lifts the whole into elegy. Held below 9.0 because long stretches are argument and plotting, and the lament with the chorus, grand in grief, runs long.
Caravaggio · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
The elevation is dread, cold and still, and it is high. Its places are the Baptist’s body on the ground, the neck half severed, in the instant before the knife; the executioner’s bent back, a figure of labour over a body; the old woman’s hands to her face at the edge of the light; the blood running out into the signature; and above all the dark wall over the group, which makes silence the medium of terror. What holds it is range. There is one register and one instant, with no grandeur and no consolation, no angel, no palm, no heaven opened, and a work of one temperature sits below works that rise across kinds of elevation.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
The elevation is dreadful, and it is everywhere. The height is in the whole before it is in any part: a land without a living tree, brown and rust under a smoky sky, running to a sea where ships burn and founder, with fires along the horizon. The terror recurs at every scale the eye takes up: the scythe raised over the crowd at the centre, the wall of skeletons behind their coffin-lid shields closing the right, the wheels on poles and the hanged. Two things hold it below the highest figures. The grotesque and the comic disperse awe into wit and inventory, as the design intends, which lowers the height of any one moment. And a panel of small figures, under two square metres, cannot give grandeur by scale; the grandeur here is of extent.
Anonymous · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
The elevation is real and it recurs all along the approach: the pagoda’s five roofs seen over the cloister from the south, each narrower than the last, so that the tower lightens as it rises; the pair seen through the Chūmon, one mass broad and low, one slender; the Kondō’s interior, dark under deep eaves, with the Shaka Triad of 623 on its dais; the disciples weeping in clay at the Buddha’s death in the base of the pagoda; the Guze Kannon in the octagon, an image kept wrapped for centuries. Restraint here is a register of height, not a want of it, and the moments come often. What holds the axis is that nothing works by scale or light as a cathedral or a domed hall does.
Søren Kierkegaard · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The book rises often and from its first pages. The Exordium’s four rides, each closing on a mother weaning her child, are among the most charged pages of nineteenth century prose, terror held in a grave, almost liturgical cadence. The Eulogy opens on a cosmic alternative, that if there were no eternal consciousness in a human being and only a wild ferment beneath everything, life would be empty and comfortless, and climbs to Abraham, great because he expected the impossible. The knight of faith who looks exactly like a Skatteopkræver, a tax collector, is a sublime turned inside out, grandeur invisible in the bourgeois. The merman lifts the book again near its end. What holds the axis: long stretches of the Problemata are cool dialectic, repetitive in their formula. Frequent height, not continuous.
William Blake · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Height is reached often and at the top. The Preface calls “Bring me my Bow of burning gold” against the “dark Satanic Mills”. Milton’s descent is seen by Blake as a falling star, “on my left foot falling on the tarsus”, and all this vegetable world appears as a sandal on that foot. Milton meets Urizen on the banks of Arnon and builds him flesh of red clay, walking round him as a sculptor round his image. The lark’s ascent and the wild thyme in Book the Second are among the most transporting passages in English verse, and the close makes all ready “for the Great Harvest & Vintage of the Nations”. Held below the top because between the heights lie long flat stretches of names and geography, where the verse drops to inventory.
Robert Browning · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Elevation recurs, and in several keys. “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” sustains a dreadful, sickened grandeur for thirty-four stanzas and ends on the blast of the horn: “Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set, / And blew”. “Saul” rises to David’s prophetic vision. “A Grammarian’s Funeral” climbs the mountain with the scholar’s corpse borne on the shoulders of those who mourn him. “A Toccata of Galuppi’s” turns Venetian frivolity into cold mortality: “Dear dead women, with such hair, too”. “Two in the Campagna” ends on “Infinite passion, and the pain / Of finite hearts that yearn”. The frequency is high. But much of the book, Lippo and Blougram above all, works by wit and argument rather than height, which is right for it and keeps the figure from the top band.
Georges Bizet · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
The heights are real and recur. The prelude drops from the bullring’s daylight to the fate motive in the low strings and leaves the chord hanging. The Card solo is the sublime of dread: over a quiet, low accompaniment the voice falls to its lowest register on “Toujours la mort!” (“Always death!”), between two bright trios. The Flower Song rises to its soft high close; Act II ends by turning a brawl into a hymn to liberty; the final duet, the summit, is broken across by the crowd’s cheering, with the fate motive fortissimo over the body. Held below the top by frequency: much of the score’s fame is charm and brilliance, which is pleasure, not elevation.
Hans Scharoun · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Elevation comes often, and from the purpose itself. From the low, crowded foyer the stairs bring the visitor out on a slope of a great tent-roofed valley, the terraces falling and climbing in every direction and the platform below. When the orchestra plays, the sound and the whole gathered public are in view at once, an experience of collective attention few rooms give. The ceiling rises over the room like a sky, the reflectors hung beneath it like clouds. Outside, the gold, peaked and folded exterior has a festive lift, tent and crystal at once. What holds the axis below 9.0: the register is joyous and buoyant more than awed; from the street, in the open ground of the Kulturforum, the exterior can read as an awkward heap; and the foyer, exhilarating in its movement, is dim and low in places.
Seljuk and later builders · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Elevation comes often and in more than one register. The north dome chamber is a great small room: a brick dome on trilobed squinches whose ribs, arches and surfaces resolve the square to the circle with a clarity that is cold and complete. The south dome is larger and heavier, its zone of transition massive, the room grave over the mihrab. The hypostyle gives elevation of multiplicity: bay after bay of brick vaults, each patterned differently, under low raking light. The court with its four iwans is grand in daylight. Held from the top because no single overwhelming moment governs the whole, and the tile skin of the court is fine without being transporting.
Hugo van der Goes · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The elevation is real and recurs across the whole opened field. First and highest is the stillness at the centre, a hush round the child that every figure keeps, even the shepherds at its edge. Then the light on the faces of the Virgin and the kneeling angels, cold and even, a winter daylight rather than a glow. Then the still life, lit more brightly than anything else and set at the viewer’s eye. Then the wing landscapes: bare trees against a pale sky, the Magi’s train small and remote, the cold carried to the edges. The register is awe with an undertone of unease, which the disjunctions of scale and the staring shepherds bring. Held below the top because its height is grave and close, not vast: it does not rise to terror or to transport by scale.
Flannery O'Connor · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The register is comic and grotesque, and the elevation comes against it, which is why it strikes. The grandmother’s gesture in the woods, after the shots, is the book’s height, transport and terror at once. “The Artificial Nigger” closes on Mr. Head and Nelson before the plaster figure on a lawn, a moment O’Connor makes into mercy descending on two humiliated people, and the old man feels himself ready for Paradise. The boy walking alone into the river in “The River” to find the Kingdom of Christ is a dreadful height. “A Temple of the Holy Ghost” ends on the sun likened to the elevated Host, and “The Displaced Person” rises at its close to the peacock’s tail and the priest’s words over a dying farm. Perhaps six of the ten reach a real summit. Held below the higher reaches because three stories rise little, and because the heights are of one kind, the violent irruption, rather than many.
David Lynch · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
The elevation is mainly dreadful, and frequent. The descent into the grass to the beetles’ roar is terror in one camera move. The closet scene sustains dread for many minutes, and Frank’s entrance turns it to something close to horror. Ben’s “In Dreams”, the work-light under his face and Frank mouthing the words, is the film’s height: absurd and terrible at once, and a kind of transport. Dorothy naked on the lawn stops the film; the last apartment, a dead man standing, is a tableau of strange stillness. Rossellini’s “Blue Velvet” at the Slow Club reaches a cold beauty. Held lower by the light world: the robins and the dance rise into irony as much as beauty, and the film knows it.
Robert Bresson · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Height is reached by withholding, and at the ends and in a few scenes it is reached fully. The credits set the method, the Schubert broken by a bray. At the circus the donkey is led past the cages and exchanges looks, cut shot by shot, with a tiger, a polar bear, a chimpanzee and an elephant. Gérard’s hand moves to Marie’s in a dark car; Marie is stripped and shut in an empty house. Then the death at dawn on a hillside, the flock coming round with their bells, the Schubert returning, the beast lying down: among the highest moments the medium has reached. Frequency is high for so flat a surface, but it is not sustained: stretches of the middle, the bar and the gang, are inert by design, and they hold the axis where it is.
Béla Tarr · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent, and almost always dreadful. The opening tracks cattle wandering out of a barn into the mud for minutes while a bell sounds. Estike carries the dead cat in the rain and stands at the bar window while the dancers turn inside. Irimiás and Petrina walk up a town street into a wind full of blown litter. Horses run loose in a town square at night. The villagers march to the manor in the rain. The Doctor nails boards over his window until the screen is dark. Height comes from duration, a shot held until it changes kind. What holds the figure: the elevation keeps to one cold register, and long stretches, the Doctor drinking and the bar, are flat by design.
John Donne · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Height is reached often, and in more than one key. The dreadful: the “Nocturnal upon St Lucy’s Day”, “’Tis the year’s midnight, and it is the day’s”, where the speaker is “every dead thing”, “re-begot / Of absence, darkness, death; things which are not”, the coldest summit in English lyric. The tender: the gold of the “Valediction”, “Like gold to airy thinness beat”. The grand and the comic at once: the dawn rebuked in “The Sun Rising”, where “all princes I” and the sun is told its duty is to warm the bed. The uncanny: “A bracelet of bright hair about the bone”, in the opened grave of “The Relic”. “The Good-Morrow” and “The Anniversary” rise in their last stanzas. Held below the top on frequency: the cynical pieces and the tail are witty, not elevated, and in a body of fifty-odd lyrics perhaps a third reach real height.
Alfred Hitchcock · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Elevation here is of the dreadful kind, and it comes repeatedly. The shower is the summit of the film’s suspense: the curtain torn back, the silhouette, Herrmann’s violins shrieking in a figure the ear cannot settle, then the water running and the drain dissolving into Marion’s open eye. The house carries the dread to the same height: Arbogast on its stairs, seen from overhead, his fall seen through his own reeling eyes; the fruit cellar beneath it, where the swinging bulb passes light across the empty sockets; and the last face, where a skull shows for an instant beneath the smile. Four heights in under an hour. What holds the axis is the first part, which rises to tension rather than transport.
Aeschylus · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Height comes often and in different keys. The dread of the parodos: gold and multitude marching to an absence. The dream, the Dorian woman breaking the yoke and Xerxes rending his robes over it. The Messenger’s dawn: the Greek paean echoing from the rocks, the trumpet, and the cry “ō paides Hellēnōn, ite, / eleutheroute patrid’”
“On, sons of the Greeks, free your fatherland”; then the Persians clubbed in the water like tunny, and the river Strymon freezing out of season and melting under the retreat. The raising of Darius from the tomb, a dead king called up by name and cry. The terror is cold and exact, and it rises repeatedly. Held below the top because the last stretch, some 170 lines, is ritual lament, and on the page the antiphonal cries flatten after their first force.
Wassily Kandinsky · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Elevation is real and of one kind, cataclysmic grandeur, a storm seen from inside. It recurs across the field: the first sight, three metres wide with no rest anywhere in it; the central ovoid, eye of a storm or seed, the one place the turbulence seems to begin; the long black lines that cross the field, unreadable as objects and still carrying their force; the passages of high yellow and white that open like light breaking; the thick notes of colour, blue against orange, struck again and again as the eye travels. Height and frequency are both high. What holds it below the top is that every summit is of one temperature: nothing is still, there is no counterweight of calm or dread, and for a viewer who will not stay the clamour levels into noise.
Titian · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The elevation is beauty, sustained across the whole surface rather than reached at moments: warm flesh laid across white, red and green; the slow fall of hair over the right shoulder; a light that models the body with almost no shadow, so that it seems to give off warmth rather than receive it; the cool deep room and the evening sky beyond. The returned gaze adds a charge the sleeping Venus lacks, and it renews the height each time the eye comes back to her face. Height and recurrence are both present, very high within a chamber register. What holds the axis there is the register itself: one kind of beauty, with no terror, no grandeur and no transport beyond a held calm.
Leonardo da Vinci · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Elevation is constant and of one register, hushed wonder close to awe, and it rises in several places. The Virgin’s face, lowered, in half shadow, lit from the left, between thought and sleep. The angel’s face turned out to us, the most beautiful head of the four and the coolest, under a fall of curled hair. The open hand above the Child, foreshortened and held still in the dark, the most charged form on the panel. The view through the arches of rock to pale, unreal peaks and still water, distance opened behind intimacy, a geological time behind a family. The dark of the cave, from which bodies emerge as if the light were finding them. What limits the axis is range: one temperature, no terror, no grandeur of scale. It is high in kind and rises often, below the vault and the hour of the greatest works.
Claude Lanzmann · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
The elevation is dreadful, and it comes at a number of points across the length. Srebnik in a flat-bottomed boat on the Ner, singing the song he sang as a boy for the guards. Bomba cutting a man’s hair, falling silent at the memory of the women from his own town while the camera stays. Gawkowski at the cab window of the hired locomotive, drawing a finger across his throat as the train enters Treblinka station. Suchomel at a blackboard, singing the camp’s song. Karski breaking off and leaving the frame. Between these the film is level by design, interview and landscape for long stretches, and the axis counts frequency as well as height: that is what holds it here.
Raphael · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Elevation is real and high, and of one kind: the apparition. The curtains part on light, the light is full of faces, and out of it a figure steps toward us with a swing of the mantle that makes walking on cloud seem a natural act. The height recurs within the field: in the Virgin’s face, in the child’s look, in the mantle’s arc against the pale ground, in the cherubs dissolving into light. Against it: one sustained note on one canvas, one register of grave wonder, no terror, no grandeur of scale beyond the life size of the figures, and the two putti at the foot lower the temperature by design. Level on this axis with Las Meninas at 8.7, a step above the Mona Lisa at 8.5, whose note is quieter: this one is transport.
Sandro Botticelli · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Elevation is beauty in one register, cool and grave, and it recurs across the width of the panel rather than arriving once. The Graces’ hands, joined high and low, and their veils, through which the bodies and the dark trees both show. Flora’s face and the roses held in her gathered dress, the most celebrated passage in the picture. Venus’s slight inclination of the head, the one gesture of welcome. Chloris’s terror, flowers already at her lips, is the single note of dread and is necessary to the height. The grove, its oranges lit like lamps in the dark, holds the field in a stillness of night and day. What holds the axis is range: no grandeur of scale, no transport by force. One temperature, held for three metres.
Pallava · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The elevation is grandeur, and it recurs. The first sight of the whole face, a cliff alive from foot to crown, is the summit. The elephants, the largest at about life size, move with a slow weight that is the work’s second height; the serpents in the cleft, hands joined, rise against the descent. The celestial couples sweep toward the centre from both sides, so that the upper face seems in flight. The cleft still carries the river down through the rock. Between the summits the register is delight, often comic, rather than awe, and the ascetic’s emaciation has an austere force that stops short of terror. High and frequent, short of the top.
Duccio di Buoninsegna · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The elevation is of two kinds, and it recurs. The front is grandeur: a field of gold, the Virgin larger than life in a deep blue mantle, the angels’ heads leaning on the throne’s back, a court of heaven set before a city. Its height is that of the icon made monumental. The back is a long sequence of smaller rises: the Entry into Jerusalem climbing toward the gate, the Crucifixion against gold with the crowd divided, the Deposition and the Entombment, the angel on the tomb before the three women. The frequency is high across many fields. What holds the axis is range of temperature: the scenes are intimate and grave, seldom terrible, and the front’s grandeur is that of order rather than transport; it rises often, and at one pitch.
John Milton · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The height is real and comes several times. The first lament: “O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon”. The sun gone “dark / And silent as the moon, / When she deserts the night / Hid in her vacant interlunar cave”. The Messenger’s narration, held back and then released; the semichorus’s phoenix, “that self-begotten bird”; and the last line. The dreadful height is the catastrophe heard and not seen. But the axis weighs frequency as well as height, and the middle, between Dalila’s exit and the Officer’s entry, falls to wrangling: Harapha’s scene is a contest of boasts, its comedy deliberate but low in elevation. That holds the axis below 9.0.
Lorenzo Ghiberti · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The elevation is of one register, beauty and wonder, and it recurs across all ten fields and the whole gold surface. Its highest places: the Creation of Eve, the figure drawn out of Adam’s side and lifted by angels in a cloud; Jacob and Esau, the arcade receding behind the figures in a light that seems to belong to the metal itself; Solomon, the hall rising over the crowd to the meeting at its centre. The doors as a whole, two gold planes at the threshold of the baptistery facing the cathedral, are themselves a height, and accounts across five centuries report it. What holds the figure is range: almost no terror, no dread, little grandeur by scale. Even the Flood and the fall of Jericho are rendered with poise rather than force. High beauty, often, in one temperature, above Donatello’s David at 8.3.
Johannes Vermeer · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The elevation is real and of one temperature, the cool stillness proper to Vermeer, and it recurs across the field: in the light from the left along the creased paper of the map and down its border of towns; in the model’s face, half lit under the wreath; in the brass of the chandelier, each arm and the eagle caught in the same daylight; in the heavy tapestry of the curtain, near and dark against the luminous depth beyond it; in the painter’s red stockings and the striped light of his doublet. For a picture of a room the height is very high. Range and kind hold it below the top: no grandeur, no terror, no transport by scale, only one hour of light in one room.
Prince Hachijō Toshihito and Prince Toshitada · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Elevation here is beauty, frequent and sustained, almost never grandeur or terror. The pond is withheld along the approach by the screening pine, then given whole. The Old Shoin’s bamboo platform lies level with the water, open to the east. A long stone leads to the Shōkintei, whose blue-and-white checkered alcove is set against the water seen through its openings. From the Shōkatei on its height the view runs back across the pond, and from across the water the shoin stand in a staggered line of white paper and dark timber. The circuit is built to rise every few dozen paces. Height holds the axis: this is a sublime of exactness and quiet, highest on the moonlit platform, and it does not reach transport.
Toni Morrison · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The heights come often, and in several kinds. The opening: a man in blue silk wings on a hospital roof, a woman singing below him, red velvet rose petals scattered in the snow. Pilate at the boy’s first visit, peeling an egg and telling of her father’s ghost. The terror of Hagar’s monthly attempts on Milkman’s life with whatever knife or ice pick comes to hand, and the pity of her last shopping, ruined in the rain. Circe among the Weimaraners in the ruined Butler mansion, a woman who should be dead. The night hunt at Shalimar, where Milkman, alone in the woods, hears the men talk to the dogs and feels the earth. Pilate’s death in his arms. The last sentence, “If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.” Held below the top because stretches of the first part run level, in domestic rancour and in the barbershop’s debates.
Le Corbusier · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Elevation is high, cold and grave, and gathered in few places. It comes in the church, a dark, tall box in which the concrete takes the light from slots and the sung office resonates off bare walls, the altar raised in it like a block in a quarry. It comes in the crypt, where light falls down the cannons onto curved walls in strong colours, a cave lit from above and among the strongest interiors of its century. It comes from below on the slope, where the wings hang on their pilotis over the falling ground, and in smaller ways along a corridor of ondulatoires or from a loggia. What holds it is frequency: cells, corridors and classrooms are austere and ordinary by design, and the summit moments are two rooms.
Alfred Tennyson · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Heights recur, and of more than one kind. The dreadful sublime of VII’s dawn: “On the bald street breaks the blank day”. The stilled landscape of XI, “Calm is the morn without a sound”, its calm turned to the calm of the dead carried on the sea. The cosmic vertigo of LVI and CXXIII: “There rolls the deep where grew the tree”; “The hills are shadows, and they flow / From form to form, and nothing stands”. The trance of XCV, where “The dead man touch’d me from the past” and the dawn winds “Mixt their dim lights, like life and death, / To broaden into boundless day”. Then the bells of CVI and the spring of CXV. For a poem of this length the heights are frequent, and they are among the highest in Victorian verse. Against them stand long tracts at a level temperature and an ending that descends to the domestic on purpose: the plateau between the peaks keeps the axis below the epics.
J. M. W. Turner · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The elevation is the modern sublime: not the Alps or the sea, the old subjects of Turner’s terror, but a machine coming out of the storm at the viewer. It rises in more than one place. The black funnel and the fire beneath it burn through the grey; the bridge plunges out of the lower right corner and puts the viewer in the train’s path; over the river at the left the light opens, gold and white in the rain. The register is grandeur and threat together. It is held where it is because the field is quieter than its reputation: most of it is a soft, veiled grey and gold, and the terror is gathered into one small dark form rather than spread through the whole. Height at the top of its kind; frequency moderate.
J. M. W. Turner · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Elevation is spread across the surface rather than lodged in one place. The sunset is the evident summit: a sky that seems to burn outward from the low sun, cloud built in paint so thick that it reads as substance, and its fire carried down into the water. But the cool half rises too, in another key: the hull, pale as a wraith, lifts against a darkening blue, and the crescent above gives the scene the stillness of a vigil. The blazing height and the hushed one are both present wherever the eye rests. Held where it is because the elevation is of one register, elegiac grandeur, with no terror in it and no strangeness that unsettles; the sublime of Turner’s storms and avalanches is a harder and higher thing.
Louis Kahn · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Elevation here is serene and luminous, cool rather than terrible, and it recurs. It comes first at the porch, where the open shell and its line of sky are seen before one enters; then in the grove, gravel underfoot and low trees overhead; then in the galleries, where the underside of every vault glows silver-grey and the light shifts as a cloud passes; at the vault ends, where a thin arc of glass parts concrete from travertine and the shell seems to float; and in the courts, which stop a walk with trees, sky and water. Frequency is high, since each repetition of the unit rises again. Height is held below the top: the rooms are of house scale, with no vastness and no dread, and the register is one.
The masons under Ismaila Traoré · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Height and frequency. The eastern wall over the market is one of the great elevations of earthen building: three towers and a rank of pinnacles, the wall striped by pilasters and bristling with toron, rising sheer from the platform above the square. It recurs from every side, since the building is walled on all four and seen across the flat roofs of the town, and in the flood season it stands over water. In the year it rises again in the replastering, when the whole wall is covered with people. The hall, as its plan gives it, is a forest of massive piers in half-dark, lit from the roof. Held well below the top because the height keeps one register, mass and rhythm, the interior does not open into a space that lifts, and the building elevates from without more than within.
Josquin des Prez · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Elevation is constant and mostly of one kind, a luminous calm. The Kyrie rises in interlocking imitations. At Et incarnatus est the counterpoint gives way to chords: the classic point of awe in the Mass, set here with great plainness. The Osanna moves more broadly. The last Agnus, the hymn surfacing in the top voice over the other three, is the work’s largest moment and a quiet one. Height is real and frequent. Held below the upper band by range: the register seldom leaves serenity, and there is little terror or grandeur of force. The height is that of clarity more than of transport, and the final Agnus, the strongest claim on the axis, is one moment.
Achaemenid, under Darius I and Xerxes · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Height and frequency are both real, and the summits recur along the route the building lays down: the double stair seen from the plain, the mountain behind; the bulls of the Gate over the head of the stair; the few columns of the Apadana still standing, the field of bases round them; the procession unrolled in shallow relief along the east stair; the jambs of the Hall of a Hundred Columns in their grid of bases, the throne borne aloft on them; the polished frames of the Tachara, doorways opening on nothing. The register is stately and calm, grandeur by repetition and order rather than transport. The interiors that made the halls rooms are gone, and the height that was inside them; the axis is held there.
Paul Thomas Anderson · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
The elevation is dreadful, and it recurs. The opening: the shaft, the dynamite, the fall, the crawl across the scrub, with Greenwood’s sustained strings against an empty landscape. The gusher, then the blowout that takes H. W.’s hearing. The derrick burning at night, Plainview’s face lit by it, the percussion of the score driving the scene. The train taking the boy away, screaming. The baptism, with Eli’s slaps and Plainview’s voice breaking. The bowling alley, terror tipping into the grotesque, and the last line. What holds it at this height is frequency: the middle hour of leases, Henry and the pipeline has long stretches at a lower pitch. The last scene is as much grotesque as high, and is credited only in part.
Alejo Carpentier · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Height and frequency both, and in a book this short the frequency is the striking fact. The burning of Macandal before the assembled slaves, who see him fly from the stake while the whites see a man burn, is a double sight and one of the great scenes of the century’s fiction. The ceremony in the storm before the rising. The Citadel rising on its mountain, its mortar said to be mixed with the blood of bulls, the labour of thousands for a king’s fear. Christophe struck down at mass by the apparition of the archbishop he walled up, then alone in his palace as the court deserts him. Ti Noël’s last changes, the geese, the great green wind. Held below the summit because many heights are pictorial and seen from outside.
Anselm Kiefer · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
The elevation is dreadful and grand at once, and it is the work: a hall the height of the viewer’s body and more, opening to a depth the eye is pulled into, the blackness pressing on every side, and at the end a small fire, which is either a sanctuary lamp or an oven, and the picture will not decide. The height is very high and is held across the whole field, not in one passage: the vault, the walls and the floor all carry the pull. What holds the axis below the top is frequency and range: one image, one impression, at one temperature. Nothing in the canvas rises a second time in a different way.
The Doors · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Elevation comes often and of two kinds. The dreadful kind is the record’s best: The End, from its tuned tremolo guitar and drone through the long, quiet spoken passage to the band’s rising frenzy and collapse, is real terror held over eleven minutes, and End of the Night is a smaller, colder height. The warm kind is Light My Fire: the baroque organ figure, then two long solos over a fixed vamp, organ then guitar, rising by accumulation and returning to the figure. The Crystal Ship has a fragile lyric height, the voice at its most tender over piano, and Break On Through lifts by drive. Twentieth Century Fox, I Looked at You and Take It as It Comes have energy and no height, and Back Door Man has menace more than elevation. Height on five or six of eleven tracks, but counted by time the record is high for most of its length, since the two long pieces that fill close to half of it are elevated throughout, and at The End very high.
Robert Johnson · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
The height is dread, held cold. “Hellhound on My Trail” is the summit: a treble figure that will not settle, the voice rising to falsetto and dropping to a mutter, an end without resolution. “Come On in My Kitchen” rises the other way, by quiet, the slide answering the voice and the line about “rainin’ outdoors” half spoken. “Stones in My Passway” has its road “dark as night”; “Crossroads Blues” strains the voice over the slide; “Me and the Devil Blues” delivers its worst lines flat, almost amused; in “Preachin’ Blues” the blues is a “low-down shakin’ chill” and the guitar drives. Six or seven sides of sixteen rise. “Terraplane Blues”, “32-20 Blues”, “Milkcow’s Calf Blues” and “Kindhearted Woman Blues” entertain and do not.
John Milton · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Height and frequency both. The prose rises again and again out of argument into vision, and the rises are earned by the argument beneath them. Books “are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them”, and like the dragon’s teeth Cadmus sowed they “may chance to spring up armed men”. Truth’s friends go “imitating the careful search that Isis made for the mangled body of Osiris”. The peroration sees the nation as a strong man “shaking her invincible locks”, and then “as an eagle mewing her mighty youth”. These are among the summits of English prose. Held below the higher figures because the elevation comes in set pieces within a long pleading, and between them run stretches of precedent and ridicule that are lively but not high.
Peter Paul Rubens · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
The height is the central panel, and it is high. The white sheet runs from the top of the cross down the diagonal to John’s red, and the body lies on it, pale and sliding, the head fallen to one side; the light falls on body and sheet against a dark sky, and the whole mass seems to pour. That fall is grandeur and pathos at once, a sublime of weight, and it recurs at the Magdalene’s face and hair beneath the foot and at John’s strained back. The wings rise less: the Visitation is gracious, warm and open to the air, the Presentation stately, Simeon’s upturned face a second and quieter height. Closed, the giant wading under his small burden has a grandeur of its own. Held below the top because the wings are beauty more than elevation.
Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Elevation comes often and from more than one source. Across the square the composition reads at once: the dome lifting behind the temple front, the two columns standing like signals before it. Inside, the oval draws the eye along its axis to the high altar, where the saint rises in stucco into a burst of gilded rays lit from hidden windows, and then up into the drum and Rottmayr’s dome, where the heaven the saint is entering opens in light and colour. The interior is bright, high and pale. Held below the summit because the grandeur outside is partly a display seen from a distance, the flanks fall flat, and the square today does not let the facade be approached as it was meant to be.
Ife · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
The elevation is cold and continuous: grandeur of repose. It rises in head after head, so frequency holds, and it rises highest in two places. In the crowned head the tiers of beads and the crest lift the still face into ceremony. In the Obalufon mask the slits beneath the eyes and the copper surface make the face at once alive and withdrawn. The head in the British Museum, the striations running down cheek and forehead like a fine rain, is among the most quietly overwhelming faces in the sculpture of its centuries. What the heads do not reach is terror or transport. The kind is no charge, but the range is narrow, one register held high, and that keeps the figure below works that rise in more than one key. Above Nefertiti at 8.5, under Laocoön at 8.9.
Nayaka builders (and earlier) · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The height is high and the frequency higher. Elevation comes in the four outer gopurams seen across the city, tier on tier of figures rising to the crown and its finials; in the passage from the bright street under a gateway into corridors of carved granite; in the dark halls lit by lamps, with bells and the nagaswaram; in the tank court, where the roofs open to the sky and the gold of the goddess’s vimana stands over the water; and at the sanctum, a small flame-lit room at the end of the approach. It recurs at every gate and every opening. What holds it from the top: the sublime arrives by accumulation more than through one compelled figure, the register is crowded, and the stucco, renewed in modern paint, reads bright rather than grave.
Pagan builders, under King Kyansittha · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Elevation recurs, and it is the building’s chief instrument. Outside, the white and gold mass rises from the flat plain of brick ruins in a pyramid of terraces to the gilded spire, and holds the eye from across Bagan. Inside, the corridors are narrow, tall and dim, and each turn at a porch brings the worshipper suddenly before a colossal standing figure, its gilding lit from above by an opening that cannot be seen. That encounter comes four times on any circuit, each at a different hour of light. Held below the top because the register is narrow, awe and serenity, and the corridors between the encounters are passage rather than height.
Prince · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Height comes often and in different kinds. The Cross begins as a quiet drone and rises into a full rock arrangement, the guitar coloured like a sitar and the band crashing in, and it earns the rise. Adore is warm elevation sustained for six minutes, a falsetto and stacked harmonies held at height with horns. If I Was Your Girlfriend reaches a cold height, a disturbing intimacy, in its spoken close. It’s Gonna Be a Beautiful Night is collective ecstasy, nine minutes of a band in a hall. Forever in My Life, its lead voice staggered and answering itself, and Strange Relationship reach smaller heights. What holds the figure: the first two sides rise less than the last two, Play in the Sunshine, Hot Thing and It swing without lifting, grandeur is touched only in The Cross, and terror only glimpsed in the title track.
Tadao Ando · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Height is very high. It comes in the cross seen from the back of the dark room, the concrete black around it and the light burning at the edges of the four panels; in the cross thrown across floor and pews by a low sun, moving through the morning; in the turn past the oblique wall from daylight into near dark before the cross is seen; and in the stillness of the empty room, where light is the only event. The register is austere and calm, never terrible, and it is one register. Frequency is the limit: one image and one passage into it. Hour and season renew the image, but a single room with a single sign rises fewer times than a building of many rooms, and on a dull day the cross is dim.
Kendrick Lamar · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Elevation comes often and in every temperature. u is terror, a man coming apart over a bed of jazz, drunk, screaming, then weeping. Alright is uplift, its chorus rising over a bright, spare beat into something nearer a hymn than a hook. The Blacker the Berry is fury raised to grandeur, and its last word turns it on itself. How Much a Dollar Cost holds grace at height, Ronald Isley’s voice entering at the end as the voice of the refused God. These Walls is warmth, and the close of Mortal Man, the poem read whole, the question put to the dead and the silence after it, is the summit. Held below the top by frequency: the interludes, Institutionalized, Hood Politics and You Ain’t Gotta Lie stay level, and a register that argues more than it soars keeps several tracks on the plain.
Carol Reed · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
The elevation is frequent and of several kinds. Harry’s appearance in the doorway, a cat at his shoes, light thrown across the street onto his face and the half smile before the light goes, is one of the great revelations in cinema. The wheel lifts two men above the city to look down at it, a high place in the old sense. The sewer chase is dread built from echo, water and torchlight, ending in fingers through a grating. The last shot, down the cemetery avenue as the leaves fall, is the summit and one of the coldest endings of its decade. The empty tilted streets keep the height between. Held below the top because some of it is elevation of style rather than of feeling.
Built for Taira no Kiyomori · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The elevation is of beauty more than grandeur, and its frequency is the building’s gift: it rises with every tide. At high water the vermilion halls and the gate stand on open sea, the reflections double them, and the corridor becomes a walk on the water; at evening and by lamplight the gate seen from the platform is one of the great images of built form. The passage along the corridors, with the sea under the boards and the gate turning in and out of view between the posts, rises again and again. What holds it: the scale is low and horizontal, with no single volume of great height; at low tide the mud flat lowers the register; and the crowds and the town press close.
Reed and Stem, and Warren and Wetmore · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Height is high and frequency fair. The Main Concourse is one of the great public rooms: the long vault, the windows high in the end walls, the crowd crossing on every diagonal under a sky of gold figures, the clock at the centre a still point among them. Elevation recurs elsewhere: in the south front at night, the great clock of Tiffany glass under Coutan's gods; in the Guastavino vaults below, low, tiled and resonant; in the descent of the ramps. It falls on the platforms and much of the lower level, which are utilitarian, and in the corridors that join the building to the streets. A sublime of the crowd and the room, concentrated in one hall rather than spread through the whole, and held there below the buildings whose elevation is general.
Charlie Chaplin · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent and of more than one kind. The first meeting: the car door, the flower held out, the girl’s hand finding his lapel, played almost without movement under “La Violetera”. The embankment at night, a stone tied round two necks, dread played as farce. The boxing match, a ballet of hiding behind the referee, rising past comedy into pure invention of the body. The summit is the last scene: the flower picked from the gutter, the coin pressed into his hand, her fingers recognising the hand, and his face over the rose, half shame and half joy, held. It stands among the great single moments of the medium. Held below the top because much of the elevation between the summits is delight rather than transport, and the comedy, however high, is a different kind of height.
Luchino Visconti · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent, and mostly elegiac. The film opens on the wind in the curtains of Villa Salina and the rosary murmured as the camera moves through the rooms. The family enter the church at Donnafugata grey with dust and sit in their pews like statues. The hunt crosses the burnt hills. Then the ball rises again and again: the Prince alone in the library before a painting of a deathbed, the waltz with Angelica as the room stops to watch, and the walk home at dawn, the kneeling as the viaticum passes, the words to the morning star. Nino Rota’s score gives lyric height without insistence. Held where it is because the middle at Donnafugata is for long stretches a comedy of manners, and the battle in Palermo is spectacle rather than elevation.
Polykleitos the Younger (attributed) · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Elevation here is frequent and dependable. The bowl seen from the top rows opens onto wooded hills; the orchestra lies small and bright below; thousands sit silent in stone, and a spoken line, or a dropped coin, carries to the rim. It rises at every performance and on every visit, and frequency counts. The landscape lends part of it, and the landscape was chosen and used. What holds it below the top: the register is serene grandeur, not terror or transport, and it is one effect reached again and again, not a sequence of distinct heights such as a great interior gives with its changing spaces and light.
George Bähr · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The exterior rises again and again. From the Elbe, as Bellotto painted it, the stone bell gathers the city’s skyline into one swell, the curve rising out of the walls without a break and the four corner cupolas drawing the eye to the lantern. Inside, the lift comes from the galleries climbing round the room, from the sudden height of the inner dome over what seems at first a theatre, and from the altar wall, where the gilded altar and the organ above it rise as one vertical. The elevation is frequent, light and festive more than awful: pastel colour and gilding, reconstructed, give grace rather than terror. That keeps it short of the highest rooms.
Gérard de Nerval · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Height is real and frequent where the book is at its best. “El Desdichado” opens “Je suis le Ténébreux, le Veuf, l’Inconsolé, / Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la Tour abolie”, “I am the dark one, the widower, the unconsoled, / The Prince of Aquitaine at the ruined tower”. “Artémis” opens “La Treizième revient... C’est encor la première”, “The thirteenth comes back... it is the first again”. In “Sylvie”, Adrienne sings in the ring of girls on the lawn before the château and is crowned with laurel in the moonlight, and the mystery play at Châalis rises too. Frequency counts, and the axis is the book’s: “Jemmy”, “Émilie” and “Corilla” do not rise.
Jackson Pollock · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Elevation is real and of one kind, grandeur and transport. Its forms: the first sight from across the gallery, fourteen square metres of web at the height of a standing body and twice its reach, with no place to begin; the great black arcs, each a metre or more in one throw, which the eye rides like a line of music; the near view, where a square foot holds as much event as the whole; the thin passages, where the ground opens and the web seems to breathe; the teal, found late, a cold note in an earth field. Rosenblum’s “abstract sublime” (1961) was coined for this register. Height is high; frequency is the question. The field is one sustained register with local summits, and it depends on the viewer giving it both distances: many see a mess, and the painting does nothing to persuade them. Held below the two painted rooms, which enclose the viewer, and below Guernica’s single blow.
Olmec · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Grandeur is the heads’ first fact, and it recurs: not once in the body but in every head, at its height in San Lorenzo Monument 1 and in the largest heads. The elevation is not of terror or transport but of weight and calm: a face many times the size of life, eyes half lidded or open under a heavy brow, looking outward with no expression that can be named, so that the viewer stands before a presence rather than a picture. The modelling of the San Lorenzo heads adds a second register, soft lips and cheeks swelling out of hard basalt, the living made out of the mineral, and that tension is itself sublime. Held short of the nines because the register is single: one note, held at great height and never modulated.
Boris Pasternak · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The book rises often, and its height is in nature and in the fusion of nature with feeling. The ceiling of the prose is the winter at Varykino: the house under snow, Lara and Katya asleep, Yuri writing by lamplight while the wolves gather on the ravine and become in his poems the enemy at the door. Others: the train east through the Urals, the spring thaw, the rowan in the snow that Yuri addresses as Lara, and Lara’s lament over his coffin, among the great laments of the novel. The poems rise more often than the prose: “Winter Night”, with its candle and the shadows of crossed arms and legs on the ceiling, “August”, where the poet foresees his own funeral, and the Passion poems that close the cycle. Held below the top because the prose between the summits is uneven, and the sublime is sometimes signalled by the narrator rather than earned by the scene.
Katsuhiro Otomo · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent, and its register is dreadful. The silent white dome over Tokyo in the first shot; the chase down the expressway, the red tail-lights drawn as trails that hang in the air; Tetsuo’s walk out of the hospital through soldiers and tanks; the bridge he breaks, and the satellite beam that takes his arm; the stadium, where the jars are opened in the cold; the body that swells past the edges of the stadium in a mass of flesh, cable and screaming infant forms; and the white sphere that eats the city a second time. Geinoh Yamashirogumi’s score, of gamelan, percussion and chanted voices, lifts the end into something like a requiem. The film rises again and again across two hours, and the height at the close is real. Held below the top because the summits are mostly of terror and spectacle, and the tender heights, the boys’ childhood remembered inside the light, are brief and partly told.
Almohad builders; cathedral by Gothic masters · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Elevation is high and comes often, by three ways. The tower, seen over the roofs from almost anywhere in the old city, the brick reddening at evening and Faith turning at the top; and the climb, ramp after ramp in the half dark, to the bell stage and the city below. The church, one of the largest interiors of Christendom, a forest of clustered piers rising to vaults in shadow, the gold wall of the retablo lit behind its grille. The court, reached from the street through the Puerta del Perdón into ranks of orange trees and the sound of water. Held below the top: the interior is dim, the coro blocks the long view, and the register is grandeur more than transport.
Sienese builders; facade by Giovanni Pisano · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent and of several kinds. The interior is the strongest: the banded piers, receding dark and white, make a forest of stripes under blue starred vaults, dizzying rather than calm, and the light under the dome falls on the floor’s figures. The floor, when uncovered, is a field one stands on rather than looks up to, raised to the register of a ceiling. Then the facade, its figures leaning out above the square; the descent to the baptistery; the library’s sudden colour. Outside, the empty facade wall stands against the sky, its windows framing nothing. Held below the highest marks because the stripes overwhelm as much as they elevate, and the effect is cumulative more than single.
Antoni Gaudí · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Height is high and frequency higher. Elevation comes at the street, in the stone front moving along the Passeig de Gràcia and round the corner like a cliff worn by water, the iron balconies tangled against it like weed; in the entrance halls, where the courtyard opens overhead and the eye goes up past the floors to a curved patch of sky; in the attic, a long vault of white brick arches that rise and fall like the ribs of a great animal; and on the roof, where hooded towers and chimneys stand over a ground that climbs and drops. The house renews its elevation at every level and in the changing light on the stone. The register is fantastic, at times faintly menacing, and reaches wonder more than transport; there is no vast interior, and the flats are flats.
Andrei Tarkovsky · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Height is reached often and in more than one key. The minute without gravity in the library, when Kelvin and Hari turn in the air among the candelabrum and the books to the Bach chorale, after the camera has read Bruegel’s The Hunters in the Snow inch by inch: one of the summits of the medium. The dreadful: Hari’s revival after the liquid oxygen, the body bending back into life with a sound like breaking ice, and Hari tearing through a metal door because she cannot bear to be out of his sight. The hypnotic: the drive, which becomes a dread with no object. Rain falling inside the father’s house, and the last pull-back through cloud. Held below the top by frequency: the commission, the corridors and the quarrels are long flats between the peaks.
Constantin Brâncuși · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Elevation is the subject, and the form achieves it. The eye starts at the foot and is carried up the long curve, faster as the form thins, and released at the oblique top into the air above. The polished bronze takes the room into itself and gives it back as light sliding along the surface, so the mass seems to thin into the gleam; walking round it, the reflections run and the form changes its edge but not its lift. It is beauty and transport in one register, cool and exact, and its height is high. What holds it is frequency: one form, one rising, one register, renewed as the viewer moves but not varied in kind, and dependent on the light. Under flat light or behind glass the effect falls.
Ernest Hemingway · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Height and frequency both, across a short book. The first leap of the marlin, the fish rising out of the sea at a length the old man has never seen, longer than his skiff, is a summit, and it is prepared by hours in which the fish is only a weight on a line. The nights on the water are a second register, cold and wide: the stars, the phosphorescence, the old man alone with the line across his back, talking to the fish as to a brother. The kill, the harpoon driven down and the fish lifting high out of the water before it dies, is the third. Then the descent, elevation of the dreadful kind: the blood in the water, the sharks, the meat torn off in pieces. The last sentence lifts once more. Held below the higher figures because the height is lyric and single-voiced, within the scale of a novella, and some elevated passages lean on repetition for their swell.
Wim Wenders · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent, and it is the film’s method. A hand writes the song of childhood, an eye looks down on the city, and angels stand on the broken spire of the Memorial Church. In the Staatsbibliothek they move among readers while the thoughts rise into one murmur. Damiel crouches on the shoulder of the gilded Victory on her column. He holds a dying motorcyclist and gives him a litany of remembered things in place of fear. Cassiel cries out as a young man jumps. Homer sits in an armchair on the empty ground of Potsdamer Platz. Alekan’s camera makes height itself a register. Held from the top because the second movement lifts less often, and its closing monologue asserts by text an elevation the image has not earned.
Michael Cimino · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent and of both kinds. The cathedral wedding, the choir and the crowns held over the couple; Michael alone above the cloud on the peak, the deer taken with one shot under choral music; the cage over the river, slaps and screams and a pit below, held at a pitch of terror the cinema of its decade rarely sustained so long; the escape down the river; the second hunt, the shot fired over the deer and the shout across the valley; Nick’s face in the Saigon den as he knows and does not know Michael. Between them, the guitar of the “Cavatina” and John at the bar piano. Held below the top: the Saigon interludes and parts of the return play level, and some of the height is pressed out by duration.
Hilma af Klint · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Elevation is warm and of one kind: delight at a scale that dwarfs the viewer, transport rather than terror. It comes at the first sight of the ten together, sheets over three metres high in colours no painting of 1907 carried at that size; in the loose forms floating like buds or cells in childhood; in youth and adulthood, where the forms swell, double and crowd to the edges, the densest passages of the cycle; and in the drop into old age, where circles and ordered figures stand quiet and the eye feels the cooling as a change of air. Height is high and recurs across the ten. What holds it is the single register: no darkness, no dread, and some panels read at a distance as decoration.
Vincent van Gogh · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Elevation of the dreadful kind, and it is the whole canvas, not one passage. The sky is the summit: a low ceiling of blue going to black, the strokes swirled and dragged so that the air seems to move toward the viewer. Against it the wheat is a flare of yellow driven by wind, each stroke a stalk bent the same way, and the crows break up from it, the nearest at the size of a hand. The wide format makes the field more than the eye takes in at once, and the sense of exposure comes from that. Height is high. Frequency holds it below the top band: one effect, at one temperature, sustained over a metre, not a work that rises again and again across a room, a vault or an hour. Water Lilies, at 9.0 on this axis, carries elevation over far more; this canvas has the sharper single pitch.
The Flaming Lips · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent and warm, wonder and grief together. Race for the Prize opens at height, a brass-like fanfare over drums the size of a hall. The Spark That Bled turns from hush to a rising chorus and then into a different song, and the turn is a lift. Waitin’ for a Superman climbs on a piano figure and a crashing kit to its question. Feeling Yourself Disintegrate is the summit: a wordless choir-like opening, then a song about dying sung as a lullaby. The Gash rises as a massed chant; A Spoonful Weighs a Ton and What Is the Light? rise too. Buggin’, The Observer and Suddenly Everything Has Changed stay near level. Seven or eight of twelve rise. Held from the top because much of the height is one gesture, the swell, repeated, and some is made by loudness.
Leos Carax · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent and of many kinds, and frequency is what the axis asks. Merde’s run through Père-Lachaise to Akira Ifukube’s Godzilla theme, eating the flowers from the graves, ending in a pietà with Kay M: the grotesque raised to icon. The motion-capture dance, two bodies in black with points of light becoming serpents on a screen. The entr’acte, Lavant leading a growing band of accordions through a church in one tracking movement, the purest lift in the film. Kylie Minogue singing “Who Were We?” among mannequins in a gutted store. Céline’s white mask at the end of the day. Five heights, each of a different kind. Held from the top by the flatter passages between them, the beggar and the café, and by a coda that lands as a wry shrug.
Sandro Botticelli · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The elevation is high and recurs. The ring of twelve angels against the gold is a summit of devotional painting: a dance in the air, drapery and olive branches carried by one rotating rhythm, the gold behind them opening like the inside of a dome. That is transport. The second height is the embraces below, angels drawing men into their arms with a tenderness the line makes urgent; the third, the Virgin’s stillness at the centre, vast and bowed. The fleeing devils add a small, almost comic dread. What holds it below the top: the register is joy and consolation throughout, with neither grandeur of scale nor the terror the Apocalypse might have carried, and the middle register is lower in pitch than the sky and the ground.
Television · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Elevation is the record’s strongest quality, and it comes often. The title track is the summit: after the verses the guitars climb through a long solo, the drums gather, and the climb breaks into a cascade of bright figures that holds and then falls back to the verse, a transport as complete as any in its kind. Torn Curtain reaches a dark height, slow and heavy, dread made grand. Elevation and Venus lift in their choruses; See No Evil and Friction have a nervous, rising drive; Guiding Light reaches a fragile, tender height. Prove It stays nearer level. The heights are of two kinds, the bright climb and the slow dread, and they come on six or seven of eight songs. What holds the figure below the top is the voice, which strains where the guitars soar, and the sameness of the instrumentation, which gives the heights one colour.
Roman · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The elevation is grandeur: three tiers rising out of the gorge to nearly forty-nine metres, the great arch over the water, the long level line of the upper arcade drawn across the sky between two hillsides of scrub. It recurs: from the river below, where the lower arches close over the water; from the banks, where the tiers read as one diminishing rhythm; along the bridge, in the scale of single blocks; in the changing light on golden limestone and its reflection in the river. Held below the top because it keeps one register, calm and grand, without terror or transport beyond the first sight, and because its elevation is of scale and proportion: there is no interior, and the channel, its one inner space, was never meant to be entered.
Attributed to Domenico da Cortona, under Francis I · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Elevation comes often and in more than one register. From across the park the château rises out of flat forest as one white figure, its roof a city of towers against the sky, with nothing near to measure it by. Inside, the staircase is the summit: a stone helix that turns out of sight and returns, figures glimpsed through the core on the other flight, rising toward the lantern and the light. The coffered vaults of the upper halls, white stone carved with salamanders, give a measured grandeur. On the terrace one walks among chimneys and lanterns as in the streets of an aerial town. Held below the top: the register is wonder more than awe, the lodgings are rooms of ordinary scale, and the stripped interiors are cold.
Zapotec builders · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Height and frequency both. The elevation is the site’s own, and the plan makes it architecture: a vast level plane cut on a mountain top, open to the sky, ringed by mountains, the valleys falling away below the platforms. It comes on arrival, on climbing the North or South Platform and turning to see the whole plaza laid out between them, and again at every edge where the land drops. The North Platform’s broad stair, and the view along the axis to it from the South Platform, are grand by any measure, and the effect is renewed with the light and the weather over the valley. What holds it below the top is the parts: bare masonry without its stucco, its colour or its temples, plain in detail.
Christopher Wren, with Hawksmoor and Vanbrugh · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Elevation is high and recurs. From the river, or from the Isle of Dogs across it, the two domes rise as a pair over the long fronts, and between them the avenue draws the eye to the Queen’s House and up the hill to the Observatory: one of the great prospects of European building, renewed from the park looking down, with the river and the city beyond. On the ground the walk along the colonnades between the paired columns, the dome ahead, is a procession that rises as it goes. Within, the Painted Hall, entered under the vestibule dome and rising by steps from the lower hall to the upper, is a room of sustained grandeur. Held below the top because the courts behind the fronts are long, plain ranges, and some of the hall’s height is Thornhill’s paint.
Gustav Klimt · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Elevation by beauty and radiance. The gold works in the room as no reproduction carries: field and robes take the light and give it back, so the couple seems to stand in a substance rather than a space. The transport is sustained over the whole surface, not confined to one passage. The faces are its summit, the only fully modelled flesh in a world of pattern, the points where feeling breaks through ornament. Held below the top because the register is single and warm, transport without terror or dread, and because part of the effect is luxury of material, which counts as beauty but elevates less, on return, than the sublime of scale or of a disclosed abyss. The metal leaf is known chiefly from reproduction, and the figure is held loosely.
Built for King Kashyapa I · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Elevation is the experience of the site, and it comes in stages. On the axis of the water gardens the rock grows against the sky as one walks; the boulder gardens close in and open; the gallery hangs on a vertical face above the plain; on the lion terrace the two great paws stand under the bare rock, and the stair above is an iron frame; the summit opens to forest and tank on every side. Terror and transport come together. Part of this is nature’s: the rock was there. The makers’ share is the staging, which makes a height entered rather than seen. That holds the axis below a building whose whole effect is made, as the Pantheon’s is, at 9.3.
Bill Evans Trio · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
The height is frequent and of one kind, beauty held quiet. “My Man’s Gone Now” is the summit: dark voicings over the bass’s slow insistence, a dirge that grows heavier without growing louder. “Gloria’s Step” rises in its theme, the line given a held breath. “Alice in Wonderland” lifts in its waltz, the bass solo singing high on the instrument, and “Jade Visions” closes the record suspended rather than ended. “Solar” and “All of You” swing and exhilarate without rising; they are the record’s ground. Four of six pieces reach height, the strongest of them twice. Held below the 9.1 of Kind of Blue: the range of elevation is narrow, intimate rather than grand, and the club’s murmur sometimes lowers the ceiling of the quietest passages.
Neil Young · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
Elevation is real, mostly quiet, and frequent for so short a record. After the Gold Rush is the summit: piano, a high cracked voice and a horn’s short solo, a vision that rises and stays strange. Birds has a fragile height on piano. Don’t Let It Bring You Down reaches a cold dread, its “castles burning” set over a slow, eerie arrangement. Southern Man’s two guitars, trading and grinding over the band, give the record its one height of anger, and Only Love Can Break Your Heart has a lullaby’s small beauty. Height comes on about five of eleven tracks, none of it grand: the record’s sublime is the frail kind, and the rest stays on the plain.
Jonathan Glazer · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Elevation recurs, and it is mostly cold and dreadful. The opening: a point of light, a ring, an eye being made, with a voice rehearsing sounds over it. The black room, where a man walks toward her and sinks, without noticing, into a floor like black water; beneath it, one victim seeing another emptied to a skin that drifts like a husk. The beach, the dog, the drowning couple, the swimmer struck with a stone and the infant at the waterline as the tide comes in, one of the coldest passages in the cinema of its decade. Mist on the moor; a face lifted and looked at; smoke rising into falling snow. The middle third rises less often, and holds the axis below the top.
Kanye West · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
Elevation comes often and in several kinds. Dark Fantasy lifts at once on its choral hook (“get much higher”). Power’s chant over the King Crimson sample is a height of aggression, the drums stamping like a crowd. All of the Lights reaches a triumphal blaze of horns and massed voices, a fanfare over a story of loss. Runaway is the summit: the single piano note, then a long coda in which the voice is distorted until it sounds like a bowed instrument weeping, abjection made grand. Lost in the World builds from Bon Iver’s lone voice to a drum-driven ecstasy. Held below Kind of Blue’s 9.1 by the level stretches of the middle and by a grandeur sometimes asserted by volume.
Steve Reich · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
Elevation is reached often and by one means: radiance, not peaks. The opening Pulses rise at every change of chord, the whole ensemble pulsing, the voices swelling and fading on a breath, the harmony shifting under a texture that never stops; it is the work’s height, and it comes in the first minutes. Within the sections the moment a resultant pattern is taken up by a voice, so that a melody one did not know one was hearing is suddenly sung, is a lift that recurs. The bass clarinets’ pulses deep in the texture, and the cycle’s return at the close, rise again. Held below Low’s 8.8 and Kind of Blue’s 9.1 because the register is narrow by design: no terror, no grief, no silence, and stretches between changes that are sustained brightness more than transport.
The Smile · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
Elevation comes often, and in more than one kind. The Same builds from its pulse into a swell that is a real height for an opening. Pana-vision and Speech Bubbles reach a cinematic, string-borne beauty, the strings entering under the songs without sweetening them. Free in the Knowledge, plain and acoustic with strings behind it, is the warmest point, lifted by its tenderness. Skrting on the Surface closes in a slow, widening rise. Between them Thin Thing and A Hairdryer are taut and absorbing, and the television song is a jolt. Five or six of thirteen tracks rise. What holds it from the top is distance: the cool, dry mix keeps even the heights a little apart from the listener, and the rest has force and intricacy more than height.
F. W. Murnau · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Elevation of dread, frequent and of several kinds. Orlok first seen standing in the castle gateway, rigid and lit flat; his approach down the vaulted passage in the doorway’s arch; the coach in fast motion and the forest in negative beyond the bridge; Orlok rising from the coffin in the hold straight up, without bending; the ship gliding into harbour with no hand on it; the coffins borne in file through the street, seen from a high window; the shadow climbing the stair, its hand closing over Ellen’s breast; the body fading in the sunlight. The quiet passages rise too: the shore of crosses where Ellen waits, the sea. Held below the top by the slack of the town and the asylum, and by effects that now read as quaint as well as uncanny.
Sebastião Salgado · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Elevation is high and recurrent, and it is of the dreadful kind. The wide views are among the most sublime images of labour photography holds: the pit as a funnel of people, figures so many and so small that the slope seems to seethe, the ladders rising in columns out of the mud toward a rim of light. The response is the terror of number and depth, met without a single exaggeration of the place. It rises again at the other scale: a single carrier, whitened with mud, shoulders a sack on a rung and becomes a figure from a frieze; a man lies against the ground with the stillness of a body taken down. Held a step below the summit because the elevation is mostly of one key; tenderness, comedy and calm are largely absent, and the resting pictures supply only a little of them.
Neutral Milk Hotel · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Elevation is the record’s chief power, warm, ecstatic and near to breaking, and it comes often. The title song’s waltz, singing saw and brass rise almost to a hymn. Holland, 1945 is elevation at speed, fuzzed guitar and brass charging under a voice at the top of its range. Oh Comely reaches the summit by endurance, eight minutes of a voice straining and the horns entering near the end. Ghost climbs; The King of Carrot Flowers turns from domestic ruin to a shouted love of Christ that is transport and joke at once; Two-Headed Boy, Pt. Two lifts at its close and falls to silence. The Fool is grave rather than high, and Communist Daughter dissolves into drone. Height on seven or eight of eleven, the top very high; the rawness that carries it sometimes topples into strain.
The Rolling Stones · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Elevation comes at the top and more than once, in dread and in grandeur. Gimme Shelter is the summit: a tremolo guitar and wordless voices out of nothing, the band entering like weather, and Clayton’s vocal rising to the point where it breaks, terror and exultation at once. You Can’t Always Get What You Want rises from a choir and a French horn through a slow gospel build to a massed coda, grandeur earned over seven minutes. Love in Vain is beauty, slide guitar and mandolin over a slowed blues; Midnight Rambler’s slow middle is dread made physical; You Got the Silver has a small, warm height. The rest has force, not elevation, and Country Honk is a joke. Four or five of nine rise, two of them as high as the medium goes.
Charles Garnier · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Height and frequency are both high, in one register, splendour. Elevation comes in the front seen down the Avenue de l’Opéra, gilded groups against the sky over the green dome; in the passage from the low, dim vestibule, past the Pythia at the foot, into the stairwell, where the volume opens upward through three storeys of balconies and the marble branches divide and return; in the Grand Foyer, long, gilded and mirrored, opening onto the loggia over the city; in the red and gold hall under the lit chandelier and the painted ceiling; and at the curtain. The building is designed as a sequence of such moments and renews them at every interval. Held off the top: the register is festive magnificence, never dread or vastness, and for some the surfeit dulls the height. It does not reach the transport of the great vaults.
Inca, under Pachacuti and successors · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Elevation is high, and it recurs. The first encounter, at the foot of the lowest tier, is of a scale the body cannot place: a single stone taller than three people, fitted to its neighbours as if poured. Then the frequency: the saw-tooth line repeats the encounter at each salient along the length of the walls, and the eye runs along joints that never repeat a shape. The register is grandeur shading into dread, the sense of a force out of proportion to any one person, which is what a state’s wall should give. The esplanade before it, with the walls rising in three steps toward the sky, sets the whole as a stage. Held at 8.7 because the sublime is of one kind, mass, and the towers that crowned it are lost.
Antonín Dvořák · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Height is reached and it returns. The slow introduction breaks into a sudden tutti, a sublime of threat. The Largo is the summit: the chorale’s dark brass chords, then the cor anglais theme, beauty at its plainest, and at the close the theme broken into phrases divided by silence, the strings thinning before the last chords. The finale’s opening, a rising half-step in the strings accelerating into the horn and trumpet theme, is grandeur of force; the coda rises again, and the work ends on a long-held E major chord fading in the winds. Held below the top on frequency: the scherzo is vigour and charm, and the first Allegro is energy more than elevation.
Many masters, from 1386; facade completed in the nineteenth century · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Elevation comes often and in more than one register. Inside, the nave is a forest: piers so massive and close that the five aisles read as a grove in dim light, the great apse windows lit at the end of the axis, a scale that swallows a crowd. Above, the roof is the building’s singular height: marble slopes among flying buttresses and pinnacles, statues at every level, the main spire and the Madonnina overhead, the city below and on clear days the Alps beyond. Outside, the white mass of flank and apse. What holds it: the interior is darker, and its clerestory lower, than the great French vessels, and the front, seen first, elevates least.
Gustav Holst · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
Height is reached often, and in several registers. The terror of Mars: the ostinato, the brass in fourths above it, the final hammered chords, and quiet passages as dreadful as the climaxes. The beauty of Venus: the solo horn rising, the flutes answering, the solo violin, the stillness of celesta and harps. The grandeur of Jupiter’s central tune, whatever later use has done to it. The dread and the release of Saturn, the suite’s greatest height, its bells and its quiet close. The organ’s sudden glissando and the collapse at the climax of Uranus, then a long hush. Neptune’s sublime of distance. Five of seven movements rise. Held below the top because Mercury is wit, Jupiter’s outer sections are jollity by title and in fact, and the march of Uranus is grotesque before it is sublime.
Godspeed You! Black Emperor · Music
7.9 · Tier III
Elevation is the record’s purpose, and its heights are of the first order. The climax of Mladic is terror on the large scale: two drummers together, guitars and violin locked into one mass on a modal riff, a sound that seems to stand up in the room. We Drift reaches the warm sublime: interlocking guitar figures gather into a long major-key ascent that becomes transport, rising more than once. The drones keep a cold, held elevation of their own, the first reedy and ominous, the last wide and slow. What holds the figure is frequency, which the axis counts with height: the peaks come at the ends of long builds, about four in fifty-three minutes, and the approach to each is level by design.
Gustave Flaubert · Literature
9.2 · Tier V
The irony keeps elevation rationed, and that holds the axis lowest of the twelve. But the heights are real, and mostly cold. The dreadful: the arsenic, protracted and physical, the last rites given sense by sense, and the blind man’s song under the window, at which Emma sits up, laughs, and dies. The comic sublime: the agricultural show, where the councillor’s speech about manure and the seducer’s about souls are cut together until they are one speech. The warm heights are fewer: the ride into the woods and the return, “J’ai un amant! un amant!”; the dawn after the cab ride; Charles found dead in the arbour holding a lock of black hair. Height is reached; its frequency is held down by design, and the axis scores both.
Imhotep, under Djoser · Architecture
8.9 · Tier IV
Elevation comes in a few strong measures. The six steps rising over the plateau carry grandeur of the plainest kind: mass stacked toward the sky at a scale no one had built. The approach builds to it: the single narrow gate in a high recessed wall, the colonnade low and shadowed between its engaged columns, then release into the Great South Court with the pyramid filling its north side. That compression and release is a true architectural sublime, and below ground the faience rooms carry a colder awe. Between these moments the chapels and courts are serene rather than elevating, and the stripped and patched surface of the pyramid reads as mass more than as made height.
Franz Kafka · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The elevation is cold: dread, and a comedy so exact it frightens. K. on the wooden bridge at his arrival, looking up into an emptiness where the castle should be; the castle seen the next day as a mean little town with one tower, which K. compares to the church at home; the telephone that gives only a hum, like the voices of countless children; the night walk with Barnabas, K. holding to his arm in the snow in the hope that he leads to the castle, and arriving at his family’s cottage; Frieda and K. on the taproom floor among the puddles of beer, K. feeling he has strayed further than anyone before him; Amalia’s silence; the Herrenhof corridor at dawn, the files handed through doors and the bells. Height comes again and again. What keeps it from the top is the long argued speech of the middle and later chapters: as the talk rises, the heights come less often.
Masaccio · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
The elevation is grave and concentrated rather than frequent. The vault, foreshortened from below so that its coffers recede over the heads of the figures, gives a flat wall a depth that still surprises; God’s head near the apex, the cross held at arm’s length before his body, makes a real grandeur of hierarchy. The skeleton and its inscription supply the other pole, a cold dread placed at the viewer’s own height. Between them the Virgin’s level look outward is the moment of address. These are two or three summits in one field. The height reached at the vault and at the tomb is of the first order; the frequency is limited by one image, and the axis counts both.
Bertolt Brecht · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The play is built to refuse elevation, the captions draining suspense and the songs breaking feeling, and it rises anyway, which is to its credit and part of its argument. The ceiling: Kattrin on the roof in the eleventh scene, drumming while the soldiers threaten the farmer’s family and then shoot, the town waking to her drum as she dies; and the third scene, where Courage haggles a few guilders too long, hears the volley that kills her son, and must not recognise his body. The dreadful returns at the close, when she pays the peasants to bury her daughter and harnesses herself to the wagon. The cold heights belong to the Song of the Great Capitulation. Held below the top because elevation is rationed by design, and the long stretch from the seventh scene to the ninth moves by irony, not height.
Jacques-Louis David · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
The elevation is grave and still, the sublime of the dead body, and it rises in several places rather than once: the head fallen to one side with the face composed, half in shadow; the arm dropping over the tub’s edge to the floor, the quill still held; the light from the upper left, falling on the shoulder and the sheet and stopping; and the wall above, which reads at a distance as weight pressing down and as air going up at once. The register is single, mourning held cold. Nothing in it reaches terror: the knife and the blood are kept small and low. Height is high, and frequency is that of one moment, one body and one light; it sits below the works that rise across a whole sky or a whole room.
Yasujirō Ozu · Film
8.9 · Tier IV
The elevation is quiet and infrequent, and it is real: Tomi on the embankment, bending to a grandchild who ignores her, asking what he will become and whether she will see it; two backs on the Atami sea wall; the two on the grass at Ueno with their bundle, above a city with no room for them; Tomi weeping over the pocket money in her dead son’s wife’s room; the dawn above the harbour after the death; Keizō on the temple steps with the sea below; the watch in Noriko’s hands on the train. Height is reached by withholding: the camera does not rise to the dawn and the music does not swell. Frequency holds the axis down. For long stretches the film is level by design: salon business, a doctor’s house, a tour bus.
Vladimir Nabokov · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Elevation comes often, mostly as beauty and pathos, and once as something higher. The opening couplet is a summit at the first line: a bird killed by a reflected sky, and the poet speaking as that bird’s afterlife. The book’s height is the second canto’s account of Hazel’s last evening, her parents at home before the television in couplets interleaved with her bus journey and her walk into the lake: grief made by counterpoint. The third canto’s vision of a fountain, and its undoing by a misprint, rises and falls in one movement. Kinbote’s last notes, his solitude and his foreseen end, reach a cold pathos. Held below the higher reaches because the commentary’s ruling register is comedy, much of it deliberate absurdity, and long stretches of play lie between the transports.
Paul Cézanne · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Elevation is there and of one register: cool, architectural, calm. Its places are the arch itself, the trunks leaning in from both edges until the foliage nearly closes over the void, a vault of pines; the sky inside it, blue and white laid in long diagonal strokes that follow the trunks, so that the air seems to lean too; the pale river and the far bank with its steeple, a distance opened in the middle of the company; and the scale, bodies near life size under a vault more than two metres high. The transport is that of a cathedral made of trees. What limits it: one instant and one temperature, with no terror and no joy; and before some figures read as architecture they read as awkward, the heads of the left group, the strider’s legs. First sight gives strangeness before height, and the register never changes.
Samuel Richardson · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Height is real and gathers in the second half. Lovelace’s letter after the rape breaks off in a few short sentences, “And now, Belford, I can go no farther. The affair is over. Clarissa lives.”, one of the coldest elevations in English prose. The papers Clarissa writes in the days after, disordered, one set across the page in fragments of verse, give a mind breaking in its own hand. Her purchase of her coffin, its lid devised with emblems, and its use as her writing desk, is grand and terrible; Mrs Sinclair’s death is physical horror. Held below the top because the first two volumes are pressure rather than height, and Clarissa’s death, so long prepared and so plainly holy, elevates less than its approaches.
Franz Kafka · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The elevation is cold, and it is dread. The officer’s rapt account of the sixth hour, when, as he tells it, the face of the man on the bed begins to show understanding about the eyes; his memory of the crowds of the old days and the children brought forward to see; and above all the machine’s self-destruction, the Designer’s cogwheels rising out of the box and rolling across the sand while the Harrow no longer writes but stabs. The last sight of the officer’s face, with no sign of the promised redemption and the iron spike through the forehead, is among the most terrible images in the short fiction of its century. Frequency is the limit: the story rises three or four times, and its procedural register, which is its method, keeps much of it deliberately level. The height is near the top; the level is the method, but it is level.
Honoré de Balzac · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Elevation comes as pathos and as dread, and it recurs. The death of Goriot is the summit: the old man on his pallet at the Maison Vauquer calling for daughters who do not come, cursing them and then blessing them, while one of them dresses for a ball. The arrest of Vautrin is the second: the drugged convict struck on the shoulder to show the brand, rising before the police as a man of terrible grandeur. Mme de Beauséant’s farewell ball, held in full brilliance on the night she is abandoned, is the third, and the last page, Rastignac alone in the cemetery at dusk with Paris below him, is among the famous endings in the European novel. Held below the top because the register between these heights is often loud, and the pathos is pressed.
Built for Abbot Suger · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
The elevation is real and repeated, but it is not the building’s whole register. The ambulatory is its finest moment: low and light, the columns so slight that the chapels read as one band of windows bending round the apse. The thirteenth-century nave and transept rise higher, the glazed triforium joining the clerestory so that the upper wall becomes a single screen of glass, the transept roses closing the arms of the cross. The tombs add a register of death and rank. What holds the score down: the west front is massive and battered, its portals restored; most of the glass is modern, so the coloured light Suger described is now largely a reconstruction; and the building gives its height in passages more than as a whole.
Virgil · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The elevations are frequent, and of two kinds. The quiet kind comes at endings: the close of the first poem, where evening turns exile into landscape, “maioresque cadunt altis de montibus umbrae”
“and the shadows fall longer from the high mountains” (1.83), a line felt as one of the summits of Latin verse; and the close of the tenth, “ite domum saturae, venit Hesperus, ite capellae”
“go home full fed, the evening star is coming, go, my goats” (10.77). The grand kind: the fourth poem’s annunciation of the returning age, Daphnis at the doorway of Olympus in the fifth, Silenus singing from the seeds of the world in the sixth. Held at 8.6 because the grand poems are brief, the contests flat by design, and the book’s music mostly muted.
Caravaggio · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
The elevation is real and comes from one source: the light on the upturned body in the dark, the arms raised into it. It is dreadful as much as it is a transport, a man struck down under a beast twice his size, and the horse’s flank, lit like a wall, gives grandeur by mass. What holds the axis is frequency. One field, one instant, one register: the picture rises once and holds the height rather than rising again, and the height itself is quiet rather than overwhelming, which is the picture’s choice. Las Meninas, at 8.7, gives several distinct lifts across a room; this canvas gives one.
Herman Melville · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The register for most of the story is dry comedy, and the comedy is the ground the heights rise from. They are three, and each is earned. On a Sunday morning the narrator finds that Bartleby lives alone in the office over the empty days, in a Wall Street deserted of people, and the city becomes a ruin with one inhabitant. In the Tombs the copyist lies curled at the foot of the wall, and the narrator answers with Job’s words for the dead at rest: “With kings and counsellors.” And after the rumour of “dead letters” sent to the dead comes the last line: “Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!” The height is real. What holds the axis in the middle eights is frequency: three summits in a comic story, low by the form and by choice.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Height comes often, and some of it is great. The thunderstorm after the ball, Lotte at the window with her hand on Werther’s, and the one word “Klopstock!”, which names the poet whose ode both are thinking of and is the whole of their intimacy, is one of the summits of German prose. Lotte cutting bread for the children at the door is the opposite kind, a height made of the ordinary. The letter of 18 August reaches terror. The last night, the pistols and the editor’s final sentences have a cold grandeur no earlier German novel had. Held in the mid eights because the frequency is bought partly in exclamation: many letters rise by declaring that they rise, and the rapture is at times announced rather than made.
Arnold Schoenberg · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Height is reached, and more often than the work’s reputation for irony allows. Der kranke Mond, a dying moon over a single flute, is the cold sublime at its purest. In Nacht giant black moths shut out the sun over a passacaglia in the lowest registers, and that is terror. In Enthauptung the moon hangs as a Turkish sword over Pierrot’s neck, and the long interlude after it reaches dread. O alter Duft is beauty in the old sense, held for a few bars before it fades, and Heimfahrt rises by gentleness. Held below by frequency, and by design: Der Dandy, Gemeinheit, Serenade and Galgenlied are wit and the grotesque, and cruelty as comedy is not height.
Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The heights are many and mostly cold. Manhattan on Mars in chapter IV, holding his whole life at once while the parts of a watch fall, rises by the form itself. Laurie on Mars in chapter IX, finding out who her father was, ends with the turn from the glass palace toward the earth and the improbability of any one person’s birth: the book’s warmest elevation. The six wordless splash pages that open chapter XII, the dead city, the newsstand, the vendor and the boy among the bodies, are its terror at full height. Rorschach unmasked in the snow, tears on his face, demanding to be killed, is its tragic summit. Against these, long passages of procedure are deliberately flat, the drawing’s even clarity rarely lets a page overwhelm, and the creature in the last chapter is grotesque rather than sublime.
Joseph Conrad · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Elevation recurs, and it is mostly cold. The Golfo Placido at night, a darkness so complete that the lighter carrying the silver moves through it blind, with Hirsch hidden in the bottom; the collision with Sotillo’s steamer in that dark. Decoud alone on the Great Isabel, losing faith in his own individuality over ten days, rowing out, shooting himself and sinking weighted with four ingots, “swallowed up in the immense indifference of things”. Nostromo waking on the shore after his swim and his sleep like a great beast, a man with his whole public self gone. The snows of Higuerota over the campo. Monygham walking back into Sulaco to deceive Sotillo, choosing to be thought a traitor. Held below the top because the long middle stretches of political exposition are flat, the elevation is sometimes reached by an accumulation of abstract nouns rather than earned, and the close strains for grandeur with its cry over the dark gulf.
Thomas Mann · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Elevation here is mostly dreadful and ironic, and it rises often in the second half. The Consul’s widow’s death agony in the ninth part, long, physical and without consolation, is among the most terrible deathbeds in the novel’s literature. Thomas’s night with Schopenhauer in the tenth, the one moment of transport in his life, “Ich werde leben!”
“I shall live!”, is forgotten within days. Thomas’s own death, face down in the slush of a winter street after a botched tooth extraction, his good gloves soiled, is the sublime of the absurd; Hanno’s improvisations at the piano work a single motif to ecstasy and exhaustion. The warm heights are few and early: Travemünde, the sea and Morten Schwarzkopf, Tony’s one summer of being herself. Held below Anna Karenina’s 9.2 because the irony that is the book’s strength lowers its warm registers, and the first half rises rarely.
Mary Shelley · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Height is reached often, in the register of dread and of the sublime landscape. The creation: “It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils” (I.4), and the dull yellow eye opening by the glimmer of a half-extinguished light. The meeting on the Mer de Glace below Mont Blanc, the figure bounding over the crevasses toward Victor across the ice. The half-made female torn apart in the Orkney hut while the creature watches at the window. Elizabeth’s body on the bridal bed at Evian, and the grin at the casement. The ship locked in the Arctic ice, and the creature weeping over his maker’s corpse. Held below the top because between these heights the elevation is asserted in Victor’s diction more than earned in the scene, sublime in vocabulary more often than in fact.
Bob Dylan · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Height is concentrated on side two and comes in more than one temperature. Mr. Tambourine Man is transport, a long sung wish for release (“jingle jangle morning”) over Bruce Langhorne’s countermelody, rising each time the chorus returns. Gates of Eden is visionary and cold. It’s Alright, Ma is the summit, a guitar figure and a voice that turn indictment into a kind of terror, harder at each refrain. Baby Blue is elegy, high and plain. On side one Love Minus Zero/No Limit reaches a quiet beauty; the rest has force, wit and momentum but not elevation, and Outlaw Blues and On the Road Again stay on the ground. Five of eleven tracks rise, four very high: that frequency holds the figure below The Dark Side of the Moon at 9.0.
Auguste Rodin · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Elevation here is grave, not radiant, and it comes again and again as one walks round. The old man’s head, Andrieu d’Andres bent into his hands, the open hand of Pierre de Wissant lifted against nothing, Jean d’Aire’s set jaw: each view gives a new figure the weight of the whole. Just over life size and on a low base, the figures stand at the viewer’s height, and the dread is that of being among them. The sublime is the condemned man’s dignity without consolation, and it holds in daylight on a square as in a museum hall. Against it: there is no single summit image, no moment of terror or transport that strikes at once. The elevation is cumulative and austere, and it is weakened wherever the group is raised and seen from far off.
Anton Chekhov · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The elevation is real, recurrent and deliberately undercut. The third act is the summit: the town burns offstage, the house fills with the homeless and the exhausted, Chebutykin, drunk, smashes the mother’s porcelain clock, Irina breaks down over the Italian she has forgotten, and Masha confesses to her sisters that she loves Vershinin. The close rises again, the band playing as the brigade marches out, Tuzenbach dead, the three sisters standing together, and Olga saying that the music plays so gaily and one wants to live. Lesser rises: Masha’s whistled exchange with Vershinin, the cranes in the last act. Held at 8.6 because Chekhov refuses grandeur on principle, and the first two acts rise rarely.
Samuel Beckett · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Elevation in Beckett’s register, dread and laughter in the same sentence, with a few real heights of terror and beauty. The opening sets it: death awaited as a long-postponed appointment, with a comic stiffness in its closing “enfin”. Malone’s account of the light in his room and the sky beyond his window, the loss of the stick that is his only reach into the world, the grotesque tenderness of Macmann and Moll, and above all the close: a keeper with a hatchet, a boat drifting out at night with its load of the confined, and the sentence dissolving line by line as Malone’s life gives out. “Nothing is more real than nothing” is spoken as a cold height. Held here because the Lambert pages are flat by design, and the heights come at a moderate rate in a short book.
Anton Chekhov · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The register is kept low by design, and the height comes rarely and strongly. The ceiling is Sonya’s last speech, “Мы отдохнём!” (We shall rest!), spoken over the account books with Telegin’s guitar beneath it, and the whole sky seen in diamonds. The dreadful height is the third act: the professor’s proposal read out like a paper, Vanya’s breakdown, the two shots and the comedy of their missing. The warm height is the night of the second act, the storm, Sonya and Yelena reconciled over a glass, and the act ending on a piano the father will not let be played. Lesser heights: Astrov drunk and dancing; Vanya with the autumn roses. Held below the higher figures because much of the power is the pressure of an undertone, and the heights are few by intention.
Virginia Woolf · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The book rises repeatedly, in a low key. The height is the rain, which falls in a gap when the illusion has failed and the audience is left with nothing, “like all the people in the world weeping”. Its comic twin is the cows, who bellow into another gap and fill the emptiness the play cannot. The mirrors of the last scene are a terror of a dry kind. The close is the other summit: the house dark, the old people gone up to bed, Giles and Isa alone as if before roads were made, and then “Then the curtain rose. They spoke.” Between these the elevation is often satirical, in the Restoration pastiche and the Victorian constable, which is right for the book but keeps the frequency below the sustained height of The Waves. The summits are real and several; the plain between them is deliberately plain.
Anonymous · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Elevation here is calm and frequent, and at the gates it rises high. The hemisphere on its hill, against open sky above the plain, has the grandeur of a shape completed, not of a mass that dominates. The gates rise higher. The yakshi of the east gateway, leaning out from her mango tree with the bracket for a bough, is one of the summits of Indian sculpture, and the elephants and crowded architraves reach a density close to rapture, renewed on each of the four gates and on both faces of every architrave. What holds the axis is scale: the transport is spread across many panels at small scale, the dome is small beside the temple mountains and the great vaulted interiors, and there is no single moment of terror or vastness, nor does the work seek one.
Neolithic builders · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Height near the top; frequency is the cost. The highest moment is the solstice: a beam entering a dark passage, lengthening along the floor to the chamber and withdrawing after some seventeen minutes, on the darkest days of the year, in a room built for it some fifty-two centuries before. That is elevation of both kinds, grandeur and dread. Other moments recur for every visitor: the mound on its ridge over the Boyne; the entrance stone, its spirals filling the threshold; the stooping walk up the passage; the chamber opening upward into the vault, dry and black. But the summit is annual, bound to the weather and seen by very few; on other days it is shown by electric light. The white front, the strongest image from outside, is reconstruction and earns nothing here.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Elevation here is cool and lyrical, and frequent within a very short route: the roof seen from the avenue, one white line over travertine, and the steps up to a floor at the sky’s level in the pool; the large pool, holding the sky, the roof’s edge and the walls upside down; the onyx wall, lit by the glass and by the wall of light, its gold figure doubled by the book-matched cut; the chrome columns, which take the colour of everything round them and nearly vanish; the court, green marble, dark water and the bronze woman lifting her arms, reflected twice. The reflections renew it by the hour. Height is held well below the sacred buildings of the desk: one register, serenity in luxury, under a low ceiling, with no vastness and no dread; and some of what a visitor feels is the fame of the photographs, arriving first.
Rembrandt van Rijn · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The elevation is real and of one register, a warm gravity, and it recurs across the canvas: the gold sleeve, a crust of paint that burns like metal in the dark; the red of her dress, scraped and glowing, the light caught in its folds; the two faces, his bent toward her and hers withdrawn, each lit in a different key of thought; and above all the hands at the centre, where the picture’s light gathers. The height is high, among the highest in the medium for tenderness. What holds it is range: one register, no grandeur of scale, no terror, nothing of the vast; two figures in a dark room. The picture rises more than once, always at the same temperature.
Martin Scorsese · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Elevation returns, and it is cold: the Copacabana Steadicam, one unbroken shot from the street through the kitchen to a table set down before the stage; the piano coda of Layla over the discovered bodies, the pink Cadillac in the snow, the meat truck; Jimmy at the bar deciding to kill Morrie as the camera pushes in; the long coked day of 11 May 1980, cut to the speed of the drug; the diner shot in which the background slides toward Henry as he understands Jimmy wants him dead; Tommy firing at the camera. Michael Ballhaus’s camera and the songs do the lifting. Held at the figure because the height is of one kind, exhilaration and dread, never beauty or grief, and the passages of prison and marriage run flat by design.
Fyodor Dostoevsky · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Height is reached several times, mostly in the dreadful register and in a plain voice. The bath (I.9), where a hundred men in fetters crowd a steaming room and the narrator thinks of hell. The theatricals (I.11), where the convicts become actors and an audience and the narrator sees in them, for an evening, what they might have been. Christmas (I.10), its solemnity and its drunken collapse. Shishkov’s telling of Akulka’s Husband (II.4), the murder of a wronged wife narrated as gossip by a man who does not know what he is telling. The wounded eagle let go at the palisade (II.6). The fetters struck off at the smithy (II.10). Held below the top because the reportorial register keeps most of the book on the level, and the elevations are spaced by long stretches of description.
Gian Lorenzo Bernini · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Elevation is real and recurrent, and partly borrowed. It comes in two registers: from the centre, the sweep of the two arms round the obelisk, a horizon of columns and saints; within the colonnade, a forest of travertine shafts, shade and light alternating, and at the porphyry discs four rows collapsing into one. It recurs with use: an Easter crowd, a canonisation, the white smoke of a conclave give the square a height a still photograph lacks. But the greatest sight from the square, the dome above the façade, belongs to the basilica, and the square frames it. And the moment Bernini designed, emerging from the lanes of the Borgo into the open oval, went with the Spina. Scored as it stands.
George Eliot · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Elevation comes often and from different heights. The opening plain, where “the broadening Floss hurries on between its green banks to the sea”, sets a large calm the book will turn to terror. Maggie cutting off her hair, pushing Lucy into the mud and running to the gypsies are comic and painful at once and rise above anecdote. Tulliver’s ruin, the curse he has written into the Bible, his last attack on Wakem and his death have a stark, almost Biblical height. Maggie reading Thomas à Kempis in the bare house is the first summit of inward life; the drift with Stephen, the waking on the Dutch vessel and the refusal is the second; the flood is the highest and the most contested. Held below the top because the aunts’ comedy is vivid without rising, and the frequency drops in the hurried last volume.
Federico Fellini · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
The elevation is real and it recurs, but the film’s method is to raise it and deflate it, and the deflation costs height. The Christ crosses the city by air. Sylvia stands on the dome of St Peter’s with the wind in her hat. At night in the Trevi Fountain she calls, in English, “Marcello, come here! Hurry up!”, and he wades toward her as the water stops for the dawn. The miracle rises in storm and floodlight; on the beach the creature’s eye stays open and Paola turns her face. The fountain reaches the top, and little else does. Most rises are cut off at their peak, and the long nights of party between them are flat by design, so frequency is good and height is held a step down.
Daniel Libeskind · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Elevation here is dread more than beauty, and its height is near the top. It comes when the Tower door closes behind the visitor and the concrete room is cold, dark and high, a slit of daylight out of reach and the city audible beyond; in the Garden of Exile, where the tilted ground and the pillars unsettle balance and the sky is cut into narrow lanes under foliage; in the Memory Void, where the visitor walks on metal faces and the sound fills the bare shaft; at the foot of the Stair of Continuity, under its crossing beams; and on the bridges, over voids that cannot be entered. Frequency falls in the galleries, where the register is that of a museum with difficult walls, and the zinc exterior is striking rather than elevated.
Catullus · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The height is real and it recurs. Poem 5 sets the kisses against the night: the suns can set and return, and for us, once the brief light has set, there is one perpetual night to be slept. Poem 11 ends a coarse dismissal with the love fallen like the flower at the meadow’s edge, touched by the passing plough. The last line of 101, Ariadne’s lament on the shore in 64, the frenzy and waking of Attis in 63 and the homecoming to Sirmio in 31 all rise. Frequency is the charge. Of a hundred and thirteen poems perhaps fifteen to twenty reach elevation, and much of the rest is wit, abuse and occasion, done at a deliberately low pitch. The summits are high; the plain between them is wide.
John Steinbeck · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The book rises often and in more than one register. The opening rain that does not cut “the scarred earth” and the dust laid over the corn; the turtle of chapter 3, crossing the road, flipped by a truck, carrying a wild oat seed on; the desert crossing by night with Granma dead in the truck and Ma lying beside her; the vintage of chapter 25, where “the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy”; Tom’s farewell to Ma in the dark by the culvert; Uncle John setting the stillborn child in an apple box on the floodwater; Rose of Sharon in the barn, smiling “mysteriously”. Height and frequency are both high. Held at 8.6 because the elevations are prepared by a rhetoric that sometimes tips into exhortation, and because engineered sentiment, the dog killed on the road, the waitress and the candy of chapter 15, lowers the ceiling of the transport.
Ornette Coleman · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
The height is real and unevenly spread. “Lonely Woman” is at the summit for its whole length: the keening unison, the drums racing under it, the bass sounding the floor. “Peace” rises by another road, a slow piece of long lines in which Coleman’s tone and phrasing make a lyric that is plainly beautiful and unsentimental. Elsewhere the record’s register is energy, wit and argument. “Congeniality” is play, “Eventually” and “Chronology” are speed and angle, and “Focus on Sanity” holds interest more than elevation. These compel, and they do not rise in the sense the axis asks. Two tracks of six at height, one at great height, place the axis below Kind of Blue’s 9.1, where height comes on four tracks of five, and above a record that rises once.
Ernest Hemingway · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The book rises often and coldly. The first chapter’s season of dust, leaves and marching troops closes on cholera with an arithmetic that is its own terror: “only seven thousand died of it in the army.” The trench-mortar shell at Plava, and Passini dying with his legs gone. The Caporetto retreat: the column stalled in the rain, Aymo shot by Italian rearguards, a sergeant shot with Frederic’s own pistol, and the battle police on the Tagliamento bridge questioning officers by flashlight and shooting them. The night row up the lake. The last chapter, the hospital and the rain, and the last sentence. The lift comes in the first, third and fifth books and falls away in the second, where it is mostly the lovers’ and the language goes slack. The height is real but restrained, rarely the transport of the very top.
James Baldwin · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The height is real and it recurs. “The Threshing-Floor” is a sustained elevation: John falls on the floor of the Temple of the Fire Baptized and descends into a darkness of voices, his father’s face, the curse on the son who saw his father’s nakedness, the multitude of the dead and the drowned, before light comes and Elisha’s voice reaches him. Before that the prayers rise more than once: Gabriel’s first preaching and his vision of the line of his seed; Deborah’s last confrontation with him over Royal; Elizabeth’s memory of Richard in the cell. Held short of the highest because the rise is concentrated at the close and in a handful of passages, with long stretches of quieter narrative between, and because the young Baldwin sometimes reaches for elevation with more rhetoric than the moment holds.
William Faulkner · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The book rises often, and in more registers than any other Faulkner novel: the comic sublime of the spotted horses loosed through the lane and through Mrs Littlejohn’s house in the moonlight; the extravagant, deliberately overwrought pastoral of Ike and the cow, grotesque and beautiful at once and meant to be both; Eula at the schoolhouse, a mythic fertility the prose cannot hold in proportion; the dread of Mink’s nights with the corpse and Houston’s hound; and Armstid digging alone in the dark while the road goes on to Jefferson. Held under the top band because the comic frame keeps much of the book at a level by design, and because the height of the Ike prose is in part parody, which a reader may not grant.
Paul Cézanne · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The elevation is grandeur held still. The mountain rises from the plain across the upper field, not towering but massive, its ridge climbing slowly from the left and the peak breaking down sharply at the right, with the weight of a thing that has been there longer than looking. The canvas rises more than once: in the mountain, where violet and blue planes stack into a form of real geological gravity; in the sky, where blue and green patches make the air as solid and as charged as the stone; in the plain, where slanting blocks open a distance of many miles. The register is serene and austere, close to the religious. Held at 8.6 because the height is steady rather than ecstatic, a long elevation without a summit moment, and because the dense working that gives weight costs some of the light the barer late versions keep.
Gillo Pontecorvo · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
The register is reportorial, cold and fast, and elevation comes through it often, most often as dread or lament. The three women at the mirror, cutting their hair and changing their dress, passing the checkpoints and setting down their baskets to a percussive pulse, is one of the great suspense passages of its decade, and its height is moral, the viewer held between the bombers and the dead. The rue de Thèbes aftermath, bodies carried from the rubble to an organ-like lament, rises to grief. The ululation over the Casbah, the strike broken open, the crowds in the fog of 1960 and Ali’s death in the wall are summits. Held at the figure because the register refuses to linger, and some rises lean on the score more than on the image.
Anonymous · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
The elevation is of an unusual kind: not grandeur or terror but a sustained stillness that opens, for many who sit before it, into something like vastness. Fifteen stones in a yard become islands in an ocean or peaks above cloud because nothing in the field gives the scale away: a sublime of reduction, the small field held as boundless. Light and season renew it, with rain and snow on the gravel, moss after rain and shadow on the raked lines, varying it without changing its key. What holds it: it is one effect, not a sequence of rising moments; it does not overwhelm the body as a great vault does; and a crowded veranda can blunt it.
John Soane · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Elevation comes often and at small scale, which is the house’s peculiar achievement. Looking down the Dome shaft from the upper level to the sarcophagus in the half dark below, casts climbing the walls toward the lantern, is a true vertical sublime in a space a few metres across. The Breakfast Room of No. 13, its shallow canopy dome floating free of the walls, lit from hidden lanterns at either end and studded with small convex mirrors, is a small room of rare beauty. The Picture Room’s planes, opening on a further plane and then a lit recess, give revelation each time; the Crypt gives dread. The ceiling on all of it is scale: no single moment rises to a great dome or a wall of glass.
Maya · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Height is real, and the building answers frequency with the sun. The elevation is first one of mass: a steep stepped mountain alone on a flat platform in flat country, seen whole from every side, its four stairs drawing the eye to the temple, so steep that the summit seems to stand over the plaza. Its highest moment is the serpent of light, a figure of shadow that moves down the balustrade through an afternoon and joins its own stone head. That summit comes twice a year, for some days; the rest of the year the register is grandeur in one key, massive and geometric, with no interior to answer it. The highest moment is rare and the daily register narrow, and that holds the axis.
Frank Lloyd Wright · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Elevation here is beauty with an edge of danger. It comes in the house seen from downstream, its trays stacked over the falling water, one of the few domestic images of the modern world that carries something near grandeur; in the crossing of the bridge, the house above and the falls heard below; in the living room, low and wide, glazed on three sides into the trees, the water sounding under the floor; in the hatch opened and the stair dropping through the floor to the stream; and in the terraces hung over the water, felt in the body as unsupported. Frequency is good: the route turns from compression to release several times. Height is held lower. The house is small, its rooms are low, and its one overwhelming image is seen from outside, from a point no one lives at.
Joy Division · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Elevation is cold and dreadful, and it comes often. New Dawn Fades is the summit: a descending bass figure, a slow guitar line climbing over it, and Curtis’s voice breaking from its flat baritone into a cry at the close, terror and grandeur together. Day of the Lords is heavy and immense, its chorus a question shouted into a void. Shadowplay surges, the guitar entering like headlights crossing a wall. Insight ends on a rise against its resignation, and I Remember Nothing is a last, desolate summit, glass breaking in the dark of the mix. She’s Lost Control has dread rather than height; Candidate and Wilderness stay level; Interzone has force only. Five or six of ten rise, and the highest is very high, a step below the summits the medium reaches elsewhere.
Andrea Palladio · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Elevation comes in the church seen across the Giudecca canal, white above the water, dome and turrets behind the stepped fronts; in the climb of the steps; in the nave, where white surfaces and grey order take an even light from the thermal windows and the eye is drawn to the brighter crossing; under the dome, where the space opens on three sides; and at the screen, where columns stand against a further light in the choir, so that the sanctuary seems to go on beyond what can be entered. In July, with the bridge laid and the city crossing, the building is seen as it was made to be seen. The register is serene and grave, never terrible. Height is held by moderate scale, one colour and an effect that is mostly calm.
Yasujirō Ozu · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
The elevation is quiet, and it recurs. The bicycle ride along the shore, Noriko’s face open as it is nowhere else. The Noh, where her smile drains as she sees Mrs Miwa in the audience, and the long stillness of her look carries more terror than an outburst would. The inn at Kyoto: father and daughter lying side by side, her face turning, the cut to the vase in the half-dark, and back to her face, changed. Two old men sitting before a stone garden. Last, the father alone, the apple peel falling, his head dropping, and the sea. The heights are real and several. They are not frequent in the way a film of grandeur rises: long stretches are domestic and level, which is the film’s choice, and that holds the axis below the top.
Jacques Tati · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
The elevation is comic, and frequent. Grandeur of scale: the grid of cubicles seen from above, a maze in which Hulot is a dot. Delight in pattern: the flats at dusk, four lives laid side by side like a frieze. The festive crescendo of the Royal Garden, where a ruined restaurant becomes a party and the night rises to a pitch of joy few films reach. And the last movement, the traffic turning round the roundabout like painted horses to Lemarque’s music, a window swung open lifting the reflection of the coach’s passengers into the sky: transport in both senses. What holds it down is that the opening hour is cool by design, the office and the exhibition admired more than felt, and the sublime here is of delight, rarely of depth; it does not reach terror or grief.
R.E.M. · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Elevation comes on seven of twelve tracks, often at a high pitch of beauty and rarely of terror. Drive holds dread in its low murmur until the distorted guitar breaks in. Try Not to Breathe rises gently in its chorus. Everybody Hurts climbs, strings and voice together, to a climax of plain consolation; Sweetness Follows is a grave height, cello over a drone, under a voice of grief. Man on the Moon lifts in its chorus. Nightswimming is beauty sustained, piano, strings and oboe over a figure that repeats like memory, and Find the River closes in quiet transport. Five tracks stay level. The ceiling is lower than a record whose summit is terror or grandeur; frequency carries the figure.
Joel Coen and Ethan Coen · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Elevation returns, and it is cold throughout. The hunt’s set pieces reach it: the pickup’s headlights on the ridge at night and the dog in the river; the motel room where Moss sits in the dark with the shotgun, hears the boots in the corridor, and watches the light under the door go out; the night street in Eagle Pass, two men wounded, gunfire without music; the lock cylinder blown across a room; Ed Tom in the doorway of the El Paso motel, the dark room before him. The ending is elevation of another kind, the father riding ahead with the fire in the horn, told plain at breakfast. What holds the axis here: the height is of dread, not transport, and the border crossing, the hospital and Wells’s errand run flat by design.
Christopher Marlowe · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The heights are among the highest in the English drama, and the frequency is uneven. The terror of the last hour runs from “one bare hour to live” (5.2) through Ovid’s lover’s plea turned to dread, “O lente, lente currite noctis equi”, run slowly, slowly, horses of the night, to “One drop would save my soul, half a drop”. The beauty of Helen (5.1); the cold grandeur of Mephistopheles on the loss of heaven (1.3); the dread of the congealing blood and “Homo, fuge!” (2.1), man, fly. Between the bond and Helen the play rises once, in the Sins and the astronomy, and is otherwise flat for a long stretch. The axis weighs frequency, and that stretch holds it below the top.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The heights are real and they recur. The first poem, “Hegire”, opens at a high pitch, thrones bursting and empires shaking, and flies from Europe’s wars into the air of the patriarchs. “Selige Sehnsucht” stands among the summits of German lyric. “Wiederfinden” sets a lovers’ reunion against the creation of the world, light parting from darkness and the elements flying apart until love brings them back. “In tausend Formen” closes the Suleika book in praise of a beloved recognised in every form of the world, and the Paradise book rises again at the end with the Seven Sleepers. What holds the axis at 8.6 is frequency: the long middle stretches of maxim, parable and complaint are wise and level and do not try to lift.
Venetian · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Elevation is real and recurs, in the register of splendour more than of transport. The first summit is the Molo front seen from the water: a pale, patterned wall floating over shadowed arcades, doubled in the lagoon and changing with the light through the day. The second is the passage from the Porta della Carta through the Arco Foscari into the courtyard, with the Giants’ Stair rising ahead. The third is the great hall, its long room, its gilded ceiling and its end wall taken entire by Tintoretto’s Paradise, heaven painted over the doge’s seat; the Scala d’Oro and the ceilings of the Senate and Collegio keep the pitch. What holds it: the grandeur is of wealth and state, often heavy, and the many rooms of gilt and canvas dull by repetition.
Zora Neale Hurston · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The book rises often, and in two keys. The lyric: the pear tree in Nanny’s yard, a girl of sixteen watching a bee sink into the bloom, which the narrator makes a marriage of the world; and the last paragraph, the horizon pulled in like a fish-net. The dreadful: the hurricane, the lake walking out of its bed, the people in the shanties waiting, “They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God”, then the flight across the flooded land, a dog riding on a cow’s back, and at last the shooting. Between these the comic heights of the porch, its lies and its mule, have their own elevation. Held below the summit novels in height; the frequency is good for a short book.
Thomas Malory · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The height is great and comes late. The ceiling is the last books: the battle begun when a knight draws his sword on an adder (XXI.4); Bedivere casting the sword away and reporting that he saw nothing but “the waters wap and the waves wan” (XXI.5); the barge of queens; the tomb; and Ector’s lament over Lancelot dead, “the curtest knyght that ever bare shelde” and “the trewest lover of a synful man that ever loved woman” (XXI.13). Earlier peaks stand along the way: Balin and Balan killing each other unknowing, the Grail at Corbenic and Galahad’s passing, Lancelot weeping after he heals Sir Urry. Held below the top on frequency, since for long stretches of the middle the register is level and the jousts do not rise.
Leon Battista Alberti · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The elevation is grandeur of the Roman kind, and it comes often. First under the porch, where a deep coffered vault is a single great arch made into a room, a compressed threshold before the release; then in the nave, a volume without aisles of a breadth no church of its century had, the vault unbroken from the door to the crossing; then in the chapels, opening on each side as great arches, so that the walk is a sequence of openings into lesser vaults; and at the crossing, where Juvarra’s dome lifts the light. The rhythm renews the effect bay by bay. The height is held: the nave’s light is low except at the west and the crossing, and the later decoration softens the severity that gives the space its force.
The Beatles · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Elevation comes often in number and less often in proportion. “Dear Prudence” is the first height, a finger-picked figure building over three verses into a full band and a rising bass. “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” is grave and aching, Clapton’s guitar keening under Harrison’s line. “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” climbs through its sections to a doo-wop climax both funny and desperate. “Blackbird” and “Julia” are quiet heights, a guitar and a voice. “Long, Long, Long” ends in a shudder of organ and drum, a hymn close to silence; “Helter Skelter” is terror and exhilaration at once, and “Revolution 9” is dread without a tune. Against these, a third of the record is level or comic by intent.
Public Enemy · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Elevation is of the dreadful and exultant kind, the sublime of the alarm, and it comes often. Rebel Without a Pause is the height: the scream from the J.B.’s “The Grunt” looped into a siren that never stops, a voice riding it in command, terror and joy at once. Bring the Noise rises from Malcolm X’s voice into a wall of sirens and breaks. Black Steel is height of another kind, slow and grave, Isaac Hayes’s “Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic” walking under a prison narrative until the escape lifts it. Night of the Living Baseheads is vertigo, horns cut into shrapnel; Countdown to Armageddon makes a crowd’s roar an overture. Cold Lampin’, Show ’Em Whatcha Got and Prophets of Rage stay level. Ten or more of sixteen tracks rise, but mostly in one kind: the warm and the still sublime are absent.
Robert Smithson · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Elevation is real, cold and of one kind: the sublime of distance, emptiness and time. Its places: the approach, miles of unpaved road and then the lake opening below the hill; the first view from the slope above Rozel Point, where the coil reads whole against water or salt flat, the one view on the ground that gives the spiral as a figure; the walk out along the stem and into the turns, low to the surface, the horizon level all round; the red of the water against the rock when the water is in; the salt white on every stone. Height is high and frequency moderate. On the ground the spiral cannot be seen from within it, much of the grandeur is the site’s, and the most elevated view, the aerial one, belongs to the film and the photographs.
Louis Le Vau and André Le Nôtre · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Elevation comes often. From the bridge the house rises from its water with the dome behind. In the oval salon the garden is first seen whole through the arcade. On the descent the canal opens suddenly at the foot of the slope, and the grotto and the far rise stand beyond a gulf the eye did not suspect. From the height the house lies, looking back, over its mirror of water. The register is the sublime of order and distance, grandeur and calm transport, and the painted rooms add a closer splendour. It falls between: the long walks of parterre are serene rather than elevating, and the exterior is weighty, the dome low against the high roofs.
Salian builders, under Conrad II and Henry IV · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Elevation comes in three places and recurs. The crypt: a hall under the choir and both arms of the transept, groin vaults on squat columns, the arches banded red and pale, low, dim and seemingly endless; the most sustained height in the building. The nave: a long, high, plain vessel, the eye driven east by the procession of bays and pulled up by the half-columns to the vaults, a grandeur of mass and repetition. The east end from outside, apse, dwarf gallery and towers rising over the river. What holds it: one severe register, a light plain and even, and a nave whose pull is sheer length more than any culminating moment.
Alain Resnais · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Elevation is cold and frequent. The opening corridors, the camera gliding past gilt ceilings and mirrors under the organ and the incantatory voice, lift at once into a hypnotic grandeur the film sustains. The garden tableau is the summit: guests standing still on geometric lawns, casting long shadows where the clipped trees cast none, a picture of time stopped that is beautiful and dreadful at once. Further heights: the theatre audience frozen in its seats; men firing in unison in the shooting gallery; the burst of white light in A’s room, repeated until it is a seizure; the closing words over the façade at night. Held below the top because the register is single, a sustained trance whose plateaus lift less on return than at first sight, and the dread is kept at the level of unease.
Philip Glass and Robert Wilson · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Height is real and recurs. The Spaceship is the sublime of terror and speed: the full ensemble at its fastest, the chorus at its loudest, light and machinery filling the stage, the catastrophe arriving as exhilaration. The Bed is the quiet height, an organ cadenza and a wordless soprano under a rising beam, transport by slowness. The field dances rise by kinetic joy, dancers spinning on the cycle; the Building’s saxophone over the pulse is grandeur of another kind; the violin’s knee plays are intimate. Frequency is held by design. The Trials are wit and attrition, and long stretches ask the listener to wait for elevation rather than giving it: a work of four and a half hours that rises five or six times.
Andrea Palladio; scene by Vincenzo Scamozzi · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The elevation is frequent and of one kind: the sight through the porta regia and the side doors into streets that seem to run far into a stage a few metres deep, the floors rising and the house fronts shrinking until a street ends in light. Every seat is given some of it, and the central seats are given it whole. Around it the frons rises in its two orders and attic under the painted sky, and the room, small as theatres go, carries a grandeur of the whole antique world. What holds it: the height is wonder and illusion more than awe, addressed to the eye more than the body, and the frons’s crowding can tip grandeur into clutter seen up close.
Rembrandt van Rijn · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Elevation here is grandeur and radiance, not terror or transcendence, and it recurs across the field: the captain’s hand coming out of the picture toward the viewer, its shadow on the lieutenant’s coat; the lieutenant in pale buff, the brightest large surface in the work; the girl in gold, lit as if from inside among the dark coats; the flag rising at the centre against the arch; the pikes and lances standing up into the dark. The height is real and repeated. What holds it is register: nothing reaches the sublime of dread or of the sacred. A march-out of the civic guard can be magnificent; it cannot be terrible, and it is rarely transporting.
Carlo Scarpa · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Elevation here is frequent rather than towering. It comes in the first sight through the two circles; in the arcosolium, low and dark against the bright lawn, its underside lit with mosaic; in the pavilion seen across the pool, its slatted screen and stepped edges doubled in the water; in the chapel’s slow approach over water and its dim interior lit from a corner; and in the view out over the inclined wall to the fields and the hills behind Asolo. The register is intimate, a beauty at the scale of the body; terror is nowhere and grandeur only in the measured silence. What lifts the figure is frequency: over so short a route it rises again and again.
Bernardo Bertolucci · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Elevation recurs, and it is mostly cold and dreadful. The murder in the wood is one of the great passages of its decade: the car stopped on the road, the agents coming out of the trees, the professor stabbed by many hands, Anna running to Marcello’s window and beating on it while he sits, then her flight through the snow, the hand-held camera chasing her until the shots. The dance hall reaches the other pole: Anna and Giulia dancing together, then a floor of dancers joining hands in a line that winds round Marcello and closes on him. Between them come the hotel room under the flashing red sign, the leaves blown across the ministry, the train with the landscape behind the couple washed in changing light, and Delerue’s score, lyrical where the images are not. Held short of the top because the Roman middle is often decorative, rising to style rather than height.
Peter Paul Rubens · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
The elevation is of the dreadful kind, and it rises more than once. The whole canvas is a storm moving right, felt as weather: Mars surging against the restraining weight of Venus, the Fury’s torch and streaming hair, the dark sky above. The second height is Venus herself, the warmest flesh in the picture, set at the hinge of the catastrophe, so that beauty is what is being lost in the act of being seen. The third is Europe at the left, arms raised before the open temple, small against the movement and the most grievous figure in it. Held below the top because the fallen register is more an inventory than a height, and the monsters at the right are less terrible than dark.
Edward Yang · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
The elevation is quiet, and it recurs. NJ’s face laid over the night traffic in the glass of his office; Ota at a hotel piano, playing for no one; the girl Yang-Yang likes, in silhouette against a school film of storm clouds and lightning; NJ and Sherry at a railway crossing in Tokyo, cut against Ting-Ting and Fatty at a crossing in Taipei, so that a man of fifty and a girl of sixteen stand inside one moment; Ting-Ting’s dream of her grandmother folding paper cranes; Yang-Yang’s letter at the funeral. The heights come by restraint. Held below the top by frequency over three hours: the business strand and the Fatty plot are level, and the killing, staged at a distance, reaches dread more than height.
H. G. Wells · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Height is reached several times, and once at the summit of English prose of its decade. The first passage through time, the sun hopping across the sky and the seasons running past, is transport. The descent down the shafts into the Morlocks’ dark, lit by matches that go out, is terror as sharp as anything in Victorian fiction. The burning forest, Weena lost and the Traveller beating off the Morlocks with an iron bar in the glare, is a dreadful sublime. Then the last shore: a huge red sun, crab-like things, the eclipse, the cold, the silence, “The darkness grew apace”, and a round thing with tentacles hopping on the shoal. That chapter is among the great cold heights of the literature. What keeps the axis here is frequency: the dinners and much of the exposition of 802,701 are lively, not elevated.
Ralph Waldo Emerson · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Height is reached often, and at the scale of the sentence, which is where this book lives. The register is the prophetic one, transport rather than terror. “The Over-Soul” sustains it longest: “We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty.” “Circles” opens on a figure of vast scale and rises to its dread, “Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet”, and to its close, “Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.” “Self-Reliance” has the elevation of defiance: “I would write on the lintels of the door-post, Whim.” What holds the axis is that the height is of sentences, rarely of a whole essay built to a summit, and that in the duller pieces it lapses into exhortation.
Barma and Postnik Yakovlev (attributed) · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
From the square the elevation is real and recurrent. Approached from any side, the masses climb in tiers of kokoshniks to the onion domes and the central tent, and the building changes as one walks round it, so that the height returns rather than arriving once. Its register is wonder and festival more than awe, a grandeur of multiplicity, not of a single span. Inside, the central church rising into its tent gives one narrow shaft of real lift; the rest is passages, stairs and small chambers, dim and close. It equals the Chrysler Building at 8.6, earned there on one summit and here on frequency, and stays below the Sydney Opera House (9.0) and Sainte-Chapelle (9.2), whose interiors rise as wholes.
Günter Behnisch and Frei Otto · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Height and frequency both count. Seen across the lake from the slopes of the Olympiaberg, the roofs lie over the park like a veil drawn between masts, catching the sky; the saddles rise and fall in a rhythm no rigid roof can make, and the whole changes with the weather and the hour, grey, silver, dark against a storm. Under the net in the stadium the light falls evenly through the acrylic, the shadow of the mesh lies on the seats, and the edge sweeps out over the bowl with no visible support at its lip. In the hall the net is a hovering ceiling. Elevation recurs at every approach and on every path. What holds the axis: up close the cover is a grid of clamps and panels, the open side of the stadium lowers the enclosure the roof promises, and the height is wonder more than awe.
Matthias of Arras and Peter Parler; completed by later hands · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Height and frequency are both high. Inside, the choir rises under the net vault, its ribs running the length of the vessel without the break of bays, the glazed triforium and clerestory making the upper choir a field of light over the darker ambulatory. The Wenceslas Chapel is the opposite register: low, square and dim, its walls of polished stone and gold glowing at lamp light, the sublime of treasure and enclosure. Outside, the choir’s cage of flyers and pinnacles is among the most dramatic of the Gothic in Central Europe, and the cathedral stands on its ridge above the city. Held from the top: the nave adds length, not height, and the west front is grand without surprise.
Miles Davis · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
The elevation is dark and comes in surges. The title track’s opening, the ensemble swelling and receding out of time over a low bass figure, then the trumpet entering with its echo trailing behind it, is the record’s summit: grave, threatening, immense. “Pharaoh’s Dance” rises through its ominous processional, the bass clarinet underneath like something moving in water. “Miles Runs the Voodoo Down” has the height of a slow, heavy groove with long blues lines over it, the record’s most physical lift, and “Sanctuary” ends in a quiet grandeur. Against that, “Spanish Key” and the long middle stretches of the first two sides hold level, and much of the power is intensity rather than height. High peaks at moderate frequency: level with Remain in Light, under the 8.8 of Low.
Frank Gehry · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Elevation comes often and from many points. From the river and the far bank the titanium volumes take the Atlantic light, often grey and wet, and change colour with it, from silver toward gold or lead. Entering, the visitor goes down from the plaza into the atrium, whose curved walls of stone, plaster, glass and steel rise to a roof of skylights, while walkways, stair and glass lifts lead up and out over the water. The passage beneath the bridge, where building and road deck meet, has grandeur in a setting of infrastructure, and the long gallery is vast and still. The register is wonder more than awe, and it seldom reaches the gravity of the great sacred rooms.
Lars von Trier · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent and of two kinds. The first is in Emily Watson’s face: Bess praying alone in the church and answering herself in God’s stern voice, her own lowered; her joy at the wedding and in bed, looking into the camera; her terror at the telephone when the rig calls. The second is in the tableaux, still landscapes under the songs, which lift each chapter out of the handheld world into something like an icon. The dreadful summits gather in the second half: the children stoning her, the walk to the ship, the dying. The last shot, the bells above the rig, is a single great transport whatever one makes of it. Held below the top because the middle chapters, in the hospital and the house, run level for long stretches, and the climax is contested as much as felt.
Andrea del Verrocchio · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Elevation is the work’s register, and it is reached from nearly every station in the square. From below and in front, the horse’s chest and lifted hoof fill the sky and the rider’s face looks down past the viewer: terror more than beauty, the sublime of force. From the side, the long line from tail to raised foreleg and the counter-turn of the rider give grandeur in motion, a stride arrested at its height. From the far corner of the square the silhouette against the sky is the elevation, and it holds in changing weather as the bronze darkens and flashes. There is no flat side. The ceiling is one register, cold and martial, with no warmth or pathos set against it, and one moment.
Middle Byzantine builders · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The elevation is the katholikon’s interior. Under a dome as wide as the naos the eye is drawn upward through the squinch zone to the light of the drum; the lower walls are sheathed in coloured marble, the vaults and conches above in gold, and the windows are small enough that the gold carries the light as much as the glass. It recurs as one moves: from the dark narthex into the centre, from the side arms into the crossing, down into the low painted crypt and up again. The smaller church rises less within; its height is outside, in the tall drum and the brick over cut stone. Held below the great vessels by modest size, and by the loss of the dome’s own mosaic, so that the summit of the programme is a later painting.
Charles Barry and Augustus Pugin · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The height is high and comes often, outside more than in. The river front seen from Westminster Bridge or from Lambeth across the water is a long horizontal rising to two unequal towers and a spire, its silhouette changing with every step along the bank, at dusk and in fog most of all. Inside, Westminster Hall entered from the street, its oak roof spanning the great room, is the first space of the public route; the Central Lobby is vaulted and lit from above; the House of Lords, gilt and red about the throne, is a splendour of the first rank. The register is grandeur and richness, never terror. It falls within: corridors, committee rooms and offices are most of the building, and much of what lifts is sustained richness of surface rather than transport.
Kyivan Rus builders, under Yaroslav the Wise · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The elevation is real and comes more than once. Inside, the stepped vaults draw the eye out of the dim aisles and galleries toward the lit centre, and it arrives at the apse: the Virgin Orant on her gold ground, arms raised, the figure Kyivans came to call the Unbreakable Wall; beneath her the Communion of the Apostles; above, in the dome, the Pantokrator among archangels. The church rises at the crossing, at the apse and in the view down from the choir gallery. Outside, the white walls and green and gold domes climbing to the centre give a second, lighter grandeur. Held below the top: the interior is broken into many spaces and never becomes one overwhelming room, and the loss of much of the mosaic dims what it was.
Jorge Luis Borges · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The book rises often for its length, in a cool and grave register. In “El hacedor” the blind Homer descends into memory and finds a girl, a dagger and the war that will be his poem. “Everything and nothing” goes from a man with no one in him to God’s voice from a whirlwind in five paragraphs. “Paradiso, XXXI, 108” turns on the lost face of Christ, which may lurk in every mirror. “Poema de los dones” rises on a declaration of the mastery of God, who with magnificent irony gave the poet at once the books and the night, and “Arte poética” rises again on the river made of time and water. Held below the top because the elevation is brief by nature, and a third of the book does not attempt it.
Built for Bishop Bernard de Castanet · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The exterior is one sublime fact: a cliff of red brick rising from the riverside town, the tower lifting from it, read whole from across the Tarn. It is terror as much as grandeur, and the building intends it. The interior answers with an elevation of the opposite kind: one unbroken vessel, its vault painted, the eye carried the length of the room to the stone of the choir. The building rises more than once: the approach, the stair to the porch, the nave, the enclosed choir behind its screen. Held below Sainte-Chapelle’s 9.2 because the light inside is low, its colour borrowed from painting, and the sequence lacks one decisive release.
Japanese, under Emperor Shōmu · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Elevation comes in sequence, and it recurs for everyone at the threshold. At the Great South Gate the visitor passes under a timber roof whose structure is shown, between guardians far taller than a man, caught in mid-gesture; in the court the hall’s mass rises behind the bronze lantern; through the doors the figure appears all at once, filling the dim hall, its hand raised, the gilded halo behind it. The Shuni-e at the Nigatsudō adds a height of another kind each spring, torches carried along the gallery over the crowd. What holds the axis: the image is a sum of recastings, so the elevation owes more to size than to the figure’s own life, and the hall’s wide, heavy front gives grandeur without much lift.
Utagawa Hiroshige · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Elevation recurs, and in more than one register. In Sudden Shower the rain falls in fine black lines, the sky darkens from the top, the figures run on the bridge: transport out of weather. Over Susaki an eagle’s spread feathers fill the top of the sheet and the plain lies white and empty below, the scale of the sky made by one creature. At Kinryūzan the red lantern hangs under snow, a hush. At Ryōgoku one burst of fireworks stands against a deep blue night. At Ōji pale flames move among dark fields, an eerie height. Against these rise many sheets that are pleasant rather than elevated, and a print at arm’s length cannot give the transport of a vault or a wall.
Barnett Newman · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Elevation is the declared subject, and it is reached on conditions. Its forms: the first step close to the canvas, where the red fills the field of vision and seems to advance; the zips, met one at a time as the head turns, each an event against the field; the slow recognition that the field has no edge within sight and no centre to rest on; the after-image of the red. Height is high when the conditions are met. Frequency and dependence hold it: one sustained register with no recurring summits, and an experience that depends wholly on the viewer standing close and giving it time. Seen from across a room, or in reproduction, it is a red rectangle with stripes, and many viewers stop there. Below the Rothko Chapel, which encloses its viewer and asks no obedience to a notice.
Talking Heads · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Elevation is real and of one kind, the transport of trance more than the summit, and it comes often. Born Under Punches lifts when the layered voices enter; Crosseyed and Painless drives into its chanted coda. The Great Curve is the height: the polyrhythm thickens until a guitar solo tears over it, an exultation sustained. Once in a Lifetime lifts at each chorus from patter into a wide, sung swell. Listening Wind is dread, cold and slow; The Overload is dread made drone, a low height. Houses in Motion and Seen and Not Seen stay level. The record rises by accumulation, not by peaks, and most of its heights are of one warm kind; that and two level tracks hold it well under Closer at 9.1.
Henri Rousseau · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The elevation is sustained rather than struck: an uncanny, moonlit stillness held across the whole field. The terror is present and turned to wonder, a lion’s mouth a hand’s breadth from a sleeping face, and nothing happens, ever. The beauty is cool and exact: the moon’s flat disc in a sky that deepens toward the top, the lion’s mane and outline silvered, the robe’s stripes the one burst of colour in a world of blue, sand and grey. It rises in several places, not once: the moon; the lion’s head with its tail raised; the peaceful face at the centre of the danger; the water that reflects nothing. Held below the top because the register is single and does not vary, and the transport is quiet: there is no grandeur of motion and no depth of space.
Pearl Jam · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Elevation comes often, of the arena kind, cathartic rather than grand. Alive is the summit: the song builds to Mike McCready’s long solo, which lifts the burden of the words into release. Black rises from a quiet verse to a climax in which the voice breaks into wordless cries, the highest single moment of grief on the record. Jeremy’s coda gathers into a chant; Release ends in a slow, swelling invocation; Even Flow drives. Why Go, Porch and Deep have force more than height, Oceans is gentle, and Garden broods without rising. Six of eleven rise. Held from the top because the heights are of one kind, the rock climax reached by building volume and a guitar solo, and several are reached by the same means.
Eastern Ganga builders, under Narasimhadeva I · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Height is real and it recurs. It comes first as mass: the audience hall, a dark stepped mountain seen across open ground. It comes at the wheels, where a structural member of the building is carved at human scale as an object of ritual perfection, hub and spoke worked to the finest detail and repeated twenty-four times, so that elevation is renewed along the whole flank. It comes in the musicians on the roof terraces, larger than life against the sky, and in the war horse groups, among the most forceful animal sculpture of their region and century. The chlorite Suryas, calm and polished in weathered walls, are a third register. What holds it below the top is the loss of the climax: the tower the ascent was built toward is gone, and the interior cannot be entered.
Nine Inch Nails · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent and of the dreadful kind, with one summit of grief. Hurt is the summit: a near-whisper over a sparse figure that builds to a wall of distortion and then falls away, terror and lament together. Closer has a cold, hypnotic height, and its long close turns from lust to something mournful. The Becoming moves between machine noise and an acoustic passage that is briefly beautiful. March of the Pigs breaks its thrash for a quiet piano phrase, a vertigo of contrast. A Warm Place is a slow, warm height, the record’s one tenderness, and the title track is dread made sound. Piggy, Ruiner and Eraser have force more than height, Big Man with a Gun none. Seven or eight of fourteen rise. Held from the top because much of the height is of one temperature, cold dread, and the middle is level.
John Crowley · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Elevation comes often, and it is mostly warm: the height of wonder and of loss rather than of terror. Smoky’s first sight of Edgewood and its many faces; the wedding; the orrery in the attic and the discovery of what it was built to show; Violet’s otherness; and the close, where the family passes into the Tale and the house is left behind, a transport few novels of its decade reach. The book names its own sublime: “The further in you go, the bigger it gets.” It is an inward vastness, the small that holds the large, and it is the title. The dreadful register is thin: Eigenblick’s rise and the City’s decline are rendered as melancholy more than terror. Held below the top because the elevation is of one key, and because the political chapters flatten between the heights.
Alfonso Cuarón · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent and of the dreadful kind, and twice it turns into awe. The ambush on the road: a burning car rolled down a hill, a mob from the trees, the camera inside the car, Julian shot in the neck. The advance through Bexhill: Theo running down a street under fire, the camera at his shoulder, blood on the lens kept in the frame. Then the summit of the film: a newborn’s cry heard in a stairwell, the firing stopping, soldiers kneeling and crossing themselves as Kee carries the child out through them, and the tanks resuming once she has passed. The barn among the cows is a quiet height; the boat in the fog is the last. Held below the top because the middle third runs on suspense more than elevation.
Philip Roth · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent, and it comes in two registers, the comic-grotesque and the elegiac, often in the same scene. The box of Morty’s things, opened at the shore: the flag, the letters, the yarmulke, and Sabbath wrapping himself in the flag and wearing the cap, a grief so unguarded after so much aggression that it is the book’s height. The nights at Drenka’s grave, obscene and devout at once. Drenka dying in hospital. The mother’s ghost attending her son, the dead given a voice in the narration as plainly as the living. And the comic sublime of the tirades, which at their best reach a Rabelaisian height of their own. Held below the top because the obscene register, sustained, flattens by repetition, and because the elegiac heights gather in the later stretches of the book; the earlier ones rise less often.
Three Kingdoms Korea · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Elevation of one kind: stillness at its height, a calm that reads as transport. The face, the eyes nearly closed and the smile barely set, is its centre; the hand at the cheek, placed so lightly that the fingers seem to rest on air, is the second place; and the whole figure, seen from the side, is a single slow curve from the bowed head through the leaning back to the lowered foot. It recurs as one walks round: every view gives the same quiet. There is no terror in it and no grandeur of scale; under a metre high, the figure is intimate. One register, held at a high pitch from every side, sits below works that rise across a vault or a whole day, and under the Chola Shiva as Lord of the Dance at 8.9.
Joseph Haydn · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Height is reached several times, in more than one register. The Largo of No. 5, cantabile e mesto in F sharp major, a major third above the home key, is among the most inward slow movements of its century. The Fantasia of No. 6, moving through keys no quartet of its time visited, is the sublime of search. The fourth Emperor variation, the tune in the first violin over new chromatic harmony, rises by plainness; the Adagio sostenuto of No. 1 is a hymn; the opening of No. 4 is beauty as an event. Frequency is held down by design: the register is mainly wit and energy. The Goldberg Variations, at 8.9, go further.
Liao builders · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Height and frequency both. Across the Sanggan plain the tower is the only vertical, its eaves stepping in under an iron spire, and the elevation comes long before arrival. At the foot, the ground storey opens on a seated Śākyamuni rising into an octagonal ceiling, the figure filling the room as the image fills the doctrine. Each storey above was made to repeat the event, a balcony giving the plain and a hall giving a new group, and from inside the frame is a forest of brackets. Held below the top because the upper storeys are closed, so the recurrence is now largely the exterior’s, and because the register is single: calm and massive, never terrible.
Elias of Dereham and Nicholas of Ely (attributed); spire by Richard of Farleigh · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The height is real and gathered at a few points. Seen across the water meadows, the church low and long on its green with the spire lifting out of it, the building reaches a grandeur few English buildings reach. Inside, the crossing gives a second summit: the eye goes up into the lantern of the tower past bent piers and strainer arches that show the weight above. The Trinity Chapel, its vault on Purbeck shafts so slender they seem not to bear it, is a third, of lightness rather than grandeur; the chapter house on its single pier is a fourth. What holds the axis is the long body between them, nave and choir clear, linear and cool, admired for their regularity more than they transport.
Kongo · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The height is terror and awe, and it recurs across the whole surface. A Mangaaka seen in the round, over a metre of blades standing out from the body like a field of spines, the mirror in the belly, the mouth open, is among the most powerful images of dread in sculpture: force at rest that has been struck many times and is ready to strike. The height is not one moment. It is in the face, carved with a calm that makes the iron more frightening; in the stance; and in the iron itself, which reads differently from every side. This is dread with a judicial dignity. Charged: the unit is the type, and smaller and cruder examples do not rise, so the figure is held below the summit of the best single figures.
Denis Johnson · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Height and frequency both count, and in a book this short the frequency is the striking thing: nearly every story turns on a moment of transport. The widow’s scream rising through a hospital corridor while the narrator stands unhurt. In “Work”, a naked woman lifted into the air above a river, towed behind a boat on a parachute, while two men strip copper wire from a drowned house. In “Emergency”, a drive-in in a snowfall whose screen the narrator takes for a visitation. The close of “Beverly Home”, where voyeurism turns without warning into a kind of blessing. The elevation is a poet’s, sudden and earned by the flatness around it. Held below the higher reaches because the heights are lyric flashes inside short stories, never sustained across a structure, and the scale of the book limits what any one moment can carry.
Alberto Burri · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Elevation is the work’s strongest register, and it recurs at two scales. From the opposite hills the white field lies across the brown slope like a cloth over a body, the old town’s shape visible whole; this is the image most reproduced, and it is grand and cold. Inside, the experience changes: fissures at about the walker’s height, white walls in Sicilian light, the hill and the sky above, silence, and the sense of walking a town’s streets that now lead nowhere. Few works of its kind rise both from the air and in the body. What holds it below the top: the walk can turn monotonous over so wide a field, and the aerial sublime belongs as much to the photograph as to the visit. Dreadful and beautiful together.
George Miller · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Elevation here is grandeur and terror at speed, and it is frequent. The sandstorm, with fire tornadoes and cars flung into the sky, and Nux’s ecstasy inside it; the blue night crossing past the stilt-walkers in the bog; Furiosa on her knees in the dunes, screaming at a loss the film gives no words; the drum truck and its guitarist leading the army to war; the pole-riders swinging over the convoy on the return; Nux’s last turn of the rig in the canyon; the water released over the crowd. Junkie XL’s drums and strings are placed to lift rather than describe. Held below the top because the elevation is almost all of one kind, and the stiller summits are few.
Vakataka · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Elevation here is warm, not dreadful: grace, tenderness and stillness, and once or twice something close to transport. The height is real. Padmapani at the shrine door of cave 1, the head inclined, the eyes lowered, the lotus held lightly, is compassion given a body with no effort shown, among the great single figures in painting. Sundari in cave 16, the body gone slack among her attendants’ gestures. The shipwreck and the ogresses of the Simhala Avadana in cave 17, where seduction turns to devouring. The frequency is held down by the form: the walls are dense, continuous and even in pitch, and height comes from single figures rising out of a crowded field, not from a structure that builds toward it. Lost passages are neither credited nor charged.
Roberto Rossellini · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
The summits are among the highest of their decade. Pina breaking from the soldiers and running after the truck that carries Francesco, and falling in the street, is grief, speed and death in a few seconds, with her son running to her body and the priest holding him. The torture of Manfredi, his body set in the posture of the cross, and Don Pietro’s cry over him reach a dreadful height. The execution at dawn and the boys’ whistle and walk toward the city close the film on a note at once cold and lifting. Held below the top by frequency: between the summits run long stretches of plain chronicle and parish comedy, and the Gestapo salon rises to theatre rather than terror.
Edward FitzGerald, after Omar Khayyam · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Height and frequency are both high for a poem of four hundred lines. The rises are many and of one kind, a cold grandeur of ruin and transience: the battered caravanserai “Whose Portals are alternate Night and Day” (17); the lion and the lizard keeping “The Courts where Jamshýd gloried and drank deep” (18); the rose that blows reddest “where some buried Cæsar bled” (19); the Moving Finger (71), whose irrevocability lands as terror in plain words; the lantern and the shadow-shapes (68); and the close, “turn down an empty Glass” (101), one of the great endings in English lyric. What holds it is the other register, absent: no transport upward, no rapture not shadowed by the grave, and in the middle the frequency of the one note lowers its force a little.
William Thornton, Benjamin Latrobe, Charles Bulfinch and Thomas U. Walter · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Height is high and frequency fair. Elevation comes in the dome seen down the Mall from the west, white over the terraces, and at night when it is lit; in the drum’s peristyle and the stepped rise to the lantern, which make the dome read as a figure climbing rather than a cap; in the rotunda, where one looks up some 180 feet through the inner shell’s oculus into a lit canopy that seems to float; in Latrobe’s Old Senate Chamber, half-domed, small, grave and fine; and in the Old Hall of the House with its marble colonnade. The register is grandeur and calm. It falls between: the long corridors of the wings and Walter’s chambers, boxed inside them and lit from above, are rooms of business.
Patti Smith · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent and of the frenzied kind, the transport of possession. Gloria builds from a slow piano and a spoken refusal to a shouted, spelled-out chorus, a real arrival. Birdland rises in its last minutes from murmured narration to a cry, the son lifted toward the light: the record’s purest height. Land is the summit by force, the dance litany breaking into the horses, voices stacked over voices, then the sea. Kimberly lifts on a storm and a newborn sister, and Elegie is the cold kind, grave and low. Free Money is drive rather than height, and two songs stay level. What holds the figure is that the height is often of one colour, ecstasy, and sometimes reached by volume more than by building.
T. S. Eliot · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
The play rises often, and nearly always through the Chorus. The opening, “Here let us stand, close by the cathedral. Here let us wait”, sets a dread that the women’s long lines carry to real terror before the murder, in the passages of the smell of death and the animal world; after it, “Clean the air! clean the sky!” is one of the strongest choral cries in English drama. Thomas’s “Unbar the doors! throw open the doors!” and the closing Te Deum lift the action to its end, and the sermon is elevated in a quieter key. Held at its figure because Thomas himself rarely rises, by design, the Priests’ scenes are flat, and the height, though frequent, is carried by one voice.
Orson Welles · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
The elevation is frequent and mostly dreadful, and it rests on four sequences, not one. The opening crane follows a car carrying a bomb across a border to its explosion and holds the whole film’s dread in one unbroken movement. Grandi’s strangling in the hotel room, lit by a flashing sign, his eyes bulging over Susan’s unconscious face, is one of the great horror passages of the American crime film. Tana’s parlour, the pianola playing and Dietrich reading the cards for the fat man she once knew, reaches an elegy the genre rarely reaches, and her verdict on his future lands as prophecy. The last sequence, Quinlan’s voice coming back from the recorder under the bridge and his body falling into the filthy water, is the summit. Held below the top because the motel’s terror is cruder, and some of the height is of style more than feeling.
Itō Jakuchū · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent and of more than one kind. The white phoenix on the old pine is grandeur in white, its feathers patterned like lace against a dark pine and a red sun. Mandarin Ducks in Snow brings cold: snow clotted and dripping on the branches, one duck seen under the water, the stillness of a winter pond. Roosters rises by excess, a wall of combs, eyes and feathers until the birds become a pattern that still breathes. The peacock’s train, the moon behind the plum and the octopus among the fish turn transport toward the uncanny. It recurs scroll by scroll. Held below the top because it is mostly beauty and astonishment, without terror or human stakes, and some of the chicken and small bird scrolls are delight rather than height.
Diogo de Boitaca and João de Castilho · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Elevation comes often and in two keys. The summit is the entry from the west: under the low high choir and into the hall, where six columns rise without capitals of any weight into the spreading net, so that the vault reads as one canopy over a single room, a stone grove rather than a sequence of bays, and the transept opens wider still without a support. The cloister gives a second, gentler elevation: the lower walk in shade, the tracery screens cut against the bright garth, the lioz gold in late light on four sides. The south portal is grand in a public register. Held below because the long front is more extensive than elevated, and the main chapel turns the climax to a cooler key.
Jackson Pollock · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Elevation is real and recurrent, and of one kind: grandeur and turbulence, the abstract sublime of the American 1950s, not delight. It comes first by scale, nearly five metres of field at standing height, wider than the eye takes in from close, so that the viewer is inside the painting before seeing its edges. It comes again in the poles, a slow procession of leaning presences from a distance and stained bars sunk in the field close to. It comes in the light: the aluminium catches and loses it as the viewer moves, and the surface flickers at the scale of the whole and of the skein. It comes in colour, the deep blue against orange and yellow, hotter than the classic pours. What holds it is congestion: in places the density closes the field rather than opening it, and the transport is broken by surface.
Nick Drake · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
Height comes often and in one kind: a quiet, cold beauty, never grandeur. The title song’s piano phrase, entering over the guitar, is a small summit in the record’s first minute. Things Behind the Sun rises across nearly four minutes, the guitar’s figure driving the voice to the record’s widest reach. Place to Be holds at height through its whole length on a voice barely above speech, and From the Morning closes in an elevation that is almost serene. Parasite’s slow descent is the dreadful form of the same height. Over twenty-eight minutes the frequency is high, and the axis counts frequency with height. What holds the figure from the top is the narrowness of the kind, and three tracks, Horn, Road and Free Ride, that hold the record’s level without rising from it; neither holds it far.
Ancient Egyptian, under Amenhotep III and Ramesses II · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Elevation comes repeatedly and in different keys. The approach gives the pylon, the obelisk and the colossi at a scale meant to dwarf. The colonnade is the building’s height: fourteen open-papyrus shafts carry their architraves high above a narrow passage, so that the walker is made small and the line of columns becomes a single upward event. The sun court then opens to light through its double rows of bundle columns, the one passage where the building is calm and bright rather than grand. Inside, the dark and the lowering ceilings make another elevation, of enclosure. The ruin takes some of this away: the colonnade’s roof is gone, and its height is now read against open sky, not in the darkness the makers meant.
Ridley Scott · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
The film rises repeatedly, and its register is terror, which the axis credits as fully as beauty. The derelict, Giger’s ribbed and organic architecture seen through the crew’s lamps, and the fossilised pilot in his chair are a sublime of scale and strangeness rarely reached in the cinema of the decade. The egg chamber lies under a blue layer of mist. The chestburster comes at a meal, in full light, among people laughing. Dallas goes into the ducts with the motion tracker closing; the self-destruct runs in strobing light and sirens under a countdown voice, level and indifferent. Frequency is high from the landing on. Held from the top because the elevation is almost all of one kind, dread, and because the last movement, the creature seen whole, brings it back to the human scale it had escaped.
Hans Puchsbaum and others · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Elevation comes often and in two registers. Outside, the south tower is the city’s sublime: a single stone spire, its gables and pinnacles drawn up into the shaft so that it seems to grow rather than stack, seen down the streets that radiate from the square and from the hills. The roof, glazed and patterned, turns in sun and rain like a hide. Inside the register reverses: a dark, tall forest of piers, saints on every one, light only from the aisle windows, and the high altar a lit stage at the end of a long dusk. The pulpit, near at hand, is a small sublime of its own. What holds it below the top: the interior is crowded and dim with accretion, and its height is felt as gloom as often as ascent.
Hildegard of Bingen · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
Height is reached by beauty more than by terror, and it recurs. The Virtues’ choral answers rise again and again in wide arching lines, and the closing chorus, “In principio omnes”, is the summit: creation greening in the beginning, then the Father shown the wounds of his Son. Anima’s return, a solo voice low and broken before the full company, is the drama’s one moment of pathos. The Devil’s shouts give the sublime of dread a negative form, noise breaking into song. Held below the top on frequency and on range of register. Much of the procession is formulaic declaration at one level of intensity; the height is a height of radiance, with little of the transport through conflict that the highest concert works carry.
Wim Wenders · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent and of two kinds. The landscape: a man in a red cap crossing a desert of mesas under a hawk, the long Texas roads, the freeway lights seen from the hill above Los Angeles, the Houston towers and the green-lit car park at the close, all in Robby Müller’s colour, neon against dusk, with Ry Cooder’s slide guitar sounding a lament over it. The human kind is higher: the Super 8 film watched in a dark room; the second booth scene, a man telling a story with his back to the glass while the woman’s face changes behind it; the reunion in the hotel room, seen from outside. Held at the figure because the middle movement runs level for long stretches, and some of the landscape’s height is the beauty of photography more than of event.
Ogata Kōrin · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Elevation of one register, sustained rather than single. The gold ground is the first height: a field of light with no source, which in a dim room glows from within and changes as one moves. The second is the blue against it, the most saturated colour that pigment allowed in Kōrin’s Kyoto, laid in two tones so that the flowers have depth without modelling. The third is the rhythm: the eye rides the right screen’s band as a line of music, then drops down the long diagonal of the left into open gold. The height recurs across all twelve panels and does not slacken. It is grandeur of colour, with no terror and no awe of scale: one high note sustained, where the greatest pictures rise in more than one kind.
Muhammad ibn Mahmud Isfahani (attributed), under Timur · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Height comes twice, outside and in, and recurs. Outside, the ribbed turquoise dome on its drum stands over the old city, the drum lettered in Kufic large enough to read from the street, and the light changes on the ribs through the day; it is among the most memorable domes of Islamic building. Inside, the change of register is the event: from the plain approach into a chamber of gold on blue, rising through muqarnas to the inner dome, the dark nephrite at the centre among pale marble. What holds it: the interior’s gold is largely the regilding of 1996, and its effect leans on renewal; the chamber is small, so the transport is of richness more than space; and outside the height is one gesture, the dome, which the complex round it no longer frames.
Gustave Flaubert · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent and mostly dreadful. The crucified lions on the road to Sicca (II) set the key early. Around them: the feast of the first chapter, where the sacred fish of the Barca are killed and eaten; Salammbô alone with the python (X), coiling it about her before she goes to Mâtho; the night entry by the aqueduct (XII); the bronze Moloch with its arms raised, the children passed up and into the fire while the crowd sways (XIII); the starving army in the Défilé de la Hache, eating its dead while the lions feed on the rest (XIV); Mâtho’s walk through Carthage under the blows of the whole city (XV). The book rises again and again. It is held below the top because the dread is cold and its height is visual more than moral: the reader is overwhelmed rather than transported, and the warm sublime is almost absent.
Ilkhanid, under Öljaitü · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Elevation comes twice. Outside, a dome rising some 50 m from an empty plain is grand at every distance; the city that once stood between the traveller and the tomb is gone, and the scale now reads almost as geology. Inside, the single octagonal room carries the eye up a sheer wall, past the openings of the galleries, into a dome of about 25 m span: a room enclosing more height than breadth, its vault seeming to float on hollow walls. The upper gallery, open to the room and to the sky, gives a second and lighter rise. What holds it: the long-standing scaffolding and the lost turquoise skin diminish both impressions as they stand, and the room is calm rather than transporting at every return.
James Brown · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent and of two kinds. The first is velocity: the fanfare, then “I’ll Go Crazy” and “Think” at a pace that leaves no breath, the band’s stops landing as one hand. The second is the slow height of “Lost Someone”, where the vamp is held almost still and Brown’s voice climbs from murmur to scream over it, the hall rising with him; this is the summit, and it is sustained for minutes. The medley reaches a second summit in its return to “Please, Please, Please”, collapse and resurrection sung. What holds the figure: the height is ecstatic and warm throughout, never grand or terrible, and the short songs give energy more than transport. Its frequency is close to Kind of Blue’s; its single kind keeps it half a point below that record’s 9.1.
Frank Sinatra · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Height of one kind, very frequent. The title song sets a hush, voice over a few strings, that the record rarely breaks. “It Never Entered My Mind” and “Last Night When We Were Young” reach a beauty of grief among the highest in the American song on record: the Arlen especially, where the long line is held to its end as if the breath were the memory. “When Your Lover Has Gone” and “Ill Wind” darken the colour toward dread without raising the volume. Across sixteen tracks the frequency is high. What holds it from the top is the single register: the sublime here is beauty held low, never grandeur or terror, and at one tempo several middle tracks, “Deep in a Dream” and “I’ll Be Around” among them, are lovely without rising.
Eero Saarinen · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Height and frequency both count, and here elevation recurs. From a distance the arch is a thin line of light whose apparent thickness changes as one moves, since the triangular section shows two faces or one; at dusk it takes the colour of the sky, at noon it flashes. At the foot of a leg the face leans overhead and runs out of sight, and the curve seems to fall toward the one looking up. Between the legs the crown hangs 630 ft above with nothing under it. The ride in the capsule is a small dread, and the view from the crown down onto the river is vertiginous. The elevation is cold and repeated in every weather. It stops short because it is of one kind, height and void, without the depth of a room or a sequence of spaces.
Godspeed You! Black Emperor · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Elevation is the record’s native element, cold and warm, and its height is at the top of the medium. The cold opens it: a low drone and a flat voice describing the end of a city, “the car’s on fire”, in the register of a weather report. Grief comes in the lament that closes the first movement. Grandeur and terror come together in The Sad Mafioso, where a figure of tremolo guitar and violin is repeated, thickened and driven until the room seems to tilt, among the summit moments of its tradition. Providence climbs twice more, the second time into a gallop. Frequency holds the figure well below the height: four or five summits in sixty-three minutes, with long approaches, noise and a silence between.
Krzysztof Kieślowski · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent and comes in two registers. Weronika singing in the downpour as the choir scatters; her voice rising in the concert, Preisner’s setting climbing until her heart fails and she falls, the camera falling with her; the burial seen from below as earth is thrown onto the lens. In France the puppet show is the summit of the half: a ballerina marionette dances, breaks, dies, is wrapped, and rises again with wings, while the children’s faces and Véronique’s are cut against it, a child’s entertainment that is also a death and a resurrection. Smaller heights keep the line up: the transparent ball with its stars through which Weronika watches the countryside turn over from a train, a point of reflected light wandering over Véronique’s room. What holds it below the top: the clue-trail and the hotel run level for some minutes, and some of the lift is bought by Idziak’s golden filters rather than earned by the drama.
Claude Lorrain · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
This is the picture’s strength among the axes of experience. The sun is painted itself, at the centre and low, and its light comes straight out of the canvas along the water into the viewer’s eyes: a direct radiance few painters had attempted before, and none so calmly. The elevation is serene and large, a classical sublime of stillness rather than terror, and it belongs to the whole field, not to one moment: the haze on the far water, the light catching the cornices and the rigging, the cool palace at the left set against the warm open centre. It rises again and again as one looks. It is one height, sustained rather than climbed, and gentler than the highest.
Ikeda Terumasa · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Height is high; frequency is high outside and lower within. Elevation comes in the keep seen from the city down the long avenue from the station, white over its stone on the hill; on the approach, where the keep appears above a wall, is lost behind a turret and returns nearer and higher at each turn; in the view up the curved stone walls to the eaves; in the inner court, closed on every side by the four keeps; in the roofs under blossom and snow. The register is grace with menace under it. It falls inside: dark timber floors, weapon racks, steep stairs, with height again only at the top floor’s view over the plain. Most of it is an exterior, seen from outside and on the climb.
Greek (Classical) · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Elevation is high and recurs from every station round the figures. The scale, a head taller than a tall man, sets the viewer below the faces. A’s parted lips make him about to speak or to shout, and the stare of the face is a living one that the marble copies of the period do not give. The sheen of the bronze over the chest, and the tension that runs from the planted foot to the turned neck, read as menace held in check; walk round A and the twist of the torso turns repose into threat. B’s elevation is quieter, a gravity rather than a threat. The register is single, grandeur with an edge of danger, and the work rises in it again and again. Held below the top by that single register: the figures astonish, and the astonishment is of one kind.
Alfonso Cuarón · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent and of both kinds. The aeroplane reflected in soapy water raises a chore to the size of the sky. The forest fire at night, figures carrying buckets through the smoke and a man singing at its edge, is dreadful and strange. The massacre seen from the store window, the gun raised at a pregnant woman and her waters breaking, is the dreadful summit; the stillbirth, held in one long take, gives no relief. The beach is the other summit: Cleo, who cannot swim, walking into the surf on one lateral pan, and the family clasped on the sand against the low sun. Held below the top by the level the film keeps between these, by design.
Mark Rothko · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Elevation is the work’s whole aim, and it is reached. The canvas stands more than half again the height of a person, and from close by, where the painter asked the viewer to stand, the field fills sight. The dark upper block reads less as a shape than as a depth or an opening, and against the warm ground it gives the dreadful, inward elevation that Robert Rosenblum named “The Abstract Sublime” in 1961: grandeur without an object. The soft edges keep the masses breathing, so the experience changes over minutes of looking. What holds it below the top is frequency and range: one field, one register, one summit sustained, and no second height of another kind.
Greek colonists of Poseidonia · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Elevation of the cold kind, weight and duration, high and frequent. From the plain the temple stands whole in silhouette, both gables still against the sky, a rare sight among Greek temples; the columns, broad against their height, give a grandeur close to dread. Within the peristyle it recurs: the ranks of columns close and open as one walks, the inner colonnade rises in two storeys behind the outer, and the unroofed cella frames sky between stone. The porous stone, gold where the stucco has gone, changes through the day. Held below the top: the register is one note, struck at the approach and sustained rather than renewed, and part of what moves a visitor, the emptiness and the decay, belongs to the ruin and not to the builders.
Qing builders, under the Qianlong Emperor; rebuilt under Cixi · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Elevation here is grandeur and beauty, and it recurs. It comes in the first sight of the lake from the east shore, a sheet of water under the hill with the Tower of Buddhist Incense at its centre; in the climb of the front axis, terrace on terrace, with the lake widening below; in the view west from the hill, where the Jade Spring pagoda and the Western Hills are borrowed into the garden and the horizon becomes part of the design; in the Seventeen-Arch Bridge low on the water and the high arch of the Jade Belt Bridge; in the Long Corridor beside the lake; and in every season, the lake frozen in winter. The limit is height, not frequency: the register is serene splendour, with no terror and no vastness, and much detail, seen close, is decoration.
William Van Alen · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Height is high, and frequency is high outside. Elevation comes in the crown seen from the street or across the river, its steel taking the colour of the sky at dawn and dusk; in the triangles lit at night; in the needle seen over the roofs from anywhere in midtown, a figure that turns as one moves through the city; and in the lobby, low and dark, red marble and inlaid wood under the mural, a jewel box rather than a nave. The register is exhilaration and glamour, aspiration without dread. It falls within: the office floors are offices, and the lobby’s height is modest. A building that most people know from far away and from below concentrates its sublime in one place, the top, and that keeps it below the buildings whose elevation recurs inside and out.
Cass Gilbert · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Height is high and recurs, outside and in. Outside: the tower seen across City Hall Park, the cream piers drawing the eye up without a break to the copper crown; the shaft at dusk and floodlit at night; the building seen from the harbour and from Brooklyn Bridge, for decades the summit of the skyline. Inside, the lobby is a real elevation, not a jewel box: vaults gold with mosaic, veined marble, light falling from the glass ceiling, the scale of a church aisle given to a public passage. A sublime top and a sublime threshold together lift the axis. What holds it: the office floors are offices; the upper tower is private and the lobby reached by tour; and the elevation is grandeur in a borrowed manner, within the register Gothic had already proved.
Nina Simone · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
Height is reached twice at the top of the scale and several times below it. “Sinnerman” is the summit, and one of the summits of its decade: the piano ostinato, the tempo that does not relent, the breakdown to handclaps and the shouted “Power”, then the full band returning and the piano driving to the close, transport and dread at once for ten minutes. “Strange Fruit” is the sublime of terror, held low. “Be My Husband” has a stark grandeur made from almost nothing, and “Nobody Knows You” rises in its piano. Against that, the middle of the record is level, and “Tell Me More” is charm. Frequency is moderate; the height is real.
Sufjan Stevens · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent and of several kinds. Chicago rises from its strings and piano pulse into a choir over “All things go”, the record’s best-known height. Casimir Pulaski Day reaches the quiet sublime of grief, banjo and voice with a trumpet that enters near the end and does not console. Come On! Feel the Illinoise! lifts in its odd metre and its choir; The Predatory Wasp builds over minutes to a brass and vocal climax; The Seer’s Tower is the dreadful kind, a slow piano descent into an apocalypse; The Tallest Man, the Broadest Shoulders is a long ascent of minimalist pulse and massed voices. The UFO prelude is a small, grave wonder. Against this the middle fancies have energy more than height and several interludes stay level. Height on seven or eight of twenty-two tracks, most of the long ones, carries the figure.
Eero Saarinen · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Height is high and frequency good. On the approach across the flat Virginia ground, the long roof is seen from below its high edge, the piers like a colonnade leaning back: one of the great entrances of its century. Inside, the ceiling falls away from the entrance in one curve and lifts again to the glass on the field, so that the whole hall is read at once, its scale set by the bays and the light along the walls. Beyond the glass stand the aircraft. The elevation is calm and grand rather than terrible, and it holds through the whole length; the extension lengthens the run without lowering it, though the shorter hall was the more taut. Counters and screening lower the frequency, not the height.
Timurid and Ashtarkhanid builders · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Height is high, and so is frequency. Elevation comes on entering the square, as three portals of blue, turquoise and ochre tile rise on three sides at once; in the low sun taking the tile, the space changing colour through the day; in Sher-Dor’s lions and suns read close; in the ribbed domes over the east side; in the courts, quiet and enclosed after the open square; and in the gilded mosque of Tilya-Kori, gold over dome and mihrab. The register is dazzle and grandeur with a civic calm, without dread. It falls in places: the courts are serene rather than elevated, the cell ranges repeat, and much of the inner fabric is ordinary brick behind the faces. The square is the summit, and it recurs, from every side and at every hour.
DJ Shadow · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
Elevation is the record’s chief good, and it comes often, of a cold, nocturnal kind. Building Steam with a Grain of Salt rises early from a lone piano and a voice into a beat that seems to lift the floor. Changeling builds slowly to a height and lets a synthesiser line from another era break over it. Stem/Long Stem is the largest summit, strings gathering over a broken, accelerating drum pattern until the piece tips into a long, almost liturgical aftermath. Midnight in a Perfect World is the purest height, transport without event. Blue Sky Revisit closes in slow grief. The sketches between are flat.
Ansel Adams · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Elevation is the picture’s whole business, and it is high and of two kinds at once. The cosmic: a black sky of great extent, the moon small and absolutely clear in it, the snow range lit along its crest under a lid of cloud. The elegiac: the crosses picked out white against the dark land, a light on the dead that the eye reads as grace or as farewell. The two meet in one instant, and the knowledge that the instant was real, one sheet and the light gone before a second, is part of the elevation. It recurs as the eye moves between moon, peaks and crosses. Held below the top because it is one effect, a single summit sustained by stillness, in one register.
Billie Holiday · Music
7.9 · Tier III
Elevation is frequent and of one kind: the beauty of ruin, close to dread in its nakedness. “I’m a Fool to Want You” reaches it at once, the voice entering over strings as if from the end of something. “You Don’t Know What Love Is” holds a long, bare intensity. In “You’ve Changed” a solo trombone stands beside a voice that seems barely to hold the line, and the moment the voice catches is the record’s height. “Glad to Be Unhappy” and “But Beautiful” rise quietly. Against this, the chorus and the sweeter string writing flatten several tracks toward easy listening, and the single register never reaches grandeur. Six or seven of twelve rise, at a height few vocal records reach.
Alfonso Cuarón · Film
7.8 · Tier III
Elevation is frequent and of two kinds. The terror: the first debris strike, silent, Stone spun off into the black with the Earth wheeling past her visor, the camera passing through the glass into her helmet and out again; the destruction of the station given without sound, reaching her only through her hands on the hull. The grandeur: the Earth itself, the aurora and the sunrise over the curve of the planet, held as setting and never as postcard. The film rises again at the end, in the burning capsule, the lake and her first steps on the shore. The height is repeated, not single. Held below the top because the elevation is often astonishment at the means, at how it was made, and because the score at its loudest tells the viewer to feel what the image has already given.
Samuel Barber · Music
7.8 · Tier III
Height is real and high. The climax, the strings massed fortissimo in their top register and then cut to nothing, is among the plainest moments of the sublime in the concert music of its century, and the silence after it is part of the height, not a relief from it. The beauty of the line at the start, and of its return after the silence, is a second elevation. Frequency is the question. The work is one ascent, and it reaches its summit once. The figure holds above that rule because the climb is not flat, each wave rising higher than the last. Winterreise, at 9.3, and the Goldberg Variations, at 8.9, rise again and again in different registers.
Franz Kafka · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
The heights are frequent for so short a work, and most are dreadful. The first paragraph, an impossible body inspected in a plain bedroom on a rainy working morning, is the cold comic sublime the century learned from. The father bombarding his son with apples from the sideboard, one lodging in his back and rotting there, is the dreadful height. The sister’s violin in the third part is the strangest: Gregor drawn out of his room toward the music, the one moment he reaches for something beyond food and work, in front of lodgers who have lost interest. His death at dawn, the light beginning outside the window, is quiet and high. The last image, the family in a sunlit tram and the daughter stretching her young body, is an uncanny height of its own. Held at this figure because the scale of a novella limits how long any height can be sustained: the heights are many for seventy pages, and none is carried across a large structure.
Anonymous · Architecture
9.0 · Tier V
Elevation is real, quiet and mostly withheld. The approach is credited only as the threshold the sanctuaries depend on: the Uji Bridge from the town into the forest, the pilgrim’s hands in the Isuzu, the gravel under the trees, the white curtain at the gate lifting in the wind, and over the fences the thatch and the billets. Once a generation the two sanctuaries stand side by side, the new pale gold, the old weathered grey. A verse attributed by tradition to Saigyō names the register: “nanigoto no / owashimasu ka wa / shiranedomo / katajikenasa ni / namida koboruru”
“what it is that dwells here I do not know, yet tears fall in gratitude and awe”. What holds it: the building is small and seen in part, and the transfer by night is witnessed by few.
Leonardo da Vinci · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Elevation is real, and of two kinds held together: a quiet beauty in the face and hands, and in the land something nearer dread, rock and water with almost no human sign but a road and a bridge, seen from a height no one stands at. Where it comes it is high: the light on the forehead and the breast, the gradation at the mouth, the blue of the distance. What holds it is frequency and register: one figure, one temperature, one held instant, on a small panel. The yellowed varnish lays a cast over the sky and the far ranges; that is charged to survival, not here. What the panel gives the eye is a single sustained note, and a work that rises again and again across a vault or a long field stands above it.
François Rabelais · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The elevation is frequent and mostly comic: the grandeur of size and plenty. The narrator walks into Pantagruel’s mouth and finds a country, with a man planting cabbages who has never heard of the world outside (Pantagruel 32). Gargantua’s letter reaches the plain height of a learning restored after the darkness of the Goths. The rarer heights are of another kind: in the Quart Livre Pantagruel hears of the voice that cried that great Pan was dead, reads Pan as Christ, and weeps; and frozen words thaw in the air over the northern sea, the work’s one moment of pure wonder. The storm is dreadful and funny at once. Held at 8.5 because the register rarely leaves laughter for long, and the long counsel chapters are flat.
Nikolai Gogol · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Height comes rarely, and it comes through the comic surface. The humane passage is the ethical sublime in a single sentence. The square where Akaky is robbed, wide and dark, with a watchman’s booth so far off that it seems to stand at the end of the world, carries a cold terror. In his delirium the meekest of clerks swears at his excellency, and the passage reaches the dreadful. The inventory of his effects, goose quills, a quire of paper, socks, buttons and the old coat, is a height of pathos reached by listing. The ghost tearing the coat from the significant person’s shoulders is grotesque grandeur. Held in the middle eights because the governing register is comic deadpan, which keeps every elevation brief by design, and because the heights are moments within a short story rather than a structure that rises again and again.
Plato · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Height comes three times, in two registers. The cold height is Callicles’ great speech (482c to 486d): the lion’s whelp tamed by incantations, who shakes them off and tramples the writings and spells that held him (484a), and the prophecy, put in the enemy’s mouth, that Socrates, dragged into court by some worthless man, would stand helpless and be put to death (486a to b). The tragic height is Socrates’ answer (521d to 522e): that he is one of few Athenians, not to say the only one, who attempts the true political craft, and that he will be tried like a doctor prosecuted by a cook before a jury of children (521e). The myth is the third. Between them run long stretches of question and answer that are argument, not elevation; frequency holds the figure at 8.5.
Diego Velázquez · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Elevation is real and of one register, quiet and luminous. Its places: the alcove, a lit stage seen through the dark of the workroom, where the air itself seems to glow, dust and light together; the young spinner’s white blouse and bare neck under the window light, among the most beautiful passages of flesh and linen in the painter’s work; and the wheel, its spokes become a disc of light, motion stopped and not stopped. The rise recurs across the canvas, from left to right and back to the vision behind. What limits it: no terror and no grandeur of scale in the event; the punishment at the back is small, distant and nearly illegible. The transport is of seeing light in a room, high in its kind and narrow in range.
Albrecht Dürer · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
The elevation is dread and stillness held together. Death’s half rotted face and snaky crown, the hourglass at the knight’s eye, the Devil’s nightmare head, the closing gorge; and at the centre the horse lifting a hoof at an even walk and the rider’s profile unmoved. The height comes from the contrast, terror at the margins and grandeur in the middle, with the light on polished steel, and it rises more than once, in the castle on the far height as well as in the encounter. The cost is scale and medium: a sheet held in the hand and read close does not overwhelm, and much of its effect is the pleasure of intricacy rather than transport.
William Blake · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The height is real and frequent, but much of it is the height of wit. The Proverbs strike again and again: “Eternity is in love with the productions of time”, “The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction”, “The cut worm forgives the plow”. The dreadful sublime comes in the Leviathan fancy, with its spiders, its black and white sun, and the monster rising from the deep “with all the fury of a spiritual existence”. A Song of Liberty reaches for apocalyptic grandeur: “The Eternal Female groand! it was heard over all the Earth”. The designs carry the lift where the words are comic: the figure wrapped in flame on plate 3, the lovers drifting across the title page. Held where it stands because the register is mostly satiric, the transport arrives in flashes, and the Song’s elevation is partly stated rather than achieved.
Nathaniel Hawthorne · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Height comes in a dark register, and often enough to carry the book. The ceiling is the midnight vigil (XII): the minister on the empty scaffold, Hester and Pearl joining hands with him, and a meteor drawing a great letter in the sky over the sleeping town, with the physician’s face lit beneath it. The forest rises the other way: Hester unclasps the letter and throws it aside, lets down her hair, and sunshine floods the wood (XVIII). The last scaffold (XXIII) is dreadful and grand, the minister calling the woman and the child to him before the whole holiday crowd and dying there. Smaller heights: the prison door and its wild rose (I), Pearl at the brook refusing to cross until her mother takes the letter back (XIX). Held below the higher reaches because the long analytic middle runs level, and the narrator’s commentary sometimes lowers a height it has just reached.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The elevation is the dreadful kind, and it rises often. The colonel and the messenger blown apart on the road in the first pages, which Bardamu greets with relief. The night patrols through burning Flanders villages, the war reduced to darkness and noise. The jungle at Bikomimbo, the trading hut rotting with fever, and the delirium in which Bardamu is sold to a galley. The arrival at New York, the city standing upright. The close, the tug’s whistle on the Seine calling everything away. The crypt at Toulouse, its mummies laid out for tourists, is grotesque at a height few novels reach. There is a sublime of tenderness too, held to a few pages: Molly in Detroit, and the child Bébert, whose death Bardamu cannot prevent. Held at this figure because the Rancy and Vigny stretches run long on the level of sardonic report, and because the tone, by its own law, refuses the transport it so often approaches.
Andrea Mantegna · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The elevation is of one kind: dread and gravity, the sublime of the corpse. Its height is real. The first sight of the body coming toward the viewer from the depth of the picture, feet first, is a shock few paintings give, and the wounds of the feet at the front edge are the nearest thing in the field. The shroud’s folds, hard and deep as carved stone, give the body a monumental weight at a small size. The Virgin’s face gives a second, warmer height, grief at its rawest. What holds the axis is range and frequency. The register is one, cold and close; there is no transport, no light from elsewhere, no grandeur of space; the drama is a single viewpoint, met once and then known. It rises twice, high both times, and does not rise again.
Vittorio De Sica · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
The elevation is low to the ground, and it comes more often than the method seems to allow. The pawnshop shelves rise like a cliff of linen over the clerk who climbs them. The rows of bicycles at the stadium, and the one leaning alone, are temptation made spatial. The cry from the Tiber, with Antonio running along the embankment before he sees that the boy carried out is not his son, is dread at full height. The last minute is the summit, a release worse than arrest. Frequency holds the axis down. For long stretches the film is level by design, streets and errands, and the score lifts where the images had not asked to be lifted.
Michelangelo Antonioni · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
The elevation is cold and recurrent. The island is the first summit: bare volcanic rock, the sea on every side, figures calling a name into the wind, the night storm and the grey dawn over the water. The deserted town is a second, white blocks and a church and no one, the camera holding on the emptiness. Noto is a third, its facades in sun and the bells Claudia rings from the tower, a rare joy the film lets ring. The last shot is the highest: a bench, a wall, Etna, two figures, dawn. Height comes from small people set before large indifferent spaces. Frequency holds it down: long passages in villas and hotels are level by design, and the film refuses the swelling cue.
John Bunyan · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The heights are real and they recur. The burden loosed at the Cross and tumbling into the sepulchre is release told in the plainest words. Apollyon, straddling the whole breadth of the way, is terror given a body. The Valley of the Shadow, a narrow path between a ditch and a quag in darkness with the mouth of hell beside it, is sustained dread. The close is the highest passage: Beulah, the River without a bridge, Christian sinking and Hopeful holding his head above the water, the city seen through the gate. After it comes a cold summit few books place last, “a way to hell, even from the gates of heaven”. Frequency holds the figure down: long stretches of argued doctrine between the heights do not elevate, and the verses are flat.
Luo Guanzhong (attributed) · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Height and frequency both, and frequency is the strength: the book rises again and again across a century. The Red Cliffs sequence, the arrows borrowed from Cao Cao by straw boats in the fog, the chained fleet, Zhuge Liang calling the southeast wind and the fire on the river, is a grandeur few narratives sustain so long. Zhang Fei alone on the bridge at Changban; Zhao Yun cutting through Cao’s army with the infant Adou; Guan Yu reading while Hua Tuo scrapes the poison from his bone; the empty city, with Zhuge Liang at the qin on the wall; the dying general’s lamps at Wuzhang under the autumn wind. What holds it here is that the elevation belongs to the episode, not the sentence, and between the heights lie long flats of campaign.
Paul Gauguin · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The elevation is real and of one register: grave, dreaming, nocturnal in a daylight picture. It has four places. The fruit picker at the centre, arms raised against the dark of the trees, the one upright that spans the height. The blue idol, the coldest note on a warm frieze, glowing out of the shadow at the left. The old woman in her corner, the end of the procession folded into itself. The sea and the island at the upper right, a distance opened behind the company. The length, nearly four metres, makes the frieze something to walk along rather than see at once, and the walking is part of its height. What limits it: the register does not change, the middle sags into genre, and the thin, matte surface damps transport. It rises in several places, but quietly, and never to terror or joy.
Hans Holbein the Younger · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The elevation is real, of one register, and dreadful: the sublime of terror and of the absence of transport. The viewer stands before a dead man at life size at the level of his slab, and the long format moves the eye from the face to the feet like a slow walk along a coffin. It rises in several places: the face with its open eyes and teeth; the right hand, its middle finger stretched over the edge of the slab into the viewer’s space; the wound in the side, a dark slit under the ribs; the feet, stiffened, the nail wound dark. There is no grandeur of scale or light, and the height is held at one pitch from end to end. A cold height, held without relief, which does not rise from one register to another.
Odo of Metz, under Charlemagne · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Height is real, frequency moderate. The elevation is vertical and dim: from the low ambulatory into the octagon, its walls rising storey over storey, the column screens catching light from the gallery, to the gold of the vault. Under the Barbarossa chandelier, its circle of towers hung low, the room gathers on its centre. The passage east into the choir hall, a cage of glass rising far above the Carolingian walls, is a second elevation of another kind, from mass to light. What holds the figure: the room is small; the gold of the vault is a nineteenth-century surface; much of the Carolingian effect is weight rather than release; and outside, a crowded grouping of roofs and chapels rises only at the tower and the choir.
Henri Matisse · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The canvas reaches transport by colour and scale together. At nearly four metres wide the figures are larger than the viewer, and the vermilion against the deep blue is not a harmony but a collision held in balance: the eye cannot rest on the bodies without the blue pressing forward, nor on the sky without the red. The arched dancer at the left, planted, head at the top edge, and the dancer at the front flung toward the open hand are the ring’s two poles of force; between them the motion is continuous, so the elevation is the whole field sustained, and it does not drop. It is warm, ecstatic rather than terrible. The ceiling is the single image in a single register, which cannot rise through stages.
George Eliot · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The heights are of the first order and come most often in Gwendolen’s half: the opening at the roulette table under Deronda’s gaze; the panel at Offendene and the dead face behind it; Klesmer’s verdict on her hopes of the stage, which strips her; the wedding night, when Lydia Glasher’s letter and the poisoned diamonds arrive; the drowning off Genoa and the confession after it. The Deronda strand rises less often, but it rises: Mordecai waiting on Blackfriars Bridge at sunset for the figure he has foreseen, and Deronda coming up the river toward him; the two interviews with the Alcharisi in Genoa, among the greatest scenes Eliot wrote. Held at this figure because Mordecai’s discourse is often flat where it aims highest, and Mirah’s sweetness lowers every scene she governs.
Limbourg brothers · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Elevation recurs page after page, mostly in one kind: splendour, the lift of colour and minuteness at a scale that rewards the closest look. The blue and gold of the lunettes over every month; white castles against the ultramarine skies of April, June, September and October; February’s snow under a grey sky, a small figure walking toward the village; the rebel angels dropping like gold sparks from a heaven of blue thrones; Eden closed like a jewel. Terror comes once, and strongly, in Hell, where Satan on his grill breathes souls upward in a column of fire. The height is real and frequent, but it is the height of the precious, held at the size of a hand, and the Hours’ lesser pages and Colombe’s crowded scenes sit between the summits.
Dziga Vertov · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Elevation recurs, and it is mostly the elevation of speed and of seeing itself. The seats of the empty cinema fold down as if for ghosts; the cameraman, superimposed as a giant, sets up his tripod above a crowd; the Bolshoi Theatre splits down the middle and folds in on itself; the camera walks off its tripod, bows and leaves; the last reel’s cuts shorten until the city, the audience and the machinery race together into the eye in the lens. The birth, shown plainly and cut against a funeral, gives the one grave note. Held from the top by register: the film is high often but seldom deep in its height, and its comic passages, the magician and the woman blinking awake with the blinds, are deliberately light.
Jean Renoir · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
The elevation is frequent and mostly quiet. In the camp revue the news of Douaumont comes, and men in women’s clothes sing the Marseillaise: a comic scene lifted into a collective act with menace in it. Boëldieu on the ramparts at night, playing “Il était un petit navire” on a flute while searchlights hunt him and Rauffenstein asks him in English to come down, is one of the great sustained passages of the decade, courtesy and death in one frame. The cutting of the geranium is the summit in miniature, a gesture where a speech would be. The last shot of two dots crossing snow is warm elevation. Held below the top because Renoir refuses grandeur by temperament, and the first camp keeps to the ground.
Henri Matisse · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Elevation is real and of one kind, warm absorption rather than grandeur or terror. Its places: the first sight of the red at nearly two metres, a field that reads as heat and as depth at once and draws the viewer in; the moment the lines resolve into a room and the room dissolves again into red; the small bright pictures floating on the field like windows; the clock without hands, a stillness on the axis. The register holds throughout and rises again on return, as the red deepens with looking. What holds it: one temperature and one register, no dread, no transport of scale beyond the canvas; the painter’s works, small and decorative at this size, do not rise; the height comes from the field more than from any passage within it.
Martin Scorsese · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
The elevation is dreadful, not exalted, and it recurs: the cab sliding out of white steam in slow motion over Herrmann’s snare and brass, and Travis’s eyes washed in red and blue light; Betsy coming through the crowd in slow motion; the camera tracking away from Travis on the telephone to hold on an empty corridor while he is refused; a tablet fizzing in a glass at the drivers’ table until it is the whole world; the mirror; and the overhead shot after the shootout, passing slowly above the bodies and out to the street. Held at the figure by the middle stretch: the courtship and the breakfast with Iris are flat by design, the summits gather at the two ends, and only the overhead shot reaches the very top.
Otto Dix · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Elevation of the dreadful kind, and it recurs. The burning sky over a ground of the dead is the terror the eye cannot hold, and the corpse spread over the broken arch, at the top of the panel where a crucifix would hang, is a summit of horror, high and cold. It rises again in each wing: the column dissolving into mist, men walking into a grey nothing, is quiet dread; the red fire and the carried body of the right wing give the work its one warmth, a terrible pity. The predella closes it low and dark, sublime by stillness. Held at 8.5 because the register is one, the centre’s crowding at times reads as inventory rather than transport, and the enamel smooth finish keeps the viewer at a distance from the fire.
Alberto Giacometti · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Elevation in one register, and a quiet one: pathos and an austere grandeur rather than terror or transport. Its places: the first sight, a figure at one’s own height that seems far away though it is near, which is its strangeness and its height; the stride seen in profile, a line leaning into empty space with nothing ahead of it; the small, forward head, the one point at which the figure seems to look; and the surface close to, torn and kneaded as though still being made. The height is real; its frequency is that of one figure seen from several sides, not of recurring summits. What holds it: one temperature, no scale beyond the body’s, and a silhouette so often reproduced that the first sight must work against the familiar image.
Umayyad, under al-Walid I · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Elevation comes chiefly in the courtyard: a great open paved field, brilliant in Syrian light, closed by arcades, with the gabled transept front rising at its south side and the gold mosaic flashing in the west portico. To stand there is to feel the city drop away. The surviving panel, with its tall trees and pavilions along water, has a calm and inexhaustible grandeur. Inside, the prayer hall is long, dim and horizontal; its power is extent and repetition, the ranks of arcades receding east and west, more than height. The rebuilt dome over the transept is modest from within. Elevation is frequent but in one register, and much of what once carried it, the mosaic that covered the walls, is gone. The axis scores what stands.
Eugenio Montale · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The elevation is cold, and it recurs. “Forse un mattino andando in un’aria di vetro” turns, on a morning’s walk, to see “il nulla alle mie spalle, il vuoto dietro / di me, con un terrore di ubriaco” (the nothing at my back, the void behind me, with a drunkard’s terror): one of the sharpest metaphysical frights in the century’s lyric. “Spesso il male di vivere” rises in its second quatrain to the divine Indifference, the statue, the cloud and the falcon high up. “I limoni” ends with the “trombe d’oro della solarità” (golden trumpets of sunlight) breaking into a grey city courtyard. The charge: “Mediterraneo” reaches for the sea’s sublime directly and in parts declares more than it achieves. The summits are short, which is the form.
Luis Cernuda · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Height and frequency both. The heights are real and recur through the middle of the book: the cold transport of “Donde habite el olvido”, where love is remembered as an annihilation and oblivion is the only dwelling; the grief of “A las estatuas de los dioses” for gods abandoned; the lighthouse keeper of “Soliloquio del farero”, who finds in solitude the thing he loves; “Lázaro”, a resurrection told by the risen man as a return to a world without joy, as chill a sublime as the language has; and “1936”. The elevation is cold more often than warm, of the mind more than of the senses, and the axis is indifferent to which. What holds it at 8.5 is frequency: the later books are argued and deliberately prosaic, and the heights grow rarer as the book goes on.
Frank Lloyd Wright · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Elevation is in the passage and in the room. It comes on entry: from the bright terrace into the low, dim hall, then into the cloisters under the galleries, then up a few steps into a room that opens to its full height and fills with warm light from above, as deliberate a compression and release as any building on the desk below the summit. It comes in the ceiling, the grid of amber coffers glowing like a field, and in the clerestory, which lets the sky in above the heads of the galleries. It recurs with every entry and with the light of each day. Height is bounded: the room is not large and its register is one, warmth and gathered calm; and the exterior, a closed grey block on a street, gives mass and gravity but little elevation, and many have found it forbidding rather than grand.
Billy Wilder · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
The elevation is dreadful and grotesque, and it recurs. The body seen from beneath the water, the police and photographers looking down through the surface. A dead chimpanzee laid out by candlelight in a gilded bedroom and buried at night in a small white coffin. The organ in the empty hall with the wind in its pipes. The tango on New Year’s Eve, an orchestra playing to two. The projector’s beam full of smoke, and Norma rising into it. On DeMille’s stage, the light finding her and the extras gathering. The descent of the staircase, Max directing, the face coming at the lens until it dissolves. Held at its figure because the register is ironic through most of the running time, and the voice-over cools what rises.
Terrence Malick · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent and cool: the house burning, the camera moving from room to room as the fire takes the furnishings, under Holly’s level voice; the tree house in the cottonwoods, light through leaves, the river below; the Gassenhauer, a children’s tune, returning over the pair at play and in flight; the dance in the headlights on the empty plain at night; the badlands at dusk, the car small under the sky; Kit alone building his cairn, then fixing his hair to be taken; the last shots from the plane, above the clouds. The beauty is constant and the terror is held under it; the killings are never staged for height. The film rises often, but always in one key: the register is lyric by design and never reaches grandeur or dread at full stretch, and that ceiling, chosen and kept, holds the axis where it is.
Akira Kurosawa · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Elevation comes at a few great heights. Watanabe in the swing of the finished park, at night in falling snow, singing “Gondola no Uta” almost under his breath, dying, alone and content, is among the summits of the medium. Earlier he sings the same song at a bar piano, and the room falls still at his face. As he hurries down a restaurant stair with his purpose found, young women at a party above sing “Happy Birthday” to a friend, and the song falls on him as on one born again. The opening X-ray is a cold dread, stated in a flat voice. Frequency sets the figure, and the film’s own design limits it: the night tour is frenzy rather than height, the office is flat by intent, and the long wake rises only where its recollections open. The summits are few, and between them the film keeps low.
Seamus Heaney · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The book rises often and coldly. “The Grauballe Man”, “poured / in tar” on his pillow of turf and weeping “the black river of himself”, lifts the dreadful into the beautiful, and the poem weighs the cost of that against the hooded victims of its own day. “Strange Fruit” ends on the girl “outstaring axe / And beatification”: terror and transport at once. “North” reaches a height by refusing height: “Compose in darkness. / Expect aurora borealis / in the long foray / but no cascade of light”. “Sunlight” finds a warm sublime in the ordinary: “here is love / like a tinsmith’s scoop / sunk past its gleam / in the meal-bin”. Part II keeps lower by design, except in “Exposure”. Frequent elevation, not the sustained grandeur of the epic.
Michelangelo Antonioni · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Elevation is cold and frequent. The prologue is the first height: dawn in Riccardo’s flat, the fan turning, a frame of objects, minutes of silence before the words that end four years. The night in EUR is a second, Vittoria alone among flagpoles whose cables ring in the wind, a dog running. The flight above the clouds to Verona is the one moment of ease she is given; the minute of silence is the only stillness in a room of shouting; the water tower stands white and alien. The summit is the coda: the crossing, the barrel with water running out, the bus, the streetlamps coming on, the last glare of a lamp, a dread without event. The courtship, which carries much of the length, rises less.
Andrea Palladio · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Elevation comes often, in two registers. Outside, the white front on its island across the Bacino, seen from the Molo at any hour and doubled in the water, the dome standing behind it, is one of the great prospects of European building, and it takes the morning and evening light. Inside, a white room of large scale and grave proportion fills with even light from the thermal windows; the eye runs from the nave through the crossing to the screen, and through the screen into the further light of the choir, a release of space at the end of the axis. The register is serenity and grandeur, never terror. What holds the axis: the interior lacks the colour and darkness that give the strongest churches their pitch, its calm can read as coolness, and the effect of the exterior owes much to its setting.
Karl Friedrich Schinkel · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Height comes chiefly in two places. The rotunda: a round, top-lit room under a coffered dome, the ring of columns and the gallery above, the light falling from the oculus onto the statues; it is the Pantheon at a smaller scale, and it works. And the colonnade seen from the square in raking light, eighteen columns in one even rhythm, the shadow behind them deep, the whole front a single held breath. The stair hall gives a third moment, the view out through the columns from above. Frequency is moderate: the galleries are galleries, the courts give light to them, and the exterior beyond the front is plain. The register is serene grandeur, not terror or transport. The loss of the frescoes, which once gave the colonnade wall colour and narrative, lowers what the front now gives.
Fra Angelico · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
The elevation is quiet and unbroken: not grandeur or terror but a stilled beauty that rises from the whole field at once. The pale rose and grey of the loggia, the angel’s wings striped in bands of colour, the dark green of the garden, and a cool light that falls the same everywhere hold one height across the surface. There is no flat passage, so the frequency is complete, and the height is renewed with each passage up the stairs, which is part of the design. The height itself is not of the first rank. Nothing overwhelms the viewer, the scale is not vast, and the figures are modest against the architecture. Scored high in the band of beauty, below the elevations that overwhelm.
Artemisia Gentileschi · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
The register is terror, held at height across the whole field: the head foreshortened toward the viewer, upside down, the mouth open and the eyes rolled; the blade going in at the neck; the blood thrown in arcs that catch the light; the three pairs of arms locked like timbers. The single raking light from the left makes the sheet blaze while the dark closes in above. Splendour and horror stand together, the gold damask of Judith’s dress catching the light beside the spurting neck. The elevation rises in several places, the head, the jets of blood, Judith’s averted and concentrated face, but in one key and at one instant, with no second register and no release. The sublime here is the shock of an act more than grandeur, and it rises steeply rather than often.
Max Beckmann · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Two registers are reached. The wings give the dreadful: bodies forced into spaces too small for them, a body inverted, a body maimed, colour hot and closed, black contour pressing every form against the frame. The centre gives transport: the blue of the sea opening after the closed rooms, the boat cutting across it, the light on the queen and child. The structure makes the transport recur, for each return from a wing to the centre repeats the release. What limits the axis: the centre’s figures are hieratic and still, so its elevation is one held note rather than a rising, and the wings’ terror is at times damped by their own puzzle, the eye reading symbols where it should be struck. High and frequent, not at the top.
Louis Kahn · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Height is high in one place and frequency good. The elevation is the hall: arriving up the travertine stair into a room whose four walls open in great circles on floors of books, the cross beams overhead and daylight falling from the clerestory, the effect is grave and immense, among the strongest interiors of its century. It recurs on every floor, for the circles are seen from the stack rings as well as from the floor of the hall. A quieter elevation comes at the carrel, the reader alone at a window over the campus, the panel slid aside. What holds the axis: the exterior is deliberately reticent, a brick block among the academy’s Georgian brick, and rises to nothing; the approach through a low arcade is muted; and the register is one, a solemn calm.
Paul Thomas Anderson · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
The elevation is uneasy, and it recurs. The opening wake, deep blue churned white behind a ship, held under Greenwood’s strings, is a height the film returns to. The first Processing rises by attrition, a single close-up held while the questions repeat and Freddie is forbidden to blink, until the face gives. The two cells, Freddie smashing the toilet while Dodd stands still beside him, are terror and comedy at once. The wall and the window, walked between again and again, become something like a liturgy. The motorcycle shrinking into the desert, the farewell song in England and the last cut to the woman of sand are each high. Held at the figure because the elevation is spaced through stretches that are deliberately flat, and the last third rises less often than the first two.
Thomas Pynchon · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The register is comic, and the comedy is the medium of the heights, which recur. Two men at a telescope at the end of the world, timing a planet across the sun. The Visto, the corridor cut through the forest, running straight to its vanishing point, beautiful and terrible at once. The stars over the American interior, which Mason, in his grief, reads as he reads his loss. The ghost of Rebekah, his dead wife. The empty jail at Lancaster where the Conestoga were killed, approached with a gravity the comedy does not touch. And the last part, the death of Dixon and the decline and death of Mason, which carries the book’s deepest feeling. Held below the higher reaches because the comic routines and the songs flatten long stretches by design, and the reader crosses much level ground between the heights.
Buster Keaton and Clyde Bruckman · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Elevation here is grandeur held with laughter, and it recurs. The locomotives at speed through open country, filmed broad so their mass is felt; the cannon on its flatcar, its barrel sinking until it points at Johnnie, and the curve of the line carrying him clear as the shot goes on to the enemy; Johnnie on the cowcatcher throwing one tie to knock another from the rails; the armies passing behind him in their thousands; and the burning bridge, where the Texas goes down through the trestle into the river in one unbroken shot, comic and terrible at once. Held below the top: the elevation is mostly a spectacle of scale and timing, astonishing more often than moving, and the prologue and the battle are level.
Gabriel García Márquez · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The register is warm, comic and elegiac, and the book rises often within it. Urbino’s death is farce and grandeur at once: the great doctor up a ladder in the mango tree after the parrot, and his last words to his wife. The young Florentino playing the violin at night in the cemetery for Fermina, and the love that runs on letters through a telegraph office, have the lift of the romances they imitate. The last chapter is the height: the slow approach of two old people, the river stripped of its forests and its manatees, the yellow flag raised so that the boat may go on and never put in, and the last answer, “Toda la vida”
“For the rest of our lives”. What holds the axis there is that its elevation is of beauty and tenderness, frequent but rarely overwhelming; there is no terror or grandeur on the scale of the massacre in Blood Meridian or the station in Anna Karenina, and the cholera itself, the corpses in the river and the war glimpsed from the boat, is kept at a distance.
Dionysus Flambouras · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Elevation comes by compression and never by lift, and it comes often. A boy lays a failed roof again with the branches all running one way; a father holds a lit match at the corner of a reglazed sash and the flame stands straight; a hole is cut back by the width of a hand so a body need not be folded to fit. The summit is Three Steps: a sick dog counted down a basement flight one tread at a time, then the same dog climbing back toward a man on a wet kitchen floor and stopping on the third step below, the man’s hand open beyond the top one. The register would be falsified by a raised voice and never raises one. What holds the axis is that height is always taken by contraction, and the stretches of sporting procedure between the summits rise little.
Giulio Romano · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Height and frequency together. The height is real and rare. The Sala dei Giganti is one of the few rooms in Europe whose sublime is terror, total and immediate: the walls themselves falling, the architecture of the room denied by the architecture painted on it, the visitor inside the catastrophe. The Camera di Psiche rises too, in its banquet and its crowded vault, an elevation of abundance and desire, and the garden front over the water, the loggia opening on the long axis, is beauty of a calm order. But the frequency is uneven. The exterior is low, horizontal and rough, deliberately unheroic; the court’s elevation is wit, which smiles rather than lifts; several rooms please without rising. One summit, one high slope, and an intelligence between them.
W. H. Auden · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Height and frequency together. The heights are real and several: the lullaby, “Lay your sleeping head, my love, / Human on my faithless arm”, where tenderness is lifted by its own knowledge of transience; the close of the Yeats elegy, “In the deserts of the heart / Let the healing fountain start”; the lovers’ clocks in “As I walked out one evening” turning to dread, “The glacier knocks in the cupboard”, and the ending’s “crooked neighbour / With your crooked heart”; “Funeral Blues”, whose hyperbole is grief’s own. But the register is chiefly diagnostic and urbane, and the elevation intermittent: the portrait sonnets, the ballads and the light verse are clever before they are transporting, and “Miss Gee” works by a deliberate coldness. A book that rises repeatedly, not steadily.
Buscheto and Rainaldo · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Elevation is real and frequent. From the west door the interior is a forest of columns in receding ranks, the striped walls running into depth, the aisles opening sideways into further aisles and the transepts into further naves, so that the space keeps extending beyond what the eye holds. The façade in strong light, its galleries casting shadow on shadow up four storeys, is one of the great surfaces of medieval Europe. The crossing, where the arms meet under the dome, gives a second height. What it does not give is the vertical seizure of a Gothic choir or the single overwhelming volume of Hagia Sophia: timber roof and many columns keep the space horizontal, and the gilded ceiling lowers the ascent into ornament.
Workshops of Qin Shi Huang · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The height is real and of one kind: the sublime of number. The view down the long corridors of the first pit, rank behind rank in the earth to the far wall, is grandeur and dread together, a host of the dead standing in its own grave. It recurs in the horses of the second pit; in the kneeling archer, whose taut body and level gaze are elevation at the scale of one figure; and in the broken figures still lying in the unexcavated trenches, which add terror to grandeur. What holds the axis is range and frequency. The transport is largely one effect, the multitude, given at full force once and then varied, and the single figure, frontal and stiff, rarely rises on its own. It stands below Water Lilies at 9.0, which rises again and again.
Peter Jackson · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Elevation is the trilogy’s commonest event, and height and frequency are both high. The Balrog on the bridge of Khazad-dûm; the Argonath rising over the river; Gandalf’s return at dawn over Helm’s Deep, the Rohirrim pouring down the slope behind him; the Ents’ march and the breaking of the dam; the beacons lit from peak to peak across the White Mountains; Théoden’s charge on the Pelennor; Mount Doom. Howard Shore’s score is the chief instrument in all three films. The cost is frequency’s own: the films reach for height so often, under such sustained music, that some of it is insistence, in the slow-motion farewells and the last looks of the codas, and grandeur sometimes stands in for terror. The Fellowship of the Ring rises highest for its length; The Return of the King most often.
Claire Denis · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Elevation is of two kinds and recurs. The drills under Britten’s choruses lift bodies at labour into ceremony: men in a line in white light, arms raised and turning, embracing in pairs, flung across an obstacle course. The landscape rises with them, black volcanic rock, a still bay, the salt flat where a dark figure walks on white ground until he falls. The night in which Galoup and Sentain circle each other is a duel without contact, and the last dance is ecstatic and terrible at once. Frequency counts, and between these summits the film is level for long stretches: the Marseille frame is flat by design, and the town and the club idle, so the heights stand apart rather than in a chain.
Raymond Hood and the Associated Architects · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Elevation is real and it recurs. The approach from Fifth Avenue is one of the great urban sequences of its century: the gardens draw the eye down the channel, the ground drops to the plaza, and the slab rises from behind Prometheus in a sheer limestone face whose piers run unbroken to the sky. The slab seen edge on from 49th or 50th Street is a second and colder sublime. The Music Hall auditorium, its arched bands spreading from the stage like a sunrise, is an interior of real grandeur. The rink and the tree of winter are popular rather than architectural and are given nothing. What holds the figure is frequency across the whole: the secondary slabs are handsome fabric, not elevation, and the grandeur is gathered on one axis and in one room.
Willa Cather · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Elevation is quiet, frequent and real. The first night on the Divide is “not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made”. In his grandmother’s garden the boy lies against a pumpkin in the sun and the book reaches its creed: “That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.” Peter and Pavel’s story of the wedding sledges and the bride thrown to the wolves is terror told in a cabin. Mr Shimerda frozen in the barn, and the grave at the crossroads that the roads later bend around, carry grief at the scale of the land. The summit is the plough at sunset, enlarged against the sun’s disc, “picture writing on the sun”, then shrinking as the sun goes down; the fruit cave of Book V is the last height. Held below the summit because the heights are lyric and pictorial, seldom tragic, and Book III flattens.
Metallica · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent and mostly of one temperature, the dreadful and the overwhelming. The title track’s clean middle section is the warmest height: two guitars in harmony over a slow figure, then the long lead, then the riff returning like the drug reclaiming the user. Sanitarium rises by stages from clean, unsettled verses to a last section in double time, the record’s best-made ascent. Orion is the summit of the other kind, a slow bass melody under harmonised guitars, grave and open, framed by a march that swells in and out. Battery’s turn to full force is a shock of power. The Thing That Should Not Be is weight without height, and the range of feeling at height is narrow.
Chen Kaige · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent and often dreadful. The boys’ escape into the city and their sight, from the stalls, of a master singing Xiang Yu, which sends Xiao Laizi back to the beating weeping; the courtyard punishment in the snow; the first full performance of the title opera, Leslie Cheung’s Yu Ji turning with the swords; Dieyi singing for the Japanese while Xiaolou is held; the bonfire, costumes and scripts burning in a rain of sparks while two painted faces accuse each other; Juxian in her red wedding dress, hanging. The summit is the end, in the empty hall, the sword and the childhood name. Held below the top because Zhao Jiping’s score often raises what is already high, and the middle chronicle has long level stretches between summits.
Gunnar Asplund · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Height and frequency both count. The height comes chiefly in one place. From the low black vestibule the narrow stair rises with no view until the head clears the floor, and then the whole circle of books and the bright rough wall above it open at once: among the most exact passages from dark to light in modern building. The rotunda sustains the elevation for as long as one stays in it, and the light from the clerestory moves on the plaster through the day. Outside, the orange drum on its block above the pool has a severe grandeur at a modest size. Held at its figure by frequency: the reading rooms and children’s rooms are fine rooms, not elevated ones, and the street fronts are quiet.
Frank Capra · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Elevation comes often and in two registers. The warm heights: the walk home after the dance, the moon offered, stones thrown at an old house; the telephone scene, two faces pressed cheek to cheek over one receiver, desire turned almost to anger, as charged a love scene as its decade made; and the last gathering, money poured on the table and the bell on the tree. The cold heights: George shouting at his children and breaking the model bridge, the prayer at Martini’s bar with Stewart’s face giving way, the bridge in the snow, and Pottersville, where his mother does not know him Held below the top because some warm heights are reached by pressure on feeling rather than earned by the image, and the last ten minutes press hardest.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Elevation here is cool, still and luxurious, and it recurs across the main floor. It comes in the descent from the closed street front by the curved stair into a room that opens all at once to the full width of the glass and the city beyond; in the onyx wall, veined stone standing free in the light; in the panes lowered into the floor, so that the room stands open to the air with no frame between the body and the garden; in the dark curve of ebony round the table; in the chrome columns catching the light until the structure seems to dissolve. The register is serenity and splendour, without terror or grandeur. What holds it: the upper floor and the street front are plain and give little, so the height gathers in one room, and the room’s scale is domestic, not vast.
Dionysus Flambouras · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Elevation arrives by compression and by dread, and it arrives often. A boy wedged inside a wall whispers the last numbers of the countdown with a crescent that does not know he is there; when he is pulled free the party is still on the rescuers, a champagne flute nobody put down, a paper hat, glittered eye makeup above a pry bar, and the smell reaches the adults before he is fully out and is not named, which the sentence calls both the kindness and the injury. The first night home he asks his mother whether they are still looking for him. A coat stands whole in the lake under the beam of a lighthouse unlit for seventy years, and whole is worse. Mrs. Alvarez adds a second name to a prayer she has said for eight years. The comic movements, the bins and the sale, rise less, and the register never lifts; the height comes from contraction.
Jonathan Glazer · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
The elevation is dreadful and cold, and rationed by design: the daytime image is flat, evenly lit and nearly without composition for effect. The summits are of sound and of breaks in the image: the opening black, held until the audience is uneasy; the river, where the father sees what is in the water; the mother at the window, the sky orange above the wall; the girl moving in white light through a negative world, the one image of goodness and the most beautiful in the film; the museum with a vacuum running; the last descent. Height is great at several points. Long stretches hold dread at a low steady pitch, and frequency is the cost.
Jackson Pollock · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Elevation is real and sustained rather than recurrent. At the distance of a few steps the dark web dissolves and the field becomes light: a pale, warm haze with a cold metallic glint in it and no edge the eye can settle on. Closer, it becomes energy: lines thrown, pooled and flicked, crossing at every scale from a thread to a stripe, so that the eye keeps travelling and never arrives. The two distances alternate as the viewer moves, and the alternation is the rising. It is lyrical and vast at once, a cloud or a nebula without being either; it has no terror, and its grandeur is of extent, not of weight. What holds it below the top is frequency: an all-over field has no summits to recur, and the height is one height held, not a height reached again and again.
Federico Fellini · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
The elevation is real, and it rises toward the end. Gelsomina’s first drum roll; the Fool on the wire above the night square, lit against the dark and seen from the crowd as something from another order; the pebble speech in the dark yard; the road at dawn after the killing; the van driving away from a sleeping woman across a bare winter landscape. The coda is the summit: the washing on the line, the tune in a stranger’s voice, the drunk strongman in the surf at night, clutching the sand and looking up. What lies between holds the figure lower: the circus stretch is level and picaresque, and Masina’s clowning more than once reaches for sentiment rather than height.
Akira Kurosawa · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Elevation is dreadful and frequent. The spirit seen through the reeds of its hut at a spinning wheel, chanting in a thin, toneless voice, then gone, leaving a heap of bones; the long ride in fog; Asaji leaving the room in the dark during the murder, the only sound her silk on the floor, then returning out of black with the drugged sake; Miki’s ghost, white and still in his place at the banquet; the birds blown into the hall; the forest moving through mist; the arrows. The film rises at least seven times. What holds it: every rise is of one temperature, with no height of beauty or pity to answer the dread; Asaji’s madness is the play’s scene played well rather than surpassed; and two of the heights, the banquet and the arrows, are coarsened by grimace and shouting.
Martin Scorsese · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Elevation comes often and in more than one register. Terror: Lazarus’s hand reaching out of the dark of the tomb and gripping Jesus as if to pull him in; the heart drawn from the chest and held out bleeding; the desert circle, where a snake speaks with Magdalene’s voice and a lion with Judas’s. Ecstasy: the baptism, naked bodies and drumming at the river, played as possession rather than piety. Dread on the hill, where the crucifixion is staged without decorum. The last minutes rise highest: the old man crawling through a burning city, the return to the cross, the face changing from agony to joy, the image flaring into light as bells ring. Gabriel’s score lifts much of it. Frequency is held by the flat stretches of the ministry and by visions whose effects show their cost.
Correggio · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
The elevation is the subject. Io’s face in profile, thrown back into the vapour, is transport made visible on a face only partly seen, and it is one of the high moments of Renaissance painting. The height is not placed in one spot: the long curve of the back from shoulder to hip, lit warm against the cold grey of the cloud, carries the same transport down the canvas. The dark of the cloud adds a second register, something near dread, a vast formless thing closing on a small warm one. The elevation is of one kind, and its range is one figure in one instant, with no grandeur of space or of company. High and frequent within a small field.
Hayao Miyazaki · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Elevation of the warm kind, and frequent. The bus stop at night: rain, a lamp, Mei asleep on Satsuki’s back, a clawed foot beside her, then the drops from the trees drumming on the umbrella until the spirit leaps and the whole canopy falls on him at once. The night of the seeds, the sprouting willed upward in a slow dance and the tree rising to fill the sky, and the flight on the top over moonlit fields. The Catbus pouring across wires and paddies. Two children in a tree outside a hospital window, watching their parents laugh. Terror is reached once, briefly, in the dusk search. The register is gentle by design, and the film rises often but rarely to awe; the last rescue rises less than the bus stop.
Led Zeppelin · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent, and of one kind above all: grandeur by weight. Whole Lotta Love rises twice, at the riff’s first entry and at the return after the abstract middle, where the band falls back in on Jimmy Page’s solo with overwhelming force. What Is and What Should Never Be lifts at each chorus, the quiet dream breaking into a wall of guitar, and its close spins across the stereo field. Thank You reaches a warm height in John Paul Jones’s organ and its false ending. Heartbreaker’s unaccompanied break is a summit of another kind, one player suspended outside the song, and Ramble On rises at each chorus. What holds it: no terror, and little beauty held for long.
Thutmose (attributed) · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Elevation is real and of one register: beauty of a cool, exact kind, grave rather than warm. It holds in the profile, where crown and neck make one long curve against the air, the strongest view; in the frontal face, where the inlaid eye gives life and the empty socket the sudden sense of a statue that is also a ruin; and in the colour, the blue of the crown against the skin, surviving as few ancient surfaces do. It rises more than once as one walks round it. Held where it is because the range is one face and one temperature: no terror, no grandeur of scale, no transport beyond the stillness of a beautiful head.
Medang (Mataram) builders · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Height is the building’s first fact. A cluster of steep towers rises from a flat plain under volcanoes, the Shiva tower at about 47 m well clear of the rest, and from the second court the eye climbs from the low fallen rows to the summit in a single line. The effect recurs smaller: the steep stair to the east cella, the dark corbelled chamber with the god standing in it, the turn into the north cella where Durga crushes the buffalo demon. The reliefs give beauty more than terror: wishing trees with kinnara pairs, lions in niches, dancers, Ramayana scenes of real grace. Held short of 9 by range: one strong ascent, repeated by each tower, and small dark rooms that do not lift.
Joseon builders · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
The elevation is cold, repeated and constant rather than climactic. Through the east gate the long hall stands across the empty grey terrace: nineteen bays of red columns under a single dark roof that runs almost the whole width of sight, the line unbroken. The effect is gravity, quiet, and the presence of a great many dead held in order. It does not rise to a climax and is not meant to; it holds one note, very long. The second hall repeats it at a lower pitch, its centre lifted, and the raised path through the trees prepares both. The figure is high because the effect is unmistakable and sustained across both courts. It is held by the range: one register of solemnity, without the transport of light or height.
The White Stripes · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
Elevation comes as force rising to exaltation. Seven Nation Army rises by accumulation: the riff alone, then the drums, then the guitar’s surge at each break, a mounting that has made it a crowd’s song. The Bacharach and David cover comes nearest to transport, a whisper that breaks open into a roar and back, the song’s desperation made physical. Ball and Biscuit climbs in its solos, the guitar pitched up into a squall three times. There’s No Home for You Here lifts on massed overdubbed voices, and In the Cold, Cold Night has a small, still beauty. The limits are kind and frequency: the heights are mostly of one kind, and the second half stays level.
Chaulukya, under Queen Udayamati · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent, and it comes by descent. From the flat ground almost nothing shows; then the earth opens into a long trench of carved stone, and each flight down narrows the sky, cools the air and dims the light while the walls close in, thick with figures. Each pavilion frames the level below, so the view is a succession of colonnaded screens receding toward the dark. Apsaras and gods stand at eye level, near enough to touch. At the end the shaft drops away and Vishnu lies at the water’s depth. What holds it below the top: the lost upper pavilions take the vertical counterpoint that once rose above the trench, and the dry tank removes the reflected water and the chill that were the descent’s goal.
Charles Rennie Mackintosh · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Height is high and frequency moderate, in a register of intensity rather than grandeur. Elevation came in the library: a dark room of timber posts and beams, the gallery held back from the columns, clustered pendant lamps hanging into its height, the light of the tall west windows cutting through it like light into a grove. It came on the west façade seen from the steep street, the oriels rising almost the height of the wall; on the south elevation, a cliff of stone and glass above the city; and in the Hen Run, a glass corridor over Glasgow. The studios, high and evenly lit, are serene rather than elevated. This is a building of moments rather than one sustained register. The axis reads the work as it was made, and the loss is weighed under The Imperishable.
Pre-Pottery Neolithic builders · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Height and frequency both count, and the height is real. The central pillars of enclosure D, over five metres, read as giants at once abstract and bodily: arms coming round the shaft to hands that meet above the belt, the head a blank slab of stone. The predator coming head down the shaft of pillar 27 is terror carved in near full round. The ring itself, a circle of stone figures facing inward, is a dread place, and elevation recurs from enclosure to enclosure, figure after figure. Held below the top: the register is one, dread and strangeness rather than transport; many pillars are plain or modest; and the largest elevation depends on standing inside the ring, which no visitor can now do. It is a sublime of first sight, not one renewed by light and hour as a standing building’s is.
Jane Campion · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent and of two kinds, wild beauty and dread. The landing: a piano crated on an empty black-sand beach in surf, and the shot from above of it left there at dusk. The return to the beach, Ada playing while Flora dances and turns cartwheels at the tide line. The bush as a drowned world, feet sucking in mud, the trunks lit blue-green. The pageant’s shadow axe; the axe in the rain, Flora’s white pinafore, the finger on the block. The summit is the sea: Ada pulled down by the rope around her foot, hanging in green water above the sinking piano, then kicking free to the light. What holds it at 8.5: the middle hour’s lessons are rhythmic rather than rising, and Nyman’s theme lifts less on each return.
Andrei Tarkovsky · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent and of two kinds, luminous and dreadful, set against each other. A boy in sunlight, a goat, a butterfly, his mother’s face, and the cut to a windmill and war. The star at the bottom of a well, the mother leaning over it, a shot, the water flung up. Apples spilling from a lorry in rain onto sand where horses eat them. The night swamp under flares, and a boy alone in it. The camera low among white birch trunks. The boat in the dark past the hanged men. The run along the shallows toward a dead black tree. Held below the top because the dugout stretches are level and the score sometimes underlines what the image has already raised.
John Vanbrugh with Nicholas Hawksmoor · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Elevation is grandeur, theatrical and martial, and it comes often. From the Woodstock gate the bridge, the lake and the palace rise into one prospect. On the northern axis the approach crosses the bridge and climbs to the Great Court, where the masses step forward and up toward the portico. The skyline of towers, finials and trophies breaks against the sky like a fortified town. The Great Hall rises through the house to Thornhill’s ceiling, the Saloon opens on the axis to the south, and the Long Library runs the length of the west front in one light. Height and frequency are both real. Held below the high band because the register is one, grandeur that addresses the viewer, seldom transport; the effect is often weight more than height; and the strongest prospect owes its water to Brown.
Franz Marc · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The elevation is the dreadful sublime, reached across the field, not once. The red shafts come down like judgement from the upper left; the deer’s flung-back neck is the height of the picture’s terror, an animal looking up at what is falling on it; the trees break; the whole plane shatters into light. The scale carries it, the diagonals passing over and past the viewer, and the colour is at full pitch, red against blue, a world going up in fire and glass at once. The height recurs, in the boars’ dark zone, in the crossing trunks, in the right side’s surviving drawing. Held short of the top because the faceting that makes the catastrophe also distances it, terror partly turned into pattern, and because in the restored third the colour that carried the elevation is gone.
Can · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Elevation comes often and in two kinds. The warm kind is trance: Halleluhwah rises not by peaks but by duration, until the groove feels like weather, and Oh Yeah lifts on its pulse with a reversed voice hanging over it. Paperhouse breaks from its tense opening into a driving height. The cold kind is dread: Aumgn is the record’s terror, an intoned syllable in a dark room, the drums arriving late and the climax as much assault as transport. Peking O has frenzy more than height. Bring Me Coffee or Tea is a quiet height after the storm, and Mushroom a close, haunted one. Some of the second disc’s long stretches are level rather than raised. It stands below Low at 8.8, which reaches a higher single summit.
Mudéjar builders, under Peter of Castile, and later hands · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent, and of one kind: delight more than grandeur. The Salón de Embajadores is the height, a cube of carved stucco and tile under a gilded cupola of interlaced stars, lit through triple arcades from the rooms on either side. The Doncellas rises again, the lace of its arches over the pool between the sunken beds; the small Muñecas, dim and close, is the counter-register. The gardens add water, orange trees and the long walk of the grotto gallery; the vaulted cistern under the Crucero adds a dark elevation. Held from the top because the register is intimate and ornamental: no room dwarfs the body or opens to the sky as the Pantheon (9.3) does, and the rise is of enchantment, not of awe.
Radiohead · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Elevation comes often, warm more than cold. Fake Plastic Trees is one summit: an acoustic song that gathers strings, organ and the full band, breaks the voice open at its height and falls back to its first hush. Street Spirit is the other: a circling minor-key arpeggio, a voice rising to a long cry, and a close that asks the listener to “immerse your soul” before the fade. Planet Telex rises in its swirl, the title track swings to a sweeping chorus, High and Dry floats, (Nice Dream) turns from lullaby to storm, and My Iron Lung detonates out of its quiet verse. Bones, Sulk and Black Star have energy without height, and the summits stay within the scale of the rock song.
Knights Hospitaller builders · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The register is grandeur and dread, and it recurs. From the approach the castle stands on its spur against the sky, the talus and towers rising as if from the rock. The ramp makes an elevation of fear: a long, dim passage climbing and turning back on itself under openings from above, so that the body knows it is watched. The south face, seen across the birka, is one cliff of dressed stone from water to parapet. Then the reversal: inside, the loggia and the vaulted hall give a calm the walls have bought, and the towers look out over the Homs Gap. Held below the top because the elevation is of mass and situation; no interior space transports as a great church does.
Luigi Vanvitelli · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The work rises often and at its main stations. The grand staircase, a single wide flight that turns and divides under a double vault, is lit and framed so that each landing opens a new view; the octagonal vestibules above and below, looking out in eight directions, are the moment of the building. In the park the elevation is cumulative: the long water seen from the palace, the eye drawn up to a white thread of falling water on the green hillside, and at its foot Diana and Actaeon in the spray. The court theatre is a small, intense room. Against this, the town front is long, regular and flat, its central accent too weak for its length, and the many apartments are fine without elevation.
Peter Zumthor · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Elevation is the chapel’s purpose, and it comes on each entry. The passage makes it: out of an open, level field, through a heavy steel door, along a dark angled way, into a narrow room whose black walls rise and lean together toward a small opening of sky, so that the eye is drawn up a funnel of charcoal to the light. Within it the glass points glitter like stars; on a wet day rain falls through the opening onto the lead and stands there; on a clear day a patch of sun moves over the ribbed wall. The register is grave, close to dread and to consolation at once, and the lone tower in the field has its own gravity. Held below the top because the room is one, small, and its height of one kind, not repeated across a sequence of spaces.
Cormac McCarthy · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
Elevation comes often, and it is lyric more than dreadful. The opening sets it: the boy riding out at evening on the old Comanche road, where the book lets him imagine the nation that once rode it. Then the breaking of the wild horses, days of work rendered as a rite; the night storm in which Blevins strips himself for fear of the lightning; John Grady and Alejandra in the lake at night; the knife in the prison at Saltillo; the pistol barrel heated in the fire and laid in the wound; the boy’s dreams of horses; the Abuela’s burial at the close. Terror rises in the prison, and on the road where Blevins is taken into the trees. Held below the higher reaches because the lyric often tips into the sentimental, the love scenes fall flat beside the horse scenes, and the long comic stretch of the ride south stays on the plain.
Jean-Luc Godard · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The film rises often, and frequency counts. The night drive in Paris with coloured lights sweeping across the windscreen; a car burning on the road; a car driven into the sea; Anna Karina singing among the trees by the shore; Raoul Coutard’s light on the Mediterranean, and the long tracking shots along the water. The ending is a true summit, dreadful and comic at once: the painted face, the dynamite wound round the head and lit, the second thought that comes too late, the explosion, and the turn to the sea with Rimbaud whispered over it. Held short of the top because the elevation goes lyric and ironic in turns, and the irony cuts the height down before it can build, as the film intends.
The Stooges · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent and of one kind: frenzy, the Dionysian rather than the grand. Dirt reaches it by withholding, a slow vamp in which Ron Asheton’s wah guitar rises over a bass that barely moves, and the voice stays inside the groove until it breaks. 1970 reaches it by addition: the saxophone enters a song already at full tilt and lifts it past what a rock band could do alone. The title track is a rite in progress, a voice calling the band on. L.A. Blues is terror more than transport, a noise with no centre. Height comes on four or five of seven tracks. What holds the figure is the single register: little grandeur, no beauty in the narrow sense, and the first two songs have drive more than height.
Maya, under Jasaw Chan K'awiil I · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Height is high. Elevation comes in the figure from the plaza, a near-vertical mass of pale stone rising nine stages to a dark doorway and a crest above it; in the pairing with Temple II, the plaza held between two upright faces; in the view across the canopy, where the crests of Tikal’s temples stand out of the forest; and, for those who once climbed, in the ascent itself, steep enough to be a test. The register is grandeur with dread in it: the stair is a threat as well as a way. What holds it is frequency. The building is one figure seen from outside, the temple at the top a few dim narrow rooms with no interior that rises, and the elevation, renewed by light and season on the face, stays in one register.
Burial · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
Elevation comes often and is of one temperature, the transport of longing. Archangel is the summit: a cut and pitched voice over a skipping beat and a wash of chords, tenderness and loss at once. Untrue, at the centre, rises by layering until the voices seem to come from several distances at once. Etched Headplate holds a long, grave rise; Shell of Light lifts on a voice that circles without arriving; Raver closes with the nearest the record comes to the dance floor’s exhilaration, held at a distance. The short pieces give a lower, colder height of rain and crackle. Height comes on six or seven of thirteen tracks, all of it warm grief, never terror or grandeur.
Richard Serra · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Elevation is physical, cold and recurring. It comes on entering the hall, where eight dark walls stand in one long space; inside the spirals, where a corridor a shoulder wide winds under a wall leaning inward above the head, and the floor seems to tilt though it does not; at the centre of each spiral, where the passage opens into a still oval chamber and the pressure lifts; in the double ellipse, where the space between the plates widens and narrows as one walks; and along Snake, whose two curving corridors seem to move. It is the sublime of weight and of being enclosed, closer to dread than to beauty, and it rises again at every work. Held below the top because the effect is of one kind, repeats with diminishing surprise by the sixth enclosure, and is blunted in a lit gallery among crowds.
Denis Johnson · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Height and frequency both count, and for so short a book the heights come often and in more than one register. The dreadful: the valley burned, the cabin gone, the ash Grainier walks through, a desolation given at its full size. The cold grandeur of the old forests and of the men who felled them, giant trees brought down in a world that will not see them again. The uncanny: wolves howling at night, Grainier answering them, and the wolf-girl at the cabin whom he takes for his daughter. And the last page, where the book rises out of one life into a single witness and closes on the passing of an age, a height reached in a sentence. Held below the higher reaches because the chronicle keeps much of the middle level by design, and some of the heights are moments rather than passages sustained.
Mughal, under Shah Jahan · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Elevation is the building’s principal experience, and it recurs. The climb of the east stairs toward the gate; the passage through the gate’s shade; the opening of the court, its pavement bright in sun, the three domes and two minarets rising beyond the tank; the court filled for the prayer of Eid, rows reaching to the arcades. The register is grandeur, not terror, and calm, not transport. The prayer hall seen close elevates less than the court seen whole: the domes are a skyline more than an interior, and the hall within is modest beside the open space it faces. Height is real and frequent; the summit of elevation in its tradition, the forest of Córdoba or the dome of the Süleymaniye, is not reached.
Mark Rothko · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Elevation is the canvas’s whole aim, and of the kinds the rubric names: transport, and grandeur by scale. The canvas is taller than a person, and seen close, as the painter meant such canvases to be seen, it fills the eye; the soft edges let the rectangles hover and advance, so that the field seems to breathe. The thin layers make the colour seem lit from within, and the rust against the blue gives warmth and depth at once, a heat the cool does not cancel. Robert Rosenblum’s essay “The Abstract Sublime” (1961) set this painter beside Friedrich and Turner. What holds the axis is frequency: one sustained state, not summits recurring across a varied field, and one that depends on light, distance and time spent more than most paintings do.
Algernon Charles Swinburne · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent, and some of it is very high. “The Triumph of Time” reaches the sea as consolation and annihilation at once: “I will go back to the great sweet mother, / Mother and lover of men, the sea”. “Hymn to Proserpine” reaches a historical grandeur, the old gods going down under the new, in a long line no English poet had sustained at that pitch. “The Garden of Proserpine” reaches a still, cold peace that is one of the summits of English elegy; “Itylus” a piercing lyric height in eight rapid lines a stanza. The dreadful sublime is there in “The Leper”. Held below 9 because the height comes by one means, incantation, used so often that it dulls: “Dolores” and parts of “Laus Veneris” are loud without rising.
Russian carpenters · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
The elevation is of the silhouette, and at its height it is real. Approached by water, the pyramid of domes rises from a flat island under a wide sky, the shingles silver or gold with the light, the cluster turning as one moves round it so that the domes regroup at every step. In snow, at dusk, against the white of the frozen lake, the effect is grandeur with no stone in it. Frequency holds it down. One enters a low, dim room under a painted ceiling, among icons, and the height outside is shut away. The sublime is all exterior, one great image renewed by weather and season rather than a sequence of elevations.
Built for Vimal Shah and Vastupala and Tejapala · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Height is high and frequency very high. The elevation comes at the domes of the open halls: rings of carved courses rising to a pendant, in Luna Vasahi a lotus that seems to hang free in white stone, in Vimal Vasahi figures standing out from the brackets round the circle. It comes again and again in the corridor, bay after bay, each ceiling a different lotus or a different scene, so that the walk round the court is a sequence of small heavens. The passage from the plain gate into the white interior is itself a passage of the kind the axis rewards. Held short of the top because the register is wonder at abundance rather than grandeur: the rooms are low, the light dim and even, and the eye is overwhelmed more often than lifted.
Mark Rothko · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The elevation is the point of the type, and it is real here. It comes from the size of the field, larger than the reach of the arms; from the soft edges, which keep each rectangle from settling as an object, so that it seems to hover and breathe; from the white band, which reads as light coming through the canvas rather than paint laid on it; and from the warm fields glowing against the rose. The register is warm: transport by colour, without terror. What holds the axis is frequency and range. The elevation is one sustained experience, not a rise repeated through a structure, and it is in a single key; the dreadful pole the axis also admits, which the darker canvases reach, is not attempted.
Terrence Malick · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Height and frequency are both high, and the second costs the first. The valley under its mountain walls, clouds moving across the faces and a scythe cutting in the foreground; Fani alone at the plough; the light through the barn; the prison window and its patch of sky; the meeting in Berlin, short, through officials, after which the film’s air goes thin; the condemned men walked across the yard at Brandenburg; the valley after, the harvest and the children in the grass. The elevation is warm and dreadful at once: the earth is made so beautiful that the regime’s claim on it becomes an obscenity. But the wide lens and the rising camera are so continuous that the heights level into one register: when every shot rises, the meeting in Berlin and the yard at Brandenburg are not set off as they would be in a film that kept something back, and in the long third hour the film rises without climbing.
Denis Villeneuve · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Elevation comes often and in both kinds. The worm ride is the first summit: Paul planting his hooks on a moving dune, the worm rising beneath him, the ride held in one long movement under Zimmer’s score. The arena on Giedi Prime is the dreadful summit: a black sun, fireworks bursting like ink in a white sky, Feyd killing drugged Atreides captives before a chanting stadium. Jessica’s Water of Life, close in a dim cave, is the sublime of terror. The war council turns grandeur to dread as the acclamation rises. The storm assault, Fremen on worms across the horizon, is grandeur in scale. Held below the top: the height is mostly of scale and terror, the romance between the summits is played level, and the final duel lifts less than what preceded it.
Talk Talk · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent and mostly warm. Happiness Is Easy rises slowly and opens when the children’s voices come in, a lift that is also an irony. April 5th is a hush close to suspension, organ, soft percussion and a voice at the edge of hearing: beauty by restraint. Living in Another World is the record’s force at full stretch, harmonica and organ driving a chorus that keeps climbing, the voice raw at the top. Time It’s Time is the summit, a long build over a steady groove until a choir and the full band carry it to a release earned over the whole record. Life’s What You Make It has drive more than height, and two songs stay mostly level. Five of eight pieces rise, two very high, by patience rather than spectacle.
Sedefkâr Mehmed Agha · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
The building rises often, and most of all from outside. From the sea or from the Hippodrome the stepped mass of exedrae, semidomes and dome, held between six needle minarets, is one of the great silhouettes of any city, and Hagia Sophia answers it across the square, so that the two make one skyline. The forecourt, quiet and almost as broad as the hall, prepares the entry. Inside, light from the many windows falls on the tiled galleries and on the white marble of mihrab and minbar, and the dome opens above the low ring of lamps. What holds it below the summit of its tradition is the interior’s mass: the four piers fill the view and close the centre, and the painted upper zones are busier than the structure.
Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly · Film
7.9 · Tier III
Elevation is frequent and of one kind, transport by joy. The title number is the summit: a man in love in a downpour, closing the umbrella, swinging on the lamp post, stamping in the gutter, with Rosson’s light on the wet street, until a policeman’s look returns him to the pavement. Around it the film rises again and again. In “Make ’Em Laugh” O’Connor runs up the wall and through the scenery, elevation by comic body. “Good Morning” sends three dancers across a house at dawn. In “You Were Meant for Me” Don makes romance from a wind machine, a ladder and a coloured light, and the making itself lifts. Held at the figure because the register never darkens and the satiric stretches run level.
Frank Gehry · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Elevation comes often, and at its height in the purpose itself. Inside, the fir walls rise round the platform, the ceiling billows overhead like a lifted canopy, light falls from above at daytime concerts, and the organ’s splayed pipes stand behind the orchestra like a sheaf thrown upward; the sound has been praised from the opening as clear, warm and close. Outside, the steel breaks over Grand Avenue like canvas filling, closes round the visitor in the garden and takes the colour of the sky at sunset. The register is buoyant, never terrible. What holds the axis: the exterior’s motion repeats at close range, the foyers are cramped and labyrinthine, and the height is exhilaration more than awe.
Duke Ellington · Music
7.8 · Tier III
Height comes late and comes hard. The diminuendo is the Ellington of 1937, reeds and brass in close-wound figures, sinking. The interval climbs by insistence: Paul Gonsalves keeps to the middle of the horn, riffs and repeats, the rhythm section and the shouts from the band push, the crowd joins, and by the last choruses the sound of the place is part of the music. The crescendo returns to the written piece at full force, Cat Anderson’s high trumpet over the close. That is transport of a physical kind. “Jeep’s Blues” has beauty of another kind. Frequency is the cost: the suite swings and does not rise, and half the record waits for the height.
Herzog and de Meuron · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Elevation is high and frequent, and it comes in stages. It comes first in the ascent: the escalator, white and studded with small reflective discs, curving so that its end is hidden, a slow rise through the warehouse toward a window of light. It comes on the Plaza, where the port opens on every side, ships passing below, the city behind, the glass overhead bellied and cut into mouths. It comes in the Grand Hall at its height: the terraces climb steeply, the audience hangs over the stage on every side, the pale cellular walls read as something grown rather than built, and the room has the vertigo of a crater. And it comes from the river, where the glass crown floats above the brick and takes the colour of water and sky. What holds the axis: the register is exhilaration and wonder, rarely awe; the foyer stairs are tight and repetitive; the hotel and the flats give nothing to the height.
Zaha Hadid · Architecture
7.6 · Tier III
Height is high, and frequency high outside, lower within. Elevation comes in the first view across the plaza, the white surface rising from the ground in one motion to the crest and falling back; in the curl over the entrance, where the roof peels away from the glass and seems to hang without support; in the change of the surface through the day, dazzling at noon, soft at dusk, lit from below at night against the grey blocks of the city; and in the lobby, where floor, wall and ceiling run together and the eye finds no corner. The register is buoyant and cool, never terrible. Within, the museum and galleries are good white rooms, and the height is an image held for a long look: it does not deepen with movement through the building.
George Orwell · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Elevation is mostly dreadful, and it comes late. The heights: the Two Minutes Hate, in which Winston’s hatred swings loose from its object; the arrest in the room above the shop, when a voice behind the picture says “You are the dead” and the paperweight is smashed on the hearthstone; O’Brien’s fingers, four or five; the boot “stamping on a human face”; the cage of rats; the last scene in the Chestnut Tree, with the gin, the tear and the victory bulletin. The warm heights are few and exact: the thrush singing in the Golden Country, the prole woman at her washing line singing a song composed by a machine. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve is frequency. The plain register keeps elevation rare in the first half, the long expository passages of Part One and the Goldstein tract run level for many pages, and the height of the book is gathered into its last third.
Samuel Beckett · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Elevation comes, but by deflation more than by height. The opening of the long paragraph, two men on the road at evening watched from a rock, is among the most beautiful passages in Beckett’s prose, a pastoral of country and dusk that the narrator undoes as he makes it. The sucking stones are the comic sublime, a combinatorial frenzy pursued to the last permutation. The crawl through the forest and the last sight of the plain from the ditch carry dread and a strange release. In the second part the heights are Moran’s study of the dance of his bees, which he refuses to reduce to meaning, and his return through the seasons to a house abandoned. What holds the axis here is frequency: long stretches are flat by design, comedy is the usual register, and the book rises less often than the novels it stands among.
Luigi Pirandello · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The play reaches height several times, and the heights are real. Madama Pace appears when the Father hangs hats and coats on the pegs to make her shop: the play’s most uncanny moment, and one of the great coups of the modern stage. The Mother’s scream as the Father’s hand touches the Stepdaughter breaks the rehearsal of the scene into the event itself. The last sequence, the Little Girl drowned in the garden fountain, the shot behind the trees, the Actors unable to say whether the Boy is dead, the lights failing, is the third. Between them much of the play is argument and the comedy of rehearsal, whose register is wit and exasperation. It rises by shock more than by sustained ascent, and the heights are intermittent.
Chinua Achebe · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The register is plain and the book rarely lifts it, which is right for it, so height comes from situation, not from style. The peaks are real. Ikemefuna’s cry, “My father, they have killed me!” (ch. 7), and Okonkwo cutting him down because “he was afraid of being thought weak” (ch. 7): one of the great terrible moments of the century’s fiction. Chielo’s night journey with Ezinma on her back, Ekwefi following in the dark and Okonkwo waiting with his machete at the cave mouth; the egwugwu coming out; the body behind the compound. Between them long stretches are level by design. This is the lowest axis of the twelve, held there by frequency, not by height; Part Two is the flattest.
Stendhal · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The style refuses elevation on principle: Stendhal cuts the swell before it comes, and the book’s heights are dry. They are real. The hand taken in the dark at Vergy, seized by Julien as a duty to himself and felt by the reader as terror; Julien alone on the rock above Verrières, watching a sparrow-hawk and envying its force and its isolation; the ladder to Mathilde’s window; the shot in the church, given in a few lines; the cell, where the prose slows for the only time; Mathilde in the carriage with Julien’s head on her knees. The execution is withheld, and its absence is a height. What holds the axis among the lowest is frequency: long stretches of the Paris book are comedy and manoeuvre, with no wish to rise.
Jean-Luc Godard · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Height is kept rare by design, and the axis counts frequency. The summit is the death: Michel shot in the back, running and staggering the length of the street, the fall at the crossing, the faces, the closed eyes. It comes close to the tragic by refusing to ask for it. A second height follows at once in Patricia’s face looking straight out of the screen, a cold beauty the film has held back until then. Around them are lifts the axis counts, being indifferent to register: the address to the camera on the road, Seberg calling out the paper on the Champs-Élysées, the jump-cut drive with Solal’s score under it. The hotel room is flat by intention, and the summits are few.
Albert Camus · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Two great heights and several lesser ones, set in a prose that is flat by design. The first is the beach: the sun a blade on the forehead, the knife flashing light into his eyes, the trigger giving, and then four more shots, knocks on “la porte du malheur”, the door of misfortune; dread and grandeur at once, the whole physical world pressing on one hand. The second is the close: the chaplain driven out, a night of stars and the smells of earth and salt, and a man opening himself to “la tendre indifférence du monde”, the tender indifference of the world. The lesser heights are the funeral procession in the heat, and old Pérez cutting across the fields and falling behind. Held at this figure because most of the first part is level, and the elevation, when it comes, comes rarely: height counts, and so does frequency.
David Foster Wallace · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Elevation comes often, through comedy and dread, in a book whose usual register is not elevated. The Eschaton degenerating into violence is the comic sublime, a world war on four tennis courts. Gately’s fight with the Canadians outside Ennet House is a set piece of physical terror. Kate Gompert’s account of clinical depression is dreadful in the old sense. The wraith at Gately’s bedside, speaking words into his head, is the strangest height. Hal in the opening section, saying to himself “I am in here” while the deans hear only noise, is the book’s coldest moment, and the last pages, Gately’s memory of a binge and its punishment, end on a beach where “the tide was way out”. Held below the higher reaches because long stretches are deliberately flat, procedural or comic, and the heights are spaced across a thousand pages.
Jean Renoir · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
The elevation is of dread more than of beauty, and it comes in a few great passages: the hunt, beaters tapping through the Sologne and the animals driven to the guns, a rabbit curling as it dies; the Danse macabre at the fête, figures in skeleton costume moving among the guests in the dark with lights; Octave alone on the steps at night, conducting the orchestra he never led; Robert beside his orchestrion as it plays, a man at the height of his own happiness among machines; the last shadows along the façade. What holds the axis lowest is frequency. Between these passages the register is comedy and the film does not reach for lift, which is right for it, and leaves the heights few.
George Gordon, Lord Byron · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The poem rises often and refuses to stay up, and both count. The height is real: the shipwreck’s terror and the sea’s indifference; the Haidée idyll, among the most sustained lyric love passages in English narrative verse; “The isles of Greece, the isles of Greece! / Where burning Sappho loved and sung” and “The mountains look on Marathon / And Marathon looks on the sea” (III); the Ave Maria stanzas; Haidée’s death; the cold horror of Ismail; the dark abbey of the last canto; “Between two worlds life hovers like a star” (XV.99). But the method is bathos, applied on purpose to its own heights, and the poem says why: “And if I laugh at any mortal thing, / ’Tis that I may not weep” (IV.4). Frequent high moments, deliberately unsustained, set it above most comic works and below the epics it parodies.
Stanley Kubrick · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Elevation is not the usual mode of farce, and when it comes here it is dreadful or exultant. The refuelling under a love song, two aircraft joined in slow motion over cloud, is a cold beauty that is also a joke. The B-52 skimming the Arctic and then Soviet ground to “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” builds a grim forward drive. Kong astride the falling bomb, whooping and waving his hat, is the summit of the film and one of the great images of its decade: the cowboy’s ride as the end of everything. The epilogue, explosions blossoming to “We’ll Meet Again”, is a second summit, terror and tenderness in one register, and Adam’s War Room gives a standing grandeur to every scene set in it. What holds the axis is frequency: long stretches are talk, brilliant and level, and the War Room’s comedy works against height by design.
Franz Kafka · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The register is cool and almost juridical, and the story refuses elevation for most of its length: the comedy of the ladies who flinch from carrying him, the impresario’s bows and chatter, the sign no one updates. The heights are two, and they come late. The dying man’s whispered confession into the overseer’s ear, his last look still holding the conviction that he is fasting on, is a cold summit. And the panther, a noble body that seems to carry freedom in its jaws, put into the cage where the straw was, is the one burst of plenitude in a story of emptiness, and the crowd presses around it; everything before has earned it. Held at this figure because elevation arrives twice, at the end, and its frequency is low by the work’s own design.
Friedrich Nietzsche · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The register is mostly a cold height, the elevation of the sharp formulation. §146: “Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. Und wenn du lange in einen Abgrund blickst, blickt der Abgrund auch in dich hinein.” The warmer summits come late and are real: §295, the long period on the genius of the heart that turns out to name Dionysus; §296, the farewell to the written and painted thoughts that fade as soon as they are written; and the poem’s “Oh Lebens Mittag!” Frequency is high in the short form and height is rarely sustained across pages: the part on scholars and the part on peoples and fatherlands are flat country. The book rises more often than most philosophy and less often than the greatest poems.
Masaccio · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The elevation is grandeur of one register, austere and grave, and it recurs across the frieze. The ring, a wall of heavy bodies in a half circle under one light, has the weight of sculpture. The head of Peter, furrowed and indignant, and the head of John beside Christ, pale and still, are each a point of height. The collector’s bare legs and turned back, the one body in motion, make the stillness of the others felt, and behind the heads the landscape opens into a cold distance of bare hills and pale sky. There is no transport, terror or radiance: the picture is sober by intention. The figure is high in its kind and narrow in its range, and Peter hunched over the fish is where it falls.
Huang Gongwang · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The elevation is the opposite of the Northern Song sublime of Fan Kuan’s cliff over tiny travellers. There is no terror and no towering; the highest massing, in the central range, is grand only by accumulation. What rises is quieter and frequent. Each opening of water, where the paper is left empty and the far shore is a few strokes of pale ink, is a release of breath. The central range, built of layered strokes, gathers to a weight the low banks do not prepare. The last distant hills fade into the paper as if the world went on past the scroll. The height is moderate and the frequency high, six or seven risings along the length. The axis rewards transport, and the scroll refuses transport by design.
Albert Camus · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The elevation is cold and recurrent, held inside irony. A laugh behind him on a bridge at dusk, with no one there, is a small terror the book makes metaphysical. The summit is a fall heard and not seen in the dark, and a man who does not move: told in a few sentences, then circled for the rest of the book. Amsterdam is given a dead grandeur, its concentric canals likened to the circles of hell, the fog, the Zuider Zee a flat grey nothing where sky and water cannot be told apart. The doves that never come down over the city, and the snow of the last chapter greeted as their descent, are a real lift, mocked and meant at once. Held here because the irony keeps lowering what it raises: almost every height is undercut within a page by the speaker’s self-regard, by design, and the salon voice rarely allows transport for long.
Ernest Hemingway · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Elevation here is cold and frequent, and almost never announced. The close of “Indian Camp” rises on its irony: the boy in the stern of the boat in the early morning, who “felt quite sure that he would never die”, has just watched a birth by jack-knife and a man who cut his own throat. The vignettes reach terror in a few lines: the cabinet ministers in the rain, the hanging of Sam Cardinella, Maera dying in the ring. “Big Two-Hearted River” reaches a still, lit height in the burned country and the river, a transport made of exact attention. Held in the low eights because the style refuses the sustained height and the book is built on flatness: much of the middle, “The Three-Day Blow”, “Mr. and Mrs. Elliot”, “Out of Season”, does not rise and is not meant to, so the frequency is uneven across fifteen pieces.
August Strindberg · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The elevation is dreadful and mostly late. The summit: Jean beheading the greenfinch on the chopping block, and Julie over its blood wishing his whole sex drowned in it; then the bell, Jean’s collapse into servility, and the close, where Julie asks to be commanded as if she were asleep and goes out into the morning with the razor. Earlier there is the strange lyric height of the two dreams, and Jean’s childhood memory, half true and half lie, of wanting to die for love among elder blossoms in an oat bin. Between these the register is kept deliberately low: flirtation, quarrel, accounting. A play of this pressure rises less often than it threatens to, and frequency holds the axis here.
Joseph Heller · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The elevation is dreadful, and it comes late. Chapter 39, “The Eternal City”, is the height of the book’s terror: Yossarian walks alone through a night Rome of beaten dogs, a beaten boy and a soldier in convulsions, and the police arrest him for being in Rome without a pass while Aarfy’s murdered maid lies on the pavement below the window. Chapter 41, Snowden’s wound opened under the flak suit, is the other summit, and it lands because the book has withheld it for four hundred pages. There are smaller rises earlier: the chaplain’s dread and his sense of having seen a naked man in a tree at Snowden’s funeral, the death of Kid Sampson under McWatt’s propeller and McWatt’s turn into the mountain. What holds the axis there is frequency: for most of its length the register is farce, and farce does not elevate.
Ernest Hemingway · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The elevation is cold, held under the flat sentence, and it comes in the second book in a run. The river at Burguete and the walk through the beech woods. The first running of the bulls, and the death of Vicente Girones on the horn, reported almost in passing and then answered by a waiter’s bitterness at a man dying for fun. The fiesta at its height, with the riau-riau dancers circling Brett. Romero’s last corrida, a slow and exact account of a man working close to the horn and killing well, which is the summit of the book. The swim at San Sebastián in the coda has a clean, cold height of its own. What holds the axis is the first book and the low register, by design: much of the novel is talk in cafés, and the book distrusts the rise it achieves.
Thomas Jefferson · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Elevation here is beauty, serene and ordered, at a domestic scale. It comes in the Lawn seen from the Rotunda’s steps, the two rows of columns stepping down the terraces; in the colonnades, whose rhythm runs the length of the green and is broken at intervals by the pavilions’ larger fronts; in the Rotunda seen from the Lawn, dome and portico closing the axis; and in the Dome Room, a round room under a dome, where the Pantheon’s effect is felt at half its size. Frequency is high: the walk along either colonnade renews the effect at each pavilion, and the gardens give a second, intimate register. Height is the limit. Nothing here is vast or terrible, and the one opening onto the large, the view south to the mountains, was closed in 1898.
Fritz Lang · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
The elevation is terror, and it is frequent. Frau Beckmann calls “Elsie!” into the stairwell, and the call carries over the empty stairs, the attic, Elsie’s place at the table, her ball rolling out of the undergrowth, her balloon caught in the telegraph wires. Beckert at a shop window, framed by a display of knives, sees a girl reflected, and the whistle begins. The chalked letter on his back, seen by him in a mirror. The office building at night, the searchers going floor by floor while Beckert works at a lock in the lumber room. The court: a cellar of faces and Lorre’s speech. Between these the procedural and comic passages hold the register level by design, and that keeps the heights from coming oftener.
T. S. Eliot · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Height in “Prufrock” is real and comes late: the mermaids “singing, each to each” and the last lines, ending “Till human voices wake us, and we drown”, are among the most lifted endings in modern English verse, and they are lifted by the very voice that has spent the poem disqualifying itself. Dread rises in “Rhapsody on a Windy Night”, where “Midnight shakes the memory / As a madman shakes a dead geranium”, and the poem closes on “The last twist of the knife”. “La Figlia Che Piange” reaches a cold, posed beauty: “Weave, weave the sunlight in your hair”. “Preludes” rises once, in the gentle and suffering thing, before the worlds revolve like women “Gathering fuel in vacant lots”. Frequency is what holds the axis: the elevation lives in four or five places, and the satires, by design, never leave the level ground.
Le Corbusier · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Height is high outside and on the roof; frequency falls within. Elevation comes under the pilotis, where the slab is carried overhead on legs of raw concrete and the ground runs free beneath; in the long faces, a grid of loggias with colour flashing at their sides, changing with the sun; on the roof, a deck open to the sky with the Marseille hills on one side and the sea on the other, the stacks and the stage set against them; and in the double-height living room, where two floors open to the view through the loggia. It falls in the interior streets, long, low and dim, the daily route of every resident, and in the flats’ narrow upper rooms. Elevation at the feet and the crown, with a tunnel between.
Willem de Kooning · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Elevation of the dreadful and grotesque kind, with a comic edge the axis does not discount. Its forms: the first sight, a figure nearly two metres high bearing down on the viewer, her eyes near the level of a standing face; the teeth, the one passage where the paint turns hard and white in a field of soft flesh colours; the near view, where every inch of the surface is a decision reversed, so that the violence is felt as time; and the strange sweetness of the colour, the pinks and pale yellows of cosmetics and sunlight, set against what the figure does. Height is real. Frequency holds it: one blow sustained by a turbulent surface, not a work that rises again and again, and many viewers register only aggression or a joke.
Ivan Turgenev · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The heights are real, and placed late. Bazarov’s dying in his father’s house, with Odintsova come to him with a German doctor, is the book’s height, and his last words to her hold it: “Дуньте на умирающую лампаду, и пусть она погаснет” (blow on the dying lamp and let it go out, ch. 27). The last paragraph rises with it: the old couple at the grave, and the flowers that speak of the calm of indifferent nature and of more than that. Below these come the lyric heights: Nikolai alone in the garden at evening, remembering his dead wife; Bazarov lying by the haystack and telling Arkady that a burdock, “лопух”, will grow out of him; the duel, staged as near comedy and turning to dread. Much of the book is comedy and argument, in a register that does not seek elevation. The height is high; the frequency, moderate, is what holds the axis here.
Juan Bautista de Toledo and Juan de Herrera · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Height is real and frequent outside: the grey block from the road or the slope above, a horizontal mass against the Sierra crowned by dome and spires; the Court of the Kings, its front rising in one plane to the six kings; the basilica under the dome, dark, vast and grey, the gilded altarpiece at the end of the axis; the library, a long barrel-vaulted hall painted above the shelves. The register is grandeur and austerity, near dread in the church and the crypt. What holds it: elevation is concentrated in four or five places in a building of hundreds of rooms, and the corridors and long fronts are monotonous by design.
Jan van Eyck · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Elevation of one kind, a cool wonder at the minute, and it recurs. The first height is the distance: from the dark loggia the eye goes past the two figures at the parapet to the river and its city, and on to mountains in blue air, a deep space opened inside a small panel. The second is the crown, gold and stones held over the Virgin by an angel in flight. The third is the Child’s crystal orb, a world in which light is caught. The fourth is the surface of things, brocade, fur, tile and stone, given at a resolution that turns attention into awe. What holds it lower: there is no grandeur of scale and no terror, and the principals are still and grave rather than transported. It rises often, at a small pitch.
Bob Dylan · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Elevation is real and comes often, in a plain register: never grandeur, rarely transport, mostly the height of feeling held exactly, judged on voice and melody together. Tangled Up in Blue rises verse on verse until the refrain lands like a return. Idiot Wind is the dreadful height, organ and voice pressing a fury that becomes, at the end, almost pity. Shelter from the Storm reaches a hushed, hymn-like height through its many verses; If You See Her, Say Hello is grief held at a distance, and the distance is the height; Simple Twist of Fate has a quiet one. The other four songs stay level or rise only in wit. Five or six of ten songs rise, the highest very high in feeling and low in sonic grandeur, and that kind holds the figure.
Bong Joon-ho · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
The elevation is dreadful, and it rises in the second half. The descent in the rain: three people running down stair after stair, street after street, the water deepening as the city drops, the music widening over it; it is the film’s height and a true sublime of scale. The bunker revealed, the passage opening into the dark, a man living below the house. The semi-basement flooding, Ki-jung sitting on the spurting toilet to smoke, terror and comedy in one frame. The garden party, a knife in sunlight among guests and cake. The last shot, the camera lowering from the snow to the window. Held below by frequency and register: the first hour is a comic caper, brilliant and level, and the party’s climax trades height for shock.
Diego Rivera · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Elevation is grandeur shading into terror, and it recurs. Standing in the court, one is enclosed: the two great walls face each other, and the space is full of fire, steel and bodies on every side. The blast furnace and the foundry on the north wall are the first height, light and heat in a dark interior, molten metal poured among men. The stamping press on the south wall is the second, a machine at the scale of a god. The reclining giants above lift the factory into a cosmological register, and the infant in the bulb is a quieter height, wonder rather than awe. Held below the top because the crowding of the main panels disperses the eye, much of the surface is exposition, the process shown step by step, and the grisaille and corner panels do not rise.
José Saramago · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The dreadful sublime, frequent and high, with a second register of grace. The first blind man at the green light, seeing only white. The soldiers’ volleys into the forecourt. The women’s night in the ward of the gun, told with a restraint that makes it nearly unbearable, and the walk back. The scissors. The fire in the asylum, and the blind feeling their way out into a city where no one guards them. The basement storeroom of a supermarket, and later that basement found full of the dead. The church, where every image has its eyes bandaged. Against the terror, three women washing in the rain on a balcony, which rises to a kind of joy, and the dog that licks the tears from the doctor’s wife’s face. Held off the summit because the narrator’s irony and the long, level sentence keep the heights at a slight distance, by design, and the return of sight is told quickly.
Robert Bresson · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Elevation is cold and comes from precision. At the Gare de Lyon a wallet passes from hand to hand down a train corridor and through a crowd on the platform, cut to rhythm and almost without words, and theft becomes a ballet and a liturgy at once: that is the height. The first theft at Longchamp, a clasp opened while the face stares ahead and the sound of the crowd swells, has the terror of a first transgression. The last scene, two faces at the bars with Lully on the soundtrack, is the one place the film warms, and it lifts. Between these much is level by design: rooms, stairs, flat voices, a policeman’s courtesies. The refusal is right, but the axis counts how often, and frequency holds it here.
Krzysztof Kieślowski · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
The register is low and close, so frequency is counted against restraint. In I the boy asks about death beside a dead dog in the snow; later his father overturns an altar, and candle wax runs down the face of the Black Madonna like tears. V is the cycle’s terror: a murder long, clumsy and physical, with rope and stone, and a hanging staged as procedure, with officials, forms and a trap. In II a bee climbing out of a glass of syrup carries the film’s turn. IX ends with a bicycle ridden off an unfinished viaduct. Against these, III, IV and X stay at the level of chamber drama, and the beauty is often austere rather than elevating. Height reaches the top only in I and V.
Stanisław Lem · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The height is of two kinds, and it comes often. The cold sublime: the ocean rising into symmetriads, cities a mile high that build and dissolve in hours by laws no one has read; the double sunrise over the water; the old mimoid at the end, a dead imitation of forms, where the ocean’s wave flows around Kelvin’s hand without touching it. The dreadful: Gibarian’s body and his monstrous visitor; the moment Kelvin first understands what Harey is and shuts her in the rocket to fire her into orbit; the moment she tears through a steel door because she cannot bear to be apart from him; the oxygen and her revival. The close, Kelvin waiting on in faith in “czas okrutnych cudów”
“the time of cruel miracles”, is one of the great endings of its century. Held below the top because the library chapters, though they carry their own wonder, are long stretches at a plateau.
Thomas Pynchon · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The heights are dreadful, and frequent in the historical chapters. The ceiling is Mondaugen’s chapter, the siege party’s decadence over the drumming of the rising; Fausto’s Malta under the bombs, and the disassembly of the Bad Priest in the ruins, which Fausto’s confession records; Godolphin’s account of Vheissu, a country of iridescent surfaces, and of the void he found beneath the ice at the Pole; the waterspout off Malta in the Epilogue that takes Sidney Stencil’s xebec. The comic heights count too: the alligators in the sewers, Father Fairing’s parish of rats. Held below the higher reaches because the New York chapters run long at a deliberately low pitch, and the heights are spaced.
Ursula K. Le Guin · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The elevation is cold, and it comes repeatedly. The Foretelling at Otherhord, with Faxe the Weaver and the Celibate and the Pervert drawn into the circle, rises into dread and gives the one true answer. The escape from Pulefen Farm, Estraven carrying the drugged Ai out in the dark, is grave. The crossing of the Gobrin is the book’s height and is sustained: the noise of the stove in the tent, the white weather in which no surface can be seen, the volcanoes Drumner and Dremegole smoking over the ice, Estraven’s mindspeech heard in Ai’s head in his dead brother’s voice. Estraven’s death at the border is terrible and spare. Held here because the first half rises seldom: the parade, the court and Mishnory are interesting rather than elevated.
Graham Greene · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The register is not the high one: heat, vultures, sweat, bad teeth, brandy. Elevation comes as pity and as dread, and it recurs. The night in the crowded cell, with a couple making love in the dark and a pious woman’s outrage, where the priest feels for these people the love he could not feel for the respectable, is the book’s summit and one of the great scenes of its decade. The Indian woman at the field of crosses, laying a lump of sugar by her dead child, carries a terrible grandeur in silence. The last night, the priest’s dream of a meal at the altar and his waking certainty that only one thing counted, “to be a saint”, and that he had missed it, rises very high. The execution seen from Tench’s window, between two pulls at a jefe’s tooth, is elevation by withholding. What holds the axis there: the flight across swamp and mountain is often flat by design, and the heights are spaced.
Ernest Hemingway · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Elevation is cold and frequent. “The Undefeated” carries it longest: an aging matador, out of hospital, takes a nocturnal fight for little money, is gored and goes on, and on the operating table is told his coleta will not be cut. “The Killers” reaches dread without a raised voice: two men in derby hats in a lunch-room, the cook and Nick tied up in the kitchen, and the big man upstairs who will not run. “In Another Country” rises at the major’s grief, the man who will not be resigned looking out of the window. “Now I Lay Me” makes a sleepless night its own height, and “Hills” holds terror under small talk. What holds the axis is that a third of the book does not rise: “Che Ti Dice La Patria?”, “A Pursuit Race”, “Banal Story” and “To-day Is Friday”.
Giorgione · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
The elevation is real and of one register. The lightning against slate cloud, painted as a crack of light and not as a symbol, and the green light it throws on the town, its walls and its leaves; the white of the woman’s body and cloth against the dark bank; the long recession of the stream under the bridge. It is the stillness before the storm, an uneasy, held beauty rather than terror or grandeur, and it recurs across the field in the light. But it is one instant at one temperature, and the figures are quiet, not exalted. The Starry Night, at 9.2 on this axis, is the opposite pole of the same theme, a sky all motion; this is nature as threat held at a distance. Above most cabinet pictures for the quality of its weather, below works that rise again and again.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Elevation here is lightness and clarity, cool and exact. It comes in the white frame seen across the meadow, floating over the grass with no visible base; in the climb, from the ground to the terrace, turning, and up again to the porch under the shade of the roof; inside, in the floor running out to the glass in every direction with nothing between the eye and the trees; at night, when the box becomes a lantern in the dark field; and in the photographs of the floods, the house standing like an ark on brown water. Frequency is high: the seasons renew it, green, autumn colour, snow, each remaking the walls of the room. Height is held lower: a house of this size has no vastness and no dread, and its one register is serenity at a domestic scale.
Käthe Kollwitz · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
The elevation is grave and cold, and on the site it is sustained rather than struck: the low kneeling bodies, the flat field of plates, the trees, the long sightline from the parents to the graves. Its kind is dread and humility, not transport. There is one register and no second height, as there cannot be in two figures, but it holds from every approach and every distance. The mother seen near, her face sunk into the cloak, is the summit; the father’s face, set and open-eyed, is its counterweight. The sorrow any war cemetery has is not credited, only what the figures add to it: the sense of being watched by the living from the edge of the dead. Above The Swing and Broadway Boogie Woogie, below Water Lilies and The Starry Night.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Elevation is cold and grave, and it recurs. It comes in the approach across the plaza, where the dark tower stands back and the noise of the avenue seems to fall away; in the bronze at evening, when glass and metal go nearly one colour; at night, when the lit ceilings at the perimeter make the tower a single glowing volume against the darker lines of its frame; and at the corner, where the sections step and turn and the mass reads as a solid cut clean. Frequency is good: every face, at every hour. Height is held: there is no terror and no vastness of interior, the register is one, composure, and the lobby is calm rather than transporting. The Johnson rooms add a warmer register, credited lightly.
Luciano Laurana and Francesco di Giorgio Martini · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Elevation here is the beauty of measure and of setting, and it comes often. It comes in the courtyard, where light arcades and the long Roman inscriptions give an exceptional calm; in the Torricini seen from the road below, towers and loggias standing over the valley like a gate to the town; on the loggias themselves, looking out over the hills; in the studiolo, where the panelling opens cupboards that are not there; and in the enfilade of state rooms with their carved frames. What holds it is height: the grandeur is civil, never vast, and much of the interior, stripped of hangings and furniture, now reads as fine bare rooms.
Stanley Kubrick · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
The elevation is dread more than beauty, and it is concentrated. Somerton is the summit: the liturgy played backwards, the circle of kneeling women, the red cloak and censer, the masks turning together toward the stranger. The unmasking, with the masked woman’s voice from the gallery, is terror and grace in one image. Kidman’s two monologues rise by voice alone. The single piano notes of the Ligeti make dread a sound, and the morgue is still and cold. Against that is frequency: much of the film is a man in conversation in lit rooms, and the second day descends by design into anticlimax. The flatness is counted.
Diego Velázquez · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
The elevation is grandeur, and a cold kind: a sovereign at life size, so close that his gaze lands on the viewer. The second height is the colour itself, the crimson of the silk against the duller red of the hanging, the light caught on the mozzetta in broad strokes that turn to sheen at a step back. The white lace, a few dragged and flicked strokes, is a third. There is terror at the edge of it, which is why a later painter could make the figure scream; the canvas itself does not scream. Frequency is held by the form: one figure, one moment, one register of awe held steadily. Below the transport of The Starry Night, above the delight of Fragonard’s Swing.
Tawaraya Sōtatsu · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
The elevation is of two kinds, and both are real. The first is grandeur: life-size divine figures, the gold catching light in a dim temple room, a storm gathering across more than three metres. The second is the comic sublime: the Thunder God caught at the top of his motion, drumsticks raised and scarf streaming, like a dancer at the height of a leap. The height recurs in each figure, in the dark spill of the clouds, and above all in the empty centre, which is charged rather than vacant. Terror is held at a distance. This is exhilaration more than dread, and it does not reach the awe of the greatest religious images: high and repeated, within a narrow range of feeling.
Rembrandt van Rijn · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Elevation is real and of one kind, a grave grandeur: the frontal figure filling the canvas, the white cap and the lit face against the dark robe and the pale wall, the stillness of a man who looks back. It recurs in the face, which rises on every return, and in the confrontation of the living face with the two drawn lines. It does not range. There is no transport by scale, no terror and no second register; the wall is quiet, and the lower half of the canvas is dark and open. The frequency is low by design: one height, sustained, and the rest held down to serve it.
R.E.M. · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent and of one kind: beauty, wistful and close, rarely grandeur and never terror. Perfect Circle is the summit, a slow figure on piano and guitar under a voice that seems to be remembering rather than singing, with the harmonies of Mills and Bill Berry rising beneath it. Talk About the Passion lifts at each return of its title, and a string line darkens it. Pilgrimage opens on stacked voices like a chant heard through a wall, and Shaking Through and West of the Fields rise in their choruses. Radio Free Europe has drive, not height; Moral Kiosk and 9-9 are tense, We Walk and Sitting Still level. Height on five or six of twelve, and the top is not among the medium’s highest.
Nirvana · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Elevation comes often and is mostly dreadful. Heart-Shaped Box is the summit: a slow, ugly verse over a descending figure, then a chorus that rises to “a new complaint” with the voice tearing at its top. Scentless Apprentice is terror, Grohl’s drum pattern under a scream repeated until it stops being a voice. Frances Farmer lifts at its chorus into the record’s one open melody, a melody of revenge, and Pennyroyal Tea lifts too. Dumb and All Apologies give the warm height, cello under a plain voice, and All Apologies ends in a round, “all in all” sung under the noise, the last and most generous rise. Very Ape, Milk It and tourette’s have force without height, and Radio Friendly Unit Shifter is level by design: six or seven of twelve rise.
Dionysus Flambouras · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Elevation is rationed and usually adjacent to disgust, which is a decision rather than a deficiency: the satirical parts hold deliberately low and the grotesque means to repel. Against that the book keeps its heights, and they recur. A boy on a Radio Flyer in a country that has not yet asked him for anything; a labyrinth in which a woman is passed “the way a theme is passed”; a man who allows a memory to become unimportant and registers it as an improvement; a stairwell whose voices arrive out of phase; a coffin that will not go down. The two short parts after the removal reach furthest, a man carving a name he cannot finish and a widower whose account ends “It waited. I took my time.” The last height is reached by act, not lyric: twenty-four dollars counted into a furnace in seven places. Held where it is because the heights are spaced through long administrative flats, which the method requires and the axis still counts.
Euripides · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Height comes late, and often once it comes. The opening is still and beautiful: a king awake at night under a star, envying the obscure man, writing and unwriting. Clytemnestra’s indictment rises to terror when she tells how he took her as a prize, killing her first husband and her infant. Iphigenia’s supplication is the summit of pathos: “kakōs zēn kreisson ē thanein kalōs”
“better to live badly than to die well”, an answer to the whole heroic code. Her decision and her departure song, calling for the garlands and the dance around Artemis’s altar, are terror and radiance at once. Below the top because the first half moves on quarrel and intrigue, its pitch near comedy by design.
Robert Wiene · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
The register is dread, and it rises often. Cesare’s waking in the cabinet, the eyes opening in close-up in a face painted white and black, is one of the great revelations of the silent screen. Alan’s murder is shown as shadow on a wall. Cesare at Jane’s bedside, the knife raised and lowered as he looks at her, then carrying her across the painted rooftops, is terror and strange beauty together. The words written across the frame around the walking director make madness visible as letters on the world, and the final courtyard, Cesare gently holding a flower, is cold height. Held below the top by long stretches of fixed tableau and procedure between the summits, and by some elevation of design rather than of feeling.
Mirak Mirza Ghiyas, under Bega Begum and Akbar · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Elevation here is grandeur and calm, almost never terror. It comes in the approach: through the west gate the tomb appears on its axis across the garden, lifted on its plinth, red and white against the sky, the white dome above its ring of kiosks; along the causeways and the channels the building grows and holds its centre; on the plinth’s terrace the garden and its walls fall away below; and at each of the four faces the view is renewed. Height is the limit. The chamber is tall and lit through screens, and the white cenotaph under the inner dome is quietly affecting, but the interior is plain and the rooms round it are passages; and outside the dome on its drum stands a little apart from the body, the great arches a little flat.
Nikos Kazantzakis · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent and of both kinds. The dreadful: a Zealot crucified on a cross the young carpenter has made; Lazarus raised as a rotting body brought back; the crucifixion itself. The warm: Magdalene’s house; the Baptist at the Jordan; the slow sweetness of the vision, years passing in a village; and the end, the waking on the cross to find he has not betrayed, and the last cry, which the narration takes as a beginning rather than an end. Between them, the old disciples arriving at the deathbed as Jerusalem burns is the book’s grandest scene. What holds the axis here is the register. It is ecstatic almost throughout, blood, sun, flesh and the cry, so that elevation becomes the book’s resting pitch and loses height by constancy, and some of it is reached by rhetoric rather than by event.
Giorgio de Chirico · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The elevation is of one kind, and real: dread, a cold sublime of stillness and threat in an ordinary place. It comes at once, in the shadow that falls into the street before its maker can be seen; in the van’s black interior, an opening onto nothing; in a street that slopes away too steeply, so that the ground seems to tip the child forward. It is sustained across the field rather than placed at one point: the long shadows, the darkening sky and the silent arcade hold one pitch everywhere. What holds it is scale and range: no grandeur, no transport by size or splendour, one register. Below The Starry Night (9.2), whose sky rises to several summits; above Broadway Boogie Woogie (8.0), its single register the more intense.
Jorge Luis Borges · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The elevation is cold and frequent, and it comes at the ends. “La esfera de Pascal” closes on a sentence of the widest reach: “Quizá la historia universal es la historia de la diversa entonación de algunas metáforas” (perhaps universal history is the history of the different intonation of a few metaphors). “Nueva refutación del tiempo” spends its length taking time apart and then gives it back, with the river, the tiger and the fire, and the admission that the one who refutes it is Borges. The wall and the burnt books, the flower brought back from Paradise, Keats’s bird that is every nightingale: each rises. Held where it is because the middle of most essays is argument, citation and irony, which do not rise and are not meant to, and the reviews never leave the ground. Height is high; frequency is moderate.
Parmigianino · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The elevation is cool and strange, and it is real. The Virgin rising through the panel, the small head turned down and the long column of the neck catching the light, is a figure of transport in the register of the uncanny, grace so far past nature that it chills. The second height is the void at the right, where the eye drops through a gulf of space to the minute prophet and the soaring column, a cold grandeur. The third is the pallid Child, beautiful and lifeless. The height recurs in the angel’s luminous bare leg, the polished vessel and the silk over the Virgin’s body. What holds it is the narrow register and the slackened unfinished passages.
Kraftwerk · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Elevation is cold, steady and more frequent than steep. Europe Endless opens in a luminous, unhurried uplift, a long major-key glide that is beautiful without a climax. The title track has the grandeur of the machine in motion: the low pulse, the melody laid across it like a horn heard through a window, the vocoded voice. Metal on Metal is the record’s one moment of force, struck metal brought forward until the train is felt as weight. Franz Schubert is serene, the record’s nearest approach to calm beauty. Against this, The Hall of Mirrors is eerie rather than high, and Showroom Dummies is wit. Height comes on four or five of seven tracks, and none reaches the single summit that Warszawa gives Low.
T. S. Eliot · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Elevation here is of a deliberate and paradoxical kind: the poem’s grandeur is the grandeur of diminishment, and its summit is a whimper. Within that mode it rises often for so short a work: the opening chorus, hollow and stuffed, with “rats’ feet over broken glass”; the Dantean distance of “Those who have crossed / With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom”; the “Multifoliate rose” of the fourth part, the one image of glory in the poem; the Lord’s Prayer that cannot be completed; and the ending, the most famous anticlimax in English verse. Held at this figure because the elevation is mostly dread and cold, the design forbids sustained lift or variety, and the one warm height, the rose, is kept at arm’s length on purpose.
Gustave Flaubert · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
It rises often, and in several registers. The grand and sensuous: the Queen of Sheba’s arrival and her offers, a set piece of seduction and jewelled excess. The dreadful: the massacre in Alexandria in which Anthony takes part in his reverie, and the martyrs. The cosmic: the Devil’s flight, which carries him past the stars into a universe without a centre, where elevation is terror. Then the close, which turns from the Sphinx and the Chimera to the first cells and Anthony’s cry that he has seen life born, and ends with the face of Christ in the disc of the sun. Frequency is high. The charge is that the height is often the height of spectacle, and that the processions of the fourth and fifth parts flatten it, by a design of exhaustion, for long stretches.
Christina Rossetti · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The book rises often, and at two pitches. The cold pitch: “Does the road wind up-hill all the way? / Yes, to the very end”, sixteen lines that make a pilgrimage of plain questions; the turn of “Remember” into its sestet; “Echo”, “Come to me in the silence of the night”, the dead lover called back by a voice that already knows he will not come. The hot pitch is the title poem’s two great passages: Lizzie standing firm in the glen while the goblins smear the juice on her face, and Laura’s fever of recovery, the fire in her veins, likened to a watch-tower shaken down in an earthquake. “A Birthday”, “My heart is like a singing bird”, is an elevation of joy, rarer in her. The devotional section rises seldom, and the ballads not at all.
João Gilberto · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Elevation comes often and it comes small. The turn to the major in “Chega de Saudade”, where the voice lifts over Jobim’s strings without raising its level, is a true height. So is the long line of “Desafinado” as it crosses its unexpected harmony, the slow suspended close of “Aos Pés da Cruz”, and the unhurried “É Luxo Só” that ends the record. The kind is beauty held at arm’s length, never grandeur or terror, and the scale of each height is a phrase, since no track lasts long enough to build. Frequency is high across a short record. It stands below Kind of Blue (9.1), whose ballads hold height for minutes at a time, and below Low (8.8).
Luis Barragán · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Elevation here is quiet and frequent, never vast. It comes in the hall, where the dim vestibule opens into warmth and light falls from above onto Goeritz’s gold; in the living room’s great window, the garden filling it and the cross of the mullion set against the green; in the library stair, rising without a rail to a door, as if into the wall; and on the roof, where high walls leave planes of colour against the sky. The frequency is good: the house is built as a series of such moments, and each room has one. The height is held lower because the scale is domestic and the register calm. There is no terror and little grandeur, and the transport is a cloister’s, not a cathedral’s.
Jean-Luc Godard · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Elevation recurs, and in different kinds. Nana in the cinema watching La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc, the cut between Falconetti’s face and Karina’s, tears answering tears, is one of the summits of the cinema of its decade: a film asking another film for grace. The dance in the billiard hall, Nana circling the room alone to the jukebox while the men do not look, is joy made solitary. The talk with Parain lifts thought into drama, quiet and grave. The end is a cold sublime: the exchange between pimps in a yard, the shots, Nana dead on the ground, the car gone, the film cut to its end card without coda. Held below the top because the middle tableaux, the catechism above all, are flat by design, and the design costs height.
Zhang Yimou · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
The register is cold and composed, and elevation comes as beauty and as dread, often at once. The lanterns carried in procession and hung at dusk down the length of a courtyard; Meishan singing opera alone on the snowy roof; the hammering bells heard from a dark house that was not chosen; Yan’er’s lanterns burning in the snow; the black covers drawn over Songlian’s lanterns, one by one; Meishan taken across the roof at dawn to the locked room, and Songlian’s scream seen from a distance in the grey; the last summer, Songlian in her student clothes walking the courtyards. The frequency is high, but the range is narrow: the film rises in one key, ceremonial terror, and a beauty so even that it sometimes flattens the peaks.
Diego Velázquez · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The elevation is real and of one register: calm, sensuous, held. Its places are the long line of the body, from the shoulder through the waist and over the rise of the hip to the legs, drawn as one unbroken curve against the dark satin; the flesh, warm pearl against cold grey, modelled with almost no shadow, so that the body seems to give off its own light; and the reflected face, the one place where the picture goes strange, a dim presence looking out of the black frame. The transport is of beauty seen, and it recurs across the whole surface. What limits it: one temperature only, no terror and no drama, and the Cupid, the least achieved passage, lowers the height wherever the eye reaches him.
Ottoman builders, under Mehmed II and successors · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent and seldom overwhelming. The palace refuses grandeur by design: low eaves, porticoes, courts of trees, no great interior. Its height is that of beauty and prospect. The Baghdad Kiosk, sheathed in tile and marble, its portico open on the Golden Horn; the terraces of the Fourth Court, from which Europe, Asia and the mouth of the Bosphorus are seen at once; the Privy Room of Murad III, a domed chamber walled in tile round a tiered fountain; the panels of the Circumcision Room. The Privy Chamber of the Relics adds a dread of the sacred. Against these, the calm Second Court, the cramped Harem, the working kitchens, and nothing with the transport of the great domed interiors of its own city.
Robert Maillart · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Elevation is genuine and recurs. From the road the white arch appears across the dark fir slope of the gorge; from below it springs from bare rock over a deep drop; on the deck the gorge opens on both sides. It is the sublime of lightness over depth, the abyss answered by a thin curve. Much of the terror belongs to the gorge, which is site and not work, though it is the bridge’s thinness that turns the drop into a crossing felt rather than a view seen, and the white curve against the dark slope is a made image. The register is one: the same moment is offered from every standpoint. There is no interior, no sequence of spaces and no light changing within a volume, as at the Sainte-Chapelle (8.8).
Hoysala builders · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Elevation here is neither the height of a tower nor the void of a dome; the temple has neither. It is the transport of density. The large figures of the outer wall, among them the dancing Shiva, Shiva flaying the elephant demon, Durga, the forms of Vishnu and Ravana shaking Kailasa, rise from a surface cut so finely that jewellery stands free of the stone, and the effect recurs round the whole perimeter. Inside, the turned pillars and the coffered ceilings in low light give a second, darker register. What holds the figure is the lack of one overwhelming moment of space: the sublime is cumulative and close, and the absent superstructure denies the building the rise its plan prepares.
Cistercian builders · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Elevation comes often and quietly, and it is the building’s whole register. In the church the bare stone takes the light of the few windows, so that the pointed vault and the apse read as the light’s container; when the sun strikes the apse or the west oculus the room is transfigured without a single image. The acoustic, a long reverberation in a room of cut stone, makes sung office the building’s completion. The cloister gives a second height, the heavy arcades framing the garth so that the sky becomes its ceiling. What holds it: the register is single and contained, the rooms are small, and the height is a deep calm rather than transport.
Roman, under Hadrian · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Elevation comes often, and in more than one register. Beauty, composed and serene: the Canopus seen down its length to the Serapeum, columns and statues doubled in the water; the Pecile pool under its great wall. Enclosure and withdrawal: the ring of columns round the island, the moat between. Grandeur: the vaults of the Large Baths, still standing in part. And the sublime of ruin, which the work as it stands carries and which Piranesi taught Europe to feel here: brick cores, fallen vaults, pines and cypress in the walls. Frequency is high across a long walk. Height is the limit: no single space reaches the Pantheon’s room, and the grandeur the marble gave is lost.
Vladimir Nabokov · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Elevation comes often, mostly as beauty and the ecstasy of memory. The first Ardis summer, its orchids and butterflies and the children’s discovery of each other, is written at a pitch few English novels sustain. The summit is Lucette’s last night: the film Don Juan’s Last Fling, in which Ada has a small part, Van’s flight from Lucette to his cabin, and her drowning in the night sea, rendered from inside her failing consciousness; the chapter is terrible and beautiful at once. The drive across Switzerland in Part Four, the essay on time running beside the road to Ada, is a second height, and the close, where the old lovers die “into the finished book”, a third. Charged: long middle stretches are comic, satirical or decorative, and the Ardis rapture at times cloys.
Elvis Presley · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
Height is reached, and often. “Blue Moon” is the highest and strangest thing on the record: a standard emptied into an echoing, wordless falsetto over a loping figure, a nocturne nearer to dread than to romance. “Trying to Get to You” rises through the performance to a pitch of need the song on paper does not hold. “I Got a Woman” and “Money Honey” reach the other kind of elevation, transport by drive, and “Blue Suede Shoes” opens the record already raised. That is frequency as well as height. What holds the figure short of the top: the middle of side one is pleasant and flat, “Just Because” is a romp, and “Tutti Frutti” has the excitement of its model without the abandon. Several summits across twelve short tracks, and the record returns to height more than it leaves it.
Jack Kerouac · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Transport, often, and of one kind: the high of speed and music. A tenor player in a San Francisco club drives the room toward what Dean calls IT; the night drives cross the plains; the crossing into Mexico opens the long road south; the catalogue of the mad ones who “burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles” carries the sentence up with them. Then the elegiac height of the last paragraph: the sun going down over New Jersey, “the forlorn rags of growing old”, and Dean named for the last time. Held where it is because the heights are often asserted by adjective (holy, mad, great, sad) rather than earned by the scene, and between them run long stretches of anecdote that rise no higher than the telling of them.
Danny Boyle · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
The film rises often and early, and its elevation is the dreadful kind. The empty London sequence is a true sublime: a small figure in a hospital gown under the London Eye and down Whitehall, the most familiar of cities emptied of every person, a single “Hello?” answered by nothing, the music swelling over it. Then the tower block lit by flares, the taxi in the tunnel as rats pour past toward the light, the horses running in a green field, the burning horizon at the Manchester blockade, and the storm, where Murphy’s cue climbs as Jim moves through the house. Several summits are built from music and montage rather than the image’s own pressure, and the climax rises in the lower register of revenge.
Apichatpong Weerasethakul · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent and of one kind: calm wonder, sometimes cold. The buffalo pulling free at dusk and walking into the trees, watched by red eyes, rises at once. The dinner is the summit of the first half: Huay fades into her chair, translucent, while the family keeps eating, and then the red eyes on the stairs become the son. The princess at the waterfall, her face seen in the water, has a strange erotic height. The night walk to the cave, a torch on glittering rock, is the summit of the whole. Held below the top because the register is deliberately low, the highs come as stillness rather than transport, and the hotel room lifts nothing.
Gandharan · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
The elevation is of a cold kind and it is sustained, because the whole figure is one sight. Terror: the living skeleton, the hollow belly, the cords over the bones, a body that should be dead sitting upright. Grandeur: the stillness, the strict frontality, the symmetry of the ribs under the halo, so that the horror is held in a form of perfect calm. The meeting of the two is the work’s height, and it does not diminish on looking: the eye moves from the rib cage to the face and finds peace where it expects agony. The range is that one meeting. There is no second movement and no colour, the schist giving one even grey, and the height recurs only as the viewer returns to the same confrontation. A single sustained summit in a small field.
Mughal, under Akbar · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Elevation is real and comes in two kinds. The grand: the Buland Darwaza seen from below its steps, among the most overwhelming gates in Islamic building; the passage through it into the mosque court, vast, open and level, closed by the prayer hall; the saint’s tomb small and luminous in the red court. The delightful: the Panch Mahal open to the wind at every storey; Anup Talao with its platform over water; the courts stepping across the ridge, each opening to another under a sky the pavilions frame rather than close. It recurs from court to court, and the red stone changes with the hour. What holds it: the palace is more graceful than transporting, its rooms small and stripped of their painting and fabric, and the great gate’s force is a single blow, as much assertion as elevation.
Haruki Murakami · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent, and at its height strong. Lieutenant Mamiya at the bottom of the Mongolian well, where for a few seconds a day the sun stands directly overhead and floods the shaft with a light so intense that he feels he could die of it, and who afterwards lives as an empty shell. The skinning of Yamamoto, told by the man who watched, in a flat voice that makes it unbearable. The zoo animals shot in Hsinking in August 1945, dread and absurdity together. Toru in the dark of his own well, passing through its wall into the corridor of a hotel. The uncanny is the book’s ordinary weather, and the suburb itself becomes a place of terror. Held below the higher reaches because the long middle of Book Three, the business of healing and the computer exchange, runs at ground level.
Eladio Dieste · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Inside, the walls move: straight at the hand and the eye, rolling higher up, meeting a roof that rolls with them, so that the room seems at once a tent and a sea. The light comes through small openings in the brick, low and warm, and the brick’s colour makes the interior one material lit from within. Outside, the long walls ripple against the sky above a straight base, an image of great calm for something so plainly in motion. The elevation recurs at each stage of the approach: the forecourt, the threshold, the nave, the descent into the baptistery. It is a small room, and its sublime is of grace and repose, never of grandeur; it does not reach the height or the frequency of the Pantheon (9.3) or Sainte-Chapelle (8.8).
Alan Moore and David Lloyd · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
It rises often and twice very high. Valerie’s letter, written on toilet paper in the next cell and passed through a hole in the wall, is the summit: a woman’s life told in a few pages of small handwriting over Lloyd’s spare images of her, ending on the last inch of herself she will not give up. Evey’s release, on the roof in the rain with her arms open, comes directly from it and is earned. The opening night, fireworks and music over a burning Parliament, the dominoes, and V’s body laid in the train among roses and gelignite under Downing Street are true rises. Charged: much of the elevation is theatre, V’s Jacobean speeches and alliterative monologues being performance more than height, and the cabaret interlude works as an idea more than as a lift on the page.
Michael Mann · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
The film rises often and in several registers. Terror and grandeur in the street battle downtown, gunfire with a weight and an echo off glass towers that the cinema had rarely given it, a woman carried and a child held as a shield. A quieter height in the coffee shop: two men across a table, the camera close over each shoulder, each telling the other he will kill him if he must. Desolation in McCauley’s empty house over the Pacific, blue and bare. Transport at the close: the runway at night, landing lights crossing the frame, a hand taken as one man dies. Goldenthal’s score and the Kronos Quartet give the night city an ache. Held below the top by frequency: the middle hour, of marriages and procedure, runs level.
Mark Z. Danielewski · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Elevation of the dreadful kind, and often. The first measurement, a quarter of an inch the tape cannot account for, is a small and exact terror. Holloway’s expedition, its leader going mad in the dark, firing on his own men and recording his end on tape, is a set piece of horror. Navidson’s last exploration, alone, his supplies failing, reading a book by the light of its own burning pages as the space around him loses floor and wall, is the book’s height and among the strangest in the fiction of its decade: the act of reading made into the last fire. The pages that hold a few words each enact the fall. The other height is pathos: Pelafina’s letters, loving, lucid and then breaking, are the most moving pages in the book. Held below the top because the heights are spaced through long stretches of commentary and diary, many flat by design and some flat by default.
Louise Bourgeois · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Elevation is real, and it is dread joined to tenderness. Its places: the first sight across a hall or a plaza, a creature taller than a house standing on needle points; the approach, as the legs separate and the body rises out of view; the moment beneath, the body overhead and the legs standing round like the ribs of a vault, the viewer inside the animal’s span; the sac seen from below, the eggs pale behind the mesh; the thinness of the legs against the mass above, which makes the whole seem to hover, and could fail. Height is high at the first encounter and beneath the body. Frequency is moderate: one encounter, renewed at each approach, and the work’s familiarity, a landmark people photograph and meet at, blunts the dread where it stands.
Thelonious Monk · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
Height comes, and it comes as strangeness more than as beauty. The title track’s theme, heavy and lurching, its intervals wide and its corners hard, has a grandeur of its own, and the switch to double tempo is a lift every time it comes. “Pannonica” is beauty: the bell tone of the celeste over Monk’s harmony gives the portrait a glow no other track has. “Bemsha Swing”, with the timpani, ends the record in a kind of comic grandeur. Frequency is the charge. The blues swings and rarely rises, and it is a third of the time; the solo standard is wit and tenderness more than elevation. Height on two tracks and a half of five, below the 9.1 of Kind of Blue.
Jørn Utzon · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
The height is the church room: the white vault rising toward the altar, light poured down it and diffused so that no source is seen, the ceiling seeming to float. It is beauty of a quiet, Nordic kind rather than grandeur, and the room is not large. The corridors give a lesser elevation, repeated: long and high, sunlit through their glass roofs, a procession of light before and around the church room. The exterior gives none, by design. The height is real and sustained through the one great room, and the corridors help its frequency, but the building rises in one place, and the whole does not rise again and again.
Robert Smythson (attributed), for Bess of Hardwick · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Elevation comes first from the approach: a cliff of glass on its hill, the towers and their letters against the sky, bright as no house in England had been. It comes in the climb of the stone stair, turning, from the hall’s low shade to the state floor; in the High Great Chamber, tall and lit on two sides, its frieze of a forest running round above the hangings; and most of all in the Long Gallery, its length lit by a wall of glass, the light falling across the floor bay after bay. The register is grandeur and brightness, with a touch of austerity, never terror. Frequency falls below: the ground and first floors are domestic and ordinary, and the house keeps its height for its top storey. The Villa Rotonda repeats its best moment on every side; Hardwick saves its best for the top.
Wang Xianchen; Wen Zhengming (attributed design) · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
The elevation is not grandeur but a quiet transport, and its strength is frequency. It comes at the Hall of Distant Fragrance, whose four sides of lattice open the room to the pond, so that the room is made of the view; at Xiaocanglang, where one looks north through the covered bridge across a long reach of water and a small garden reads as deep; at the pagoda outside the wall, drawn into the near water; in the lotus of summer, for which halls are named; in rain on leaves, for which pavilions were placed. The height is moderate, and it is argued from the form, not from the crowded garden of the present. What carries the axis is that it recurs at nearly every turn and in every season.
John Updike · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Elevation comes often, and through the body. The opening, in which a grown man joins boys at a backboard and feels the old perfection in his hands, is the first height. The golf shot that finally carries, the ball rising and seeming to hang before it falls, is the book’s purest transport, a grace in the physical world. The night drive south, through a darkening country of radios and diners, is a long dread. Mrs Smith among her rhododendrons in flower, speaking to Rabbit of the life in him, rises into a benediction. The drowning is the book’s terror, and it is sustained without relief. The search in the woods after the funeral and the last run close on an open, uncertain lift. Held below the higher reaches because the elevation is lyrical and local more than grand, and the long domestic middle is low by design.
Roman · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
The elevation is of more than one kind. Terror: the startled woman at the corner, her cloak arched over her head by her own recoil, looking away from what she has seen; the dark winged figure with the rod raised, her wing spread across the red; the young woman’s bared back and buried face. Transport: the naked dancer turning with cymbals above her head, the one figure in the room in full motion, the release after the blow. Awe: the god reclining at the centre of the far wall, facing the door. And the height recurs as one moves round the room. What holds it lower is the stage: one ground, one light, one distance, with no depth, no sky and no change of scale, and long calm stretches of sacrifice and toilette. Sacred dread inside a dining room, high and not vast.
Joseph Paxton · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
The record is of elevation, often and widely felt, and the frequency is high: the effect is the whole interior, not one moment. The nave a perspective of a third of a mile, its end lost in haze; the transept vault over full-grown trees; light everywhere and no wall; Osler’s glass fountain at the crossing; the colours of Owen Jones’s scheme, primaries set to the iron so that the structure read as a single tone at a distance. Accounts of 1851 speak in the language of fairyland and of the sublime by quantity, and at Sydenham the vault ran through the whole nave. Held where it is because the elevation is of one kind, the sublime of extent and light, and because it now reaches anyone only through description, lithograph and photograph, which are evidence but cannot be tested by a visit.
Qutb ud-Din Aibak and Iltutmish; upper storeys by Firuz Shah Tughlaq · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Height is high and frequent outside. From its foot the shaft rises with the fluting running up it like a bundle of reeds or columns, the light catching flute and channel differently at each hour, and the balconies on their honeycomb brackets ring it at diminishing intervals, so that the eye is drawn upward faster than the tower rises. Across Mehrauli it stands over every other thing, and the red sandstone glows warm in late light. The carving rewards the close look: whole bands of calligraphy cut deep, with no slackness in the letter. Frequency falls short: there is no interior to enter, and the paler, plainer upper stages end the ascent with less force than the lower three began it.
Ingmar Bergman · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The first dream is one of the medium’s high passages: the overexposed empty street, the clock and the watch without hands, the man with no face who falls into a stain, the hearse wheel caught on a lamp post, the coffin breaking, the hand that pulls him toward the corpse with his own face. Beside it stand the strawberry patch in summer light; Sara’s confession in the house while old Isak listens; Karin in the forest, laughing with her lover and then speaking of her husband’s coldness, watched from the trees; and the last image, Sjöström’s face at rest after the parents on the far shore. These recur across the film rather than standing alone. Frequency holds the axis down: the road between stations, the Almans in the car, the students’ squabble and the ceremony at Lund are level, and the evening reconciliations are gentle rather than high.
Leonard Cohen · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Elevation is quiet and frequent, and about five of the ten songs rise. Suzanne is the summit: the fingerpicked figure circling, the voice level, and the image of Christ on the water lifting the song without any rise in volume, the added voices and strings arriving like light on the river. Sisters of Mercy has a fragile height in its waltz. So Long, Marianne rises by its chorus, the one place the record sings out, and its “laugh and cry” is the most open feeling on it. The Stranger Song reaches a grave, hypnotic height by repetition. Master Song absorbs more than it lifts; Winter Lady and Teachers are slight, and Stories of the Street stalls. The height is real and never overwhelming, a little below Low at 8.8.
Shona builders · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Elevation is grandeur of mass and of enclosure, cold and grave. It comes at the outer wall of the Great Enclosure, a curved face of grey coursed stone rising many times a man’s height, without opening but its narrow doors; in the parallel passage, where two such walls stand close enough to touch and the sky is a strip above; at the tower, solid and blind; and on the hill, where the walls rise out of the boulders and the climb opens onto the valley with the enclosure below. The site renews it at each approach and each turn. Held below the top because the register is one, mass and silence, and because much of what is felt is the ruin’s quiet, which the living capital did not have.
David Fincher · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The elevation is terror, and it recurs at intervals: the gluttony victim found by flashlight; the sloth victim, presumed dead, coughing in the bed after a year of photographs; the killer walking into the station bloody to the elbows, calling to the detectives; and the desert, one of the summits of its genre. The cut from a week of rain to a dry white afternoon under pylons, the van coming over the flat, the box, Somerset running to stop what cannot be stopped and Mills’s face as he understands: the film’s dread is released all at once, in light. Against these, one summit of another kind: the library at night, the guards at cards while Bach plays. Held below by frequency: the middle between the finds is procedure and chase, and much depends on the last twenty minutes.
Michael Jackson · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Elevation is real and comes in several forms, none at the very top. Billie Jean holds a taut, hypnotic height for its whole length, tension that never breaks. Human Nature has a floating, nocturnal beauty, the record’s gentlest height. Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’ rises in its last minutes into a chant, an ecstasy of rhythm. Beat It has force more than height, its guitar solo a shock of brilliance more than a summit, and Thriller is a pleasure of camp horror, its terror played for fun and lifted as theatre by Vincent Price’s passage. Baby Be Mine, The Girl Is Mine and P.Y.T. stay level, and The Lady in My Life is warm without rising far. Height on four of nine, the highest short of the medium’s summits.
Steven Spielberg · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Elevation of terror, high and repeated. The landing craft opening into fire; the plunge under water, where the sound drops and rounds trail through the green; Miller deafened on the sand, the world reduced to a ringing while a man shouts at him without voice. The sublime of grief follows almost in silence: a mother at a kitchen window sees an officer and a chaplain step from a car, and her knees give way on the porch. Wade’s death at the radar position rises again, and at Ramelle the knife pressed slowly into Mellish on the upper floor, while Upham sits frozen on the stair below, is among the most dreadful scenes in the medium. Held from the top by frequency: between these the march is level, and the end is lifted by music and a flag rather than by the image.
David Lynch · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Elevation is constant, and almost all of it is dread. The planet in its void and the lever pulled; the walk under a continuous roar; the chicken that bleeds and moves its legs when it is cut, and Mrs. X’s convulsion at the table; the child’s first unwrapping and its cry; the child’s neck stretching into a vast swaying head as the lights burn out. Against the dread stands a strange beauty: the Lady in the Radiator, cheeks swollen, shuffling across a small lit stage to a fairground organ while worms fall around her and she treads them. The white embrace at the close lifts too. What holds the axis down is the single register: one pitch held for an hour dulls by the last third, and the beauty is one song and one ending against the rest.
Jim Jarmusch · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The film rises often, and coldly. The opening on the train, passengers changing from city men to trappers at each fade while the fireman’s blackened face speaks of the boat and the water, sets a dread the film keeps. Blake lying beside a shot fawn, touching its wound and then his own, is a quietly elevated image. The forest under Neil Young’s distorted chords lifts again and again: the guitar is less a score than weather. The passage through the Makah village, among carved houses and tall poles, is grand, and the last shots, the canoe drawn out from shore into open sea, close the film at height. Held from the top by the deliberate flatness of much of the comedy, which lowers frequency more than peak.
Mimar Sinan · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The elevation here is beauty, not grandeur, and it comes often rather than once. First the passage: the dim stair out of the bazaar’s noise up into the light of the terrace. Then the portico façade, already tiled, announcing the room. Then the hall, every surface to above the window line in cobalt, turquoise and red flower, the light from the windows of the drum and the tympana falling on glaze, so that the walls seem to give off colour rather than take it. It rewards the eye at arm’s length, a single carnation with the red standing proud, and from the centre of the carpet. What it lacks is height: the transport is of enclosure in a garden, not of rising.
Miloš Forman · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The film rises often, and the rises are its best scenes. Salieri reads the manuscript pages Constanze brings, and the scores fall from his hands as the music sounds over them. He describes the adagio of the Serenade for winds, K. 361, the plain accompaniment and then the oboe entering over it. The Commendatore steps from the stage of Don Giovanni as Leopold’s ghost; the masked messenger stands in the doorway; the Confutatis is dictated at the bedside, assembled part by part in the room; the cart goes out in the rain to the Lacrimosa. Much of the height is Mozart’s, and the film’s own share is the staging of hearing, a real achievement but not the music’s. The comic register is level by design for long stretches.
Steven Spielberg · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Terror, often and high. The opening night swim, the girl’s body jerked across the surface while the boy on the beach lies drunk within shouting distance; the Kintner attack seen from Brody’s chair, the beach blocked by passing bodies, and the track and counter-zoom on his face; Ben Gardner’s head rolling into the hole in the hull; the shark rising behind Brody as he ladles chum, and his backing into the cabin with “bigger boat”. The summit is the Indianapolis speech, delivered at a table by lamplight in one long held passage, three men drunk and then silent, and the shark’s blow on the hull breaking off the song that follows. Held short of the top because the elevation is nearly all of one kind, dread released in shock, and its last summit, the tank exploding, trades awe for cheering.
Barry Jenkins · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Elevation recurs, in a quiet register. The swimming lesson, the camera low in the water as Juan holds the boy’s head and the sea lifts them both, is the first summit and the film’s baptism. Paula’s scream in the corridor, the sound withdrawn and the light turned pink, rises to dread. The night beach, two boys in blue light and wind with the waves held over their talk. The chair through the classroom door, in slow motion. Then the diner, where a whole film’s longing is compressed into glances across a counter, and the last image of a boy on a beach at night, turning to look at the camera. Held below the top because the height is of intimacy, seldom of grandeur, and the school plot of the second chapter is flat between its summits.
Gustav Klimt · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Elevation in two registers and more than once. Dread on the end wall, where Typhoeus fills nearly its whole height, coils and wings spreading into a dark patterned mass with the pale Gorgons hung against it, the strongest passage of terror Klimt painted. Transport at the close, the embrace under ranked angels in profile, gold and white, the walk ending in a sound made visible. Between them lighter lifts: the genii drifting along the empty wall like a held note, the knight standing still among them. Every field rises once, and the height is greatest at the monster. What limits it: the last field’s transport is decorative more than overwhelming, the choir is a pattern of repeated heads, and set high on the wall the frieze asks to be looked up to and does not engulf.
Lee Chang-dong · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The summit is the dusk at Paju. High on Ben’s marijuana, Hae-mi takes off her top and dances against the last light to Miles Davis’s music for Ascenseur pour l’échafaud, dancing the Little Hunger and the Great Hunger she learned of in Africa, and then she weeps. It is one of the great held shots of its decade. Other heights recur: the light reflected from Namsan Tower that reaches her room for a few minutes a day, and the dream in which the boy Jong-su watches a greenhouse burn. The ending is a dreadful summit: a stabbing in snow on an empty road, a car burning, a naked man shaking in a truck. Held below by frequency: the long middle of the search is level dread rather than elevation, and height comes less often than the best scenes promise.
Paul Thomas Anderson · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The elevation is mostly beauty, with a cold thread of dread, and it recurs. Jonny Greenwood’s score lifts scene after scene: the piano and strings under the drive into the country, the long lines over the fittings. The dresses rise on the women who wear them, the countess’s gown, the princess’s wedding dress mended through the night. The mother in her wedding gown at the foot of the bed is the one supernatural image and the most haunting; at the omelette tenderness and fear are one expression on his face. Height comes at three or four points, and frequency is good. The register is luxurious more often than high, and the sublime of terror is hinted rather than reached.
Maqsud Kashani (named in the inscription) · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The elevation is real and of one register, grandeur held still. The yellow medallion radiates on the deep blue across more than ten metres. The density lets the drawing curve as finely as a manuscript page at the size of a room, and that change of scale is itself the sublime effect. As it is now shown, flat under glass in low light, it is seen from above, and what most accounts report is the sense of looking down into depth. The lamps hanging into blue space are the moment of height. What holds the axis is frequency and range: one image and one temperature, without terror or transport, understood in one look before it is studied.
Henry Bacon · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Elevation is high and recurs, gathered on two moments. The first is the approach: the white block at the end of the long water, growing as one walks, then the steps that lift the visitor from the city into the colonnade. The second is the turn on the steps, the obelisk and the Capitol on one line and the whole Mall laid out from the threshold. At night the lit colonnade over the water repeats the first. Inside, the half light between the screens gives a hush of weight. Held below the top: without the figure, which is not scored, the central room is grave and well proportioned rather than a transport.
Donald Judd · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The documented experience of the sheds is of a cold grandeur that recurs. The aluminum takes the colour of the sky and the grass through the glazing, so that at given hours the boxes read as voids, as mirrors, as solid blocks, and the rows dissolve and reform as the sun moves. The elevation comes through a day and through a year, not in a single moment, which the axis rewards; the scale, two long halls of identical volumes stepping into perspective, gives the transport of a field rather than of a figure. The height is of one register, a calm radiance without terror or tenderness: the sublime of order and light, high in its kind, and judged from the long record of the light rather than from the rooms.
Alexandre Dumas · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
The book rises often, and the heights are real. The Château d’If chapters are its summit: the scratching in the wall, Faria coming up through the floor, the education in the dark, the old man’s seizures, and the escape sewn into his shroud and thrown into the sea, where the fortress buries its dead. Then the grotto and the treasure; the Pharaon sailing into Marseille on the day Morrel has set for his death; Haydée’s testimony before the Chamber of Peers; Noirtier speaking by his eyes; Villefort, mad, digging in the garden at Auteuil. The elevation is often melodramatic, and the Paris middle runs flat for long stretches: the heights come thick in the first and last movements and thin between.
Oscar Niemeyer · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Height is high and the elevation recurs, almost wholly outside. From the Esplanada two white towers rise alone over a long white horizontal, the bowl and the dome set on it like vessels on a table, the sky of the central plateau very large around them. At dusk the towers stand in the pools and the bowl’s rim cuts the sky. From the air and at the end of the axis the building is one sign on an empty horizon, a grand and cool elevation, calm and never terrible, renewed with every hour and every approach. Held below the top because the elevation falls inside: the plenaries and the foyers are fine rooms of their decade, not rooms of the same height.
Jackson Pollock · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Elevation by scale and speed, and it recurs. At first sight the whole field moves, faster than the eye can follow; standing close, as the narrow hall it was made for compelled, the viewer could never see it whole, and the rush exceeds the frame of vision. That is the grandeur here. It recurs along the length: each upright a new surge, each swing of yellow or pink lifting across the black, the flung passages breaking the rhythm into spray. It is warm and violent, nearer the dynamic sublime of a stampede or a storm than the calm of Monet’s rooms (Water Lilies, 9.0). What holds it: elevation of one kind, sustained more than rising to distinct summits, and passages where density reads as agitation. Above Broadway Boogie Woogie (8.0).
Claudio de Arciniega and successors; facade by Manuel Tolsá · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Elevation comes often and in more than one register. Outside, the south front with its two towers, crowned by Ortiz de Castro’s bell-shaped tops, holds the vast plaza with a weight few buildings could carry: the scale of the front answers the void before it. Inside, the height is moderate and the light low, and the summit comes at the north end, where the Altar of the Kings rises toward the vault as a cave of gold, its estípites and figures dissolving the wall into a carved and gilded heaven. The organs over the coro and the chapels opening one after another into gold and shadow repeat it smaller. What holds it: the nave does not soar, the coro blocks the long view, and the grandeur is weight and richness more than lift.
Victor Fleming · Film
8.1 · Tier IV
The film rises often and in every register the axis allows. Warm: “Over the Rainbow” sung in a barnyard by a girl of sixteen, held mostly in one setting; the door opened from sepia onto colour, one of the purest moments of transport the cinema has, made without a word. Dreadful: the cyclone advancing across the plain; the Witch’s arrival in red smoke in Munchkinland; the hourglass of red sand in the castle, with Aunt Em’s face in the crystal turning into the Witch’s; the winged monkeys pouring from the tower. Grand: the first sight of the Emerald City across the poppies, the head in fire and smoke. The height is high and the frequency real through the first two thirds. What holds it: the comedy of the city, and a last stretch where elevation gives way to farewell.
Shreve, Lamb and Harmon · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Height is high, frequency moderate. Elevation comes from a distance, the tower standing alone in midtown with no rival near it for most of a century, its unbroken vertical strips drawing the eye straight up; from the foot of the shaft on 34th Street, where the steel lines run up out of sight; in the lobby, gold and marble under the restored ceiling, the building’s own image on the end wall; and above all on the terrace of the 86th floor, where the purpose of the building for most visitors is elevation itself, the city laid out to the rivers. The register is grandeur of mass and of view, with an edge of vertigo. It falls within: the top is less singular than the steel crown of the Chrysler Building, the mast and antenna a needle of record more than a figure, and the office floors give nothing.
John Milton · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Height is frequent and of more than one kind. The lyric heights first: the Lady’s song, “Sweet Echo, sweetest nymph that liv’st unseen”, which makes Comus himself speak of “divine enchanting ravishment”; the invocation, “Sabrina fair, / Listen where thou art sitting / Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave”; the epilogue’s flight past “the sphery chime” to its close, “Or if Virtue feeble were, / Heaven itself would stoop to her”, the masque’s best lines and its theology in two. The dreadful height is lower but real: the Lady alone in the dark, answering her fear with “pure-eyed Faith, white-handed Hope”. Comus on Nature’s “full and unwithdrawing hand” is grand in a sensuous mode. Held off the top because the long debates are flat between the heights, and the height is lyric rather than dramatic.
John Ruskin · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Elevation here is of one kind, the transport of seeing, and it comes often. The first sight of the Alps from the hill above Schaffhausen in 1833, a child before a horizon he first takes for clouds, is one of the great passages of nineteenth century prose, and the book places it so that a life turns on it. The aspen at Fontainebleau, drawn and suddenly understood as composed by laws finer than any he had been taught, rises in a few lines. The Rhone at Geneva and the Alps from Champagnole and the Jura return to the same height, and the last paragraph, fireflies over Fonte Branda among the lightning, closes on a summit. Between them lie long reaches of domestic comedy and record with no aim at height: high and fairly frequent, not sustained.
Geoffrey Bawa · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Elevation here is serene and grand at once. The chief moment is from across the water: the copper roofs piled in tiers, dark against the sky, floating on their reflection, a mass that seems weightless because the eye meets it over a level lake. It recurs along the causeway, as the cluster resolves into separate roofs and then into deep shade beneath them, and in the verandahs, where light falls through the rows of columns towards the water. Frequency is good: the approach is built as a sequence of such views. Height is held below the top. The register is one, dignity in repose; there is no dread and no vastness of the kind the great capitols reach, and the elevation is the exterior’s and the approach’s more than the chamber’s.
Frank Ocean · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
Elevation comes often and is warm. Bad Religion is the summit: an organ and strings under a voice climbing from confession into a falsetto cry, grief and transport in one breath. Pyramids rises twice, at the break where ancient Egypt dissolves into the modern club, and at its close, a long guitar solo over a slow synthesised groove. Thinkin Bout You lifts at its falsetto hook; Pink Matter turns stately and strange, André 3000 at his most inward; Forrest Gump ends the songs on a shy, high tenderness; Sierra Leone floats. The rest has charm or force more than height: Super Rich Kids is drily cool, Crack Rock bleak, Monks level, and the short pieces do not rise. Six of twelve songs reach height, the highest very high.
James Gibbs · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Elevation comes often and at more than one scale. From the streets that enter the square the dome rises over the walls with no preparation; from the tower of the University Church the building sits in its square like a held object; from the edge of the city it is one of the domes and spires of the skyline. The paired columns of the drum, cast in light and shadow, give the elevation a slow pulse. Inside, the upper reading room is high, pale and lit, the stucco dome lifted on its windows, and the descent to the vaulted lower room and the walk round the gallery change the height of the experience. Its sublime is of measure and repose, not of size or terror, and the scale is modest. Frequent, warm and real.
Félix Candela · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Elevation is high and frequent, and of one kind. From outside, the eight points lift off the ground and the water like petals or a hem caught by wind, and the whole seems to rest on a few points only, a weight that should not be possible. From inside, the vault floats over the room and rises toward the glazed edges, so that light enters where the roof is highest while the ceiling descends toward the middle: a dome inverted. The groins draw the eye down to the eight supports. It recurs at every hour, with the light on the concrete and on the water. What holds the axis is register: buoyant and graceful, never awful; the room is small enough that grandeur yields to delight, and the height is lyric, not tragic or vast.
Emily Kame Kngwarreye · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Elevation is real and it recurs across the length. At first sight the field has the scale of a wall and the colour of a season, and it reads as weather or growth more than as paint. Close to, it rises again: green laid over yellow over red at different densities makes passages that flicker and swell, and where the cool whites and blues come through the warm the surface opens like air over ground. The transport is warm, of abundance and of light, not of terror, and it is renewed panel by panel, which is the test of frequency. It is held below the top because it is of one register throughout: the field rises again and again to the same height and does not turn into dread or grandeur.
Anselm Kiefer · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Elevation by scale and by weight, at two distances. From across the room the pyramid stands frontally, tier on tier, at the size of a wall: a monument to death, seen from below. Close to, the crust reads as earth, and the shards lie in it like finds in a burnt site. Between the two distances the wires catch the light, thin bright lines descending from the apex, the one fine thing in a heavy, dark field, and that is the canvas’s summit, and it is high. The elevation is dreadful rather than warm, and the axis does not mind which. What holds it is range and frequency: one register, the funerary sublime of the ruin, which the painting of the decade shared, and few bright moments, the wires and their convergence, with little else rising out of the ground.
Vladimir-Suzdal builders, under Andrey Bogolyubsky · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The elevation is of a particular kind: not grandeur but height drawn from smallness. The proportions are stretched upward, the drum tall on its piers, the zakomaras raised, the windows narrow, so that a small block reads as a tall one from across the meadow. The rise recurs: in the approach across the field, in the reflection in the flood, in the run of the half-columns from plinth to arch. Inside, the narrow volume under the dome lifts the eye steeply. The sublime is frequent and never terrible, a beauty held at one pitch. A building of this size cannot give the transport of a great vessel of space.
Peder Vilhelm Jensen-Klint; completed by Kaare Klint · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The building rises more than once. First on the approach: the front looms up from low brick houses, a sheer pale cliff ribbed like pipes, its stepped crest against the Copenhagen sky, a shock of scale that photographs undersell. Then inside, where narrow pointed bays, tall piers and the one yellow of every surface make a volume that seems made of light more than of brick; with no ornament to rest on, the eye goes up. Then, more quietly, the long nave seen from the chancel, its bays closing toward the west. The elevation is frequent and of one temper, cool and lucid. The even light denies the room the darkness that would deepen it, and there is no single overwhelming moment, no dissolution of the wall.
Chamberlin, Powell and Bon · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Height is high, and it comes often. Elevation comes in the view from the lakeside across the water to Gilbert House, a terrace standing on columns in the lake with the towers behind it; in the three towers seen from the podium, their serrated edges catching the light the length of their height; in the long terraces, their vaulted roofs repeated like a city wall, planting falling from every balcony; in St Giles Cripplegate, a medieval church held in a court of concrete; in the conservatory, a jungle round a fly tower. The kind is massive and grave. It is held below the top by the descents: the undercrofts, the dark ramps from Aldersgate and Beech Street, the low foyers of the arts centre.
H. P. Lovecraft · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
The elevation is frequent and of one kind: the dreadful sublime of scale, cold and vast. The Antarctic city of At the Mountains of Madness, seen from the air above the plateau, and the descent through it to the shoggoth’s piping, “Tekeli-li!”; R’lyeh risen, its geometry wrong, a door that opens at an angle the sailors cannot hold in mind; the farm at the end of “Colour”, the trees glowing and the colour going back up into the sky; the narrator of “The Shadow Out of Time” finding a manuscript in his own hand, written millions of years before. Few writers in English of the century rise to the cosmic so often. Held below the top because the heights are often announced, “unnamable” and “blasphemous” standing where the sentence should show, and there is no warm elevation anywhere.
Dante Alighieri · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
The height is real, and frequency holds it. Io son venuto al punto de la rota opens on the turning heavens and a winter in which the whole of nature is frozen, the winds, the birds, the waters, while the lover’s torment alone does not change: cosmic cold set against a fixed passion, stanza after stanza. Al poco giorno holds the same chill in a lower key, the short day and the great circle of shade, in which the lady is a stone in green grass. The close of Così nel mio parlar, tenderness and cruelty fused in one fantasy of revenge, has a dreadful height; Tre donne rises in a graver register, dispossessed virtues weeping at Love’s door. Held where it is because the elevation lives in perhaps a dozen poems, and the rest of the body is graceful rather than high.
Ray Charles · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
Height is real, of one warm kind, and it comes on perhaps five of twelve tracks. You Don’t Know Me is the summit: the voice moves from near speech to a cry on the turn of the melody, and the strings open beneath it. Born to Lose rises by weariness, a voice that sounds as if it had already lost. In I Can’t Stop Loving You the chorus states the title and Charles answers above it, half preaching and half pleading. You Win Again reaches the dreadful kind, resignation that sounds like confession. The band tracks swing more than they rise: Bye Bye Love, Half as Much and Hey, Good Lookin’ have drive and wit, not elevation. The chorus sometimes flattens the height it frames, and some string tracks settle into lushness rather than lift.
Thomas Bohier and Catherine Briçonnet; gallery by Philibert de l'Orme and Jean Bullant · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
The elevation is beauty, not grandeur and not terror, and it is frequent. From the banks the gallery’s arches and its two rows of windows run across the river with their reflection, so that the whole reads as a figure doubled on the water; this is the summit, and it is renewed with every change of light and season. Inside, the gallery is a long, bright room with light from both sides and water below both: one walks the breadth of a river inside a house. The vaulted corridor and the straight stair give lesser, real moments of order and ascent. It does not rise to the height of a great interior volume and never reaches the dreadful or the vast. High, frequent, and of one register.
Built for Ashikaga Yoshimitsu; rebuilt 1955 · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
The elevation is real and its frequency is the garden’s. The moment is the reflection: the gold storeys doubled in the still pond, dark islands and pines between, Kinugasa-yama behind, renewed under snow, in maple and in summer green, and by the light, the gold catching low sun at evening and going pale at noon. It is the beautiful, not the terrible or the grand. The pavilion is small. And the view is single: composed to be seen from the southern shore, a few further views on the walk round the water, no interior and no passage through the building to renew the height. Since 1987 the gold is so complete that the building risks reading as an object displayed.
Andrew Stanton · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent in the first movement and returns at the end. The opening descends from space to a ruined city of rubbish towers under a show tune, and the joke becomes grandeur. EVE’s first flight, looping over the wrecks at speed for the pleasure of it, is release. The dust storm, the night in the trailer and the lighter held up in the dark are quiet summits. The summit proper is the dance in space outside the Axiom: WALL-E driven by a fire extinguisher, EVE circling him, set to Newman’s score, a slapstick device raised to transport. The memory restored by a touch of hands, over the sparks of their joined heads, is the last height. Held below the top because the middle stretch on the ship, its chases and its comedy of hover-chairs, is played level and cartoon-fast, and the climax at the holo-detector is suspense more than elevation.
Antoni Gaudí · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Elevation comes often and in many places. The front in morning light, its glass and tile shifting from blue to green to gold over the stone; the salon of the main floor, its ceiling turning in a spiral round the lamp, its bay opening on the avenue between columns of stone; the light well, where the visitor climbing the stair passes through a column of deepening blue; the attic, white ribs in sequence like the inside of an animal; the roof, the scaled back and the turret against the sky. The register is wonder and delight, at times uncanny, never grand or terrible. What holds it: the scale is domestic and the rooms small, the elevation is of surface and light more than of space, and the upper flats do not rise at all.
Pierre Bonnard · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The elevation is of one kind and sustained: colour at a pitch of radiance that recurs across the whole surface rather than at one summit. The tiled walls burn in yellow and violet; the water holds the body in a cooler shimmer; the light seems to come from the paint itself rather than from a source. It rises again and again, patch by patch, and the frequency is high. There is a second, quieter height: the stillness of the figure, lying as if laid out, gives the brilliance a grave undertone, beauty held over something not said. What holds the axis below the top is range. The transport is warm only; there is no grandeur of scale or of event, and the dread some find is faint in the image, implied by the tub’s shape more than achieved.
The Walkmen · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
The record rises more often than its slow pace suggests, and its height is warm and ragged. In the New Year is the summit: organ and guitar locked in a driving figure, Matt Barrick’s drums rolling under it, the voice thrown at the top of its register until it nearly breaks, an elation that sounds as if it might not last. Red Moon is the second height, of the opposite kind, a quiet song carried by brass into something like a Salvation Army hymn at dusk. Dónde Está la Playa lifts on its swing, and On the Water and Postcards from Tiny Islands open into long reverberant space of real grandeur. Between the heights the record holds a mood without rising.
Eero Saarinen · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Height is high and frequency good. Elevation comes in the approach, the roof spread over the roadside like a lifted wing; in the entry, where the low edge of the shells opens into a hall that rises and widens toward the field; in the seams, lines of daylight running up between the vaults so that the roof seems to float on light; in the view through the inclined glass from the sunken lounge, aircraft framed beyond; on the bridge, where the hall is seen in one sweep; and in the curving red tubes, narrowing before the last threshold. The register is exhilaration, never dread. It is held lower because the hall is not vast, the register is one, and tubes and lounges sit in the key of a fine interior rather than a grand one.
Alan Moore and J. H. Williams III · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
The axis the work earns most often, and the drawing earns it. Williams changes manner sphere by sphere, so that each stage of the ascent arrives as a new visual world, and several of those arrivals are among the most elevated pages in the medium: the approach to the supernal spheres, the dissolution into light at the crown, the Tarot issue’s single unbroken procession of images from the origin of the universe onward. The last issue’s two great images, made by the reader’s own hands from its pages, are a height of a strange kind. Frequency is real and uneven: the first arc is a handsome superhero comic, the hiding and pursuit of the last third are flat for long stretches, and the transport often comes on a page whose words are explaining it.
Isambard Kingdom Brunel; completed by Hawkshaw and Barlow · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Elevation is the bridge’s strongest gift, and it comes often. From the Clifton side the deck is a thin line drawn across the gorge between two stone gates, the tidal Avon and its mud far below, the woods on the far wall; from the river it is a thread in the sky. On the deck the drop opens on both sides through the open railing, and the sublime of terror that the eighteenth century found in this gorge is given a road through it. The site does much of the work, and that is charged: across a lesser gap the bridge would not rise so high. But the siting is the design’s, the decision to take the highest and widest line rather than descend, and the slenderness that makes the view is the structure’s. The figure recurs at every hour and from every point round the gorge. Held below the top because the towers, stripped, give the eye little of their own at close range.
Ancestral Puebloan builders · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Height is real and comes chiefly at one moment: the first sight from the canyon rim or the overlook opposite, a village of pale towers and walls under a vault of rock, small against the cliff, the canyon falling below. A human order is held inside a natural one, and the stone of the walls is the alcove’s own, so the village reads as grown from the cliff. It recurs more weakly in the descent by ladders and narrow ways, in the square tower rising to the roof of the alcove, in the shade of the overhang after the glare of the mesa. What holds it is frequency: inside, the rooms are small, low and cellular.
Alexandros of Antioch (attributed) · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
The elevation is real and of one register, cool and serene. It comes from scale, a figure a head taller than a woman and set above the viewer; from the long spiral read upward from the knotted drapery through the bare torso to the turned head; and from polished skin against the deep-cut shadow of the folds. It recurs as one walks round: the three-quarter view from the left, where the torsion is strongest, is its summit, and the frontal view has the calm. The armless shoulders add a severity. What holds the axis is range: one figure, one temperature, no terror and no transport beyond admiration. It is high and steady, not a run of summits.
Beach House · Music
7.9 · Tier III
Elevation is the record’s chief good, and it comes on most tracks. Myth rises at its chorus over a ringing guitar figure into a wide, sustained height. Wild climbs by accumulation, the drums pushing under the organ until the song opens. Lazuli is the summit of brightness: its arpeggiated keyboard and its final refrain stack voice on voice until the song seems to lift off its ground. Wishes reaches a warm, almost choral height; On the Sea is a held, piano-led suspension. Irene is the long ascent, a repetition that becomes incantation and ends in a roar of organ and drums. Held from the top because the height is of one kind, beauty swelling, never terror and seldom grandeur, and the middle rises only partway.
Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders and the London Symphony Orchestra · Music
7.9 · Tier III
Height is real and concentrated. The string climax of the sixth movement, swelling over the organ until the orchestra seems to fill the room and then withdrawing, is the record’s summit and a genuine elevation, the sublime of slow accumulation. Sanders’ first entries over the harpsichord figure have a beauty of tone that rises without effort. The close, where the sound thins toward silence, is a second, colder height. Frequency holds the axis down: much of the record is beautiful rather than elevated, and its method, restraint and sameness, is designed to keep height rare. Kind of Blue rises more often. One great summit, lesser heights around it and a sustained beauty.
Peter Gabriel · Music
7.9 · Tier III
Elevation comes more than once and of more than one kind. The title track is the summit: a slow build of drones and percussion under which Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s voice enters and rises in long melismas, answered by a boy soprano, a height of devotional transport that few records of its decade reach. The Feeling Begins has a grave, open height in its first minute. It Is Accomplished is the warm kind, an exultant release of drums after the agony. Zaar reaches trance; Gethsemane and Stigmata hold a low dread. Between the heights much of the record is level, beds that hold a colour, and some synthesiser pads of their years lower a peak rather than carry it.
Nine Inch Nails · Music
7.9 · Tier III
Elevation is the record’s chief good, and on a long record it comes often. The Day the World Went Away rises on a choir of wordless syllables over a held wall of guitar, a grandeur of loss. We’re in This Together climbs to a chorus that is triumph and desperation at once. Just Like You Imagined is the dreadful sublime, a fast piano figure under drums and massed guitar driven to a peak. La Mer is height by withdrawal, and The Great Below rises out of it, slow and drowned. The Way Out Is Through builds by layers to an arrival, perhaps the summit. Held from the top on Right, where Into the Void, Where Is Everybody?, Please and Starfuckers, Inc. have force and groove without height.
Alejandro González Iñárritu · Film
7.8 · Tier III
Height and frequency are both high. The opening attack, carried by a camera that passes from man to man through arrows and water, reaches terror within ten minutes. The bear, in one unbroken shot of a man mauled, turned over and mauled again, is among the most dreadful sequences of its decade. The land is sublime in the old sense, scaled against a crawling man: frozen rivers, cedar forests, an avalanche watched from far off, a meteor across the night, bison and wolves, a mountain of bison skulls in a vision. The cliff and the night inside the horse rise again in the last hour. Held below the top because the elevation is almost all of one kind, physical dread and natural grandeur, and the visionary passages reach for a transport the film does not earn.
Radiohead · Music
7.8 · Tier III
Elevation is frequent, warm and grieving. Daydreaming is the summit: a slow fall through piano and strings that sinks rather than climbs, ending in a low voice and a low groan of bowed strings. True Love Waits rises by subtraction, layered piano figures circling a voice. The Numbers builds from an acoustic figure to a string climax, the record’s grandest moment. Decks Dark lifts on a choir and a heavy drum entry; Glass Eyes is piano and swelling strings, beautiful and frail; Burn the Witch has the terror of its struck strings. Ful Stop reaches force more than height, and Tinker Tailor stays in its murk. Seven of eleven rise, all in one temperature.
Francesco Bartolomeo Rastrelli · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Elevation is frequent and at times high. The Jordan Staircase, reconstructed to Rastrelli’s design, is the strongest single space: white marble, gilding, mirrors and a painted ceiling, a two branched ascent that turns back on itself into light. The river front seen across the Neva, a long range of columns under a skyline of figures. The approach from Palace Square under the triple arch into the great courtyard. The Great Church, gilded and domed. The St George Hall and the Armorial Hall of the rebuilding, white and gilt halls at a scale few palaces reach, and the corridor of generals in the Military Gallery. Against it: the grandeur is mostly of one kind, magnificence, and it repeats; many later rooms are rich rather than elevated.
Michael Mann · Film
7.7 · Tier III
Elevation comes often and high. The opening run through the forest, three men at full stride under the trees, sets the register before a word is spoken. The night bombardment of the fort, mortar fire falling in long arcs, has a dreadful beauty; the massacre on the march is terror staged across a whole meadow. The falls give the grandest image of the romance, a promise shouted over the water and a leap into the white. Heyward’s death at the stake, ended by one shot from far off, is the coldest height. Then the ridge, the most sustained summit, carried under the main theme. Held below the top because some of the height is lent by the score, and the romance’s elevation is at times a poster’s rather than a transport.
My Bloody Valentine · Music
7.7 · Tier III
Elevation is the record’s chief good, and it comes often. She Found Now opens in a low, warm haze, beauty without event. In the second half of Only Tomorrow the lead guitar rises in a long, bending line, the first true height. Who Sees You makes vertigo pleasurable; Is This and Yes is a height reached by withdrawal; In Another Way lifts its bright figure over the breakbeat toward exultation. Nothing Is reaches the dreadful sublime by insistence alone, and Wonder 2 closes in a roaring wash, transport and threat at once. If I Am and, less so, New You stay level, and the first third’s heights are textural more than climactic.
Eduard Riedel and Christian Jank, under Ludwig II · Architecture
7.7 · Tier III
Height is high and frequent outside, uneven within. The elevation is the conjunction of building and site: white walls and grey towers on a rock above a gorge, the Alps behind and the lakes below, seen from the Marienbrücke as a pinnacle over a falling torrent and from the valley floor as a crown on the forest. The approach climbs and turns, and the castle appears and disappears. Within, the Throne Hall rises through two storeys in gold and blue to its apse, and the Singers’ Hall opens long and painted to its stage; both reach a theatrical grandeur. The register is romantic longing, with a touch of the uncanny in the grotto. It falls in the private rooms, where carving and painting cloy, and much of the sublime is the mountains’, borrowed.
The Smashing Pumpkins · Music
7.7 · Tier III
Elevation is the record’s strength, and it comes often. Tonight, Tonight is the summit: strings swell under a snare roll and a voice that strains upward, grandeur reached by a rock band with no irony. Porcelina of the Vast Oceans builds from a quiet guitar figure to an oceanic wall and recedes, height reached over time rather than by a hook. Thru the Eyes of Ruby gives a long, layered ascent; 1979 a smaller, aching height; By Starlight and Farewell and Goodnight a hushed, warm descent. The dreadful register is present in Bodies and the opening of Where Boys Fear to Tread. Held short of the top: many tracks between are force without elevation, and the strain in the voice sometimes thins the reach.
Jonathan Swift · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
The elevation is cold and mostly dreadful, and it comes at intervals. Brobdingnag gives the sublime of the body seen too close: the beggars, the cancer in a woman’s breast, the maids of honour, the monkey carrying Gulliver to the roof, the eagle that drops his box into the sea. The immortals who decay without dying are among the most dreadful pages in English prose. The fourth part rises to terror in the Grand Assembly’s debate on exterminating the Yahoos, and to a desolate height in the last chapter, where Gulliver talks with two horses in his stable four hours a day. The first voyage reaches only charm. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve is the voice, which never permits itself transport, and the long stretches of the third part that do not rise at all.
Geoffrey Chaucer · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Chaucer’s register is comic, ironic and humane, and elevation is not his constant mode; but it comes more often than the reputation allows, and in every kind. Beauty: “Whan that Aprille with his shoures sote” (A 1). Grandeur: Theseus on “The firste moevere of the cause above” (A 2987). Pathos: the dying Arcite (A 2777 to 2779) and Griselda’s “O tendre, o dere, o yonge children myne” (E 1093). Terror: the Pardoner’s old man knocking on the earth with his staff (C 729 to 731). Devotion, in the rhyme royal of the Prioress and the Second Nun. The height is real and recurs. What holds it down is frequency: the Monk, Melibee and the Parson’s treatise are long reaches that do not rise.
Gustave Flaubert · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The book refuses elevation as a policy, and the axis, indifferent to policy, counts height and frequency. The heights exist and are rationed. The first sight of Mme Arnoux on the steamer, “Ce fut comme une apparition” (I.1). The forest of Fontainebleau with Rosanette while Paris fights in June (III.1), a cold sublime of rocks and old trees set against the guns. The paragraph after the coup that carries fifteen years, “Il voyagea” to “Il revint” (III.6). The last meeting with Mme Arnoux and her white hair. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what lies between them: a register deliberately flat, which is not elevation, so that the heights are real and their frequency low. The flatness is credited where it belongs, on The Living Form and The Swerve.
Donatello · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Elevation of one register, a cool and uncanny beauty rather than grandeur or terror. Its places: the polished skin catching light against the darker, worked surfaces of hair, wreath and beard; the face under the brim, half in shadow and withdrawn; the smooth living foot on the dead, bearded face whose eyes are not quite closed; and the feather, which turns the eye up the leg and makes the beauty disturbing. It is a figure to walk round, and it rises again from several sides. What holds it: it is under life size, still, and at one temperature throughout; there is no transport by scale, and the terror of a beheading is set aside by design. High in kind and narrow in range, it stands below Michelangelo’s David, the Pietà and Saint Teresa, each at 9.1 here, which rise by scale, pathos or motion that it refuses.
Piero della Francesca · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
The elevation is of one kind and high in it: stillness. The coffered ceiling, the white and pale marble, the measured fall of the pavement and the one light on Christ inside the hall give a cool grandeur, the sense that time has stopped in the geometry. The three men stand with a monumental gravity unusual at this scale, and the sky over the right half is a second, quieter height. But there is no transport by scale, no terror and very little warmth: the scourging is held at a distance so that it does not rise to pathos, and the register does not change across the panel. Height recurs within one temperature, on a small field with a narrow range of light.
Robert Frank · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Elevation is real, of a cold and grieving kind, and it recurs. The summits: the body under a blanket beside U.S. 66, the mourners at St. Helena standing apart beside their cars, the night highway of U.S. 285 running into the dark, the crosses on U.S. 91, the translucent flag in Jay hung like a veil over the street. These rise past observation into elegy. Between them the book keeps a deliberately low register, bars, counters, lobbies, parking lots, faces at a premiere, and that lowness is the method: the height comes as a sudden drop into grief rather than as sustained grandeur. Several true summits across eighty-three plates, and long passages of plain seeing between them. It reaches terror and pity more than transport, and the axis is indifferent to which.
Elia Kazan · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent and mostly warm. The glove in the park, Terry working it onto his own hand while he talks so that she must stay to get it back, is tenderness in a hard world that few films match. The taxi rises to grief without a raised voice, Terry’s hand pushing the gun away. The hill, where his confession is drowned by a ship’s whistle and her hands go over her ears, is sublime in the full sense: the truth told and not heard. What holds the axis among the lowest of the twelve is how some of the height is reached. Bernstein’s score pushes elevation the images do not need, and the last walk is staged as passion and procession, so that its height is partly asserted.
Henrik Ibsen · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The register is a drawing room, and the elevations are dreadful rather than exalted, and few. The summit is the end of the third act: Hedda alone at the stove, feeding the manuscript in by handfuls and speaking to it as the child of Thea and Løvborg. The second is the close: a wild dance tune from the inner room, Tesman’s reproof, the shot, and Brack’s conventional phrase over the body, which turns the terror to a terrible comedy. The vine leaves Hedda imagines in Løvborg’s hair are her dream of beauty, and the beautiful never comes: his shot goes to the bowels in a brothel. That irony is the point, and it caps the axis: elevation is what the play refuses its heroine.
Horace · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Horace declines the Pindaric sublime by name. In 4.2 Pindar is a river in flood and the poet a Matine bee, working small and hard, and the self-description is the programme. Elevation still comes, and often, but cool or grave more than transporting. The heights: the monument of 3.30, outlasting bronze and the pyramids; the doubled name of 2.14, “Eheu fugaces, Postume, Postume, / labuntur anni”
“Alas, Postumus, Postumus, the fleeting years slip by”; the fled snows of 4.7; the turn of 1.37 to the queen who would not be led in a triumph; the gravity of 3.3 and 3.5. Between them lie many odes of charm and wit, whose register caps height by design.
Albrecht Dürer · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The elevation is real and of one register, a cold, hieratic gravity: the gaze meeting the viewer’s without expression, the stillness of the symmetrical face, the hair falling like a carved frame, the gold letters glinting out of the dark. On a small panel it rises in more than one place: in the eyes, in the hand, and in the fur rendered hair by hair until it becomes a kind of light. But it is one instant, one figure, one temperature, with nothing of terror, of transport by scale or of the grandeur of space. The awe is the icon’s awe, and an icon holds its height by fixity, not by recurrence across a field.
Alexander Pushkin · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The play rises often, but its register is cold and laconic by choice. Pimen’s night scene is the first height: the old monk writes by lamplight, “Ещё одно, последнее сказанье, / И летопись окончена моя”
(One more, last tale, and my chronicle is done), and his calm makes the murder he tells of at Uglich more terrible. Boris’s monologue of the burdened conscience is a second, and his cry “Ох, тяжела ты, шапка Мономаха!”
(Oh, heavy art thou, cap of Monomakh!) is of it. The holy fool before the cathedral is a third: “Нельзя молиться за царя Ирода, Богородица не велит”
(One may not pray for Tsar Herod; the Mother of God forbids it). The final silence is the fourth and highest, reached by subtraction. What holds it in the low eights: between the heights there is brisk statecraft and court comedy that never tries to rise, and Pushkin refuses rhetoric where Schiller or Shakespeare would swell. The heights are real and recur, but they are few and spare.
Salman Rushdie · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Elevation comes chiefly as comic transport, and it comes often: the grandfather’s nose striking the frozen earth of Kashmir on a spring morning in 1915; the opening, which starts toward “once upon a time” and swerves to the date and the clock; the midnight birth under the nation’s fireworks; the Widow’s hand in the dream, green and black, plucking children. The darker heights are real: the soldiers lost in the Sundarbans, in a jungle that answers their crimes with visions; the bombing of the family in 1965 and the silver spittoon falling on Saleem’s head; the closing vision of the crowd, a whirlpool of multitudes that annihilates. Held here because the register is so continuously heightened that the heights flatten into a plateau of brilliance, and the book rarely reaches the stillness or the terror of Blood Meridian or of the deaths in Anna Karenina.
Charles Baudelaire · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The book is built to deflate: its characteristic motion is elevation broken by a knock at the door, a joke or a pistol shot. The heights are real and several. “Le Confiteor de l’artiste” begins in the grandeur of an autumn evening over the sea and ends in the cry that “il n’est pas de pointe plus acérée que celle de l’Infini”, “there is no point sharper than that of the Infinite”. “La Chambre double” builds a room of paradise and destroys it with the bailiff’s knock and the return of Time. “Le Port” and “Les Fenêtres” reach a still, cold transport; “Any where out of the world” climbs through a dialogue with the soul to its final cry; “Une mort héroïque” holds the terror of a perfect performance and the whistle that kills the performer. Across fifty pieces the frequency is moderate, and the deliberate bathos lowers it.
Donatello · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Elevation of the dreadful kind, and real. Its places: the face at close quarters, the hollowed eyes looking past the viewer, the open mouth that seems to speak or pray with difficulty; the hands, where the figure gathers itself toward something it cannot see; and the whole silhouette, a dried column of hair and sinew rising from long feet, which reads from across a room as a thing burnt down to its frame. What holds the axis is frequency and range. A single figure gives few places to rise, and there is no light, space or company in which elevation can recur; the register is one, austere and fixed, and ordinary beauty is refused by design. It rises sharply and repeatedly in one key, below works that rise across a vault or a crowded field.
Mikhail Lermontov · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The book is cool and ironic by temperament, and rises often for all that. The traveller’s crossing of the Cross Pass in snow at the opening of “Bela”, the mountains drawn with an exactness Russian prose had not had; the night boat at Taman and the struggle with the girl in the dark water, Pechorin unable to swim; the duel on a narrow ledge above a drop, at six paces, which Pechorin himself chose so that a wound would be death; and the ride after Vera’s letter, in which the horse is ridden to its fall and the rider weeps. The register is restrained, and the restraint is part of the height. Held below the summit because the elevation is local, scene by scene, and the book’s habit of undercutting itself, Pechorin mocking his own tears the next morning, keeps it from sustaining transport.
Kurt Vonnegut · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The book refuses the elevated register on principle, and its heights come by understatement. The firebombing itself is not shown: Billy and his guards are underground in a meat locker, and come up to a city like the surface of the moon, a cold sublime of absence. A film of a bombing raid watched backwards, the destruction undone, is the book’s single great transport, terror turned into a dream of undoing. The corpse mines, the four guards like a barbershop quartet, the horses whose bleeding mouths make Billy weep at the end of the war, and the bird’s last question, “Poo-tee-weet?”, all rise. Held in the low eights because the deadpan flattens by design, and long runs of the Ilium and Tralfamadore material are comic rather than elevated.
Natsume Sōseki · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The register is quiet, and the heights are few but real. The opening on the crowded beach at Kamakura, the young man swimming out after the stranger into open water. The discovery of K: Sensei wakes, sees K’s door open, the lamp, the blood thrown on the screen, and a black light of the irrevocable runs through his whole future in an instant. K’s last line, added to his note as an afterthought, that he should have died sooner, and why had he lived so long. The young man on the train with the letter. Dread runs through the testament’s last chapters, in Sensei’s years beside his wife, keeping silent. Held in the low eights because elevation is rare by design: long stretches of Part I and nearly all of Part II are flat on purpose, and the heights depend on the plain ground beneath them.
John Milton · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Milton chose a lower style for this poem, and the axis records the choice. Long passages are argument and the Son’s replies are kept plain, so elevation comes less often than in the first epic. The heights are real. The pinnacle is one of the great climaxes in English verse: after some two thousand lines of words, one act, “Tempt not the Lord thy God; he said and stood” (IV), and Satan falls under the similes of Antaeus and the Sphinx. The night of storm, with the Son sitting through it unshaken, rises, and so does the morning after. Athens lifts even as it is refused, and the banquet is lush. But much of Books II and III moves on the level, and the axis weighs frequency as well as height.
Jean Racine · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Elevation here is cold and comes often, but rarely rises to transport. Its heights are of dread: the concealed emperor watching Junie lie to her lover, where the stage itself becomes a trap; “J’embrasse mon rival, mais c’est pour l’étouffer”
“I embrace my rival, but it is to stifle him” (Act IV), the play’s one line of pure terror; Agrippine’s prophecy to her son in the fifth act, foretelling her own murder and his end. The abduction speech of the second act has a lyric beauty held inside the cruelty it describes. Against these, Britannicus and Junie speak the plain register of young lovers, and the third act, with its quarrel and arrest, runs at the level of intrigue. A tragedy of politics in a closed room keeps the sublime under restraint: frequent rather than towering, and the lowest of the eleven axes the Universal Minimum covers.
Roman Polanski · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
The register is cool, ironic and sunlit, and elevation is not its usual mode. When it rises it is dreadful: the reservoir at night and the knife in the nostril; the slaps and the confession, a terror played in a bright bedroom; the dry riverbed by day with a boy on a horse, a desert under the city; the car horn sounding after Evelyn falls on the wheel, the girl screaming, and the camera rising over the crowd in the dark street. Jerry Goldsmith’s solo trumpet over strings and prepared pianos gives the film a lament it never states. Held at the figure by frequency: the middle hour is procedure, elegant and level, and the summits gather at the confession and the end.
Don DeLillo · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Elevation passes through irony, and the irony is its means as well as its limit: the heights rise out of the deadpan, and they recur. The cloud seen at night from the family car, lit by helicopter searchlights, which Jack likens to a death ship of Norse legend. The sunsets after the event, lurid and long, that draw the town to an overpass to watch in silence. Steffie saying “Toyota Celica” in her sleep, which Jack receives as a moment of transcendence. Wilder pedalling his tricycle across the expressway and coming through untouched. Terror rises once, flat and strong, when the data shows a “nebulous mass” in Jack. Held below the higher reaches because the dominant register is deadpan comedy, which caps height by design, and because the motel climax trades the sublime for the grotesque.
J. M. Coetzee · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The lowest of the twelve. The register is cold and exact, and the book rises rarely; when it rises it rises high. The shooting of the dogs in their cages and the burning of Lurie’s scalp are terror without rhetoric. The finest elevation is quieter: Lurie taking the bodies of the euthanised dogs to the hospital incinerator himself, so that they are not beaten stiff by the workers, doing it for no reason he can give; and the last scene, in which he carries the young dog he has grown fond of into the surgery. Lucy’s “Like a dog”, taken from the close of Kafka’s The Trial and turned to a life begun again from nothing, is the other height. What holds the axis here is frequency: the heights are few and spaced, and the prose’s refusal of uplift is its method.
David Fincher · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
The elevation is dread, and it comes in a few great passages separated by long stretches of procedure, which counts against frequency. The summits: Lake Berryessa in full daylight, the hooded man walking down to the couple on the shore, played without score and without cutting away; the overhead shot that follows Paul Stine’s cab through the grid of the city before the killing; Kathleen Johns on the dark road with her child, the stranger’s courtesy turning; Graysmith in Vaughn’s basement, footsteps above him. Then the quiet summit at the end, Graysmith in a hardware store staring at Allen across the aisle while Allen looks back. The procedural middle is absorbing and flat by intent, and the last act’s elevation is all in one stare.
PJ Harvey · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent and of one cold, eerie kind. On Battleship Hill is the summit: the voice pushed to the top of its range over a slow sway, the hill’s beauty and its dead in one line, “cruel nature” as the refrain’s verdict. The Words That Maketh Murder rises in its chant, many voices on a playground figure, terrible by its cheerfulness. England is keening, the voice almost breaking on a single held line; The Colour of the Earth ends the record in a plain, hymn-like grief. The rest has force more than height. The register holds the figure: the voice is deliberately thin and the arrangements light, so height comes as chill and lament, never as grandeur, and it comes on five or six of twelve songs.
Robert Louis Stevenson · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The register is dry, a lawyer’s world, and the terror comes through it in sharp, repeated strokes rather than sustained elevation. Enfield’s first story sets the pitch: the man “trampled calmly over the child’s body and left her screaming on the ground”, and “It wasn’t like a man; it was like some damned Juggernaut.” The Carew murder, seen by a maid from a moonlit window, ends in a beating “with ape-like fury”, under which the bones are heard to break. Utterson dreams of a figure without a face gliding through a city of lamps; the fog lies over Soho as a “chocolate-coloured pall”; a face at a window is seized by terror; an axe goes through a cabinet door; Lanyon cries “O God!” as the drink takes hold. These rise often and high. What holds the axis there is that the summit moments are short, and the last pages of the statement are raised more by pathos than by grandeur.
Bertolt Brecht · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The method works against transport, and the play’s elevations are cold and intellectual, which the axis allows. They recur. The third scene, the night of 10 January 1610, Galileo and Sagredo at the telescope finding that the stars around Jupiter move and that there is no crystal sphere, is the height of wonder. The twelfth, the Pope argued down by the Inquisitor while he is robed piece by piece, his resistance thinning as the vestments go on, is grandeur and dread in one stage image. The thirteenth is the terror: the disciples’ joy as five o’clock passes in silence, then the bell, then the recantation read out. Between these the register is argument, comedy and chronicle, and it stays there for long stretches.
Robert Altman · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Elevation comes mostly in the last movement and is cold: three gunmen and one man moving through snow and silence, the church burning behind them, the town’s steam pump working while the hero crawls to his drift and the flakes settle on his face; then the cut to Mrs. Miller’s eye on the glass. Before that, Cohen’s songs over mud and lamplight lift the arrival and the night sequences: the stranger riding in under the first song, the women’s tents under the second. The cowboy’s death on the rope bridge has a terrible beauty, the river moving below him. The frequency is the limit, and it is weighed: for long stretches the film is deliberately flat, brown and overheard, and the heights are earned by refusing height elsewhere.
Naguib Mahfouz · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Elevation here is quiet and occasional, the elevation of the realist novel rather than of vision. The heights are earned by the hundreds of pages beneath them: Fahmy’s death in the demonstration and the father’s receiving of the news; Amina’s return home and her silent submission; Kamal’s discovery that Aida has married another, and his long disenchantment; the father’s decline and his death during an air raid; Amina’s last illness at the close, while the grandsons are in prison and the family goes on. The work rises repeatedly. What holds it here is the prose, which rarely climbs on its own: its manner is measured and even, long stretches of the middle volume sit at the level of social comedy and analysis, and no height reaches the terror or transport of the first rank.
Frank Lloyd Wright · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Elevation here is horizontal and calm. Outside it comes in the long run of roof and balcony seen from the corner, planes floating over deep shadow so that the brick mass seems to hover, and in the west eave carried out over the terrace, a span felt by a passer-by as a held breath. Inside it comes as release after compression: the low, dark entrance and the turning stair, then the living floor opening along its whole length to the prows, light through the art glass falling in patterns on oak, the ceiling bands drawing the eye down the room. Frequency is good. Height is bounded: a house, with no grandeur of size and one register, shelter and serenity; the ceilings are low, and on a dull day the interior is more sombre than exalted.
Henri Labrouste · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Elevation is concentrated and real. From the head of the stair the reading room opens at once: the long double vault running away on its thin iron arches, light falling from high windows over ranks of books, the iron reading as lace against the volume, lightness carried to a monumental length. The moment recurs with every entry and holds through a day’s work, and frequency counts. The ground floor is lower in key: the painted vestibule charms rather than rises, and the exterior is sober and handsome, not transporting. Against the upper chapel of the Sainte-Chapelle (8.8) the height is lower; against most civic interiors of its century it is very high.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The elevation is real and cool, and the approach builds it: a long low platform, two flights of travertine steps, a pause, and then the room opens, one floor of light under a ceiling that seems to float, the structure that holds it visible outside the glass and above the eye. The calm of a room this large with nothing in it is the building's height, and it holds wherever one stands. Outside, the girders against the sky give the hall a severe grandeur, and at night it becomes a lantern on the dark campus, its whole interior seen through the clear upper glass. What it does not reach is transport: no ascent within, no change of light from space to space, no second register. It rises once, wholly and repeatedly, at one pitch.
Maya, under K'inich Janaab' Pakal and his son · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Elevation comes twice, in opposite directions. The ascent: a steep stair up nine terraces to a low, wide temple, its five openings dark against the green of the hill behind, a grandeur of placing rather than of mass. The descent: a narrow, damp, corbelled stair turning down into the mountain, and the crypt opening on the carved lid with the figures on the walls round it, an experience among the most charged in the architecture of the Americas. What holds it is height and frequency taken together. The exterior, read alone, is a refined Palenque temple on a pyramid of moderate size, without the scale of Tikal’s temples; and the descent, the summit moment, is reported closed to visitors in recent years and is known to most by record.
Thomas Pynchon · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Elevation comes in a few great moments set in a comic medium. Oedipa weeping in Mexico City before Remedios Varo’s painting of girls in a tower, embroidering a tapestry that spills from the windows and becomes the world, is the first height, and its image of a self that weaves what it takes to be the world governs the rest. The night walk rises continuously, and the old sailor shaking with the delirium tremens, whom Oedipa holds, is the book’s purest transport, a pity close to the religious. The last page, the auction room locked and the bidder about to declare himself, is a suspended sublime. Held in the low eights because much of the book is slapstick and satire, and its heights are few and spaced.
Gabriel García Márquez · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The register is a reporter’s, cool by design, and elevation is rationed; when it comes it is high. The ending is among the great terminal scenes of its century. Santiago Nasar, cut open at his own front door, which his mother has barred believing him inside, walks round the house holding his entrails, brushes the dirt from them with care, speaks to his aunt Wenefrida across the yard, and falls face down in the kitchen. The plainness of the telling is what makes it dreadful. The wedding night, when Bayardo San Román returns his bride to her mother’s house, has a cold grandeur; the autopsy has a grotesque horror; Angela writing letter after letter, for years, to a man who does not answer has a quieter height. What holds the axis there is the method, which keeps most of the pages at the level of evidence: a book that rises once at the end and twice in the middle stands below one that rises throughout.
Constantinian, Crusader and later builders · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Elevation comes, and comes more than once. In the rotunda, light falls from the crown of the dome onto the shrine and the crowd round it. At Calvary a rock lies under glass beneath lamps, reached by a steep stair from the dark floor. The stair down to the chapel of St Helena and the chamber below it gives the sense of going into the earth under the church. At the Holy Fire on Orthodox Holy Saturday the rotunda fills with flame passed from hand to hand. The register is numinous and often dreadful. What holds it: the interior is dark, divided and cluttered, the nave walled up and the views cut, the Edicule fussy where the moment asks for plainness.
Wu Cheng'en (attributed) · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Height is real and often comic, and the register is wonder more than terror. The ceiling is in the opening chapters: the stone egg split on the mountain and the monkey bowing to the four quarters with light from his eyes reaching Heaven; the leap through the waterfall to the cave behind it; the Eight Trigrams furnace, from which he comes out with eyes of fire; and above all the wager with the Buddha, the somersault to five pillars at the end of the world, the name written on one, and the pillars found to be fingers. At the close the bottomless boat, where Tripitaka sees his own body float away downstream, is a height of a still kind. Flaming Mountain and the true and false Monkey King rise again. What holds it here is frequency: much of the middle is brisk adventure, and the set descriptions are often ornament rather than elevation.
Henri Matisse · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Elevation is warm and of one kind: joy, the spirits lifted by a field of high colour. It comes at first sight, from across a room, when the yellow ground and the pink and violet trees declare themselves before any figure is read. It returns in the long contour of the reclining woman at the centre, one line from raised elbow to foot; in the ring of dancers, small and fast against the meadow, the one place where the picture moves; in the leaning trunks whose colours change from tree to tree without reason and seem right. It does not climb further. The register never deepens into grandeur or dread, and between its summits, at the garlanders and the herdsman, the canvas is pleasant rather than lifted.
Frank Herbert · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The book rises often, and its height is mostly in its conceptions: the first sight of a sandworm swallowing a spice crawler; the ornithopter flight into the Coriolis storm; Liet Kynes dying in the open desert with his father’s voice on ecology in his head; Paul’s first ride on a maker; Jessica’s transmutation of the poison in the Water of Life and the swarming memories of the Reverend Mothers; the worms coming through the breached Shield Wall in the storm. The gom jabbar scene has real terror, and the Litany against Fear, “I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer.”, has earned its long afterlife inside the scene that needs it. What holds the axis is the sentence. The height is in the event and the idea; the prose that carries it is serviceable and often flat, and the reader supplies much of the transport. Frequent, high in conception, rarely sustained in language.
Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers with Gianfranco Franchini · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Height is real; frequency is moderate. Elevation comes in the ride up the escalator tube: the square falling away, the roofs of the Marais and Les Halles opening, and at the top Paris laid out from Notre-Dame to Sacré-Cœur and the Eiffel Tower, an ascent given free to the public when the building opened. It comes in the scale of the frame seen from the square, girder and bracket repeated down the length; in the east face at night, the coloured ducts massed like an organ or a refinery against the old street; and in the square itself, a slope of crowd and performance. It is exhilarating, never dreadful, and of one register. Within, the floors are low for their extent, and the building’s best moment lies outside its purpose.
Hou Hsiao-hsien · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Elevation is recurrent and quiet. The opening holds the surrender broadcast heard in darkness while a child is born, and the electric light returning. The summit is the train during the uprising: men move down the carriage asking passengers whether they are Taiwanese, and the youngest brother, who cannot answer, forces out the words with a voice he scarcely has. The prison, cellmates called out one by one and shots heard off screen, is the second height. Hinomi’s written words over mist on the hills and the family photograph lift more gently. What holds it lower: the method distrusts rising, much of the length is kept deliberately level, and the returns of the landscape lift less than the first.
Christopher Nolan · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
The register is dread, and it rises often. The Joker lifts his mask in the bank and speaks, and the face is seen for the first time. In the interrogation the light comes up on him alone in the room. The hospital explodes behind him as he walks out in a nurse’s dress, the blast stalling and resuming. He leans his head out of a police car window into the night air, a moment of release held without music. Grandeur comes in a truck turned end over end on a city street and in aerial views down onto the city at night, with a single rising string note given to the Joker in place of a theme. Held below by frequency: the action between these moments is loud rather than elevated, and the closing montage leans on its words.
Robert Penn Warren · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The book rises often, and its height is real but frequently pushed. The Cass Mastern chapter is the summit: the ring on the dead Duncan Trice’s hand, Annabelle’s selling of the slave Phebe down the river, Cass walking unarmed into battle and dying slowly of his wound in an Atlanta hospital, all in the plain diction of a journal that gives it a gravity nothing else in the book matches. The Judge’s suicide and the mother’s scream that tells Jack who his father was is a second height; the night drive west to Long Beach and the last pages carry real grandeur. Against this, the temperature of Jack’s voice is high for so long that elevation and overstatement become hard to tell apart, and the similes pile up.
Athenian (architect unrecorded) · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Elevation here is beauty, not grandeur or terror, and it recurs. The korai are the height: six figures at ease under a load, the weight carried down through the straight leg while the other knee bends, each varied in drapery and hair, against the sky above the south cliff. The north porch is the second: tall slender columns, a coffered ceiling and the great door with its rosettes, seen from below across the lower ground. The east porch and the anthemion bands carry it at the scale of a hand. It rises at every face but the west, and at first sight. Held from the top: the building is small, its elevation is of refinement rather than transport, it is no longer entered, and the west front is flat.
Philip Roth · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Height comes often, and its best register is the dreadful. The scene in which Coleman tells his mother he is leaving her, and she understands what he means, is the book’s emotional summit, and it is given without commentary. Steena at the Silk family table, and her leaving afterward, reaches the same height by a smaller road. Les Farley’s breakdown in a Chinese restaurant is a set piece of terror. Faunia dancing in Coleman’s bedroom, and two men dancing to the radio early in the book, reach a strange late tenderness. The close is the height: Zuckerman on the frozen lake with Les and his auger, the white field around one small dark figure, a menace never spoken. Held off the top because the arias on the national scandal flatten the middle, and the heights are spaced among long stretches of argument.
Leonardo da Vinci · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The elevation is beauty of one cool kind, and it is high: the face lit from the upper left, the light falling across the brow and down one cheek into shadow under the jaw; the white of the ermine against her dress and against the dark; and the hand, a passage of grave beauty in itself. A second register, smaller and stranger, is in the animal: its small fierce head, its claws on her sleeve, a hunter’s alertness, and an edge of the uncanny in two heads turned the same way. The height recurs in perhaps three places on one panel, and the range is narrow: no grandeur, no terror, no transport by scale. One face, one hand and one animal are the whole field, and a work that rises across a room or a sky stands above it.
Kazuo Ishiguro · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Elevation in a muted register, reached several times and never raised in voice. Kathy alone in the dormitory, holding a pillow as a baby and swaying to the song, while Madame watches from the doorway and weeps: the book’s coldest and warmest moment at once, its meaning reversed in the third part. Tommy, after the visit to Madame, raging in a dark field by the road, caught in the headlights, Kathy holding him. The stranded boat in the marshes, and Ruth’s confession. The close, at a Norfolk field where rubbish is caught along a wire fence, and Kathy lets herself imagine Tommy appearing across it, and does not let the fantasy run. The heights are real and spaced; long stretches are deliberately level, and the restraint that makes the summits possible keeps their frequency low.
Mexica · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The elevation is dreadful and grand, and it recurs. The first height is scale and order together: a disc some 3.6 metres across in which every element is placed, the eye held at the centre and then carried outward ring by ring to the serpents. The second is terror: the face with its flint tongue, the talons gripping hearts, the fire serpents with gaping jaws, and the knowledge that the image speaks of sacrifice. The third is the abyss of time, the four dead ages folded into the arms of the present one. It is cold elevation, awe and dread, and the axis is indifferent to that. Held below the high band because the relief is low and the effect is one of total pattern more than of separate summits: much of the surface, the day signs and the bands, reads as register rather than as rising.
Don DeLillo · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The heights are many and mostly dreadful. The opening, the boy riding the subway to the ends of the city, rises through its own rhythm into a vision of the underground as the self’s only freedom. The chapter of 22 November, told from inside the depository window and then in the confusion after, is a set piece of terror held in exact detail. Oswald’s death, rendered from within as the pain and the darkness close and as he sees himself on television, is the book’s coldest height, and Marguerite’s grief, in her own voice, reaches a grotesque grandeur. Branch alone before paper reaching to the ceiling is a quiet sublime of the unknowable. Held below the higher reaches because long stretches are procedural by design, the plotters’ meetings and the operatives’ talk running level, and because the heights gather in the last hundred pages.
The Strokes · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Elevation is of one kind, the rush of a band locked tight, felt as speed and release, and it comes often. Last Nite lifts on its guitar break. Hard to Explain is the height: its machine-tight beat opens into a sung chorus of real reach, with a guitar line climbing over it. Someday has a bright, rueful lift, and Take It or Leave It ends the record at full force; The Modern Age and Barely Legal have drive. The title song sways rather than rises, and Soma, Alone, Together and Trying Your Luck stay level. The limit is the ceiling: the heights are exhilaration, not transport, grandeur or dread, reached by momentum inside a short song and never sustained. Frequent and warm, within one register.
Maya · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Elevation comes often and in different kinds. The battle walls rise to a tumult the ancient Americas barely record in paint elsewhere: bodies interlocked, spears crossing, trumpets raised, warriors grasping captives by the hair, the ground line given up in places so that the scramble fills the wall. The arraignment is the cycle’s height and its terror: the pale, slumped captives against the ordered ranks above, the ruler still at the top of the steps, the sprawled body whose foreshortened limbs fall toward the viewer. The dancers of the last room, spinning in great winged costumes on the pyramid stair, have a cold grandeur. The first room has spectacle more than elevation, and its rank of mantled lords is flat. The cycle rises in two rooms of three, very high on one wall.
Arcade Fire · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Elevation comes at intervals and is mostly warm. The title song’s piano bounce carries a quiet ache that does not lift but holds. Suburban War rises at its close into the loudest passage of the record, the friends gone, the drums driving. We Used to Wait builds by repetition over a pounding piano to a long climax. Sprawl II is the summit: Régine Chassagne’s voice over a synthesised disco pulse, “dead shopping malls” rising like “mountains beyond mountains”, a flight from the suburb made into dancing, the record’s one transport. Half Light II has a slow swell. Between them a long middle of mid-tempo songs stays on the plain, Modern Man, Rococo, Wasted Hours and Deep Blue, and the reprise is a fall by design. Five or six of sixteen rise; the highest is high.
Dorothea Lange · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The elevation is of one kind: gravity, pathos held still. It does not rise to terror or grandeur, and it is not transport by beauty; it is the weight of a face that has stopped looking at anything near. For a single still image, frequency is not a run of summits but a summit that does not fall, and this one comes at first sight and holds. It holds by restraint: no tears, no appeal to the camera, the eyes directed past the frame, the mouth closed under the fingers. A grief that does not perform lifts further than one that does. Held below the top because the register is narrow, the scale is a person at arm’s length, and the image does not open beyond its figure.
Paul Thomas Anderson · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent, and the summits are kinetic rather than contemplative. The opening raid at night, carried on Jonny Greenwood’s insistent piano, has the propulsion of a march. Perfidia, heavily pregnant, firing a gun is an image of terrible exhilaration. The raid on Baktan Cross, crowds and police in the streets, rises to a civic sublime. The summit is the chase on the hill road: three cars on a road that rises and falls like a swell, each vanishing behind a crest and appearing again, pursuit felt as vertigo and dread. The close lifts quietly. Held at the figure because much of the middle is comic and level, and the elevations are mostly of motion: the film rarely reaches the stillness that lifts 2001: A Space Odyssey or Tokyo Story.
Ptolemaic builders · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Elevation comes at the pylon, a sheer face of stone on which the colossal king smites his enemies before the god, and at the threshold, where a granite falcon stands beside the doorway into the court. It comes again in the passage from the sunlit court into the screened hypostyle, where the floral capitals rise into shadow, and at the end, in the dark sanctuary, where the granite shrine catches what light reaches it. The roof, open to the sky above the sealed rooms, adds a last height. It recurs, so frequency is high. Held at 8.3 because the register is awe of enclosure and sequence, not of span or volume: the inner rooms are not great spaces, and the hypostyles are not the columned forests of the New Kingdom halls.
Leo Tolstoy · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Elevation comes, and it comes at the book’s two poles. The Easter matins in the country church, Katyusha in white with a red ribbon, the greeting of the feast exchanged, and the night after it with fog over the river and the ice breaking up, is among the most charged things Tolstoy wrote: holiness and seduction in one movement of the earth. The night at the station, Katyusha running beside the lit carriage in the rain and the dark, and the child moving in her that keeps her from throwing herself under the train, is a height of dread. The march in the heat, prisoners falling of sunstroke in a Moscow street, is the cold sublime of the state. Between these the book is often flat by design, an inventory of offices and anterooms, and the heights grow rarer as it goes east.
Romano-Egyptian painters · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Elevation is of one kind, grave and quiet, and it recurs. The best encaustic heads hold a stillness in which the gaze seems turned at once toward the viewer and past; the wax gives the flesh a depth and warmth that no other ancient medium has carried to us, and the light in the eye, a placed white touch, makes the face present across eighteen centuries. Met in a room of them, the effect rises with number: one face after another looking out, an assembly of the dead. The gold of a wreath or a gilded ground adds a cold radiance to some. But there is no grandeur and no terror, the range is narrow, many panels are pleasant rather than elevated, and the later tempera panels rarely rise.
Aghlabid builders · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Elevation comes in a calm register and recurs on every entry. From the glare of the court the eye passes into a dim forest of columns that seems to go on in every direction, the arches repeating past counting; the central aisle opens a higher corridor toward the mihrab, and under the ribbed dome the light from the drum falls on carved marble, lustre tiles and the dark teak of the minbar. The court is a great bare field under the sky with the tower at its far end, and has the grandeur of emptiness; the tower rises heavy and plain. What holds it: the building is horizontal and austere, its height comes in two or three places, and its exterior is a wall. Awe here is breadth and quiet, rarely transport.
Chris Marker · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Elevation of several kinds. The prologue, Sunday crowds on the jetty, planes, a face at the rail, is already uncanny. The ruined Paris is dread; the camp, under whispers and a heartbeat, is terror made of almost nothing. The meetings rise to tenderness, in the garden and before the cross-section of a great tree. The museum’s animals are a stillness inside a stillness. The summit is the one moving shot, the woman opening her eyes as birdsong rises, among the great moments in cinema; the last run along the jetty is the second. What holds it: the heights are moments in a short film, the camp scenes repeat their effect, and the journey to the future is flat.
Arnolfo di Cambio (attributed) · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
The height is real, and it comes mostly from outside. The tower, off-centre and carried forward over the corbels, seems to rise from the gallery itself; from the piazza, from the long court of the Uffizi and on the skyline beside the cathedral’s dome it is one of the strongest single figures in any European city. The register is stern grandeur: rough pietraforte, the dark band of corbels, merlons against the sky. Inside, the Salone gives a second height, one of the largest halls of its century, and the courtyard a small gilded release after the hard front. What holds it is frequency: many rooms are only rooms, the rear blocks are plain, and much of the Salone’s grandeur belongs to its painted ceiling, which is not credited.
François Truffaut · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
The elevation is real and comes in a handful of places. The night ride in the police van, Paris going by through the bars and the boy’s face in tears, is the first height. The rotor at the fair, the drum spinning and the boy pressed flat against its wall and grinning, is pure physical exhilaration, and the camera shares it. The opening tracking shots of the streets and the Eiffel Tower under Constantin’s theme give the city a grave tenderness. The last run is the summit: the long lateral tracking shot, the arrival at the shore, a few steps into the water, the turn to the camera and the freeze. Between these the register is level by intention. Height is reached three or four times, and frequency counts.
Auguste Rodin · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Elevation of one kind: gravity, mass bent down under its own weight, darkness collected in the hollows between the arms, the head and the knees. Seen from below on its pedestal against the sky, as this cast is seen, the figure has real grandeur, and the shadow the hand throws across the face is its one summit, frequent because it is there at every hour. Its places are few: the bowed head, the knot of arms and knees, the hard edge where the back turns. What limits it is one register, with no terror and no tenderness, and a weight that sometimes reads as heaviness rather than height. Read fresh, without its fame, it rises once and stays at that pitch, where The Gates of Hell, at 8.9, rise and fall over a whole field.
Claude Monet · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Elevation is real and recurs across the set. The full sun canvases in blue and gold, where the portals become hollows of cobalt shadow in a burning façade, are the summit. The morning canvases, in which the stone dissolves into blue haze, are a second and colder height. The grey canvases hold a dull grandeur in which the mass of the building returns. Frequency is high, because many canvases aim at the same transport. Height is held below the greatest because the elevation is of one kind, a dazzle of light on stone, never terror and rarely grandeur of scale: the façade is cropped so close that the building’s size is felt as surface rather than height. Some canvases, overworked, are inert.
Charlie Chaplin · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Elevation here is comic transport, and it comes often. The ride through the gears, the worker carried through the wheels with a calm that makes him their part, is an image of grandeur as well as a joke. The blindfold roller skating along the unrailed edge of the store’s top floor is lyrical and terrifying at once. The breakdown is danced, with spanners and an oil can. The song is the height of the film: the lyrics fly off with his cuffs, and he makes a language and a mime that the room understands without a word of sense. The last shot, the couple walking away down the road, has lift. Between these the prison and the shipyard are flat, and the girl’s hardship reaches pathos more often than height.
Michelangelo Antonioni · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
The elevation is cold and uncanny, and it recurs. The park by day: a wide green under a wind that never stops, the leaves loud on the track, a couple at the far edge. The enlargements: silence, the prints pinned along the wall, the cut from one to the next as the eye finds the hand in the hedge, the most sustained suspense in the film made of nothing but stills. The body at night, white in the grass under a lit sign. The last sequence, the camera following a ball that is not there until its sound enters the track. Held at the figure by frequency: the studio, the girls and the party are level, and a surface cool by design keeps much of the film from rising.
Bruce Graham and Fazlur Khan (Skidmore, Owings and Merrill) · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
The elevation is real and frequent, of one cold kind. From the lake shore and the length of Michigan Avenue the black tapering mass, its diagonals reading as giant crossings at the scale of the city, carries a severe grandeur: the dread of weight held in the air, made legible. The taper makes the tower seem taller than it is and gives it the sloped stance of a mountain or a pylon rather than the flat cliff of a slab. From the upper floors the views over the lake and the grid are a sublime of their own, but they are the site’s, credited only as far as the narrow top frames them. At the foot the building is less moving: the plaza and the street level do not rise to the tower.
Norman Foster (Foster and Partners) · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Elevation comes in two registers. The first is the approach from below: one walks under a building that seems to float, looks up through the glass underbelly, and rides the escalators into a hall full of reflected daylight. The atrium, ringed by the open office floors, is a true vertical space, a nave for commerce, and the sunscoop’s light moving through it is the building’s best moment. The second is the exterior at night, from Statue Square or the harbour, where the masts and trusses read as a lit skeleton, grave and exact. The register is cool, and it recurs at the ground, the hall and the facade. What holds the axis: the office floors above, where most of the building’s life is spent, are calm and well made, not elevating.
Johannes Vermeer · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
The elevation is real and of one kind: a quiet radiance, an instant made permanent. It sits in the thin white stream, the picture’s one movement, held still; in the bread, whose crust breaks into points of light; in the light on the whitewashed wall, graded from the window down and across, which carries more feeling than any face; and in the blue of the apron against the yellow of the bodice, colour at full strength in a plain room. These heights recur across the surface, so frequency within the frame is good. The range is narrow: no grandeur, no terror, no transport by scale. It is a small picture of a kitchen, and its height is the height of stillness, below works that rise across a room or a vault.
Unknown (English or French) · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Elevation is real and of one register, a jewelled and rapt stillness. It rises across the right wing as a whole: eleven angels in a blue the more intense for its expense, crowding round the Virgin with wings raised, so that blue and gold read at a distance as a single radiance. It rises in the angels’ faces, tilted and attentive, several turned toward the king; in the gesture across the hinge, the Child leaning from his mother’s arms toward the kneeling man and the king’s open hands answering him across the gap; and in the gold ground of the left wing, tooled to catch light as the viewer moves. It never changes key. There is no terror and no grandeur of scale: beauty and transport at the scale of the hand.
Steely Dan · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
Elevation is real, of one cool kind. The title track is the summit: after the hushed verses the music opens into an instrumental landscape, Wayne Shorter’s tenor solo enters, and Steve Gadd’s drumming builds over the closing vamp into a climax of a kind pop records seldom attempt, transport held in perfect control. Deacon Blues rises at each chorus into a wide, sad swell, and the horns and Pete Christlieb’s solo give its fantasy a height the man never reaches. Home at Last lifts on Bernard Purdie’s shuffle into a buoyant, weary grandeur; Peg has a bright lift. Black Cow is lustrous but level, I Got the News has energy without height, and Josie is a strut. The height is poise, never terror, and its one great peak is a single track.
Alice Munro · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Elevation comes often for a book whose voice never rises, and it comes at the turns. In “Floating Bridge” a sick woman, on the day she learns her illness may not kill her after all, is driven at night by a teenage boy onto a floating bridge across a marsh, and the boards move under her on the water: a passage back into life, given as a kiss and a sense of the dark around her. In “Nettles” two people who knew each other as children shelter from a storm in the weeds of a golf course, and he tells her that his young son was killed in an accident at home. The close of “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” is a recognition whose meaning is left unsettled. Held below the higher reaches because the register is cool by design, and each height is a single turn inside a story.
Anonymous · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
The work’s elevation is wonder, ʿajab, and it rises often. The jinni leaves the fisherman’s brass vessel as smoke and gathers into a giant; the Prince of the Black Isles is stone from the waist down, his city become a lake of coloured fish; the third dervish’s Magnetic Mountain draws the nails from ships, and a palace of forty doors keeps one forbidden; Sindbad has his Valley of Diamonds and his roc. The cold height is the City of Brass, where Musa ibn Nusayr’s company crosses the desert to a city of the dead whose walls are written with verses on the vanity of kings: the one sustained elegy, and the highest point. Held below the summit because the register is often formula, and the war romance and the anecdotes are level ground.
Aeschylus · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
Height in two kinds. The dreadful: the parodos, where the din of chariots, the shaken spears and the stones on the walls arrive as sound before sense, so that the women hear the siege they cannot see; the Capaneus and Hippomedon speeches, boast set on boast; the seventh speech and Eteocles’ recognition, the play’s summit. The cold grandeur: Amphiaraus, the just man in an unjust army, who carries no device, because “ou gar dokein aristos all’ einai thelei”
“he wishes not to seem the best but to be it” (592), and who foresees his own grave in enemy earth. The stasimon on the curse and the iron that divides the inheritance rises again. Frequency is the charge: the opening third and the lament are lower.
Umberto Boccioni · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Elevation is real and of one kind: grandeur in motion, a figure that seems to walk into a wind of its own making. It rises at the first sight of the profile, where the stride and the backward flare read as one surge, and again in the turn round the figure, where the masses that were flame from the side close into a narrow, almost classical upright from the front. The Winged Victory of Samothrace, which Marinetti set below the motor car, is the figure’s real rival, and in the elevation it borrows from her, the forward step into resisting air, it meets her on her own ground. What holds the axis: the figure is well under life size, the transport is one sustained height rather than a repeated rising, and the surface of flame and metal can go cold and decorative under museum light.
H. H. Richardson · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Elevation comes twice, in two registers. Outside, the rock-faced granite banded in brownstone gathers the arms, the apse and the turrets up to the tower, so that from across the square the church reads as one heaped mountain of masonry. The effect holds from every side and at every hour, and it holds against the glass of the John Hancock Tower beside it, which reflects it. Inside, the crossing opens upward over a room dim and warm with red, green and gold, lit by coloured glass, and La Farge’s opalescent window at the west end gives the interior a glow unlike any Gothic Revival church of its time. The elevation is of richness and weight rather than of soaring: the arms are low, and much of the room is dark and enclosed.
Metallica · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent and of the dreadful kind. Fight Fire with Fire reaches it at the turn from acoustic prelude to thrash, and again at its close in a sound of explosion. For Whom the Bell Tolls opens on a bell and a distorted bass line that sounds like a voice, then sets a riff that advances as slowly as men in mud. Fade to Black rises twice, in its harmonised acoustic melody and in the closing section, where the outro solo climbs to the record’s warmest height. Creeping Death has the summit in its bridge, “Die by my hand”, the destroyer given a crowd’s voice. Escape and Trapped Under Ice stay level; the top is high but not transfiguring.
Winslow Homer · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The elevation is terror and grandeur of one kind, the sea’s indifference. The swell lifts the boat at a slant against a low horizon, the water deep blue-green under a heavy sky, and the man’s stillness sets off the motion around him. The sharks give a close terror, physical and immediate; the waterspout gives a far one, the scale of weather. The height recurs across the field rather than living in one spot. Two things hold it down. The perils are legible in the illustrator’s way, so the picture names the danger rather than letting it overwhelm. And the size: under a square metre, it is a sublime held at arm’s length. Homer’s seas at Prouts Neck, with nothing in them but water and rock, rise higher.
Thomas Cole · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Elevation of two kinds held in one field. The storm is the dread kind: a dark mass of cloud with rain still falling across the left, the wind in the broken tree. The valley is the serene kind: a great lit distance with a river curling through it, seen from a height that makes the viewer feel the size of the land. Their meeting along the diagonal, where the light breaks out from under the cloud, is the summit moment, and it runs the whole width of the canvas rather than standing at one point; the eye returns to the storm, the loop and the far hills. Held below the top: the grandeur is that of a view from a known lookout, not of the overwhelming, and the pastoral half is beautiful more than transporting.
Jonathan Demme · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The register is dread, and it rises often. The first walk down the hospital corridor, past the cells to the glass, with Lecter already standing, waiting. The Memphis escape, where music plays in the cage and a guard is hung aloft like a winged figure, a terrible tableau. The doorbell, cut so that the raid’s ring sounds in an empty house while Starling stands alone at the true door. The cellar in total darkness, seen through Gumb’s night-vision goggles, his hand near her face, the hammer of a revolver cocked. Catherine at the bottom of the well, looking up. Howard Shore’s score carries a low, grieving undertow toward lament. Held at its figure because the elevation is almost all terror, much of the middle is level procedure, and the coda turns the height into a joke.
Michel Gondry · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The elevation is frequent, and it comes as loss made visible. The two lie on the frozen Charles River at night, the ice cracking under the stars; the bookstore goes dark shelf by shelf around them; the beach house at Montauk falls into the sea around a remembered couch while she says “Meet me in Montauk”. Joel is a child under a kitchen table, Carrey shrunk by forced perspective; a street empties as he runs through it. Jon Brion’s score, a few piano figures and small strings, keeps the feeling bare. The comic register cuts the height by design, and the summits are many but never prolonged; the elevation is not sustained across whole movements.
Pierre Peysson and Jean de Louvres, under Benedict XII and Clement VI · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Elevation is real and comes chiefly from mass. The west front seen from the Place du Palais is a cliff of ashlar ribbed by tall machicolated arches, almost without openings low down: grandeur of a hard and threatening kind. Within, the Grande Chapelle is a vast single vessel, its height and width felt at once; the Grande Audience under its two aisles of vaults has a weight the chapel lacks. The Cour d’honneur filled for the Festival at night is sublime in a sense the builders did not foresee. Held below the top: the elevation is of one kind, mass and enclosure, seldom rising to light, and much of the interior is bare stone and empty rooms.
Guillermo del Toro · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The film rises often, and in both registers. Terror: the Pale Man waking, setting the eyes into his palms and lifting his hands to see, while the hourglass runs and the girl eats the grape; Vidal sewing his own slit mouth in the mirror and drinking through the wound. Pity: Mercedes’ wordless lullaby, carried by the score from the first scene; the mother’s death in the bed among the burned root. Grandeur: the last descent, the girl’s blood running into the well, and the throne room in gold, set against the hum over her body. Held below the top because much of the height is the fairy tale’s own imagery, and the strongest moments are shocks of horror that do not open further.
George Saunders · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
The register is comic, and the elevation comes through it, often. “Victory Lap” rises when the boy breaks every rule he was raised by and strikes the abductor with a geode, and rises again, more dreadfully, when he cannot stop and the girl must stop him. “Escape from Spiderhead” reaches its height at its end, when the voice continues past the narrator’s death, above the building, in a lift the book has not prepared and does not need to. “Tenth of December” holds a frozen pond, a boy through the ice and a dying man in the cold water, and sustains its height for pages rather than for a sentence. Held below the higher figures because the comic surface caps several stories by design, and the heights are lyric reversals inside short forms, not a height held across a structure.
Anselm Kiefer · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Elevation of dread and grandeur, by height and by matter. The case rises over the viewer, and the lead is felt as weight overhead, a mass held up by iron. Glass lies underfoot and catches the light, so the lowest point of the work is also its most brilliant. The arched pane at the top reads as a church window or a tympanum: light where there is no image, only a name. The eye’s path from that pane down the shelves to the floor is the work’s own descent, and it repeats each time one looks up. What holds the axis: one object, one encounter, one register; the height lives in scale and mass more than in recurring summits; and lead and iron are grey by nature, so the elevation does not change in kind.
Tang builders · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Elevation comes at the approach and under the eaves. The hall stands at the top of the temple on its terrace, reached up a steep stair, so it is seen first from below, its roof broad and low against the hill, and the climb is the passage into it. The eaves are the summit of the effect: the bracket clusters spread from the column heads in tiers and carry the roof far over the head, and the shadow under them is deep. Inside, a dim aisle opens on a crowded platform under a low lattice ceiling: gravity and enclosure, not height. The elevation is in the whole profile, not one moment. Held in the low eights because it is a height of repose and mass, not of transport.
Vincent van Gogh · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The elevation is real and immediate: the whole field burns, and the heads at the top, their discs built up like matter, stand from the pale wall with the force of something alive and spent at once. It is warm elevation, transport by colour, with an undertow in the drooping heads at the left and in the seed heads, whose dark centres and ragged petals bring decay into the light. Height and frequency both count. The height here is one, sustained across the canvas rather than repeated in separate summits: the picture rises once, all of it together, and holds. The lower third, the table and the base of the vase, is quieter and serves the height above it. A single canvas of this size cannot rise again and again, and the figure records that.
Wassily Kandinsky · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Elevation is real, in two registers, and it recurs across the field. Dread at the right centre, where black lines cut across hot colour like breaking timbers, the event at its most violent. Transport at the left, where colour dissolves into a rose and violet haze and the eye is let go. Grandeur in the scale: three metres of field with no horizon or edge to stand on, so that the viewer is inside the flood rather than before a picture of one. The diagonals carry the eye between the centres with a motion no small canvas could give. What holds it is frequency against density: the summits compete, and first sight gives tumult before height. Above Broadway Boogie Woogie (8.0) for range; below The Starry Night (9.2) and Water Lilies (9.0).
Built for Yajnavaraha · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The elevation here is beauty, not grandeur, and it comes often. The red stone warms toward evening. The flame-edged frames of the pediments rise in tiers over the library doors. The devatas stand in their niches under carved canopies with a poise that has made them among the most admired figures of Khmer carving. The colonnettes at the sanctuary doors are cut so deep that the stone reads as wood or metal. A visitor meets one height after another at close range, and there are few flat passages. But the work never reaches the overwhelming kind of elevation: the height of each moment is limited by the scale the patron chose. The frequency is what holds the axis above 8.
Max Ernst · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The elevation is dreadful and sustained. The extent of the panorama, the cold clean sky over the putrefying land, and the way every passage of the long canvas teems with the same eaten matter give a steady terror of extent: the sublime of the ruined world rather than of the storm. It rises repeatedly, not once, since each section, looked into, opens a further gallery of encrusted forms. What holds it below the high band is that the small scale of the canvas and its jewel-like finish keep the terror at a distance. It is a horror one inspects, not one that overwhelms the body, and the figures do not rise to the pitch of the land.
Thai builders, under Rama II and Rama III · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Elevation is real and frequent. From the river the tower lifts out of a low city in a single tapering figure, and at dawn and at sunset, the hours the name invokes, the porcelain takes the light across the whole surface. Close to, it changes kind: the stairs are steep enough that the climb is felt as fear in the body, so the ascent of the mountain is a physical fact, and the terrace returns the city and the river below. Near at hand the detail is beautiful at the scale of a hand, flower after flower. What holds the axis is that the building has no inside: no room encloses the sublime, and the experience is of an object and a climb, the rise repeated on fewer registers.
Gustav Klimt · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Elevation is real and of one kind: radiance. The leaf changes with the light and with the viewer’s place before it, so that the field burns and dims, and the face, pale and small inside it, is the more startling for being the only soft thing there. It rises in more than one place: the wall of gold flecked with discs; the cascade of the gown with its eyes; the red mouth and dark hair against the gold; the hands twisted together at the breast. The register is warm and luxurious, with a cold undertow in the pallor and the enclosure. Held below the high eights because the elevation is one effect sustained rather than several heights reached, and because it is splendour without terror or depth of feeling: the transport of richness more than of revelation.
Antonio Canova · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Elevation here is beauty, sustained rather than single, and it rises from every main view: from the front, the ring of arms round the two faces; from the side, the crossing opening like a pair of compasses with the wings at full span; from behind, the long line of his back and leg and the turn of her torso up to him. The height lives in the near meeting of the faces, to which the eye returns from every side, and in the wings, cut thin enough to read as feather and air. The register is warm, lyrical and still. There is no terror; the deathlike sleep is present only in her heavy lower body, and the group does not reach the dread the highest works carry.
Mastodon · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
Elevation is the record’s chief power, and it comes often. Oblivion rises at its chorus, the sung voices lifted over the guitars into a hard, open height. The Czar builds over nearly eleven minutes from a slow, keyboard-tinted opening to Spiral, where the guitars climb in a long, mounting figure, the grandest moment on the record, dreadful and exalted at once. The title track’s height is grave, a slow, heavy elegy with a raw guest voice. The Last Baron ends in a long instrumental ascent and a sung return. Quintessence and Ghost of Karelia have drive more than height, Divinations brilliance more than grandeur. The highest moments belong to the instruments; the singing at the peaks strains. It stands below ’Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend! at 8.7.
Denis Villeneuve · Film
8.1 · Tier IV
The register is dread, and the film rises in it repeatedly. The Juárez convoy: black vehicles in formation crossing the city over Jóhann Jóhannsson’s low pulse, the bodies hanging under the overpass, and the halt in the jammed lanes at the crossing, where the guns come out among ordinary traffic. The tunnel descent: the team walking down into the dark against an orange sky, figures in silhouette until the horizon takes them, the most elevated image in the film; then the passage underground in night vision and thermal. Alarcón’s dinner, quiet and absolute. The coda, gunfire beyond a football pitch and the boys’ pause, a small sublime of indifference. Held at its figure because the elevation is of one kind, and the investigative scenes at the middle are level.
Byzantine, under Justinian · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The elevation is real, and it comes most from building and place together. Walls of pale granite stand in a narrow valley under bare red mountains; the fortress is small against the massif, and that scale is the experience. Inside, the passage rises: from the narthex through the sixth-century doors into a dim nave hung with lamps, to the apse, where the gold of the mosaic and the white figure of Christ in the mandorla gather what light there is. The second height is the Chapel of the Burning Bush, entered without shoes, low and enclosed, the spot itself. What holds it: the nave is a modest basilica under a later painted ceiling, crowded with fittings, and the elevation is carried by site, apse and chapel rather than by the space of the church.
Tulunid, under Ahmad ibn Tulun · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Elevation by breadth and repetition, not height. The court is the summit: a square of open ground closed by arcades of one rhythm on four sides, the domed fountain at its centre, the light falling flat and white on the floor and the shadows of the arches marking the hour. From the deep qibla halls it is seen through ranks of piers, dark giving onto bright, and the passage from shade into the open square is renewed at every entry. The minaret gives a second ascent, by an outside stair, with the city and the Citadel below. What holds it: one register, grave and calm, renewed for everyone who enters, rising neither to terror nor to the transport of a lifted interior.
Massive Attack · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
The record rises rarely, but once to real height. Unfinished Sympathy is the summit: the strings enter over a hard breakbeat and Shara Nelson’s voice climbs against them, a public grief made out of a private one, and the long string coda leaves the beat behind. Safe from Harm reaches a dread of its own as the bassline tightens under Nelson’s chorus. Hymn of the Big Wheel lifts at the close, Horace Andy’s high, trembling voice over a slow swell, a hymn in fact as well as in title, and One Love has a quieter beauty in the same voice. The rest is cool by design: Blue Lines and Five Man Army are mood and swagger, Daydreaming and Lately lovely without height. One summit, two high points and a long plateau.
Johannes Vermeer · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Elevation is real and of one kind: beauty, quiet and immediate, at first sight and on every return. It rises at the eyes, whose wet highlights catch the viewer; at the lips, with their two small points of light; at the earring, a shape made almost wholly of a reflection and a glint; and at the blue of the turban against the dark. The light on the face is soft, and the passage from lit cheek to shadowed neck has no line in it, so that the head seems to breathe. What holds the axis is the absence of any other register: no grandeur, no terror, no transport by scale. The canvas is the size of a page and its beauty is close rather than overwhelming. It rises at several points across one head, but the summit is one note.
Roman, under Caracalla · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Height is real and frequent, and it is the ruin’s own. The walls of the bath block rise as cliffs of brick and concrete, and the visitor reads the size of rooms whose roofs are gone by the height of their springing. The frigidarium, open to the sky, gives the scale of a vault that is no longer there; the caldarium’s piers stand round a void about 35 metres across. Shelley’s word for them, “mountainous”, is the right one: grandeur and its fall at once, renewed by each season of overgrowth and light, and in summer by a stage lit at night between the piers. What holds it: the register is mostly mass and loss, the lit interior under its vaults is gone, and the ruin seldom rises to one summit moment.
Built for Tokugawa Iemitsu · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Elevation comes often and in two registers. The first is splendour: the white, gold and colour of the Yōmeimon and the Karamon set against dark cedar trunks give a dazzlement few buildings in any tradition match, and it returns at each court. The second is rarer and higher. Past the Sakashitamon the stair climbs through cedar and moss, the colour falls away, and the tomb pagoda stands in bronze in a plain enclosure under the trees. That descent from glitter into austerity is the shrine’s one moment of awe as against wonder. What holds the axis: splendour that crowds the eye is a lower kind of height than a single governing light. The frequency is high; the summit less so.
Bob Marley and the Wailers · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
Height comes often and is of one kind: warmth with weight under it. Natural Mystic is the summit, the fade-in from nothing, the slow pulse, the voice warning of a thing “blowing through the air”, prophecy rendered as weather. Exodus rises by accumulation, horns, the answering chorus, a bass that never moves off its figure, until repetition becomes transport. Waiting in Vain reaches beauty in its melody and in Junior Marvin’s guitar break. One Love lifts at the close, a hymn sung as a dance. The frequency is held down by the middle of side one, which drives rather than rises, and by Jamming, Turn Your Lights Down Low and Three Little Birds, which are pleasure and charm. Grandeur and terror appear only as menace; the record is not dreadful where it could have been.
Abbasid builders, under al-Mutawakkil · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Height is real and comes from the Malwiya. A cone of brick winding to a point over a plain with nothing else on it is one of the great single images of building: its figure changes as one walks round it, the ramp reads as a line drawn up the sky, and the climb, narrowing, unrailed and exposed, turns elevation into vertigo. From the top the enclosure lies below as a plan, a second elevation of another kind. The walls give grandeur by extent, their towers in raking light. Frequency holds it: inside the walls is an empty field, the forest of piers is lost, and the register is single, grandeur and dread with no intimacy.
Vijayanagara builders · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent and in places high. The open hall, seen from its plinth, is a forest of composite piers whose rearing beasts and clustered shafts turn mass into upright motion in the hardest stone, with the light falling between them. The stone chariot, small as it is, has the force of a single image: a procession arrested and made permanent. The tones of the struck colonnettes add a third register. What holds the axis is scale: there is no great vertical and no single overwhelming space, and the shrine is low and dark by design. The grandeur the ruin takes from the boulders round it belongs to the site and is not credited. The height is that of the carved hall, repeated, not of a sublime volume.
Frederick William Stevens · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Elevation comes often. On the approach from the street the wings draw the eye to the central block and the dome lifts above the gables, grand in the full Victorian sense; at dusk the stone and the dome against the sky make one of the great urban sights of the century. Inside, the booking hall under its ribbed vault painted with stars is a true elevation, colour and height held over the daily press of passengers, and the carved detail at close range rewards the eye again and again. Held from the top because the register is magnificence rather than awe: the building delights and impresses more than it transports, and its other interiors are offices.
Giuseppe Mengoni · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Height is high, and frequency is high, which is rare in a commercial building. Elevation comes at the threshold: from the open piazza, under the great arch, into a long nave of light whose roof is sky seen through iron. It comes again at the octagon, where the arms open into a domed space about as high as a church’s crossing, a cage of ribs and glass filled with daylight over the lunettes and the floor’s arms of the nation. It recurs with the day and the weather, light changing on stucco and marble, and at night with the lamps in the vaults. The register is festive grandeur, never dread. What holds the figure is the dress at eye level, shopfronts and signs, so that the elevation is above the head and the ground is a market: the sublime belongs to the roof and the octagon, not to the street.
Ragnar Östberg · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
The building rises often. The tower seen across Riddarfjärden from Södermalm, its brick shaft carrying the gold crowns into the light, is one of the great urban silhouettes of the north. The arcade, where the court opens through columns onto the lake, gives a quieter elevation. The broad stair descending into the brick court of the Blue Hall has a processional grandeur, and the council chamber’s dim painted roof a gravity of its own. The Golden Hall, entered from the stair, is a shock of gold, and here the axis is held: its elevation is partly that of display, closer to spectacle than to transport, and the topmost moments do not reach the highest the medium has built.
Neil Young with Crazy Horse · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
Elevation is rough, warm and dreadful at once, and it comes often. Cinnamon Girl lifts at once on the riff and the high harmony over it. Down by the River is the first summit: the solos rise out of a two-chord vamp by insistence, a single bent note held against Whitten’s rhythm until it becomes a cry. Cowgirl in the Sand is the higher, a long, ragged ascent in which the lead keeps finding and losing the line while the band swells under it, so that the reaching is itself the height. Running Dry reaches the dreadful kind. The title song is bright rather than high, and Round & Round and The Losing End stay level. Four of seven rise, and the height is of one kind, transport by grinding.
Steven Spielberg · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
The elevation is frequent and of one kind, warm wonder, with dread as its counterweight. The rises: the ship in the forest at the opening, lit from below in fog; the bicycle crossing the full moon, an image so complete it became its maker’s emblem; the bicycles lifting over the suburb at sunset at the end of the chase; the glowing heart and the reviving flower; the departure, the rainbow trail over the forest under Williams’s finale. The dread is real: the house sealed in plastic, men in spacesuits at the windows, the creature grey and drying in the creek bed. Held from the top because the register is single and pressed: the score asks for feeling where the image has already given it, and the summits are sweetness more than grandeur.
Soundgarden · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent, and much of it dreadful. Black Hole Sun’s chorus is the height everyone knows: a prayer for annihilation sung in a soaring line over a guitar turned liquid, beauty and catastrophe in one breath, and its descending solo dissolves rather than climbs. Fell on Black Days rises by weight, the voice climbing over a riff that refuses to lift with it. 4th of July is the sublime of terror, the lowest guitar of the record grinding under a voice that seems to come from inside the ground. Like Suicide builds for seven minutes to a release half ecstasy, half collapse. The flats are Kickstand, Mailman and Fresh Tendrils, and Spoonman’s height is exhilaration rather than transport.
Richard Rogers · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Height is high, frequency good, inside and out. Elevation comes in the atrium seen from the Room: galleries rising the full height of the block to the glass vault, light falling the whole way down, the escalators crossing in it. It comes outside, seen obliquely from the narrow streets and from Leadenhall Market, the steel towers climbing past the cornice line of the old City and the glass lifts moving up their faces; and at night, when the building is lit in blue and becomes a machine of light. The register is exhilaration in mechanism, never dread, and it recurs at every approach. Held lower: the office floors are offices, the streets give no room to stand back, and the one great interior is repeated rather than varied.
Andrei Tarkovsky · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
The summits are among the highest in film. The house burns in one take while the household runs across the wet field, Alexander evades the ambulance men and Maria comes on her bicycle. The boy waters the dead tree and lies beneath it, and the camera rises up the bare branches as the Bach returns. Alexander and Maria rise together above the bed. The jets shake the house in the evening, and a long silence follows; visions in monochrome show a ruined street. The herding calls and the shakuhachi make the night strange. The elevation is dreadful and devout by turns. Held well below the top by frequency: the first part is long and level, a chamber piece of talk, and the heights come late, in a few great blocks rather than throughout.
Denis Johnson · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent, and it is the book’s distinctive power: a prose that reaches visionary height out of ordinary squalor. The opening sets the pitch, a monkey shot by a young sailor on the day of Kennedy’s death, an absurd killing set against a national grief. The Colonel’s tales of his own war, told as legend, have a grandeur the book lets stand and then undermines. Storm’s descent into madness after the Colonel is gone, and James Houston’s in the field, reach real terror; Kathy’s grief and her late faith reach a strange tenderness. Held below the higher reaches because the long middle runs at ground level, in archive work, drinking and talk, and its heights are fewer than the book’s pitch promises.
Mimar Hayruddin · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Height and frequency together. The arch is one of the most elevating single figures in stone in the Balkans: a thin ring thrown high over a green river between grey banks, its curve reading from below as too light for its material. The elevation recurs from many stations: from each bank, from the water’s edge below, and from the crown, where the deck falls away on both sides and the drop to the river opens beneath the parapet. The dive from the crown, a body falling some twenty metres to the water, makes the height felt in the most direct way. What holds the axis: the work is one figure, and it rises once, fully, from every side, not through a sequence of spaces.
Woody Allen · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Elevation here is frequent, and visual. The overture is one of the great openings of its decade: skyline, streets, rain, fireworks over the park on the Rhapsody’s climax, a voice correcting itself beneath the images. The dawn shot of Isaac and Mary on a bench under the Queensboro Bridge, small against the span, holds the film’s whole romantic idea in one frame. The planetarium, silhouettes against projected moons and craters, is beauty made from darkness. The carriage ride with Tracy and the last close-up of Isaac’s face each rise. What holds the axis below the high eights is the source of the elevation: almost always the city or the light, rarely the people, so that the transport belongs to the photography and to Gershwin more than to the drama.
U2 · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
Elevation comes on six of eleven tracks, all warm. Beautiful Day holds the height: a muted, chugging verse over a drum loop opens into the chorus, and the bridge, the flood and the world seen from above, releases The Edge’s ringing guitar, the old sound returned as release. Walk On builds from a hush to a litany, and its close is a real lift. Kite rises on its final passage, the voice straining upward, and Stuck in a Moment reaches a gospel warmth in its falsetto. In a Little While has a small, worn beauty, and Grace ends on a quiet height. Held from the top: the height thins after the sixth track, Elevation has force rather than height, and terror and the cold sublime are absent.
George Lucas · Film
7.9 · Tier III
Elevation is frequent and of one warm, grand kind. The opening shot is a summit in the first minute: the Star Destroyer passing overhead and filling the frame for seconds on end. Luke at the twin sunset, with Williams’s theme for the Force rising, is the second and the best. The station seen whole, “That’s no moon”; Kenobi lowering his sabre to Vader and vanishing; the jump to lightspeed; the trench run, the targeting computer pushed away and the station exploding; the long aisle of the throne room under the march. Ben Burtt’s sound, the sabre’s hum, Vader’s breath, the scream of the fighters, carries much of the height. Held at the figure because the elevation thrills more than it deepens: it seldom passes exhilaration into terror or grief, and the losses are let go quickly.
A. M. Cassandre · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
The elevation is real, and it is the oldest kind: grandeur through scale, the mass that exceeds the eye. The low viewpoint makes the viewer look up, and the hull widens toward the viewer as if about to pass over; the birds turn the ship into a cliff. The graded black of the bow against the light gives the steel a gravity flat colour would not, and the small white of the superstructure at the summit is the release. It is a sublime of power, slightly dreadful, and at poster size it works on the street at a distance and again up close. What holds it below the top is frequency: the sheet rises once, in one impression, and does not rise again. That is the form’s nature, and it is not charged as a fault.
Denis Villeneuve · Film
7.9 · Tier III
Elevation is the film’s strongest gift, and it recurs. The heighliner’s hold, a dark chamber into which frigates descend; the ornithopters beating like dragonflies over open sand; the worm rising beneath the harvester, its mouth opening above Paul as spice hangs in the air and he stands still within it; the Sardaukar’s chanted blood rite, a terror made of voice; the night assault, ships over the city and the shields falling; Kynes calling the worm on her killers. Zimmer’s score and the sound design lift scene after scene. The sublime is cold and colossal, and that is no charge. What holds it below the high eights is uniformity: the heights are of one kind, and the human summits are reached less fully.
Roman · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Height is high at one place and real elsewhere. At the Azoguejo the arcade stands nearly thirty metres over the square, the lower arches so narrow that they read as slots of sky between granite piers, and the eye climbs two tiers to a channel that seems too slight for what holds it. The elevation is of weight held without mortar, stones the size of a body balanced in the air for nineteen centuries. It recurs along the line, the arches lowering as the ground rises, the arcade turning and reappearing at the ends of streets, changing with the light on the granite. The register is grandeur, calm rather than terrible. The summit is a single stretch: elsewhere the arcade is a long, low, regular wall of arches whose effect is steadiness, and there is no interior.
Queen · Music
7.9 · Tier III
Elevation is real and comes often, mostly of the grand and theatrical kind. Bohemian Rhapsody rises three times: the unaccompanied opening harmony, the mock opera as the voices climb to the cry of “Beelzebub”, and the hard-rock break; its piano coda settles into a lower, real height. The Prophet’s Song reaches dread, a storm and a flood vision and then a long unaccompanied passage in which one voice is sent back on itself in canon. Love of My Life holds a tender height over piano; ’39 lifts at its chorus; God Save the Queen ends in ceremony. The first side stays mostly level, and camp, the manner of the heights, is also their limit. Five or six of twelve tracks rise.
Lev Rudnev · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Height is high, and frequency fairly high outside. Elevation comes in the approach: up the axis from the river and the hill, the building widening as one nears it until the wings fill the field of view and the tower climbs in stages out of them. It comes in the figure seen across Moscow, from the river, from the Luzhniki side, from the city’s ring, its silhouette unmistakable at any hour and lit at night; and in the mass at close range, which has the dread as well as the grandeur of a state that builds on this scale. The register is triumph with menace beneath it, the sublime of power. Its breadth gives it a sublime from the ground and not only from afar. It falls within: the wings and residences are long corridors of ordinary rooms, and the inner rooms rarely rise.
César Pelli · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Height and frequency are both real. The pair seen from the park or along the approach roads, two fluted silver shafts rising together, is an elevation of grandeur. The bridge, a thin span between them at mid-height, turns size into figure: it gives the void between the towers a scale and makes the sky a doorway. At night the lit towers recur across the city as its sign, and by day the faceted skin takes the tropical light differently at every hour. The register is exhilaration without dread. It falls within: the office floors are offices and the base is lost in the mall, so that the sublime is gathered in the upper body and the silhouette.
Aphex Twin · Music
7.8 · Tier III
Elevation is frequent and gentle, and in a few places high. Xtal reaches it at once: a slow chord bed, the looped voice rising over it, a beauty that seems already remembered. Tha is the summit of another kind, nine minutes in which a muffled pulse and murmured voices under a dark pad come close to awe by duration alone. Ageispolis lifts on a simple figure over a deep bass; Heliosphan and Ptolemy hold a clear, bright suspension; Actium closes in a wide calm. Green Calx and Pulsewidth have energy rather than height. Seven or eight of thirteen tracks rise, but the height is never grand or terrible: it is transport by reverie, the sublime of the small room.
The National · Music
7.8 · Tier III
Elevation comes often, as release from pressure. Terrible Love begins buried in distortion and builds until drums and voice break into a torrent. Bloodbuzz Ohio carries a forward rush on its rolling drums, and Afraid of Everyone tightens dread into a kind of grandeur. England swells through brass and strings into the largest sound on the record, and Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks rises as a hymn in which the voice is joined and lifted. Sorrow and Runaway reach a quieter beauty. The height is bounded: it seldom reaches terror or transport, because the low, level baritone keeps the self in the room, and Anyone’s Ghost, Little Faith and Lemonworld stay on the plain.
George Gershwin · Music
7.8 · Tier III
Height is real and returns. The opening is one of the great entrances in twentieth-century music: a trill and a rise that bends into a smear, a laugh turned into a call. The Andantino reaches the ballad’s transport, the long tune laid out in strings and saxophones over a slow bass, and the piano’s restatement keeps it aloft. The Grandioso return is the work’s grandeur, the tune of private longing made public. The cadenzas, above all the long central solo, rise by brilliance. Held below the top because the kind of height is narrow, the transport of the ballad and the exhilaration of speed, never terror or the cold sublime, and because the middle episodes are high spirits more than height.
Herzog and de Meuron, with Ai Weiwei and Li Xinggang · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Elevation comes often and at large scale. From the Olympic Green the lattice rises as a mass with no edge to read its size by, and the eye cannot find where structure ends and pattern begins. At night the red bowl burns through the grey steel: the building’s most memorable image, and one it gives every lit evening, not once. Inside, a bowl of 91,000 under the open saddle, the sky cut to an ellipse, has the grandeur of the arena at full size, and two opening ceremonies used it as an instrument of awe. Under the shell the concourse is a forest of inclined steel, a space of real strangeness. What holds the axis: the register is grandeur and spectacle more than transport, the bowl is a competent arena and no more, and much of the elevation depends on the crowd and the lighting.
Imre Steindl · Architecture
7.7 · Tier III
Elevation is frequent and real. The Danube front is one of the great river elevations of Europe: long, symmetrical, lifted by the dome, doubled in the water, and seen across the river from Buda and from the bridges at every hour, and lit at night. Inside, the main staircase rises under painted vaults and gilding toward the Dome Hall, and the hall itself, high, ribbed and ringed with figures, gives the procession its summit. The chambers are rich and lofty. The register is grandeur, sustained across the whole building. It stops below the highest band because the elevation is of one kind throughout, magnificence of surface and silhouette, gold and pinnacles repeated, and rarely rises to awe: the building does not have a space that changes the one who enters it.
Olafur Eliasson · Visual art
7.7 · Tier III
The height is real and was sustained for five months: a sun the size of a building low in a vast dim hall, the far wall lost in haze, the ceiling holding an inverted crowd. The single wavelength gave the space the stillness of late afternoon or of an eclipse, and the visitors’ response, lying down on the concrete as on a beach or a field, is the best evidence that the elevation was felt rather than admired. It belongs to the tradition of the Romantic sublime. Held for two reasons: the work rises once and holds there, by one route; and it shows how its sun is made, so that the transport comes with knowing. The coolness is not charged. The singleness is.
Fleet Foxes · Music
7.7 · Tier III
Elevation is the record’s chief good, and it comes often. “Sun It Rises” opens on unaccompanied voices, a sound of morning, and the band’s first entrance is a lift. “White Winter Hymnal” stacks its round until one stanza becomes a crowd. The turn of “Ragged Wood” to its slow second part is a real arrival. “Tiger Mountain Peasant Song” reaches the grave, quiet height of a hymn sung by one man at a graveside; the close of “Quiet Houses” is transport by repetition; “Blue Ridge Mountains” rises from its piano opening into the fullest singing on the record; and “Oliver James” ends on one voice, the purest height of the eleven. What holds the axis: the height is nearly always one kind, massed voices in a reverberant space, with little terror or grandeur.
Beach House · Music
7.7 · Tier III
Elevation is the record’s gift, and it comes often. The title track opens on strings and keyboard arpeggios that lift at once. Superstar is the summit: a synthesiser line that climbs and doubles, the voice riding over it, a swell that keeps rising past where a song would stop. Over and Over, long and patient, builds to a height of its own. Pink Funeral and Hurts to Love reach a cool, string-lit beauty. Held from the top on three counts: the heights are all of one kind, warm and dreamlike, never terror or grandeur; across eighty-four minutes the same swell, repeated, becomes expected, so that late heights land lower than early ones; and several middle tracks keep a level shimmer without rising.
John Nash · Architecture
7.6 · Tier III
The elevation is real, and it recurs. The Banqueting Room, its dome painted as a sky of plantain leaves and a silvered dragon holding the great chandelier at its centre, and the Music Room, with its gilded, scaled ceiling over cockle-shell coving and its lotus lamps, reach transport by excess: the eye has nowhere to rest. The Saloon, the Long Gallery with its painted glass and its iron stairs made as bamboo, and the white domes and pierced screens of the exterior against the sea light each rise in their own register. That register is wonder and dazzle, the theatre’s and the fairground’s sublime, close to delight and rarely to awe; there is no dread and little grandeur of space, since the rooms are not vast. Frequent and high within its kind.
M83 · Music
7.5 · Tier III
Elevation is the record’s purpose and its chief good, and it comes often. Unrecorded rises early and steeply, its synthesiser mass climbing over a hard machine beat into something grand and almost triumphal: the first height. Run Into Flowers reaches a quieter, brighter one, tenderness at full volume. The slow pieces have a cold, wide beauty, the sense of looking down from a height at lights. Lower Your Eyelids to Die with the Sun is the summit, a long build that keeps adding weight until the sound becomes a storm, the dreadful sublime of the title’s death in the sun, and then a release. What holds the figure is the repetition of one means, the swell, so that by the middle the heights are anticipated, and several of the shorter pieces stay level, held in atmosphere without ascent.
Giovanni Boccaccio · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Height is real and intermittent, as a comic book’s must be. The dreadful ceiling is the plague, the dead carried out of doors and the city emptied, grandeur reached in a plain inventory. The fourth day has its tragic heights: Ghismonda before her father with her lover’s heart in a golden cup, Lisabetta weeping over the pot of basil that holds the head, the eaten heart. Nastagio’s vision of the hunted woman in the pinewood of Ravenna reaches terror; Federigo’s falcon, served to the lady who came to ask for it, a quiet height of loss. Ciappelletto’s confession and Frate Cipolla’s sermon are transport of the comic kind. But perhaps fifteen tales of the hundred rise, and the bulk of the second, seventh and eighth days stays level by design.
Fyodor Dostoevsky · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Elevation here is dreadful and seldom, and frequency is the charge. The first part has an exhilaration of thought, the conscious mouse nursing its insult for forty years, the crystal palace at which one cannot even stick out one’s tongue, but it is the height of argument more than transport. The heights come in the second part and they are real. The speech to Liza in the dark, where he paints a coffin carried out of such a house into a wet grave, and the gravediggers’ talk, until she sobs into the pillow, rises to a terrible eloquence that he himself calls a game (II.6 to 7). Then her return, his hysteria, her embrace, the money left on the table, and his run after her through snow falling straight down, to find no one. Held in the low eights because the rest is abjection and farce, flat by design, and the book rises fully only at its end.
Jan van Eyck · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
The elevation is real and of one kind: a hushed wonder at the visible world rendered without remainder. It recurs at the mirror, where the whole room bends into a disc a few centimetres across with the Passion running round its rim; at the chandelier, brass caught in daylight with one flame burning; in the light from the window across the woman’s green gown and the man’s face; and in the stillness of two people who do not look at each other. It does not rise beyond that. There is no grandeur of scale in half a square metre, no terror and no transport, and the man’s grave face and raised hand are ceremony, not exaltation. The eye moves from wonder to wonder of the same temperature.
Albrecht Dürer · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Elevation here is cold and contained, and it recurs in three places. The comet flaring over the sea under the rainbow is a light from outside the closed workshop. The woman’s face, dark against the bright stone, the whites of the eyes catching light, has a gravity that rises to dread. The great solid, too large for its place, gives the scene a weight beyond its size. But the sheet is held in the hand, and its effect is pressure in a small chamber rather than transport. Scale limits frequency, not height, and beside the vaults and altarpieces that open whole worlds the print sits clearly lower.
William Gaddis · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Elevation comes, and often cold. The opening voyage, which begins “Even Camilla had enjoyed masquerades”, passes from comedy to a death at sea under a counterfeit surgeon and a burial in a Spanish town, a grief the son carries through the whole book. The Reverend Gwyon’s turn to the sun has a strange grandeur: a minister of a Calvinist church in New England led out of his faith by an older one. Wyatt at work through the night on a picture in the manner of a dead master is the book’s recurrent height, the sacred labour carried on in bad faith. Held in the low eights because the satire of the parties is long and deliberately flat, and the heights are spaced across a very long book.
Hans Holbein the Younger · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
The elevation is real, cold, and it comes mainly once. The moment the skull resolves, from the edge of the panel, with the men themselves now smeared out of true, is a shock of dread, and it is the picture’s height. Before it there is the steady wonder of material: pink satin, fur, green damask, the globes, the lute, the light on the brass of the instruments. That is beauty of the made object, high and constant, but it is display more than transport. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is that nothing here rises by scale, space or colour: the two men are poised and still, their gaze level, and one summit moment stands in a work held at one temperature.
Laurence Sterne · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The elevation is frequent and small, and it is of feeling more than grandeur. Yorick’s death, with “Alas, poor YORICK!” and the black page after it, is the first height. The story of Le Fever, in the sixth volume, rises to the accusing spirit and the recording angel, who drops a tear upon Toby’s oath “and blotted it out for ever”. Trim’s dropped hat at the news of Bobby’s death is a height reached with one gesture. In the ninth volume “Time wastes too fast” opens onto a passage on the brevity of life. Against these, the chosen register is comic, bawdy and deflating, and it turns from every height almost before reaching it; the axis weighs height and frequency together, and deflation is the book’s method. Held below 8.5 for that reason, which is no fault in the book.
Jonathan Swift · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The elevation is cold and dreadful. It comes as the vertigo of a calm voice going where no voice should: the child at a year old, the skin dressed into “admirable gloves for ladies, and summer boots for fine gentlemen”, the children bought alive and dressed “hot from the knife, as we do roasting pigs”. The dread rises again with each refinement. The single height is the paragraph of other expedients, where the real remedies are named in the projector’s mouth and dismissed, and the author’s exasperation presses against the mask without breaking it. Held in the low eights because the register never leaves irony for grandeur, beauty or transport: this is the sublime of the deadpan, intense but of one kind, and never sustained beyond a few pages.
Machado de Assis · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The book refuses elevation as a principle, written, it says, with the pen of mockery and the ink of melancholy, and that refusal is what holds this axis lowest of the twelve: frequency is low by design, and the axis counts it. It rises once to real height, in the delirium of chapter VII, where Brás is carried back on a hippopotamus to the origin of the centuries, meets a vast woman who is Nature, and watches the ages pass in procession, each a mirage of happiness over the same misery; that chapter stands with the great cosmic visions of its century in a few pages. Elsewhere the lift is the cold kind: Eugênia refused for her lameness, Nhã-loló dead of yellow fever and absorbed in a paragraph, the final negatives.
Pierre Choderlos de Laclos · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The register is cold, and the book’s height is the cold kind: the terror of lucidity. It rises in Merteuil’s account of her own making, a life of self-made dissimulation set out with a calm that is itself frightening; in the rupture letter Merteuil dictates and Valmont sends to Tourvel, whose refrain, “ce n’est pas ma faute” (“it is not my fault”), is the most brutal sentence in the book; in “Hé bien! la guerre” (“Very well: war”), which ends the alliance; and in Tourvel’s last letters, which break into delirium. The last image of Merteuil, disfigured, is a grim summit. What holds the axis lower is frequency: long stretches are comedy of manners and strategy, low in temperature by design, and elevation, when it comes, is rare and sharp.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The register is cool by design, and elevation comes seldom but at height. The ceiling is the lake at night in the second part: Ottilie, hurrying back with the child after meeting Eduard, loses her balance in the boat, the child is lost to the water, and she holds him dead against her breast in the dark. Below it stand the tableaux vivants, where Ottilie, set as the Virgin of a nativity, turns artifice for a moment into devotion; her silence and her starvation; and the close, the lovers side by side in the painted chapel. What holds the axis at 8.2, the lowest of the twelve, is frequency: the middle of the book is level, measured and social, and the axis counts how often as well as how high.
Georges Seurat · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The elevation is real and of one kind: a solemn, arrested calm in full summer light, the hieratic made out of Sunday clothes. Its places: the mother and the girl at the centre, pale against the shadow; the line of figures in profile, still as a frieze; the bank of light beyond the shadow, where the grass glows; the river and its sails, opened at the left; and the air of the whole, a heat that has stopped time. Before the large canvas the strangeness becomes gravity. What holds it: one temperature and one hour, no terror, no transport of scale beyond the size of the canvas; and the stiffness that makes the gravity also makes some figures comic, which lowers the height of certain passages.
Henry James · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The register is ironic, social and analytic, and its elevations are few but real. Chapter 42 is the chief: a night of slow recognition that reaches something near dread, as the marriage reveals itself room by room. Ralph’s death at Gardencourt, with Isabel kneeling and his “if you’ve been hated you’ve also been loved”, rises without sentiment. The ghost of Gardencourt, which Ralph had told her she could see only after suffering, appears to her at dawn: the one supernatural touch in the book, and earned. The garden at the close, with Goodwood’s kiss “like white lightning”, is the last height. Between them lie long stretches whose pleasures are comic and conversational, not elevated. What holds the axis is frequency: the heights are real, and there are three of them in fifty-five chapters.
Zhang Zeduan · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The elevation is wonder at plenitude, a world that keeps arriving, not transport or terror. It rises clearly three times: at the opening, coming out of mist with bare trees and a slow procession; at the bridge, a true summit, the arch, the boat in danger and the crowd held in one surge across the silk; and at the gate, its tower lifted over the traffic and camels passing under it. Between them the wonder is sustained over five metres without a lapse. What holds the axis lowest, with The Archetypal Deep, is the altitude of that ground: the streets delight by number and observation, and delight is not the sublime; and a scroll under a quarter of a metre high, held in the hands, makes wonder intimate rather than grand.
Lu Xun · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Elevation here is cold, and the book more often punctures transport than permits it. It rises: the madman’s terror as the eyes of the village and the dog turn on him, and his last words, “救救孩子”
(save the children); the two mothers at two graves in “Medicine”, the wreath no one can account for, and the crow that will not answer the mother’s prayer but flies off; Kong Yiji coming for the last time to the tavern on his hands, his legs broken; in “My Old Home” the friend of childhood saying “老爷”
(Master), and a wall standing between them. What holds it here is frequency: the elevation thins in the middle and lighter pieces, and “Village Opera” closes the book on a gentle nostalgia rather than a height.
Ivan Goncharov · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The register is comic and elegiac, and the book’s height comes rarely and quietly. The Dream rises to a sustained idyll touched with dread: the sleeping estate in the heat, the ravine no one enters, the stillness as a kind of death. Olga singing “Casta diva”, the aria from Bellini’s Norma, is the one moment Oblomov is lifted out of himself, and the lilac branch carries the summer. The last pages rise most: Agafya Matveyevna after his death, understanding that her life had shone and gone out, and the grave on the Vyborg side with the lilac planted by it. Between these the book runs level by design, its pleasures those of comedy and observation. Few summits, all real.
Francisco Goya · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The elevation is of one kind and real: dread, the sublime of obscurity and the night. The rising mass of wings out of black aquatint, darkest where it is farthest from the sleeper, gives the plate its height; the lynx’s open eyes and the owls’ pale faces close at the man’s back are its second and third summits. The register is cold, it recurs wing on wing through the swarm, and the stillness of the helpless man makes the night larger than its sheet. Held lower for two reasons: grandeur of scale is not available to a plate the size of a book page, and the plate rises in one register only, with no counter-elevation of beauty or transport.
Spike Lee · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
The register is comic, warm and loud, and its elevations are of three kinds. Exhilaration: Rosie Perez boxing to “Fight the Power” before painted Brooklyn facades; Love Daddy’s roll call of Black musicians, name after name. Direct address that breaks the frame: the slur montage, each speaker turned to camera, a terrible comedy; Radio Raheem’s speech of the two rings, LOVE and HATE, after The Night of the Hunter, delivered into the lens. Dread and grief: Raheem’s feet lifted off the pavement in the chokehold; the crowd’s silence after the car pulls away with his body; Smiley pinning his photograph to the burning wall. Held at its figure because the summits gather in the last half hour, the long middle rises rarely, and Bill Lee’s score sometimes asks a scene for a sweetness it has not earned.
Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The elevation is real, and cool rather than transporting. At over three metres wide the field reads as an aerial vision of a whole region, and the dotted grounds shimmer across distance in a way reproduction loses. The fire at the centre, a burst of white and dark spreading through the dotting, is the one place of terror and grandeur, the more striking for the order round it. What holds the axis here: the surface is even by intent, the palette restrained, and the work rises at its centre and holds level elsewhere. Its grandeur is of extent and of the claim, a cold kind, and is credited at that.
Le Corbusier · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Elevation here is lightness and clarity, cool and lyrical. It comes in the white block seen from the drive, hovering on its thin columns over the shadowed base; in the ramp, turning back on itself in the light from above, the body rising slowly through the house; in the terrace, a room with the sky for a ceiling, the ribbon window running on unglazed so that the land is framed even out of doors; and in the solarium’s curved screens against the sky. Frequency is good: the route is built as a sequence of such moments. Height is held lower. A house of this size has no vastness, no dread and no grandeur; its register is one, serenity in light; and many who visit find it smaller and plainer than its photographs.
Anton Chekhov · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The register is grey by design, and its height is rare and earned by the greyness. It comes three times. Gromov’s outbursts in the dialogues reach a desperate eloquence, the voice of a man who has kept his mind and lost everything else. Ragin’s first night in the ward, at the barred window, with the moon and the prison in view, when he understands that this is now the whole of his world, is a cold terror. And the death: as the stroke takes him, a herd of deer runs past him, beautiful, and a peasant woman holds out a registered letter; then nothing. That close is a summit of the short form, beauty arriving unasked at the moment of extinction. The frequency is low and the rest is held level, and the axis counts both.
Philip Roth · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Roth’s register is not the sublime one, and elevation comes as terror and as elegy rather than as transport. The heights are real and they recur. The Swede climbs the stairs in a Newark slum in 1973 and finds his daughter veiled, emaciated and living in filth, a Jain who will not harm a microbe and has killed four people: a scene as terrible as any in the American fiction of its decade. The opening’s elegy for the Swede as the neighbourhood’s god rises through its own adoration. The glove lesson reaches a grandeur of craft. The fork that Jessie Orcutt, drunk, raises to Lou Levov’s eye at the dinner party is a shock of violence in a drawing room. Held here because the dominant mode is rumination and argument, which runs level for long stretches, and because the close is satire as much as height.
Augustine of Hippo · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The heights are real and recur. The preface sets “gloriosissimam civitatem Dei”, the most glorious city of God, against a city mastered by its own lust for mastery. Time is created with the world, not in it (XI.6); a trinity is found in being, knowing and loving, “si enim fallor, sum”, for if I am mistaken, I am (XI.26). The will turns toward itself in the Fall of Book XIV; the peace of Book XIX; and the last chapter’s ladder of rest, sight, love and praise (XXII.30). Charged: long stretches are flat by design, polemic, antiquarian and legal, and the mockery of the gods of the cradle is comic rather than elevated. A work that rises often across its length and walks between.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The habitual register is cool, ironic and urbane, and most of the book’s length does not seek elevation. Where it rises it rises to the height of German lyric: Mignon’s “Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blühn”, at the opening of the third book, a song that became the type of longing itself, and the Harper’s “Wer nie sein Brot mit Tränen aß”, guilt raised to a complaint against the heavens. Mignon’s egg dance, blindfold among eggs laid on the carpet, is an exact image of grace kept by an inner law. Her exequies in the Hall of the Past are the book’s grandest scene, solemn and cold at once. Height real, frequency moderate.
Knut Hamsun · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The elevations are frequent and of one kind: the delirious, comic and terrible at once. In the cell, in total darkness, he coins a word, “Kuboaa”, and is seized by joy and terror at a word that means nothing. He bites his own finger to taste the blood. He curses God on the steps of a church. At the close he takes leave of the city from the fjord. The book rises often, but always inside one register of nervous exaltation, and it never reaches grandeur or the tragic. Its transports are fevers, and it knows they are. The mark is high for frequency and held where it is by range.
Jonathan Swift · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The height is the cold kind, and it comes in a few concentrated places. The ceiling is in Section IX: “Last week I saw a woman flayed, and you will hardly believe how much it altered her person for the worse”, and then the carcass of a beau stripped in the speaker’s presence to show what lies beneath. That is satire reaching dread, the comic voice going flat over a horror it will not register. The Epistle to Prince Posterity has a grave comedy of its own, Time mowing the moderns’ books before they can be shown; the Preface’s tub thrown to the whale has grandeur in small. Between these heights the register is wit, often brilliant and rarely elevated. Much of the tale runs at the level of farce, the brown loaf proved to be mutton, and Section XI descends to the excremental without lift.
Virginia Woolf · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The register is comic and the heights are few, but they are real, and they come at the hinges. The Great Frost is the summit: birds frozen in the air, a woman preserved under the clear ice of the Thames, the carnival on the river, then the thaw, the ice breaking up and carrying people away on its floes while Orlando rides along the bank cursing Sasha’s faithless ship. The change of sex rises through masque, trumpets and three Ladies withdrawing before Truth into a plain fact: “he was a woman” (ch. 3). The Victorian cloud has a dark grandeur, and the last chapter climbs to the stroke of midnight, the aeroplane and the wild goose. Between these the elevation is wit’s, and wit is not counted here.
Robert Frost · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The register is talk, and elevation comes rarely and by stealth; the axis counts that against frequency. When it comes it is high. In “The Death of the Hired Man” a moon falls down the west and drags the whole sky with it to the hills, a cosmic movement set into a kitchen conversation, and the poem ends on the single word “Dead”. The close of “Home Burial”, the husband’s threat to bring his wife back by force as she goes out the door, is a terror without a raised voice. “After Apple-Picking” rises steadily into its dream, the ladder pointing toward heaven still, the apples magnified. “The Wood-Pile” ends on “the slow smokeless burning of decay”. Four or five such summits in seventeen poems: real height, moderate frequency, with long stretches of deliberate level.
Kamāl ud-Dīn Behzād · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Elevation of one kind, beauty, and it is everywhere on the page: the blue and turquoise of the tiles, the gold of the friezes and of the nimbus, the clarity of each surface set beside the next, colour held at the pitch of jewels. The height recurs across the whole field rather than arriving in one place, and the frequency counts. A second, sharper height is the nimbus of flame around Yusuf’s head at the centre of a building of right angles, the sacred breaking into a palace. There is no terror and no grandeur of scale; the pursuit is enacted with restraint, in small figures. The painting rises often and stays at a jewelled pitch rather than reaching transport.
Robert Altman · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
The register is mostly comic, observational and mild, and the film keeps elevation rare by design. When it rises it rises high. At the Exit Inn Tom sings “I’m Easy” and four women each hear it as meant for her, and the camera finds Linnea, for whom it is meant and who knows what it is worth. On the Opry stage Barbara Jean’s song gives way to a rambling memory of her childhood while the audience turns. On Sunday the film crosses the city’s churches. At the Parthenon terror and a strange uplift arrive together as the camera rises from the singing crowd to the sky. The summits are real and several; the long stretches between them, kept level on purpose, hold the figure.
Gerhard Richter · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
The elevation is dread, cold and low in key, and the cycle refuses most of the means by which painting lifts. Where it rises, it rises high: in Dead, the face receding through three canvases until the third is a smear the size of a hand; in Hanged, a body at full height almost gone into the grey of the cell; in Funeral, the crowd closing over three coffins under a pale field, the one image with the width of a history painting. Against these, Arrest, Record Player and Cell are flat records by design, and the three canvases of Confrontation are tender rather than elevated. Height counts with frequency: about a third of the canvases reach the dreadful, and the rest hold the register down.
William Kentridge · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
The elevation is real, recurrent and of one register: a grave grey lament, now and then flooded with colour. The heights: the bodies in Felix in Exile sinking into the land, and the blue water rising through the drawing that carries Nandi’s figure away; the statue in Monument opening its eyes under the weight it was carved carrying, terror and grief in a moment; in Mine, a rhinoceros carried up from the shafts to Soho’s desk, and a ship’s plan of bodies laid in rows that turns the mine into a hold. Water rises in nearly every film. What holds the axis among the lowest of the twelve is the narrow register, a long sorrowful meditation, and the running time given to satire of a fat man at a desk, which does not try to rise.
Billy Wilder · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
The register is cool, ironic and hard, and elevation comes as dread. The rises are exact. The murder is played off screen, the camera holding on Stanwyck’s face at the wheel while the sound tells what happens beside her. The car will not turn over, and Neff’s hand reaches across to the key. Neff walks the track at night in the dead man’s place. In the dark living room there is a gun, the blinds, and a second shot Phyllis cannot fire. Neff staggers down the office corridor at the start. Rózsa’s score drives each of these hard. What holds the figure is frequency and kind: long stretches are sardonic talk, superbly done but level, and the summits are of tension more than of transport. Only the final exchange, with the match, lifts the film into something like grief.
Pierre Chareau and Bernard Bijvoet · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The elevation is real and it recurs: the double-height salon washed by diffused light from the glass wall, the library rising to the ceiling, the steel stair climbing open through it; and at night the courtyard front lit from outside, a wall of luminous cells seen from the cobbles of an old Paris court. Each passage through a screen is a small arrival in light. The register is single: serene, luminous, intimate. There is little grandeur and no terror, and the scale of the house keeps transport domestic. Elevation comes often but at one pitch. On this axis the house stands level with the Villa Savoye (8.6), whose elevation is of the same kind.
Hilary Mantel · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The register is cool, ironic and close, and elevation comes rarely and is earned. The heights are true, and some are terrible: the opening, the boy on the cobbles with blood in his eye and the voice above him; the night the sweating sickness takes Liz, given almost in passing, and its return for the girls, where the novel’s restraint becomes grief; Wolsey’s last days, and the masque in which courtiers act the cardinal dragged to hell, which Cromwell watches and keeps in memory for repayment; More on the scaffold at the end. Between them lie long stretches whose pleasure is intelligence, not transport. The frequency is moderate: level with American Pastoral at 8.2.
Richard Wright · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The elevation is the dreadful kind, and in the first two books it comes often. The rat in the morning; the bedroom, with the blind woman moving toward the bed while Bigger presses the pillow; the head that will not go into the furnace, and the hatchet; the reporters gathered in the basement while the ashes choke the fire; the snow over the South Side as the searchlights sweep the roofs and the hose drives him from the water tank. These are scenes of terror at height, and the pace of Book Two grips as little in American fiction does. The height is reached by situation and pace far more than by language: the prose rarely rises with the scene. Book Three has one rising moment, the last interview, and long flats before it.
Bertolt Brecht · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Elevation here is cold, and it comes in the songs. Pirate Jenny is the height: a scullery maid in a cheap hotel sees a ship with eight sails and “fünfzig Kanonen”
(fifty cannons) come into harbour and the town shot to pieces, and when she is asked which heads shall fall she answers “Alle!” (all of them), and then “Hoppla”. It is dread and transport at once, the revenge fantasy of the dispossessed raised to apocalypse. The Moritat’s shark, with his teeth in his face, and the knife no one sees, is a second height, menace made into a street song. The Cannon Song, the Ballad of Sexual Dependency, and Macheath’s call from the grave and his epitaph after Villon rise again. The spoken scenes do not rise and are not meant to. High and frequent in the numbers, flat between them, and much of the lift is Weill’s setting.
Sly and the Family Stone · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
The record refuses the elevation the band had commanded, and the refusal is its point; the question is whether the dread rises, and in places it does. Family Affair reaches a hushed, numbed beauty: electric piano over the box, Sly’s croak low in the mix, and the bass figure sliding beneath. Thank You for Talkin’ to Me Africa builds over seven minutes into a dragging, hypnotic menace that is the record’s height. Luv n’ Haight has a feverish, hemmed-in intensity. The frequency is lower than the height: Brave & Strong, Time, (You Caught Me) Smilin’ and Spaced Cowboy stay flat, by design or by fatigue. The record rises perhaps three or four times in forty-seven minutes, where Kind of Blue and Low rise again and again.
Agnès Varda · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
The film is quiet by design, and its heights are few and sure. The first is “Sans toi”: the camera closes on Cléo against black as Legrand’s piano swells, the room falls away, and a pop number becomes a lament for herself, one of the great sung passages of the decade’s cinema. The second is the long walk after she leaves the flat, in which the documentary Paris of the street rises toward exaltation because she is seeing it for the first time. The third is the close at the hospital, two faces in the light and her relief at being told she must be treated, a lift made of almost nothing. Between these the film runs low by choice. The height is real; the frequency is moderate, and frequency counts.
Roman, under Diocletian · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The elevation is real and recurrent, at a middle height. The peristyle is its summit: a long court of granite and marble columns under arcades, closed by the raised pediment of the protiron, open to the sky, with the cathedral’s tower above. The round vestibule, its dome open at the crown, is a smaller Pantheon of shade and echo. The substructures, a city of vaults beneath the city, give a second and darker rise, and the sea front carries the palace’s whole length on the water. Against these, the residential halls that might have carried the height are gone, the northern half rises little, and much of the experience is the charm of lanes and courts rather than transport.
Thomas Eakins · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The elevation is real, dreadful rather than beautiful, and it rises in three places. The brow of Gross, high and still, a head of authority painted as light itself against the black of the amphitheatre. The bloodied hand with the scalpel at the centre of the canvas, near the viewer’s eye at life size: the shock of the work and its most remembered passage. The opened thigh under the working hands, the wound’s red the only saturated colour in the room. The woman’s clawed hand is a smaller fourth. The register is grave, with terror at its edge and nothing of transport. What holds the axis is range and frequency: the vast dark of the tiers is mood rather than height, and the elevation is gathered in one vertical band, from brow to wound.
Leo Tolstoy · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The elevation is of dread, and it rises late and steeply. The night carriage, the dimming candle, the man drinking strong tea and making his odd sounds in the dark: the frame builds terror before the confession has a body in it. The musical evening is the one passage of transport, and it is transport mistrusted: Pozdnyshev hears the first movement of the sonata as a force that carries the listener into a state not his own, and the scene is sublime in just the sense he fears. The return at night, the boots taken off, the dagger, the wife’s bruised face, the children: here the book reaches a height of horror few novellas match. Frequency holds it: the tirade flattens long stretches, and the heights cluster in the last third and the one musical scene.
Francis Ford Coppola · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
The register is cool, muted and grey, and elevation is not its usual mode. When the film rises it is dreadful or desolate: the descent from above into a square in winter light, voices surfacing from noise; Harry pressed to the hotel wall, the struggle heard and not seen, a hand on frosted glass, the television turned up and the man hidden under the covers; next day the toilet flushed in a spotless room and the bowl overflowing with blood, the one image of horror the film allows; the saxophone played in the wreck of the apartment. Shire’s piano carries a lament the film never states. What holds the axis is frequency: the middle hour, workshop, convention and party, is level by design.
Clint Eastwood · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Elevation here is dreadful and elegiac. The opening and closing silhouettes of the farmhouse, the tree and the grave against a burning sky, with the guitar theme, set the film as a lament. The canyon killing rises to a terrible quiet. Ned’s body upright in its open coffin before the saloon, in the rain, is the strongest single image. Munny’s entry into the saloon out of the storm, and his exit, threatening the town to bury Ned right, is terror of a kind the genre rarely risks. Between these the register is level and often comic: Beauchamp, English Bob’s train, Little Bill’s carpentry, the Kid’s poor sight. The summits gather in the canyon and at the end; frequency holds the figure.
Joseph Wright of Derby · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The elevation is real and of the dreadful kind: the hush of a dark room in which a life is suspended, the faces lit from below as at a vigil, the white wings in the glass at the top of the light. The second height is the moon at the window, a cold distant light against the near warm one, nature outside the room against nature under the receiver. The candle is hidden behind a glass vessel, so the light seems to come from the apparatus itself. The height recurs across the ring of faces: the covered eyes, the old man’s stillness, the lecturer’s stare. It is one pitch, sustained, of awe and unease rather than transport, and the warmer genre passages at the left lower it.
Otto Wagner · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The height of the work is the hall, and it is a real one: a cool, even, almost weightless light falling from the glass vault onto the glass floor, the room seeming to float between two planes of light, the slender columns hardly there. It is serene rather than overwhelming, and it is felt at every visit, not once. The fronts are dignified and quiet, the grid of bolt heads a fine texture at close range, the cornice figures a lift at the top; the outside rises less than the inside. The elevation is a classical calm made modern, frequent and single in key: level with the best rooms of its decade, and below the transport of the summit buildings.
Alfred Hitchcock · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
The register is light comedy, romance and suspense, and elevation is not its usual mode. When it comes it is mostly dread, and once or twice beauty. Lisa’s first appearance, her face coming down over Jeff’s into the lens in a slowed kiss, is a summit. Lisa in Thorwald’s flat while he climbs the stairs, with Jeff in his chair unable to warn her, is suspense at its height, and Thorwald’s look across the yard into the lens changes the film’s footing. The dog’s owner on her fire escape is the one moment of grief, and Miss Lonelyhearts with her pills, while the songwriter’s melody rises, comes near transport. What holds the axis is frequency: the middle of the film is talk and inference, witty and level, and the climax with the flashbulbs is mechanism more than height.
Unknown court painters (Heian period) · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Elevation is of one register, the hushed melancholy the tradition calls mono no aware, and it recurs. In Suzumushi II the Reizei Emperor and Genji play music in a moonlit hall on a night of bell crickets. In Minori three figures sit in a room while the grasses bend in the wind outside. In Kashiwagi II Yūgiri visits his dying friend, both nearly lost in the hangings; in Yokobue there is a flute and a man’s grief. The height is real and steady. What holds it is kind and condition: no grandeur and no terror, on sheets made to be held close; and the losses dim it, the silver of moon and water black, so that how high the first surface rose is partly inference.
Dionysus Flambouras · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The height comes from refusal, and it comes in both halves. A man saying he is already accounted for and hearing that this saves time; a pharmacist who filled the bag and cannot hand it over; two strangers keeping two cake boxes level, the only things in the building being kept level; “Then exclude it”; a glove peeled off with a soft snap and a nurse who sees the bare hand and steps back; a boy turning a chessboard on its side between a crow and two fallen birds. Each transports by declining to interpret, and they recur. What the book never attempts is elevation of voice, and the chosen flatness of the systemic register, with the even surface of the domestic one, caps the axis.
Alvar Aalto · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Elevation here is warm, lyrical and close. It comes in the living space, where the black columns stand singly and in clusters like trunks and light from the garden falls among them; in the stair seen through its grove of poles; in the courtyard, from the covered terrace across the pool to the turf-roofed sauna and the pines beyond; at the entrance, under the free-formed canopy and its unbarked supports. Frequency is good: the house is made as a sequence of such moments, inside and out. Height is held lower. A country house of this size has no vastness, no dread and no grandeur; the register is one, intimacy in light and wood; and the white main fronts, seen from the approach, are quieter than the rooms behind them.
Antoine Watteau · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Elevation of one register, an elegiac beauty, and it recurs. The distance at the left, water and hills dissolved in golden mist, is the height of the picture: the world beyond the island opening as light. The silks of the couples catch that light in small flickers of rose, yellow and pale blue, so that the procession glows as it descends. The turned head of the woman at the hinge is a second height, a pause in the current. There is no grandeur and no terror; the scale is intimate and the figures small. What holds the axis is range: one temperature, one hour, beauty more than transport. Above a cabinet intrigue, below a vault or a sea that closes round the viewer.
John Huston · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Elevation comes chiefly as dreadful comedy and as the scale of land against men. Howard’s jig on the hillside when he finds the gold, mocking the two who walked over it, is a summit of joy. Dobbs alone at night, talking to the fire about conscience, is the darker summit. The waterhole near Durango, the bandits arriving in the heat and Dobbs killed by men who want his boots and his burros, is terror with no music to soften it. The close rises twice: the gold blowing off in a dust storm over the empty bags, and Howard’s laugh, which Curtin catches, a sublime of acceptance. Between these the film rides the pleasures of adventure at a lower pitch, and Steiner’s score often tells the audience what to feel before the image does. The elevation is frequent, not continuous.
Italo Calvino · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Height and frequency both count, and the frequency is high: nearly every city is a small elevation, an image made exact and strange. Octavia, the spider-web city, hung by ropes over an abyss, whose people know the net will last only so long. Valdrada, built on a lake, doubled in its mirror so that every act is performed twice. Baucis on its stilts, whose people never come down. Ersilia, abandoned, leaving only its strings. Eusapia, the city of the dead, which copies the living until no one knows which copies which. The final dialogue rises to a moral grandeur the rest holds back. Held in the low eights because the elevation is cool and crystalline, wonder more than transport, each height a page long, and the book builds no summit across its structure.
Thomas Carlyle · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
The book rises often and from far. Teufelsdröckh in his watchtower at midnight over the sleeping town, the thousands in their beds and he alone with the stars; the dog-day walk through the Rue Saint-Thomas de l’Enfer and the defiance that follows it; the turn of the Everlasting Yea, “Close thy Byron; open thy Goethe”, and “Love not Pleasure; love God. This is the EVERLASTING YEA”; and the close of Natural Supernaturalism, where the generations of mankind rise and vanish and the chapter ends on Prospero’s words on the stuff of dreams. These are real heights, cold and warm. Charged: the sublime is set inside a comic frame that undercuts it by design, the Editor deflating each flight, and long stretches of Books I and III do not rise at all.
Indian builders (Gupta and later) · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The elevation is real and recurrent, and of one kind. The tower rises some fifty-five metres over a flat country, gilded at its top, and is grand at first sight and from the approach; steps lead down into the enclosure and lower the visitor beneath it. The sanctum gives the second height: a dim cell, the gilded Buddha seen down the axis from the door, the light behind the visitor. The third lies outside the work proper, at the tree and the seat, in the circuit among pilgrims from many countries that the plan stages. Close to, the surface lowers it: the stucco is busy and much of it nineteenth-century, and the figure lacks the tension of the later curved spire. Much of the force is borrowed from what the place means.
Antoni Gaudí · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Elevation comes often, in a lower key than grandeur. The first height is the arrival on the terrace: an open level won from the hill, and beyond the coloured edge of the bench the whole city and the sea. The second is the Hypostyle Hall, dim under its forest of columns and its bright medallions. The third is the viaducts, where the ground seems to have grown its own cloisters. The register is wonder and play more than awe. Nothing here reaches the dread or the transport of the great interiors, and the fairy-tale manner of the lodges pulls the register toward charm. Frequency is high and height moderate.
Fela Kuti and Africa 70 · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Elevation here is of one kind, the transport of the groove, and it comes often on side one. The entry of the horn riff over the guitars and drums is the first height, an exhilaration that does not let go; the arrival of the chorus, a crowd chanting a single word, is the second, collective and comic at once; the drill, command and answer quickening, is the third. The height is never grandeur or terror, though the dread the record names sits under its laughter. The saxophone solo is level, carrying the groove forward without rising. Mr. Follow Follow is darker and slower and reaches less, a brooding weight rather than a lift. Frequent height of one warm kind, on one side, places it below the trance of Remain in Light.
Mughal court painters · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Elevation recurs, of the kinds the axis admits: terror, grandeur and wonder. The giants and demons stand larger than the men who fight them, painted with real bulk and menace; a monster coils against the hero; rocks rear and twist in the Persian manner but are pushed toward weight and mass; battles fill the field edge to edge with bodies, horses and weapons; night scenes and sorcerers’ marvels follow. The height is frequent across the survivors, because the workshop chose the extreme moment of each episode, and colour carries much of it. Held below the high eights because the elevation is of one tumultuous register, seldom stilled into the grave or the tender, and because the crowding that drives it also flattens the summits.
Gian Lorenzo Bernini · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The elevation is real and of two kinds, terror and wonder at making, and it recurs as the viewer moves. From the left, Pluto’s stride and the weight lifted against his hip carry the drive of the abduction. From the front, the hand in the thigh and Proserpina’s face, the tears standing on her cheek, give the moment of horror. From the right, her arm thrown up and her hair loosed give the flight. Cerberus’s three heads, snarling three ways, add dread at the base. Each station rises, so the frequency is high for a single object. What holds it below the top is register: the transport is of spectacle more than awe, the terror kept at an arm’s length the virtuosity creates.
Almohad builders, under Abd al-Mu'min and Yaqub al-Mansur · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The elevation is the minaret’s, and it is high and frequent. From the Jemaa el-Fna or the gardens to the west the tower stands alone over a low city, its pale stone warming toward rose at evening, the snow of the Atlas behind it in winter; from the plain it is seen long before the city. Its effect is gravity rather than soaring: proportion, mass, the slow enrichment of the faces as they rise, the lantern at the top. Within, by the published views, the hall gives the quieter sublime of its type, arcades receding in half light and the ceiling breaking into cells at the qibla end. What holds it: the tower’s register is one, grave and calm, and the hall’s grandeur is its type’s, less than the forest of the Great Mosque of Córdoba (8.8).
Aleijadinho · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The elevation is of grace rather than grandeur, and it rises more than once. First the approach up the slope to the front, where the soapstone medallion floats between the round towers and the frontispiece curls upward. Then the nave, white under its painted ceiling: the painted architecture rises past the cornice into a sky where the Virgin is borne among angels making music, so that the timber vault reads as an opening. Then the chancel, white and gilt, the retable climbing to its crowning group. The scale is small and nothing here overwhelms. Against Sainte-Chapelle’s 9.2, whose light is the whole elevation, this church rises by detail and lift, not by a total effect: its height is that of a smaller thing made with exactness.
Basil Spence · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Height and frequency. The building rises several times. In the ruin, the burned shell under the spire, open to weather, gives a dread elevation. Under the porch the engraved screen hangs between the two churches and both are seen at once. On turning back from the altar the windows hidden on the way in appear down both walls together, a moment designed and achieved. The baptistery’s bowed wall is a wall of light, and the tall, narrow nave under its lattice canopy on thin columns has a lightness that lifts. The costs: the approach up the nave is long and, before the turn, dim and somewhat dull; the exterior of the new church is heavy, its sandstone flank reading as a large modern public building more than as a summit; and elevation in the nave depends in great part on the tapestry, which is not scored.
Konstantin Melnikov · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The studio is the summit: a round room at the top of the house with hexagonal lights on every side, the sun crossing it through the day, at once cell and lantern. The house rises to it, and the rise is felt. The street front, one great window under the name, has a severe grandeur of its own, and the double cylinder seen from the garden, white and pierced, is a striking figure. Elsewhere the elevation is lower: the living and sleeping rooms are modest in height and scale, and the house is small. Height is real and recurs in two or three places, not throughout, and no part of the house is sustained at the height of its studio.
John Ford · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Elevation comes several times and at real height. Ma alone at night before the stove, sorting what she will burn, holding a pair of earrings to her ears before the mirror without a word, under Newman’s accordion, is the film’s quiet summit. The tractors come over the rise in silhouette, and in Muley’s flashback the tractor’s shadow falls across the crouching family: dread made into image. Tom’s farewell at night by the dance floor, and his walk up the dark rise as the sky lightens, is transport earned by the light it is spoken in. At the desert’s edge the family looks down into the green valley while Ma keeps what she carried: grief and promise in one view. Between these the pitch drops to Grampa’s comedy, the camp idyll and the plain business of the road.
Jean-Pierre Melville · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The elevation is cold and recurs. The opening shot is held so long that the room seems to breathe, with smoke rising and the bird’s chirp the only event. White gloves are drawn on in a corridor before the killing. On a footbridge at dusk the shot comes without warning. The Métro turns a pursuit into a slow ballet of doors and platforms, with de Roubaix’s organ and strings beneath. The last walk into the club, the hat set right in a mirror and the gun raised at the piano, is the height. It is a sublime of stillness and fate, never of terror or grandeur. The register is uniform by design: the summits are of one height and one temperature, and the middle third, the police procedure, is level.
New Order · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Elevation comes in one temperature, a cool, melancholy lift, and it comes several times. Your Silent Face is the summit: a slow, stately sequence in the manner of Kraftwerk, melodica over synthesiser chords, a melody of real grandeur. Age of Consent lifts on the bass and the chiming guitar into a rush of longing. Leave Me Alone ends the record on a height of sorrow, chiming and plain. 5 8 6 builds from an ambient introduction to a dance pulse with some exhilaration. The Village is bright rather than high, We All Stand dusk without a rise, Ultraviolence tension, and Ecstasy motion without height. Four of eight rise, and none reaches terror or sustained grandeur.
Bong Joon-ho · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Elevation here is dread, and it rises. The opening field, golden and still, with a boy beside a culvert and a body inside it. The night murder in the rain, a woman on a dark road and a hand in the reeds behind her. The blackout of the drill. The rain at the quarry with Seo alone. The tunnel, a train passing between a detective and the man he cannot prove guilty, the report in his hand settling nothing. The last shot, Song Kang-ho turning to the camera. Taro Iwashiro’s score gives the rain a lament. Held at its figure by frequency and by the film’s own manner: the comedy, part of its law, deliberately lowers the pitch through the first hour, and much of the middle is procedure played for absurdity rather than height.
Renzo Piano · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Elevation is real and repeated, though moderate. Seen from the lagoon or the road, the rank of tall open shells against the southern Pacific sky is an image of calm power, something between a village, a grove and a row of unfinished vessels. Inside a tall case the light falls through the slats in bars and changes with sun and cloud, and the wind is heard moving through the skin, a sound the building makes and does not merely admit. The walk between the villages, half open and half sheltered, is a sequence of slow alternations. What holds the axis: the elevation is of one kind, grave and quiet, and the low range, where most of the visit happens, does not rise. It is one image carried several times, with real height.
Mastodon · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
The record rises often, and its elevation is the dreadful kind. The opening riff of Blood and Thunder, with Neil Fallon’s roar on the refrain, is a summit of the genre’s grandeur. Seabeast reaches a cold, vast melancholy in its harmonised guitars and a sung rather than screamed line. Megalodon turns in its middle to a twanging, country-picked guitar figure and then plunges back into weight, and the plunge is the height. Aqua Dementia, with Scott Kelly’s voice, sounds the depth as madness, and Hearts Alive builds over thirteen minutes to the record’s largest release. Height comes on five or six of ten tracks. What holds the figure is that the sublime is mostly one register, terror and mass, varied in speed more than in kind.
Teutonic Order builders · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Elevation comes in two registers, and both recur. The first is mass: the red brick fronts seen across the Nogat, the river front of the Grand Masters’ Palace above the water, the walls and towers of the High Castle, the grandeur of a power that meant to be seen. The second is the vaulted interior: the Great Refectory and the two refectories of the palace, where star and fan vaults spring from slender granite pillars and the room seems held up by almost nothing. The summer refectory, its vault opening from one pillar, is the castle’s height. Between these much is plain: service ranges, courts and long walls that impress by extent rather than lift.
Deerhunter · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Elevation is real, of a warm, hazy kind, and comes on about half the record. Desire Lines is the summit: a modest song that gives way to a long guitar coda over a pressing beat, the two guitars climbing and circling until the haze becomes motion, transport sustained. He Would Have Laughed rises slowly across its length into a chiming close that is both elegy and release. Helicopter lifts on its bell-like figures, beauty laid over a cruel story. Earthquake has a drifting, suspended height; Coronado a brief brass exultation. The rest has charm more than height. The register holds the figure: the voice is blurred by design, and the height comes as reverie, seldom as grandeur or terror, on five or six of eleven tracks.
Christopher Nolan · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent and mostly dreadful. The opening: leaflets falling on an empty street, gunfire from nowhere, a boy running to the dunes, and the beach seen as a sea of waiting men. Stukas over the queues, the men lying down in lines as the bombs walk toward them. The hospital ship and the minesweeper rolling over, men in the dark under the hull as the water rises. The warm summit is the little boats coming over the horizon and Bolton’s answer, one word, “Home”. The cold one is the Spitfire gliding silent over the beach with its engine dead, landing on the sand and burning in the dusk. Held below the top: so much is one register of tension sustained, and the warm heights lean on Elgar and on the score more than on the image alone.
Georges de La Tour · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The elevation is of one kind, and it is held over the whole field rather than reached once: the elevation of silence, the dark that fills most of the canvas, the light gathered round one flame, the face in it turned away from the viewer. The heights are three. The flame in its glass, the brightest thing in the picture, where the light seems to swell in the vessel. The hand on the skull, living fingers resting on bone as on a familiar thing. And the line of smoke, a thread of darkness drawn up through the dark, the one figure of time passing in a stilled world. The register is cold and warm at once. There is no grandeur and no terror, and the height does not vary: one sustained height at the scale of a single figure.
Henry Fuseli · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The elevation is terror, the sublime the theorists of the 1750s described, made a domestic scene, and it is high. The horse’s head is the summit: blank white eyes in the dark curtain, a creature that should not be in a bedroom and has come in. The second height is the woman’s thrown body, a pale diagonal in the dark, beautiful and helpless at once, so that beauty and dread are given in one form. The incubus’s stare out of the canvas is the third, turning the terror on the viewer. Height recurs across the picture. It is held below the higher band because the terror is theatrical: the light is stage light, the incubus half grotesque and half comic, and the register stops short of awe.
Nick Ut · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Elevation of the dreadful kind, at a great height. The smoke rises behind the road as a dark wall over the upper frame, the fire from the sky made into a mass, and the children come out of it toward the viewer; the girl’s open arms and open mouth are the point of greatest terror, and the image makes the viewer stand where the road ends. The effect is immediate at any size. What holds the axis is frequency: one moment, one effect, and a single summit stands below a work that rises again and again. There is no second register either: the image does not pass from terror into anything else, and the terror is shock as much as transport.
Norman Foster (Foster and Partners) · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Elevation is high and frequent on the public route, rarer elsewhere. Inside the dome the ramps wind round the mirrored cone, which breaks the sky and the chamber into many facets and turns as one climbs; the city opens on every side, the Tiergarten, the Spree and the line where the Wall stood; at dusk and at night the dome is a lantern over Berlin, lit from within. The ascent to an open sky above a parliament carries a real charge. What holds the axis: Wallot’s exterior is heavy and ponderous, and the rebuilding inherits it rather than lifting it; the chamber is calm, white and functional, a good room rather than an elevating one; and the dome keeps one register, light and buoyant. The height is exhilaration more than awe, and it is concentrated in one place.
Anselm Kiefer · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The elevation is real and of one register: dread, the terror of the Romantic sublime, built from scale and depth. Before a canvas taller than oneself, the eye is drawn down a hall built to make a body small, and the crust and blackening make that grandeur funereal, a hall of power that is also a furnace and a tomb. There are three heights: the pull of the perspective; the closed door at the far end, where the axis arrives at nothing; and the surface seen near, where the illusion breaks into paper and scorched paint. What holds the axis is frequency and range: one image at one temperature, which does not rise again and has no second key.
Lauryn Hill · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
Height is real and recurs, but it gathers in a few songs. Ex-Factor is the first: a slow lament over a sampled ground in which the voice climbs to its cry, “Care for me”, a grief sustained for five minutes. To Zion rises through Santana’s flamenco guitar into a choir and is the record’s summit, joy reached as revelation. Final Hour has the other kind, rap at speed that becomes prophecy. Everything Is Everything lifts on strings and piano into a chorus of hope; the title song is a slow hymn of self-possession, and Tell Him, in the coda, a prayer modelled on Paul’s chapter on love. Against this, Lost Ones and Doo Wop drive more than rise, the long middle from When It Hurts So Bad to Nothing Even Matters stays level, and the heights are of one warm kind, never terror or the cold sublime. The summits are true; between them the record runs on the level for long stretches.
Burnham and Root; south half by Holabird and Roche · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Height is real and particular: the long dark cliff of the Dearborn front, sixteen storeys of one material, the bays rippling down its length like the folds of a hung cloth, the wall swelling outward at the foot as if under its own weight and lipping outward at the top. Seen obliquely down Dearborn Street the mass reads as geology rather than building, and the absence of every ornament makes it graver. The register is one: weight, severity, endurance. Frequency is lower. The sublime belongs to the exterior, and mostly to the north half; the south half softens the cliff with its cornice and base; and the interiors, a long corridor and office floors of their period, are handsome and restored, not elevated.
Sawai Jai Singh II · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The elevation is real and strange, and it comes more than once. The summit is the Samrat’s stair, rising toward the pole: a staircase that goes nowhere but at the sky, while the gnomon’s shadow moves across the quadrant at a speed the eye can follow, so that the visitor watches time pass. The Jai Prakash bowls give a second register, the heavens turned inside out and set into the ground; the Ram Yantra’s open drums a third, rooms without roofs whose walls are scales. The ground has the grandeur of geometry built at the scale of architecture without architecture’s ordinary purposes. What holds it well below the top: the elevation is cool and intellectual more than overwhelming, much of the ground is low and dispersed, and the full effect depends on knowing what the forms do.
John Everett Millais · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Elevation is real and of one register: elegiac beauty, cool and intense, with no grandeur and no terror. It recurs across the field rather than rising once: the pale face, the mouth open in song, the one place the eye returns to; the hands open on the surface, palms up; the silver and gold of the dress, buoyed and dragged; the willow’s leaves against the dark water; the red of the poppy and the roses on the surface like the last colour leaving. The whole bank holds a jewelled brightness that a tonal picture cannot give. The limits: one temperature, a canvas under a square metre, and a sweetness that in places, the flowers on the water above all, tips toward the decorative.
Cormac McCarthy · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Elevation here is dread, and it comes often. At the gas station a proprietor is asked to call a coin toss whose stakes he does not know, “Call it”, and a plain room becomes a summit of cold terror. Moss goes back to the killing ground at night with water for a dying man and is hunted across the dark by a truck. In the hotel at Eagle Pass Chigurh is in the corridor and Moss waits in the dark with the shotgun; at dawn Moss crosses the bridge into Piedras Negras wounded. The warm summit is the last page, Bell’s dream of his father riding ahead “carryin fire in a horn” into the dark and the cold, and it lifts the whole book by a register. Held at 8.2 because between the summits the chase is efficient rather than elevated, and the middle chapters run on procedure.
Hadhrami builders · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The elevation is real and repeated, and it comes chiefly from outside. Seen across the wadi, the city rises as one sheer mass of towers from flat palm land, pale lime at the crowns over brown mud, a cliff made by hands facing the natural cliffs of the valley; at evening, with the walls lit low, it is among the strongest images any settlement gives. It recurs on every approach and at every hour. Within, the register changes and drops: deep shaded lanes, the towers overhead, a dread more than a grandeur, and then the roofs, with the crowns of the city all round. Held below the great buildings because there is no interior summit, no room that lifts: the sublime here is of mass and number, less varied in kind.
Francisco de Zurbarán · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The elevation is real and of one kind: a hushed, devotional awe that the whole field sustains. The lamb lies in a stillness so complete that it seems held, and the light falling on the fleece against the dark gives it something of the presence of a relic or a host on an altar. The height is the meeting of tenderness and dread, the soft curled wool and the patient head beside the knowledge of the knife that is not shown. Every part of the canvas holds the same pitch, one sustained moment rather than one high point in a flat field. But it is one register, quiet contemplation, not grandeur or terror, and a small image held at one high note ranks below works that rise across a range.
Bram Stoker · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
The height is real and it comes early. The first four chapters are among the strongest passages of terror in English prose: the coach at night on the Borgo Pass, with the blue flames and the wolves; the host who serves supper and does not eat; the shaving glass that shows no reflection; and Harker at the window, watching the Count crawl face down the castle wall like a lizard. The log of the Demeter, its crew vanishing one by one and its captain lashed to the wheel with a crucifix, rises again. Lucy in the churchyard, the “bloofer lady” returning to her tomb, and Mina at the Count’s breast, drinking, are dreadful. Frequency is the charge: from the councils of war onward the second half is mostly procedure and pursuit, and the climax at the castle is brief and quickly done.
Alan Moore · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
The book rises often and in many keys. The vision of Mansoul, the upper town where the whole history of the district is present at once and the Builders, its angelic overseers, settle the affairs of the world below, is a real conception of the sublime, comic and vast together. The Lucia Joyce chapter reaches a broken, singing height that the book reaches nowhere else. A child’s death in the first book, and its rendering from the other side, give terror and tenderness at once. What holds the axis is frequency across the length: the heights are spread over more than a thousand pages, and the long stretches between them, the adventure episodes and the restatements, are flat by design and by excess.
Rudolf Steiner · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
The elevation is real and recurs, of a heavy and almost geological kind. Seen from the road climbing the hill, the west front rises as a dark grey mass that seems to move, poured stone folding over the terrace like a brow, and it holds at every distance. The west stair hall is the second summit: concrete pillars branching and leaning, the stairs climbing between walls that curve with no repeated module, light falling from above. The terrace, with the Jura and the Rhine plain beyond, is a third. Frequency is good on the approach and the ascent and falls away inside. The great hall is warm and handsome rather than elevating, and much of the flanks is weight without lift.
Federico Fellini · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Elevation recurs and is the film’s way of thinking, but its register is warm and its summits are lyric and comic. The town rows out at night to see the liner Rex pass, a lit city on black water, and Gradisca weeps. In the fog the grandfather loses his way a few steps from his own door, and Titta meets a white ox standing in the grey. A peacock opens its tail in the snow on the square. Uncle Teo shouts his want from a tree into the country afternoon. Nino Rota’s theme lifts the whole with a melancholy carried in a fairground tune. Held at the figure because the heights are tender rather than terrible, and the long middle stretch of anecdote runs between them at a level pitch.
Louise Nevelson · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Elevation is the wall’s aim and it reaches it, cold and dark. Stood before at full height, it exceeds the body: over three metres of black, rising, the top registers lost in their own shadow. The black does the work, erasing the source of each fragment so that the eye reads only edges, curves and depths, and the shadows in the cells read as part of the material. The effect is a nocturnal grandeur, the city at night, an iconostasis, an organ case, depicting none of them, and it recurs across the face, every cell its own small dark space. Held below the upper band because the register is single, with no terror, release or turn, and strongest at first encounter and in low light.
Alex Proyas · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent and mostly visual, and it recurs. The first midnight, when the city stops, the sleepers are moved like furniture and buildings grow, stretch and fold out of one another, is the film’s signature height and returns with each tuning. The hall beneath the city, its great mechanism and the face of its machinery, is dread on an architectural scale. The summit is the wall: brick broken behind the Shell Beach picture onto stars, a man falling out into nothing, and the camera drawing back to show the city as a raft of streets in space. The dawn of the coda, light on water after a film of night, is a real release. The duel above the city is loud rather than high.
Mark Rothko · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Elevation is real and of one kind: cold, grave, close to dread. It comes at the first sight of a canvas, the black heavy over the grey and nothing between them. It comes again in long looking, when the grey begins to move under its brushing and the black, which seemed flat, shows a depth and a faint sheen. And the series repeats it canvas by canvas, with small changes of weight. What holds it is the work’s own meaning: the margin keeps the viewer outside, and the transport the classic canvases gave, a field that seems to breathe and envelop, is withdrawn on purpose. The register is narrow, the summits few and of one height, and no canvas surrounds anyone.
Wassily Kandinsky · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Elevation is real and of one register, the cool sublime of a night sky. It comes first from the black disc in its blue-violet corona, which reads at once as an eclipse, a dark sun with light escaping round its edge: the strongest single image on the canvas. It recurs in the small bright discs, which glow against the dark as lights in a void, and in the clouded ground, which opens a depth with no floor. What holds the axis is the kind and the frequency. There is one summit, the eclipse, and a sustained quiet around it; there is no terror and no transport by size; and among the small discs there are passages that please rather than elevate.
Michael Curtiz · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
The film rises more than once and reaches one true summit. When German officers sing “Die Wacht am Rhein” and the café’s band answers with the “Marseillaise”, on Laszlo’s order and Rick’s nod, with Yvonne in tears, the room becomes a collective elevation few studio films equal, its force increased by a cast many of whom had fled Nazism. The song’s entrance at Sam’s piano turns the film in a phrase. The airport, fog and searchlight and an engine turning over, lifts by restraint. What holds the figure is height and frequency together. The Paris flashback is the low point, its romance conventional and its dialogue soft; and the elevation is warm and recurrent but never terrible, its height coming from feeling more than from the image.
Jules Verne · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
The book rises often, and some of its summits are high. The submarine forest; the burial in the coral cemetery, the crew kneeling in their diving dress on the sea floor; the night walk over the mountain to the ruins of Atlantis, lit by a submarine volcano; the South Pole and the black flag; the entombment under the ice, the book’s terror at its best, the men drawing the last of the air while the crew hack at the ice and the Nautilus is driven onto it to break it; the squid; the warship watched through the window as it sinks with its men; the Maelstrom. The summits are frequent and varied: wonder, grandeur, claustrophobic dread, moral horror. What holds the axis is that the sublime is often handed to the inventory, so that the rise is followed by a list, and the prose seldom matches its sights in the sentence. Height and frequency high; sustained elevation less.
Nikos Kazantzakis · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
The book rises often, and in more than one key. Zorba dances on the shore when grief or joy is too large for speech, and dances again after the cable comes down, where ruin becomes exultation. Hortense dies with the village women waiting to strip her room while she still breathes: grotesque and terrible together. The widow’s death at Easter is the book’s moment of dread. The Cretan sea and stone are rendered with a lyric fervour that lifts many pages, and the close, where the narrator learns by letter that Zorba has died far away and has left him his santuri, is a quiet height. Held at this figure because the fervour is also a habit: the narrator’s ecstasies at sunrise recur until they lose their force.
Park Chan-wook · Film
7.9 · Tier III
Elevation comes often, and it is dreadful more than beautiful. The corridor: Dae-su with a hammer against a corridor of men, filmed in one lateral take held so long that exhaustion becomes grandeur. The rooftop, a man holding another by the necktie over the drop. The fifteen years compressed, a man punching a wall into a sparring partner while a television shows the world passing. The purple album, knowledge arriving as a page turned. Dae-su on his knees, barking, then the scissors and the tongue, a sacrifice of the organ that sinned. Jo Yeong-wook’s waltzes and strings lift the cruelty toward opera, and the snow at the close is left open. Held at the figure because the elevation is often violence staged for its own pitch, and some of it, the live octopus and the ant, is spectacle rather than height.
David Lynch · Film
7.9 · Tier III
Elevation is dreadful, and at its height it is very high. The Mystery Man at Andy’s party, the white face and the voice saying he is at Fred’s house now, and the call that proves it, is among the most frightening scenes in the cinema of its decade. Fred walks into the black of his own hallway until it takes him; the videotapes play on a small screen in a large dark room; Fred’s head shudders in the cell; Alice and Pete lie in the headlights on the desert sand to “Song to the Siren”, the one warm height. What holds the figure is frequency: through much of the middle hour the register drops to genre business and the gangster scenes run to pastiche, so that the heights stand at the two ends of the film with a long flat between them.
Rem Koolhaas and Ole Scheeren (OMA) · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Height is high and of one kind: vertigo and the threat of weight. It comes beneath the overhang, where a block of many storeys hangs over the plaza with nothing under its corner; in a figure that never shows the same silhouette twice, a gate from one side, a leaning wedge from another, a broken loop from a third, so that a drive along the Third Ring Road makes it turn; in the dark glass and the net of bracing at dusk; and, as designed, at the glass discs in the floor of the overhang, looking straight down. The register is dread more than joy, a disquiet of balance. The elevation is concentrated outside, in the overhang seen from below and from a distance, and the working floors within do not carry it.
Daniel Burnham · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Height is real; its frequency is limited. Elevation comes from one place: the approach from the north across Madison Square, or up Fifth Avenue from the south, where the narrow prow rises full height and the two long walls fall away behind it, so that the tower seems thin as a blade and in motion. In weather, snow and rain and the trees of the square before it, as Stieglitz and Steichen found, the effect is strong and has not dulled. From the sides it is a long, handsome, ordinary wall of windows; from the rear, a plain face. Within there is no room of elevation: the lobby is modest, the floors are offices, and the rooms at the tip are memorable for narrowness, not grandeur.
Arnold Böcklin · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
The elevation is of one kind and it is high: the dreadful sublime of stillness. The white figure, small and upright against the black cypresses, is a moment of genuine awe, and the island’s mass rising sheer from mirror water carries a grandeur out of proportion to its painted size. The eye goes to the dark centre and is held there; that holding is the picture’s elevation. Frequency is the charge. It rises once, in one register, across the whole field at once, and does not rise again elsewhere in a different key. Above a picture of delight that rises once, by the gravity of what is elevated; below a canvas that rises in several places and in more than one temperature.
Joe Rosenthal · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
The height is real and immediate: the flag breaking into wind against an empty sky above a ruined summit, the bodies thrown forward and upward together, an act arrested at the instant before it is complete. It is the elevation of the heroic group, close in feeling to the sculptural sublime of a pediment, and the even tone of the sky makes it monumental at any size of reproduction. The axis counts frequency as well as height, and a photograph is one instant: the image rises once, completely, and has no second movement. Its height is a little rhetorical, grandeur of the public kind. It reaches higher than The Swing at 7.6 and below The Starry Night at 9.2, whose transport is sustained across the surface.
Built for Tokugawa Iemitsu · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Elevation is the building’s one great effect, and it is real. Out of the dim worship hall onto pale cypress boards, with nothing between the rail and the ravine but the crowns of maples and cherries far below, and the city spread to the west: the transport is immediate. It rises again from below, where the forest of posts under the stage, seen from the path by the falls, is as strong as the view from above. The long sweep of the bark roof, seen from the side across the valley, is a third moment. What holds the figure is frequency and register: the interior gives little elevation of its own, the effect depends on season and light, and it is the exposure, not the scale, that does the work.
Gerhard Richter · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Scored with its site. The elevation is real and it recurs: the window rises in a transept of great height, and when the sun stands in the south its colour is cast in moving patches across the piers and the floor, so that the building itself is lit through it on every clear day of the year. That frequency is the window’s strength here; its height is daily, not a single moment. The cost is that much of the height is lent by the cathedral: the same squares in a low modern room would be a fine field of colour, not grandeur. The register is calm brilliance rather than terror or transport, and from near to the surface is a flicker of units that does not itself rise. It stands above the delight of Broadway Boogie Woogie, at 8.0 on this axis, and well below the enveloping rooms of the Water Lilies, at 9.0.
Adrian Smith (Skidmore, Owings and Merrill) · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Height is extreme, and outside the frequency is real. Elevation comes in the needle seen over the flat city and the desert from far off, one silver stroke at a scale no other building offers; in the taper seen from the foot, where the setbacks climb out of sight and the eye cannot find the top; in the tip catching light after the city below is in shadow; and on the observation floors, where the city reads as a plan. The register is the sublime of magnitude, cold and close to dread. Inside it falls: the lobby, the hotel and the residences are luxury interiors of a standard kind, and the deck, reached by lift, gives a view rather than a room. The height is the whole of the elevation, repeated from different distances.
John Bradfield and Ralph Freeman (Dorman Long) · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
The elevation is real and frequent. From the water, from either shore and from the deck, the arch is a single gathered curve at the scale of the landscape, about 134 m high over a harbour of headlands, and it does not diminish with familiarity. Crossing by train under the crown, the hangers passing like a fence and the arch closing overhead, is a repeated and ordinary transport. The climb puts thousands a year on the upper chord, grandeur made literal. It is the sublime of mass and span, the cold kind: the arch is heavy, its lattice dense, and close to, the pylons are bulky masonry rather than an elevating form. That holds the height below a crown refined to one gesture.
Radiohead · Music
7.8 · Tier III
Elevation comes often, mostly dreadful, sometimes tender. There There is the summit: toms stacked under a guitar figure that circles for minutes until the release, a warning turned into a hymn. 2 + 2 = 5 breaks from its murmur into a howl at its midpoint. Sail to the Moon floats on piano and a high, unstrained voice, the warmest height on the record. Where I End and You Begin rides a driving bass under keening synthesiser; Myxomatosis has a ground-shaking fuzz; A Wolf at the Door is terror delivered flat. Backdrifts, The Gloaming and We Suck Young Blood have force or atmosphere rather than height. Six or seven of fourteen rise.
Arcade Fire · Music
7.8 · Tier III
Elevation is the record’s chief good and comes often, mostly of the dreadful and the anthemic kind. Intervention is the summit: the organ entering at full stops, the voice climbing against it, the whole band swelling into what sounds like a congregation that has lost its faith and kept its hymn. My Body Is a Cage builds from a near-whisper to the organ’s full weight and a choir, a real terror turned into release. No Cars Go reaches the exultant kind, its long coda of voices and strings a flight made sound. Keep the Car Running has a driving lift, Black Mirror an ominous grandeur. What holds the figure below the high band is that several heights are reached by mass and volume, the same climbing crescendo applied more than once, rather than by a turn the listener did not expect.
Nick Cave and Warren Ellis · Music
7.8 · Tier III
Elevation comes often and in both temperatures. The break in Hand of God, where the piano gives way to the surging loop and the voice climbs over it, is transport. White Elephant’s gospel turn is the summit: after minutes of threat the choir enters and the song lifts clear of everything before it, grace arriving without argument. The title song holds a quiet height, a voice close to the ear over slow keyboards; Lavender Fields is a hymn, choral and suspended; Balcony Man ends on a lightness it has earned. Old Time has force without height, and Albuquerque and Shattered Ground stay level. Five of eight tracks rise. The highest is very high but not the highest the medium reaches, and choir over pad makes several of the heights one kind.
Carl Orff · Music
7.8 · Tier III
Height is real, and it comes at the ends. The fortissimo opening of O Fortuna, its drop to a whispered ostinato and the build over its stanzas to a close in D major are elemental and terrifying. Ave formosissima reaches grandeur, and its cutting off is a second, darker height. In trutina is beauty of the plainest kind, a soprano line held over still strings, and Dulcissime is ecstasy at the top of the voice. Between them elevation is less frequent: the spring choruses are bright rather than high, the tavern numbers vigorous, comic or grotesque, In taberna quando sumus a rush. The sublime here is of one kind, the force of rhythm and mass, and it repeats rather than deepens.
Chinese builders (Northern Wei foundation, Ming and Qing rebuilding) · Architecture
7.7 · Tier III
Elevation is the building’s ordinary condition, not one moment. From the valley the first sight is the image: red and grey halls apparently pinned to a vertical face, propped on posts as thin as sticks, under a lip of rock. Inside, the height recurs at every turn: plank galleries with the drop below, steep stairs between levels, doors opening onto air, small dark shrines entered from a ledge. It is the sublime of terror held at a domestic scale, the vertigo of a place built to be stood on where no one should stand. What holds it below the summit is scale: the rooms are small, the passage short, and the transport is of one kind, repeated.
Soundgarden · Music
7.7 · Tier III
Height is frequent and of one kind: the sublime of mass and of the voice at its limit. Slaves & Bulldozers is the summit, a dirge slowed to the speed of machinery, ending in Chris Cornell’s voice pushed to a scream over a riff that will not resolve. Rusty Cage’s last minute drops from gallop to grind, and the drop is the height. Searching with My Good Eye Closed opens into the record’s widest space, Kim Thayil’s guitar droning in a mode that sounds older than the riff beneath it. What holds the figure: the elevation is nearly all dreadful and heavy, and the second half’s climaxes repeat a known shape.
Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach, Nikolaus Pacassi and Johann Ferdinand Hetzendorf von Hohenberg · Architecture
7.7 · Tier III
Elevation here is of two kinds. The one the work owns is the axis. From the garden front the parterre runs out, the fountain marks the foot of the hill, and the Gloriette stands on the crest against the sky, an open screen of arches through which the sky shows. Climb it and the reverse view gives the whole: the palace, the parterre, the city, and on a clear day the hills beyond. That grandeur is renewed by every walk along the axis and every turn of the paths. The second is the Great Gallery, long, white and gold under Guglielmi’s ceilings, lit from both sides, rising to festive splendour. Elsewhere the height falls: the garden front seen near is flat and repetitive, and the smaller rooms charm rather than elevate.
Steven Spielberg · Film
7.7 · Tier III
Elevation is frequent and of several kinds. Terror and wonder at once in the truck at the crossing: the mailboxes rattling, the light from above, the instruments gone mad, the burn on one side of Roy’s face. The single light over Crescendo Summit and the small craft racing past the waiting cars. Barry in a doorway of orange light, open to whatever is coming. The crowd in India singing with arms raised; the cloud boiling up over the Tower; and the landing, the mothership rising from behind the mountain like a city lit for a festival, tone answering tone until the music becomes a conversation. Held at 8.2 because the elevation is nearly all in one key, rapture and awe: the dread of the opening is given up, and the summit, held for many minutes, runs on past its need at the close.
Buena Vista Social Club · Music
7.7 · Tier III
Height comes often and in one kind: beauty held, warm and unhurried. Chan Chan’s opening figure and Compay Segundo’s entry rise at once. Dos gardenias, Ferrer close to the microphone over a slow bolero, holds at height from its first bar to its last, and Veinte años does the same with two old voices. Rubén González’s solo passages in Pueblo nuevo and the title track are the summit of the record, the danzón’s formality loosened by a pianist playing as if he had all the time he needed. Murmullo and Amor de loca juventud rise less, and the quick sones, Candela and El cuarto de Tula, are joy rather than elevation. There is no grandeur and no terror, and nothing reaches the slowest passages of Kind of Blue, at 9.1 here.
Yayoi Kusama · Visual art
7.6 · Tier III
The work’s purpose and its strongest axis. The door closes, the light falls away, and the visitor stands on a narrow path over black water in a field of points that reaches in every direction, below as well as around; the lights change colour and fade, and for a moment nothing is left but the field and one’s own repeated figure. The response reported across years of visits is closer to transport than to recognition: people speak of the cosmos, of drowning, of a starfield, of the dead. The height is real. What holds the axis is frequency and range: one effect, of one kind, held for a short visit; a known trick whose height depends on the darkness and the closed door; and a summit the same at the second visit as at the first. One summit, sustained.
Joseph Conrad · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The register is ironic and cold, held down on purpose, and elevation comes as dread and as a terrible pity, in a handful of places. The cab ride to the almshouse, with the starved horse, the maimed cabman and Stevie’s anguish, is among the great scenes of pity in English fiction. The murder is the summit: Verloc on the sofa, the knife, the slow descent he has time to see, and after it the ticking that Winnie takes for the clock and that is the blood dripping from the sofa. Her flight, Ossipon’s discovery of the body and the Professor walking off “like a pest in the street full of men” rise to a black grandeur. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is frequency: between these heights the book is flat and sardonic by design, and they come less often than in the great tragic novels.
Luis Buñuel · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
The axis is indifferent to register, and the film’s heights are of a strange order, dread and comedy at once. They recur across its length. The curtain rising on an audience, six people on a stage without their lines, is the most vertiginous image in the film. The sergeant’s dream street, dim and peopled by the dead, has an eerie beauty. The shotgun after the absolution is terror at a bedside. The piano spilling cockroaches is horror in a single image, and the road, six figures walking in open country with no end given, gathers a quiet grandeur each time it returns. Held there by method: the heights are few for the length, each is withdrawn as soon as it arrives, which is the joke, and the film chooses wit over transport.
William Makepeace Thackeray · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
A comic and satiric book that rises seldom, and rises high when it does. The close of chapter 32 is among the great sentences of the Victorian novel: “Darkness came down on the field and city: and Amelia was praying for George, who was lying on his face, dead, with a bullet through his heart.” The battle has been kept offstage for chapters and is let in with one clause. Rawdon’s return from the sponging-house to find Becky with Lord Steyne, in chapter 53, has the force of tragedy, and the narrator’s note that Becky admired her husband at that moment, strong and brave and victorious, is the book’s point of most dreadful clarity. Old Osborne reading his dead son’s letter and old Sedley’s long decline rise in a lower key. Between these the register is the drawing room and the auction, by design. The frequency is low; the height is real.
Terry Gilliam · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Elevation comes often and in two registers. The flight dreams, Sam in winged armour above the clouds to Kamen’s swelling “Brazil”, are transport, and the film knows they are kitsch, which adds a second note. Dread is its deeper height: the torture chamber, a vast cylindrical hall with a lone chair, entered by a tiny figure; Lint’s baby mask; Tuttle swallowed by a storm of paper and gone. The last shot, the camera drawing back up the chamber from Sam humming while Helpmann says “He’s got away”, is the film’s summit. What holds the figure is noise rather than height: much of the film is busy, loud and comic, and the elevations are spaced by long passages of frantic farce.
J. D. Salinger · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The register is comic and colloquial by design, so elevation is rare, and when it comes it comes from the flat voice suddenly giving way. The summit is the carrousel in the rain at the end: Phoebe going round and round reaching for the gold ring while Holden sits soaked on a bench and is, for once, happy. Before it the rises are smaller, of tenderness and dread: Phoebe’s room in the dark; the Museum of Natural History, where everything stays where it was; the ducks of the Central Park lagoon, whose fate in winter he keeps asking about; the obscenity on the walls of a children’s school, which he cannot rub out fast enough. Allie’s mitt, with its poems in green ink, carries the strongest pressure of feeling in the book. Held here because the heights are few and brief, the comic surface keeps them low for long stretches, and the summit comes once.
David Fincher · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
The register is satirical and kinetic, and elevation is not its usual mode, but when the film rises it goes high. The titles travel out of a brain, along a nerve and through the skin to the barrel of a gun. Tyler lets go of the wheel in the rain, and the car rolls into a ditch. The lye burns on the narrator’s hand in close-up while he tries to meditate his way out of it. Raymond K. Hessel kneels behind the shop at gunpoint, and the scene is terror, not satire. The last shot is a true sublime of destruction, cold and beautiful at once. Held below the rest by frequency: between these points the film is busy, funny and fast, sharp more often than high.
Frida Kahlo · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Elevation is real and comes in one register, a cold, uncanny shock rather than transport or grandeur. The opened heart on a calm face; the blood among the embroidered flowers, where for a moment stain cannot be told from pattern; the two identical gazes held steadily on the viewer; and the sky, the one passage of agitation in a picture otherwise held still. The shock is high at the first encounter and does not recur at greater height on return: the composition is frontal and static, everything presented at once, nothing withheld for the eye to reach. The sky is effective and conventional, a stage storm more than a weather. The axis credits the dread; the narrow range, one strong moment repeated across two figures, holds it down.
J. G. Ballard · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The book reaches a cold and dreadful elevation, and reaches it often: the first page, Vaughan’s body among the bus’s passengers; the narrator’s own collision, the dead man thrown through the windscreen onto the bonnet; the staged crash at the road research laboratory, watched like a ballet; the night drives along the flyovers with the airport lights. The register is flat, and the flatness is the source of the terror: the narrator describes atrocity as an engineer describes a joint. Two things hold it in the low eights. The height is one height, repeated, and by the middle of the book a reader is acclimatised rather than lifted; and the book forbids itself warmth, beauty or grandeur in any other key.
Akkadian · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The elevation is of one kind: grandeur, cold and imperial, with a strain of dread. It has three places. The king alone near the apex, against the bare stone that stands for sky, with the stars over him. The upward drive of the whole field, every soldier’s spear and step aimed toward him, so that the stone itself seems to rise. And at the right the fall of the defeated, bodies tipping off the mountain, which gives the ascent its terror. The height recurs across the field rather than standing at one point. What limits it is the register: triumph and its victims only, with no tenderness, no joy and no awe that is not power’s. The worn surface, charged elsewhere, means the eye meets weathered stone where the original rose. High in its kind, narrow in range.
Dionysus Flambouras · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Height is rationed and cold, each instance earned by the flatness around it. The kitchen in the dark, which a dead man said was only the kitchen in the dark, and in which the ninth section leaves the driver sitting. A hymn sung badly by people who learned it from different teachers. Two crosscut saws going against each other with a sound like breathing out of time. A stripped rectangle of brick at Geraldton, one corner of a sheet left under a staple. Superior from a rail painted green, where a father once said look at the water; in February a frozen bay goes unlooked at. A file fed sheet by sheet into a furnace that once burned coal. The book rises perhaps six times, and means to.
William Blake · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
The elevation is real and of a cold kind. The body set luminous against the dark has a monumental weight: the mass of the shoulders and the curve of the back carry it at the size of a sheet. The second height is the setting, the sunk, dark element behind the man who draws a circle on the floor of it, the sense of an abyss at his back. The third is the colour of the rock, a burst of red and gold printed texture that glows like a living reef. It is one sustained note, awe at beauty turned inward, rather than recurring summits. There is no terror at full force and no transport, and the scale of a print holds it.
Lina Bo Bardi · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Elevation comes more than once, in a register of exhilaration and gravity more than transport. The towers rise out of the low district as raw grey masses pierced by red-framed holes, the bridges crossing between them in mid-air with the force of a fortress or a quarry face; inside, the stacked courts open through the holes to the sky. In the halls the height is of another kind: long brick sheds under their trusses, light from above, water across the floor and fire in the hearth. What holds the axis: much of the complex is plain and low by intent, the halls are comfortable more than elevated, and the summit moments gather at the towers and bridges, seen chiefly from outside or in passage.
Philip K. Dick · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
Elevation comes as dread, and it comes more than once. A scrawl on a washroom wall, telling the survivors that one is alive and that they are all dead, turns the plot into terror in two lines. Wendy Wright found desiccated in a closet, dried out in a night, is a cold height. The summit is Joe Chip’s climb up the stairs of the hotel in Des Moines, freezing, ageing by the step, his body failing as he goes, rendered without relief until Ella Runciter’s help reaches him: one of the strongest passages of physical horror in American fiction of its decade. The last chapter’s epigraph reaches a different height, the voice of the Word. Against these, much of the book runs at the level of brisk pulp narration, and the comedy of the door, though sharp, does not rise. The heights are real, and intermittent.
Anselm Kiefer · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Elevation is real and of one kind, dreadful and elegiac. It comes at first sight, in the scale: strands rising across a large field, straw catching the light against a dark ground. It comes again close to, where the gold meets the black and the stalks become singed hair, a material that has been fire or will be. And it comes in the name, written above a field that holds no person, so that the absence of a body is felt as loss. What holds the axis is frequency and range: one motif across the width, an elevation sustained rather than rising to recurring summits, no second register of light or space, and a quiet ground. Grandeur and terror are present; transport less so. The canvas is grave rather than overwhelming.
Filippo Brunelleschi · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Elevation here is beauty of measure, calm and bright, never terror or vastness. It comes in the cloister, where the portico closes the long perspective; under the portico, where coloured terracotta follows the grey and white; and at the step into the hall, where the whole room is seen at once and the eye lifts to the twelve windows at the foot of the dome. Frequency is high: every bay repeats the same grey line on white, and the room renews itself as the light moves round the windows. Height is the limit. The room is small and its register single, a lucidity that steadies rather than transports, and it does not rise to the great vaults.
Paolo Uccello · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The elevation is cold and decorative, and it recurs. The first height is the field of lances against the dark: in the London and Louvre panels the upright and couched shafts make a rhythm like a choir, and the eye is lifted by pattern before it reads the fight. The second is the white horse at the centre of the Uffizi panel, rearing out of a dark mass, with the unhorsed rider falling: the one moment of real drama. The third is the strangeness itself, armoured men as faceted solids, horses as carved toys, a landscape tilted like a hanging, under a stillness like a dream. At full size the effect comes close to grandeur. It is not terror and not tragic height: beauty and enchantment, sustained across all three panels, high in kind and limited in range.
Josef Hoffmann · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The elevation is of a cool, exact splendour, not of grandeur or terror. From the street the white planes and their dark edges, the bays stepping forward and back and the tower rising to its crown make an image of rare clarity. Inside, the double-height hall with its gallery gives the house one rising space, and the dining room, even without its frieze, is a room of richness held in rectangles. Elevation comes often, since almost every surface rewards close looking. But the register is elegance, a beauty of proportion and finish that does not overwhelm, and the scale is domestic: nothing here lifts the body as the glass of the Sainte-Chapelle (8.8) does. Most of its admirers know it from photographs.
Martin Scorsese · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The film refuses elevation by design for most of its length. Its manner is anecdote and deadpan, the comedy of men arguing over a fish carried in a car, and through the first two hours it is lively rather than elevated. It rises late, and then repeatedly: the drive to the empty house in Detroit and the two shots in its hallway, a cold dread the more terrible for being administrative; the telephone call to Hoffa’s wife; Russell’s decline; the old man alone, asking the priest to leave the door open, and the last shot seen through the gap. These are summits of a quiet and dreadful kind, and they count. But the axis weighs frequency with height, and two hours of a film of three and a half pass almost without a summit. The figure is the late height, discounted by that long level stretch.
Don DeLillo · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
The book rises, and its heights are placed at its ends. The Acropolis governs it: the first sentence, “For a long time I stayed away from the Acropolis.”, sets the temple above the city as something James avoids, and when he climbs to it at last, near the end of his narration, among crowds speaking many languages, the scene is the book’s widest opening. Owen’s journey into the desert of Rajasthan in search of the cult, and the cult’s members met in the Mani, carry a cold dread. The closing section rises in another key: a boy at a Pentecostal service who cannot speak in tongues, given in a child’s broken spelling, the warmest height in DeLillo to that date. Held here because the long middle is level by design, the dinners and the walks keeping a cool, ironic surface for long stretches, and the heights are spaced.
Antonio da Sangallo the Younger; Michelangelo; Giacomo della Porta · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The register is grave grandeur, without terror or transport. Elevation comes at the threshold, in the dark three-aisled vestibule on its granite columns, a Roman hall inside a private house; in the courtyard, where three storeys rise to the sky in a square and the third sharpens what the two below have stated; and in the piazza front seen whole from across the square, its cornice throwing a deep shadow along the full length. Frequency is moderate. Read bay by bay the front is even to the point of monotony, and much of the block is rooms that are fine rather than elevating; elevation here is decorum raised to the scale of a state, not a recurring event.
Brian Eno · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
Elevation is real and of one kind: beauty held still. In 1/1 the piano’s slowed, reverberant tones fall into silence and the next phrase arrives when it arrives; the moment two loops coincide on a consonance is a small height, recurring unpredictably across the piece. 2/1 reaches the most. The wordless voices, stacked on loops, sound like a choir in a large stone space, a sacred hush with no rite, and that is the record’s summit. 1/2 has moments of the same height; 2/2 stays level. The whole design refuses peaks: no climax, no rise, no release. Height here is gentle and frequent rather than high, never grandeur or terror, and it chooses not to be. A tenth above Zooropa at 8.0, well under the Warszawa of Low.
Jorge Luis Borges · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
Height comes in a few places, and coldly. The title story climbs by dimension from its first sentence, “La línea consta de un número infinito de puntos” (the line consists of an infinite number of points), to a book whose first page cannot be found and whose numbers do not repeat: a true terror made of a household object. In “El espejo y la máscara” each poem rises above the last, and the third, never quoted, is sublime because it is withheld. “Undr” ends on one word found after a lifetime; “El Congreso” closes on a long drive through Buenos Aires, the book’s one warm height. “There Are More Things” builds real dread from furniture no human body could use, in a borrowed manner. Between these, “El soborno” and “Avelino Arredondo” do not rise, so the frequency is middling.
Built for Frederick II · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
The height comes most of all from outside. The pale octagon stands alone on its crest, its towers catching the light, visible for many kilometres across the Murge, its figure steady from every side: a crown laid on a hill. The approach makes it. Within, elevation is quieter: the court, a well of sky closed by eight walls; the upper rooms, their rib vaults springing from shafts of red breccia, light from the two-light windows falling across limestone; the precision of the ashlar. Frequency is moderate. The rooms repeat, and the stripping of the marble has left them austere, so that the interior’s sublime is one of order, not of grandeur or light. No single room overwhelms.
Alfred Hitchcock · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Elevation comes in three places, each in its own key. The overhead shot from the Secretariat, a tiny figure running from the slab, is dread made of scale. The crop duster is the summit: a man alone on a flat plain at noon, the road straight to the horizon, the silence held through cars that pass, then the plane turning toward him, a sublime of exposure that inverts the dark street of the thriller. Mount Rushmore gives grandeur and vertigo together, the stone faces above, the drop below, a hand holding a hand. Herrmann’s overture, a driving fandango, lends the titles lift. Between these the register is wit and glamour, elegant rather than elevated; the summits are thrill more than transport, and the train romance is charm.
Byzantine, under Archbishop Ursicinus · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
The building rises once, and fully. The passage makes it: across flat fields to a plain brick front, into a long cool nave of grey-veined columns marching in two even rows, light falling from both sides on bare walls, and at the end, raised above steps, the apse in green and gold, the cross floating in its blue disc, the saint in his meadow catching the light of the windows round him. The ratio of austerity to blaze is the experience, and it is great. What holds the axis is frequency and register. There is one summit, seen from the door and approached for the length of the nave; the side walls give nothing; the arch mosaics are smaller and later in feeling; the exterior, the round tower apart, is modest. The elevation is serene and never terrible, a height of beauty rather than grandeur.
Decimus Burton and Richard Turner · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Height is good and frequency is good. Elevation comes from outside, in the long curved body seen across the pond, its glass taking the sky and doubled in the water, a figure without one straight line. It comes inside, under the transept, where the palms rise into a light that no wall stops and the ribs curve over them like the frame of a hull. It comes again on the gallery, reached by the spiral stair, where one walks among the crowns in heat and damp. The register is wonder and lightness, with a faint oppression of heat that belongs to the effect. It is held where it is because the register is one, the scale is a large hall and not a nave, and much of the sublime is the planting’s, which the house frames and does not make.
I. M. Pei · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Height is good and frequency moderate. Elevation comes in the pyramid seen across the court at dusk, when the glass takes the sky and the palace lights behind it; at night, lit from within, a figure of light in a dark court; in the pools, where pyramid and fronts are doubled; and above all from the hall, looking up through the lattice to the pavilions and the sky, the palace held in the glass like a thing in a case. The spiral stair, turning under the apex, is a strong moment of descent. The register is clarity and poise, never terror or vastness. What holds the axis: the hall is a concourse, crowded, loud and given to queues for much of the day, so the elevation it offers is often not lived; the pyramid is smaller than its image; and its heights are few.
Snøhetta · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Elevation comes often, and in one register, a cool exaltation. The strongest moment is the roof itself: a white slope lifting out of dark water, and the climber rising above the harbour with the fjord, its islands and the city spread round, at its height in the low northern light of evening or under snow, when stone and ice read as one. Inside, the foyer’s tall glazed wall faces the water under the tilted ceiling, the oak wall rises warm through it against the white and the glass, and the passage from that light into the dark oak of the hall is a real one. What holds the axis: the register is calm rather than awful, its height a matter of light and openness more than of space or terror; after the foyer the interior is handsome rather than elevated, and the fly tower and back of house are flat.
Fleetwood Mac · Music
7.9 · Tier III
Elevation comes often and in a few kinds. Dreams is the steadiest height, a two-chord drift over an unhurried beat, the voice hovering rather than pressing, so that the song seems to float above its own grievance. The Chain rises twice: as the voices enter in close harmony over a stark kick drum, and at the break, where the bass plays alone and the coda builds on it to the guitar, the record’s most physical lift. Gold Dust Woman reaches the dreadful kind, a slow incantation near trance. Songbird is height of the plainest kind, and Go Your Own Way’s driving end is release. Five or six tracks of eleven rise; the heights are real, short and mostly warm.
Norman Foster (Foster and Partners) · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Elevation is real and comes in three places. From the plaza the diagrid swells overhead and curves away, a lattice that seems to breathe outward and then close. Across the City the tower is a single dark figure among blocks, its spirals turning as one moves. At the top, in the domed room under the lens, London lies on every side and the steel closes to a point overhead: one of the great rooms of its kind. Frequency is lower. The lobby is modest and low; the office floors are offices, their spiralling voids giving a glimpse of floors above and below, not a nave; and the top room has been a private one for most of the building’s life. The register is serene and exhilarating, never terrible.
David Foster Wallace · Literature
7.9 · Tier III
Elevation comes, more often than the subject would seem to allow. The opening, “Past the flannel plains”, raises an Illinois field at harvest to the pitch of a psalm. Fogle’s conversion is the height: a substitute Jesuit at the end of an Advanced Tax class telling the room “Gentlemen, you are called to account”, and a drifting young man hearing it as a summons. Lane Dean’s long afternoon at his desk turns from torment to something like an annunciation as a ghost sits down beside him. Meredith Rand’s confession and Drinion’s attention to it, over a whole evening, rise to a strange tenderness. Held in the low eights because the method is tedium by design: the heights are spaced through long flat stretches, and several sections that would have been the book’s summits exist only as notes.
U2 · Music
7.8 · Tier III
Elevation comes often and is of one kind, the anthemic lift, sometimes cold and martial, sometimes warm. The opening drum of Sunday Bloody Sunday, with the violin entering against it, is a real height of terror and grief. New Year’s Day rises twice, on the piano under the chorus and in the guitar break. Drowning Man is the warmest height, a long floating vocal over acoustic strum and violin, close to transport, and “40” ends the record in plain grace; Surrender lifts in its last minute. Against this, Like a Song... and The Refugee strive and shout without lifting, and the voice reaches its heights by strain as often as by release. Height and frequency are both real, and both are bounded.
Daft Punk · Music
7.8 · Tier III
Elevation is frequent, warm and of one kind: transport. One More Time reaches it twice, in the long breakdown where the processed voice floats over strings and pads, and in the return of the kick. Aerodynamic opens on a struck bell and climbs into an arpeggiated guitar solo of real exhilaration. Digital Love lifts in its last third, when the song gives way to a long harmonised solo. Veridis Quo is the one grave height, slow arpeggios moving like a processional. Something About Us is beauty at low volume, and Voyager glides. High Life, Short Circuit, the interlude Nightvision and most of Too Long hold a level rather than rise. The dreadful sublime is absent: the height, often reached, is the height of pleasure.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Elevation of one kind, warm beauty, recurring across the whole field without rising to grandeur. It comes in the still life at the front left, bottles, half-full glasses, grapes and the white of the cloth caught in broken touches; in the light filtered through the striped awning, tinting faces and shirts; in the white singlets of the men at left and right, blue and violet in their shadows; in the river and sails glimpsed through the leaves, a breath of distance in a crowded room; and in Aline’s face over the dog, the most tender passage of all. The frequency is high: almost every square of the canvas is a pleasure. The height is moderate. There is no terror, no transport by scale and no sense of the vast. The register is charm, sustained.
Tame Impala · Music
7.7 · Tier III
Elevation comes often and is the record’s chief good after its making. Apocalypse Dreams climbs through a chord change into a huge drum fill and an ascending, phased coda that is real transport. Mind Mischief turns near its close into a slower, unexpected passage that lifts the song off its groove. Feels Like We Only Go Backwards is beauty of a plainer, warmer kind, a melody that sounds remembered on first hearing. The coda of Sun’s Coming Up reaches a melancholy grandeur; Elephant gives height of the brute kind. The heights are frequent but of one family, euphoric haze, and few reach terror or gravity; Endors Toi and stretches of Music to Walk Home By stay level.
Michel Pinseau · Architecture
7.6 · Tier III
Height is high and frequency fairly high. Elevation comes in the minaret seen from the corniche and from the sea, a shaft of 210 metres on the edge of the ocean with waves breaking against the sea wall below it; in the hall under the opened roof, the sky entering over thousands at prayer; in the long perspective of the hall, its arcades, cedar ceilings and chandeliers carried to a scale few interiors of the tradition reach; and at night, with the laser turned east from the summit. The register is grandeur, cool and solemn and sometimes overwhelming. What holds the axis: the effect is often of quantity rather than proportion, the ornament repeated until the eye stops reading it; the esplanade is vast and exposed; and the sublime of the sea belongs to the site, which the building takes rather than makes, though it chose to stand there.
Ambrogio Lorenzetti · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Elevation is real and mostly of one kind, a grave and spacious delight. Its heights: the countryside opening from the gate, hill beyond hill, roads, fields and farms under an even light, a distance no Italian wall had held before; the city as a crowd of towers and loggias stacked to the edge of the wall; Peace reclining in white on her cushion of armour. Dread is reached on the west wall, in Tyranny’s horned and squinting face, but the damage has taken much of it, and the effects of war are now a ruin of a ruin. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is temperature, kept deliberately even as befits an argument for order: wonder rather than transport, a north wall solemn more than elevating, and a height that recurs across two walls but stays below grandeur.
Chantal Akerman · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Elevation is rare by design, and real when it comes. The film works by accumulation, and its height is dread built over three hours: the second day’s small failures, each nothing in itself, gather a tension the viewer feels as physical. The third day reaches it. Jeanne sits idle in her armchair in the middle of the afternoon, a thing the film has taught us is impossible; then the bedroom, the scissors, and the last shot, a woman at her table in the dark with blood on her blouse and a blue light blinking, held for minutes, among the strongest endings in the medium. Frequency holds the axis well below films that rise often: for long stretches the film is level by intention, and the height gathers in its last half hour.
Gustave Courbet · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The axis scores height and frequency, and here elevation is of one register, gravity, and is refused at the points where the tradition placed it. Where it arises: the black mass of mourners under the pale cliffs, a dark band of people under a lighter band of rock, which at this size has the weight of geology; the crucifix against the grey sky; the gravedigger’s bent back over the open earth; the white headdresses against the black. Before a canvas nearly seven metres wide the whole town arriving at the viewer’s own level is a real grandeur, the grandeur of number. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is that it does not rise again and again, and that the picture closes the places where transport would come: no light breaks, no gesture lifts, the sky is overcast. The refusal is the achievement, and the axis counts what is reached.
Édouard Manet · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Elevation is present in one register, cool and glittering, and it is not the picture’s business. Its places: the chandeliers and the white globes of light dissolving in the mirror; the crowd in the balcony, a haze of rapid touches from which gloves and opera glasses surface; and the still life at the left, where foil, glass and the orange of the fruit stand at the height of the medium as beauty. The girl’s face, still and unreadable against all that light, is the one place where something like gravity rises. There is no grandeur of scale, no terror and no transport. The height is beauty held deliberately at arm’s length, the temper is melancholy, and the picture keeps one temperature in one instant. Beauty is high; elevation in the axis’s full sense is moderate.
Virginia Woolf · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
An essay of wit and irony reaches height less often than a poem or a tragedy, but it reaches it. The life of Shakespeare’s sister is the summit, dreadful and plain at once: the same gift, no grammar school, a betrothal against her will, laughter at the stage door, death by her own hand and a grave at a crossroads where the omnibuses now stop by the Elephant and Castle. The October light on the river and the college, and the luncheon that turns through the humming of Tennyson and Christina Rossetti into the question of what the war took away, rise in a different key, an elegy for an illusion. The close lifts the last page with the promise of the dead poet’s return. Between these the register is quick and satirical, and the elevation is rarer than in Woolf’s fiction.
Nikolai Gogol · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Comedy rises here, in two directions. The comic height is Khlestakov’s lying in the third act: the soup come straight from Paris in its pot, the watermelon of seven hundred roubles, “тридцать пять тысяч одних курьеров”
(thirty-five thousand couriers alone), his being “с Пушкиным на дружеской ноге”
(on a friendly footing with Pushkin), until the lie, outrunning the liar, nearly makes him a field marshal and he falls asleep in the middle of it. It is a flight made of nothing, and the audience feels it as flight. The dreadful height is the close: the Mayor’s rage at himself, the gendarme’s announcement, and the dumb scene, every figure frozen by Gogol’s direction. Between the two the register is the steady comic level of exposure; elevation is rare by design, and the axis scores frequency as well as height.
Bruce Springsteen · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Elevation is rare by design and comes as dread and sorrow, never as grandeur. State Trooper is the record’s terror: a man on the New Jersey Turnpike at night with no “License, registration”, one repeating figure, and the voice breaking into howls, the most frightening sounds on the record. Highway Patrolman reaches a plain, long sorrow in its chorus. My Father’s House rises in its dream of running home through the woods, and falls at the door. Atlantic City has a hard, bright lift in its chorus, and Reason to Believe ends on a strange lightness, almost a hymn. What holds the figure is the record’s own choice: it keeps to the flat register of testimony, and its power is in withholding height.
Stanley Kubrick · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Elevation is real and is mostly cold. The Korova pull-back from Alex’s stare under the electronic Purcell; the fight in the derelict casino to the Thieving Magpie overture; the slow-motion revenge at the marina, bodies falling into the water to Rossini; the Ninth in the record shop and over the Ludovico films; the last fantasy on the white ground with the applauding gentry. Beethoven, played straight and through the Moog, keeps the film near height. The frequency is the limit, and it is weighed: the second half is mostly flat and comic by design, the hospital and the parents’ flat are drab on purpose, and the heights are nearly all in the first forty minutes, where the film wants the viewer’s pleasure. The elevation serves an argument, and the argument cools it.
Apuleius · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Height is reached, but not often, for the book’s native register is comic and grotesque. The ceiling is the epiphany, Isis rising from the sea at Cenchreae, crowned and robed, naming herself by the names of the nations; and the initiation, told with reserve: accessi confinium mortis (“I came to the boundary of death”), nocte media vidi solem (“at midnight I saw the sun”). Psyche raising the lamp over the sleeping god, and the drop of oil that wakes him, is the warm height. The dreadful: Meroe and Panthia cutting Socrates’ throat and stopping the wound with a sponge; Charite blinding Thrasyllus at her husband’s tomb before she kills herself. Between them stretch long passages of farce, beating and bawdry that are not meant to lift, and the axis counts how often height comes.
Donato Bramante · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Elevation of a single kind, beauty of proportion, and frequent within that kind. Seen through the cloister door the building is complete at once, every part answering every other, colonnade, balustrade, drum and dome rising in steps to the lantern. Light falls round the columns, and the shadow of the peristyle on the cella turns with the day. The effect is grace and repose, not grandeur or terror. The scale forbids the higher reaches: the court is cramped, the building cannot be stood back from, and the interior gives no answering height. The descent to the crypt and its opening over the place of the cross give a second, darker note, and it is brief. Height is limited by size and the register is one, and that holds the axis well below the grand buildings.
Richard Linklater · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
The work rises often, and low. In Before Sunrise the summit is the listening booth, where two strangers play Kath Bloom’s “Come Here” and do not quite look at each other; then the kiss on the wheel at the Prater, and the morning montage of the empty places they passed through. In Before Sunset, Celine’s hand lifted toward Jesse’s head and withdrawn, her waltz, and the dance to Nina Simone before the cut to black. In Before Midnight, a sun going down over the Mani, watched in silence. What holds the axis lowest of the eleven is height: the elevation is tenderness and the ache of time, never grandeur or terror, and frequency, which is high, cannot make up the difference.
Samuel Johnson · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
This is criticism and biography in a judicial prose whose whole manner distrusts transport, and long stretches, the minor lives, the catalogues of editions, the accounts of pensions, are flat by design. Elevation comes in a recognisable kind and at intervals. The close of the Savage, the man of genius dying in a Bristol prison, has a grave, unforced pathos. The Milton rises in its account of the blind poet at work on Paradise Lost in poverty and danger. The parallel of Dryden and Pope is a sustained height of judgment. The tribute to Gilbert Walmsley in the Edmund Smith, with its sentence on the death of Garrick that “eclipsed the gaiety of nations”, is height of the moral and elegiac kind. It recurs through the great lives without being the book’s element.
Margaret Atwood · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Elevation is real, and most of it is cold dread. The Ceremony, told flatly, the Wife holding the Handmaid’s hands, is among the coldest scenes in the fiction of its decade. The Wall with its hanged bodies, bags over their heads; the Salvaging, and the Particicution in which the Handmaids tear a man apart; “Nolite te bastardes carborundorum” scratched in the cupboard by the woman who held the room before and hanged herself; the last step into the van, “into the darkness within; or else the light” (Part XV, Night). Tenderness rises in the memories of the daughter and in the stolen nights with Nick. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the register, ironic and controlled by design: the voice turns from height to wit almost every time, the Birth Day is grotesque more than terrible, and transport is rarely allowed to stand.
Luis Buñuel · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Buñuel builds against elevation, and the film rises in spite of him, four times and coldly. The summit is the beggars’ dance under Handel’s “Hallelujah”: the chorus at full height while the blind man lashes out with his stick and a beggar dances in the dead bride’s corset and veil, grandeur meeting what it is sung over. The Last Supper tableau is a second height, the drugging under Mozart’s Requiem a third, the rope beneath the tree a fourth. What holds the axis here is distance. Only the dance is a full height; the tableau is as much a joke as a summit, the rope a shudder in one shot. Twice the grandeur is borrowed from the music, and every height is watched rather than undergone, with plain daylight between.
Ovid · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Height is real and comes at a handful of places. The summit is 1.3, the last night in Rome: the household weeping as at a funeral, the moon over the Capitol, the wife who would follow, told with a pathos Latin elegy had not reached on its own account before. The storm of 1.2, written as if in the waves, and 1.11, verses composed on deck in winter, reach a dreadful grandeur. 3.10 is the cold sublime, the Danube frozen so that wagons cross it and the wine standing in the shape of its jar. 3.3, the epitaph dictated from a sickbed, and 4.10 rise in another key. Between these the register is plaintive and level, and the plea to Caesar is not an elevated mode: the height is high, the frequency moderate.
Edvard Munch · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The elevation is real and of one kind: the stillness of the girl’s profile against the pillow, a pale face given a dignity close to the devotional, and the quiet of the bowed head beside it. The one height is the face. The pillow around it is a halo in all but name, and the eye returns to it as to the light source of the room. There is no grandeur and no terror; the register is tenderness at the edge of death, sustained across the whole field, since the scratched paint keeps every passage at the same pitch. But the axis asks for height and for how often, and the canvas reaches one height, quietly, and holds it. The Starry Night at 9.2 and Water Lilies at 9.0 rise in several places and at a larger pitch.
The Beatles · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent and of one kind: beauty, warm and close, rarely grandeur, never terror. In My Life is the summit, a plain melody on a slow ground that opens at the bridge and then, in George Martin’s sped-up keyboard solo, turns briefly baroque and rises. Girl has a melancholy height in its sighing refrain; Michelle’s descending line and close harmonies are beautiful; Nowhere Man’s unaccompanied opening lifts at once; Norwegian Wood comes near enchantment; If I Needed Someone rings. Drive My Car and The Word have drive but not height, and What Goes On, Wait and Run for Your Life stay on the ground. Six or seven of fourteen songs rise, none for long, and the highest is lovely more than overwhelming.
Jean-François Millet · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The elevation is gravity rather than transport. The three bodies have the weight and stillness of figures on a frieze; a long late light falls from the left, warm on the backs and the stubble; and the distance turns gold, the stacks dissolved in haze, a harvest seen as a promised land the women do not enter. That distance is the one place the picture lifts, and it lifts by being out of reach. The register is single and low in temperature: no terror, no grandeur of scale in less than a square metre, and a foreground kept earthbound, which is the point and also the limit. The height is reached once and held, not reached again across the field.
Octavia E. Butler · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The book reaches terror, not grandeur. The whipping Dana takes after she is caught teaching Nigel to read, the patrollers beating a man before his family in the night, Isaac’s ears, the sale of Tess, Alice found hanged: each is rendered with a flat, unsparing force, and the force lands again and again. The opening, “I lost an arm on my last trip home. My left arm.”, is one of the great first lines of its decade, and the last return, Dana’s arm held where Rufus’s hand gripped it as the wall of her own house closes through it, is a real summit of dread. What holds the axis at eight is the voice. Butler’s elevation is in event, not in sentence; the prose seldom lifts, and between the peaks the book runs at a level, purposeful plainness, so that the frequency of height is modest.
Piet Mondrian · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Elevation is real and of one kind: delight, a lifting of the spirits, the eye kept moving by a flicker it cannot settle. It comes at the first sight, a square of light alive at every edge; in the small units, which seem to travel along the yellow lines as the eye moves; in the large blocks, which read now as on the surface and now as set back, so that the field opens and closes; and in the absence of black, which leaves the whole canvas bright. What holds it is height of kind: no grandeur, no terror, no transport by scale, for the square is the size of a person’s torso, not of a room. The brightness is sustained across the field rather than rising to recurring summits.
Anthony Burgess · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The heights here are dreadful and comic more than grand. The home invasion at HOME is terror delivered in a voice that enjoys it. The Ludovico screenings, Alex strapped in with his eyes held open, reach a real horror, and the moment when he finds the music he loves turned to nausea is the book’s most painful. The warm height is Alex alone in his room with a symphony, the argot turned to rapture, which Burgess, a composer as well as a novelist, writes as transport. These rise more than once, but the voice that carries them is a performance, cocky and confiding, “O my brothers”, and its comedy keeps lowering the ceiling it builds. The last chapter’s elevation, the son Alex imagines, is gentle rather than high. A book of repeated sharp peaks, none of them at the height of the summit.
Alvar Aalto · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Elevation here is cool and frequent rather than overwhelming. It comes in the long white patient wing standing out of the pine forest; in the cantilevered terraces stacked at the end of the wing and held out into air and light; in the main stair with its colour and daylight. These rise again and again. Height is held lower, and rightly: a sanatorium does not overwhelm its patients, and the building’s purpose works against grandeur. No single interior lifts as the great sacred rooms lift, and the sublime of the place, the forest, the long winter, the dying and the recovering lying in the same rows, is felt more than built. Frequent, real, and never the summit.
Edith Wharton · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The register is held low on purpose, and elevation comes rarely, but it comes. The summit is the last page: Archer on a bench below Ellen’s windows in Paris, sending his son up alone and finding the moment more real where he sits than it would be upstairs, then walking back to his hotel. Below it: Lime Rock, where he watches Ellen at the end of the pier and wagers his return on whether she turns before a sail passes the light, and she does not turn; the museum among the Cesnola antiquities, where the two speak of meeting among objects whose uses no one remembers; the farewell dinner, which is elevation of the cold kind, dread. “Each time you happen to me all over again” rises from plain talk. What holds the axis is frequency: whole chapters of Book I run at the level of comedy of manners.
Kenzo Tange · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
There is one great moment, built to recur on every approach: under the pilotis and then from the cenotaph, the arch narrows the view to the flame and, far off across the river, the skeletal dome against the sky. That moment carries dread and stillness together and has real height, and the approach along the boulevard and the passage beneath the museum prepare it well. Elsewhere the work is deliberately quiet. The louvred elevations are calm and handsome, not elevating; the park is flat and level, its trees now grown; the interior is a gallery. A single summit moment, reached by one line though reached each time, stands below a work that rises again and again. The ruin lends a terror the building did not make, and only the framing is credited here.
Jackson Pollock · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Elevation is real and of one kind: a dark, enclosing depth, the sublime of being under something rather than before it. It comes at first sight, a tall field with no ground, no top and no place for the eye to rest; in the white skeins, which flash across the dark like light seen through water; and in the slow finding of the objects, a key or a coin surfacing in the impasto, which turns the depth from optical to literal. It recurs as the eye moves rather than rising to separate summits. What holds it is size and register: at about a square metre the canvas cannot enclose the body as the large poured fields of 1950 do, and the density that makes the depth also clots the surface in places. Height of kind, sustained, without grandeur of scale.
Hermann Hesse · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
The book reaches elevation several times and knows how. A trace of the eternal caught in a phrase of old music; the night of the masked ball, when Haller loses himself in a crowd for the first time; and above all the laughter of the Immortals, Mozart and Goethe, cold and high, which the book sets against Haller’s earnestness: icy and liberating at once, it is the book’s best image. The doors of the Magic Theatre give strange and sometimes terrible scenes, the hunt in which Haller and his old friend Gustav shoot at motorists from a tree, the killing of Hermine with a knife. But the heights are uneven. Some lyric passages tip into the inflated, and the run of doors is as often a set of illustrations as a rising action.
Philip Roth · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
The heights are comic, and they come often: the liver bought at the butcher’s, used in secret and then served to the family for dinner; the bus to Newark; Bubbles Girardi; Thanksgiving in Iowa among the Campbells, where the son of Newark hears Gentile politeness as a foreign music; the mother with the bread knife over a boy who will not eat. The transport is real and frequent. The lyric heights are fewer and the more striking for it: the Sunday softball of the fathers, and the boy’s wish to be a center fielder and nothing more, the book’s one vision of a life without guilt; and the end in Israel, the impotence with Naomi and the long printed howl that the analyst’s line cuts off. Terror lies close under the kitchen scenes and is turned to farce. Held at the foot of the eights because the elevation is mostly the elevation of performance, and grandeur is refused by design.
Abbas Kiarostami · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Elevation is rare, and the film is built to make it rare. The arid stretch, earth tipped from a hopper and dust settling over Badii’s shadow, is a deliberate flatness against which three things rise. Bagheri’s story, told on the longer road he insists on, through trees and late light, lifts the film from argument into gratitude. The night is the summit: Badii in the hole, the moon behind cloud, thunder and rain, his face lit by lightning, then the black screen held, a terror of plain means. The coda lifts as a sudden green after the ochre, though some feel it as deflation. The height is real; the frequency is low by design, and frequency counts.
Edward Hopper · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Elevation is real and of one kind: a cold stillness, the light treated as a presence in the dark, the green and yellow of the interior against the black street, the shop windows opposite lit only by what spills across. It is a quiet height and it holds through long looking, which counts for frequency. But it is a single register, one moment held, with no rising, no grandeur and no terror beyond a faint unease, and it is reached by the whole field at once rather than by repeated summits within it. The axis credits the stillness; the single temperature and the absence of any moment of transport hold it at 8.0.
Luis Buñuel · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
The register is cool and deadpan, and Buñuel refuses lift: no score, a level camera, the scandalous played at the pace of the ordinary. When elevation comes it comes as strangeness, dry and uncanny. The landau in the autumn park and the whips in the wood; Séverine laid in a coffin under a veil while the Duke conducts his rite; mud thrown at her white dress; a small lacquered box that hums and is never opened to the viewer; Deneuve’s face held still, giving nothing; the empty landau passing under the bells. These heights recur, but the method rations them, and long stretches, the ski resort, the salon of the house and the street plot, are level and comic. Frequency holds the axis here: the film is great without being elevated.
James Stirling, Michael Wilford and Associates · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Height comes in one place, and it is real: the rotunda. One climbs from a loud road up ramps, passes into a stone drum open to the sky, planted with creepers and set with sculpture, and walks round its rim with the galleries out of sight above. The noise falls away, and the sky is framed as the Pantheon frames it, but without the dome. That is elevation by withdrawal, cold and quiet, and it is the building’s centre in every sense. The top-lit enfilade gives the calm, even elevation of good gallery rooms, without strain. Elsewhere the register is wit and pleasure: the colours, the bulging glass, the terraces over the traffic. The frequency is moderate and the height high once, and the axis is held there.
Lana Wachowski and Lilly Wachowski · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The film rises often, and in more than one register. The terror is the pod: Neo waking in a membrane of fluid, cables pulled from his spine, the camera drawing back to a tower of thousands, a machine dropping him into the dark. The transport is kinetic: the dodge on the rooftop, the rescue of Morpheus from the helicopter, the subway fight ended by the train. The grandest height comes last. Neo stands up dead in the hallway, stops the bullets in the air, and sees the corridor and the agents as falling green code: the visual register changes at the instant the hero’s knowledge does. Held at the figure because the height is mostly of power and release, and some of it, the leather and the slow walk into the lobby, is style in place of height.
Hellenistic (Roman marble copy) · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The elevation is pathos, held quiet. The right arm strains against the slump of the torso, the head can no longer lift, the eyes are turned to the ground, and the moment of passing is held still for as long as anyone stands there. Byron’s line, “Consents to death, but conquers agony”, reports the effect the figure has had on viewers for four centuries, and the effect is real. It recurs as the viewer walks round: from the front the face, from behind the broad back already giving way, from the side the long diagonal of a body sinking. But the register is one, a restrained grief without terror, grandeur or transport. The scale is a man’s, and the figure rises once and is held there, not again and again.
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The elevation is of one kind: cool, exact beauty. Its places are the great curve of the back, a single unbroken contour of light that is the canvas’s chief event; the skin, pale and nearly shadowless, set against the deep blue of silk and curtain; the face turned over the shoulder, with its level, unreadable look; and the peacock fan, a burst of iridescent eyes beside the smooth thigh. It recurs across the length of the figure, so the height is not a single moment, and it holds at first sight and on long looking. What limits it is range: one register, one temperature, no grandeur of scale, no terror, no transport of movement or light. A real height in its kind, below the pictures that rise across a room or a vault.
Brinkman and Van der Vlugt · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Elevation comes in a few concentrated forms. The long glazed range, read from the road, is a sheer field of light and frame of a scale few buildings of its date reached, and lit at night it becomes a lantern the length of a street. The diagonal bridges, hung across the road, give a sense of movement held in the air that is close to grand. The tearoom, a glass cylinder on the tallest block, opens onto the city and the polder. Inside, the long bands of window beside the mushroom columns give work floors of unusual serenity. The register is cool and clear rather than overwhelming, and much of the complex is quiet, repetitive fabric, rightly so for a factory.
Terry Gilliam · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The rises are frequent and of more than one kind. Dread and wonder together on the frozen surface of 2035: Cole in a sealed suit in empty Philadelphia streets, a bear on a balcony, a lion roaring on a rooftop in snow. Joy in the car, where Cole hears music on the radio and hangs his head out of the window into air he has never breathed. The Hitchcock theatre, where Vertigo plays and Railly enters in a blonde wig, and the doubled love story becomes visible to the lovers inside it. The summit is the airport, in slow motion to Piazzolla’s bandoneon, with Railly turning to find the boy’s eyes in the crowd. What holds the figure: the middle passages run long without a rise.
Martin Amis · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
Elevation is rare, and it is high. The Auschwitz chapter is the book’s summit and its reason: the camp seen running backward, the ash drawn up out of the sky and the chimneys, bodies made whole, people loaded onto trains and carried away to their homes, so that the dreadful sublime arrives inside a vision of mercy. That double register, terror under the appearance of creation, is a height few novels of its size reach. Before it there are smaller rises, above all the dread that grows as the man grows younger and more afraid of something ahead; after it, the descent to infancy has a cold quiet. Held here because the American half is comedy by design, the backward jokes keeping the register low across most of the book, and the height comes once, if at length.
The National · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Elevation is real and rationed, and the rationing is the method. Fake Empire holds the height: a piano figure set across the beat swells under the voice and opens, near the end, into horns, the one moment the record rises in full. Slow Show turns in its coda to a borrowed refrain, a dream of the beloved held for twenty-nine years, and the quiet tune lifts the whole song. Start a War has a low, cold height in its restraint, and Gospel ends the record on a hush close to grace. Mistaken for Strangers and Squalor Victoria have force, not elevation. Terror is absent, and much is built not to lift.
Victor Horta · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The elevation is concentrated and real. From the street the visitor passes into the octagonal vestibule, where the slender iron column opens at its head into a spray of tendrils and the mosaic floor, the painted walls and the iron balustrade of the stair all take up the same whiplash, and then climbs a few steps toward the light falling down the well. It is a moment of grace rather than grandeur, and it recurs: on each landing the light and the line return. Height is high for a house. Range is narrow: the scale is a house’s, the elevation is of one kind throughout, delight, lift and lightness, and there is no terror and no vastness.
Walter Pater · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Height is real and is reached several times. The summit is the passage on La Gioconda, who is “older than the rocks among which she sits”, prose that Yeats set out as free verse at the head of his Oxford Book of Modern Verse in 1936. The Conclusion rises in its last pages, through the Heraclitean flux, to the sentence on the flame. The Botticelli Venus, Winckelmann among the pagan marbles and Pico’s gods of Greece in exile give lesser heights. Frequency is the charge. Long stretches of the Michelangelo, della Robbia and du Bellay studies are level, connoisseurial and slow, and the elevation, when it comes, is of one kind: a hushed and melancholy transport, never grandeur or terror.
Juan O'Gorman, Gustavo Saavedra and Juan Martínez de Velasco · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The elevation is real and largely of one kind: the coloured tower in strong highland sun across the wide lawn, the volcanic ground under it and the mountains behind, seen from far off and then close, where the stones resolve into figures and the figures into stones. That double reading, field at a distance and grain at hand, recurs with each face and each hour of light, so the height is not a single moment. It is a sublime of saturation and abundance more than of space. Inside, the reading rooms are serviceable and calm and do not rise to it; the building does not lift those who use it as a great dome or a wall of glass lifts theirs. The interior is where the axis loses most.
William Gibson · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent and of one kind, the vast and the cold. The first sentence, “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel”, sets a sublime of the made world, and the definition of cyberspace as “a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators”, with its lines of light running into the distance of the data, is a sublime the book invented for its readers. There is terror in the icebreaker’s slow attack on the Tessier-Ashpool ice and in the seconds when Case dies at the console. The warmest height is the beach in Neuromancer’s construct, where Case finds Linda Lee alive and leaves her. Held where it is because the heights are rarely held: the prose cuts to plot, and the climax is staged too confusedly to keep its elevation.
Toyo Ito · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Elevation is real, and concentrated in one image seen often: at night, from Jozenji-dori, the lit tubes rising through the glass like weed through water, the plates between them reading as thin lines. Inside, the widest tubes, open to the sky, pour light down several storeys, and the floors seen across through the lattices have a strange lightness. But the rising is frequent rather than high. The library floors are low and plainly fitted, the galleries are neutral boxes, and the building offers no single room of grandeur. Height is moderate; frequency is good.
Master James of St George, under Edward I · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Grandeur and menace, frequent rather than single. From the water and the quay the long south front rises as one striped wall of towers, the Eagle Tower and its three turrets at the end; seen from the far shore of the Seiont the castle reads as a city wall more than a fortress, and the bands carry the eye along its whole length. Within, the towers and the empty wards give a colder register: height without roof, a great enclosure with little in it. The mural passages give a third, narrow and dark between the loops. Elevation recurs across approaches and views. It stops short of the higher band because the interior was never made to answer the exterior: the summit of the building is its outside.
Iris Murdoch · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
The book rises often, in a register of its own, half comic and half terrible. The sea is a constant presence: in Charles’s swimming, in his fear of the rocks and the tides, and in the first sentence of the book. The heights are four. The sea monster Charles sees rising from the water early on, a moment of real dread left unexplained. His fall into Minn’s Cauldron, the churning rock basin, after Peregrine pushes him, and his rescue by James, which Charles experiences as something beyond human strength. Titus’s drowning, told with a flatness that makes it worse. And James’s death in the “Postscript”, which has a quiet strangeness. Between these the comic machinery of the theatre visitors keeps the book low for long stretches: the heights come often, not constantly.
Vladimir Shukhov · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Height and frequency both count. From the street and across the southern districts the tower reads as a thing barely there: a net of lines narrowing into the sky, the sections turning against one another, the rings marking its stages like the joints of a stem. Its elevation is of lightness and vertigo, cold and lucid. The finest moment is the view straight up the inside of the lattice, which Rodchenko photographed in 1929, where the crossing members make a spiralling moiré that closes to a point; it recurs for anyone who stands beneath. What holds it: there is no room and no sequence of spaces, and the sublime is of one kind, seen from outside and below. It rises often, always the same way.
Henri Matisse · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The elevation is real and of one kind: joy, an expansion of the spirit before pure colour at the scale of a wall. It comes at first sight, when the whole square opens at once and the white reads as light rather than paper; again in the adjacencies, where a hot plane meets a cold one and both brighten; and in the turn itself, which carries the eye round and outward and will not let it rest. At close to three metres the planes are as large as the viewer’s torso, and the colour surrounds rather than sits on a wall. What holds the axis: no terror, no grandeur of the dreadful, no darkening. The height is sustained but of a single register, the same note sounded across the field, not different summits.
Charlie Chaplin · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
The film rises twice to a height few comedies reach, and between those heights it is mostly funny rather than elevated. The first is the globe dance: alone in his office to the prelude of Lohengrin, Hynkel lifts the world as a balloon, bounces it on his head and his rump, lies with it in a slow ecstasy, and it bursts in his hands. It is beautiful, absurd and frightening at once, and its image of the world as a toy of one man’s desire is exact. The shave to Brahms, the razor keeping time with the radio, is the same skill turned to grace. The second height is the close, the barber who has barely spoken speaking to the world, and the cut to Hannah in the field, a transport many have felt and some find overbearing. Frequency holds the figure: summits in a plain of good comedy.
J. R. R. Tolkien · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
Height comes often, and in more kinds than the opening promises. The dwarves’ song in Bag End, “Far over the misty mountains cold” (chapter 1), wakes “something Tookish” in Bilbo and in the book: the first rise, out of comedy. The riddle game in the dark with a creature who means to eat him, and the leap over Gollum, are dread of an old kind. Then the burning trees and the eagles; the black of Mirkwood and its spiders; the tunnel down toward a red glow and a dragon asleep on gold. Smaug’s fall over Lake-town under Bard’s arrow is the grandest scene, Thorin’s death the warmest. Held at 8.0: the nursery register sets most of the first half as comedy, the trolls talk like Londoners in a pantomime, and the largest event, the battle, is seen by a hobbit knocked senseless and reported after.
Wu-Tang Clan · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
Elevation here is mostly dread and exhilaration, with one register of sorrow. Protect Ya Neck rises by accumulation, eight voices and no chorus; the opening of Bring da Ruckus sets the clan’s entry to a fanfare of menace. C.R.E.A.M. reaches a height of another kind: a plaintive piano loop under two flat, factual verses, so that grief arrives without being performed. Can It Be All So Simple holds a sweetness the rest of the record denies. On most tracks a verse lifts, Inspectah Deck’s above all, and Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s howl is a genuine wildness. What holds the figure well below Low (8.8) is frequency: the summits are moments inside a texture kept deliberately low and grey, the record rises in single verses more than in whole tracks, and the skits and the reprise break the line of height.
Wassily Kandinsky · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Elevation is real and of one register, a storm of colour that resolves into air. It rises at first sight, where the saturated patches seem to float above the light ground rather than sit on it and the black lines move fast enough to read as gesture. It rises again at the crossing of the divide, where the density of the left breaks into the open right. And it comes in the colour itself, which at its best has the intensity Kandinsky sought, a sound more than a pigment. What holds it is height and size: the canvas is the width of a pair of arms, not of a wall; it reaches neither terror nor grandeur, though its subject is catastrophe and its theme cosmic; and the lift is sustained across the field rather than rising to repeated summits.
Moshe Safdie · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Elevation comes in the clusters seen from the river or from the old port across the water, a hill town of grey boxes rising and stepping back; in the deep voids between stacks, where light falls through three or four storeys and the sky is cut in shifting rectangles; on the upper streets, open to river and city; and on the terraces, gardens hung in the air with Montreal across the water. The register is exhilaration in a made landscape, varied by shadow, and the moments come at every turn of a walk. Height is held lower: the concrete is plain and grey, boxes of one size read as heavy and repetitive at close range, the streets are dim in places, and there is no vastness and no dread. Its sublime is the picturesque of a mountain village made in concrete.
The Velvet Underground · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
The record rises on about five of ten tracks, and its heights are warm. Sweet Jane’s two chords and its turn into the chorus are among the great lifts of the rock song: plain, open and exact. Rock & Roll builds by stages, verse to chorus to the long ringing close, until Jenny’s rescue is felt rather than reported. New Age reaches its height at the end, a slow swelling refrain over organ, cut short on this release and still a summit. I Found a Reason rises quietly, by tenderness, and Oh! Sweet Nuthin’ is the largest: its guitars climb, as the refrain returns, into the record’s longest ascent. The rest drives or amuses without lifting, and the first side carries most of the height.
Herzog and de Meuron · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Elevation comes at one place, and comes there strongly and often. The descent of the ramp into the Turbine Hall, the floor falling away and the brick walls rising out of sight into the roof light, is one of the great entries of modern building. The hall swallows crowds and still reads empty, and with the right commission it has laid whole crowds on its floor to look up; the artificial sun of 2003 is the case always cited. The river front, the chimney and the view of St Paul’s across the water lift again. What holds the axis: the height is Scott’s room, and the conversion’s achievement is to keep it and let it be entered, which is credited at less than full; and the galleries rarely rise. One summit, repeated by use, ranks below a work that rises everywhere.
Antonio Vivaldi · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
Height comes several times, and mostly as the sublime of force. The Summer storm, a Presto in G minor of driving tremolo and falling scales, is real terror within its idiom. Winter’s opening, dissonances stacked entry by entry over a shivering pulse, is the most original sound in the set and a cold grandeur. Beauty comes in the slow movements: Spring’s Largo, Winter’s long line over pizzicato rain, and above all Autumn’s Adagio molto, where muted strings hold the sleepers in slow chords and time seems to stop. Frequency is the limit. Much of the set is charm and brilliance, the birds, the dances, the hunt, the ice, and its height is vivid more than transporting.
Sidney Lumet · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
The register is satire, feverish and loud, and the elevation comes as exalted dread. The summits are several and exact. Beale on the air, soaked from the rain, sends viewers to their windows, and the cut finds the city’s apartment blocks, figures leaning out to shout into the storm under lightning. Jensen’s voice rises to a sermon and drops to a whisper in the long boardroom while Beale sits in the dark at the end of the table. Beale falls after each broadcast as the applause sign lights. Louise’s scene, in daylight and without music, rises by grief alone. Held at the figure by frequency and kind: long stretches of boardroom satire are clever and level, and some of the height is rhetoric rather than image.
Edward Weston · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Elevation is real, and of the warm kind. The pepper glows out of the dark as if lit from within, its skin polished to a sheen, its folds catching the light in a sequence of ridges that reads as muscle. At its best the effect is close to awe at the ordinary: a thing one would slice for dinner has the gravity of a carved figure. Its force is in tonal modelling rather than size, so it survives reproduction better than most photographs. But it is one effect, sustained across the whole surface rather than recurring, and held in a small print that keeps it intimate rather than overwhelming. Height high, frequency single.
Georgia O'Keeffe · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Elevation is real and of one kind, intimate and slightly ominous. It comes in the passage from the pale upper petals, almost luminous, down into the black core, where the gradation closes to a velvet dark that reads as depth with no bottom; and in the lower petals, which spread outward and downward past the frame, so that the dark has more extent than the canvas shows. The eye goes in and does not come back out the same way. What holds it: one summit, sustained rather than recurring, at the size of a torso rather than a room; no terror and no grandeur of scale; and a cool register that the dark warms only at the centre.
Jean-Siméon Chardin · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The elevation is real and of an uncommon kind for a kitchen piece: a terrible beauty. The opened ray, its interior rose, vermilion and nacre, hung at the centre in a fall of light, is grand and dreadful together; it has the look of an altarpiece’s hung body or a flayed figure, and the face above it makes the dread personal. The height is held, not momentary, since the ray is the centre of the whole canvas. It recurs at a lower pitch in the wet sheen of the oysters, the light on the copper and the white of the cloth, each a small beauty of surface; the cat’s bristling adds alarm. What holds the axis is range: one great image and a scatter of lesser beauties, and a dread that stands nearer the edge of the grotesque than of awe.
Don DeLillo · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
The prologue is one of DeLillo’s great set pieces: thousands of couples married at once in a stadium, the parents’ binoculars searching for one face, the person dissolving into the mass, and at the close a prophecy, “The future belongs to crowds.” That is a real height, terrible and grand. Karen’s watching of crowds on television reaches a cold awe; Bill’s death, alone and unidentified on a ferry, his papers taken, has the quiet grandeur of an extinction; the Beirut epilogue rises at its close. Between these the house scenes and the debates run level, and the book’s mode is argument more than elevation. One summit and several lesser heights in a mainly discursive book: the height recurs, but not often.
Ustad Ahmad Lahori (attributed), under Shah Jahan · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Height is real and recurs. The approach to the Lahori Gate, the red wall with its octagonal towers and kiosks, is grandeur of the first order for its tradition; the passage through the dim vaulted bazaar into the light of the court is a designed transport. The Diwan-i-Am, its depth of cusped arches opening on the marble canopy, and the Diwan-i-Khas, white marble inlaid with flowers in stone, rise to beauty of the highest refinement. The register is splendour and calm, never terror. It falls between: the pavilions now stand as objects in lawns, the river that completed the eastern prospect is gone, and the barracks are bulk without elevation. Elevation comes at the gate, the halls and the terrace, and the ground between them is flat.
Nok · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Elevation is real, and it recurs at the top of the corpus. The Jemaa head, the eyes wide and hollow under high arched brows, the lips parted, holds a stillness that reads as authority; the large heads with towering coiffures are severe and monumental at near life size. The instrument of the effect is the pierced eye, a dark opening that gives the face an inward attention and a look that does not settle on the viewer. The register is cold and hieratic, awe more than delight, and it rises in many heads, which counts. Held at 8.0 because the frequency falls away below the summit pieces: much of the corpus is fragmentary, worn or modest, and the bodies, where they survive, rarely carry the height of the heads.
Ray Bradbury · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
The book rises often, and its heights are its set pieces. The opening makes destruction a joy and the reader complicit in it. The woman who chooses to burn with her books, speaking Latimer’s words, “Play the man, Master Ridley”, is the book’s moment of terror and grandeur together, and the hinge of Montag’s life. Mildred’s friends weeping over “Dover Beach” is a quieter elevation, cold and exact. The chase under the eye of the televised Hound, the stranger killed in Montag’s place for the cameras, the river crossed in darkness and the city erased while Montag lies in the grass each have real force. Against them, the lyric is often pressed too hard, metaphor heaped on metaphor until the effect is effortful, and the middle part slackens between its scenes. Height reached repeatedly, not sustained at the top.
Wassily Kandinsky · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Elevation is real and of one kind: a lifted, airy delight with a cosmic undertone. It comes first in the black circle, which reads as a body in space, a dark sun or planet with a corona, its halo a glow among hard edges. It recurs in the upper right, where transparent circles overlap and change colour where they cross, so that the forms seem weightless and suspended; and in the open ground, which lets the field breathe so that its many sharp events never crowd into noise. What holds it is its height of kind. There is no grandeur of scale and no terror; transport is gentle rather than overwhelming, and the brightness is sustained across the field rather than rising to repeated summits. The prewar Compositions reached for storm. This canvas reaches for poise.
Tokugawa builders · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Elevation comes often and at a moderate height. The Karamon at the entry, cusped and carved, gilt and painted, is the first rise. Inside, the register is gold in half-light: walls of gold leaf glowing under the shadow of the eaves, tigers among bamboo in the outer rooms, the great pine reaching across the walls of the Ōhiroma behind the empty seat. Grandeur and a controlled intimidation are renewed in each hall and deliberately quietened toward the inner rooms. The garden adds a second register, stones and water composed for a seated eye. Height is held: the palace is low, horizontal and dim by design, and the keep that would have given the castle a summit is gone.
Kara Walker · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The elevation is grandeur of an uneasy kind: a white figure at architectural scale in a long dark shed, lit from the high windows and approached the length of the hall, with the smell of molasses in the air and the floor tacky underfoot. The accounts of visitors and the photographs agree on the scale and on a real hush before it. Against it runs a second register, the attendants, small, brown and decaying, which turns awe toward pity and dread at each step. The height is repeated, not single: the arrival, the face, the turn behind her to the exposed sex, the fallen boys. What holds it lower is that much of the response recorded was laughter, posing and argument, by design and not only by failure, and that the work can no longer be stood before.
Jane Campion · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Elevation is real and recurs, mostly cold. The hills around the ranch, shot by Ari Wegner as one wide bowl under weather, carry a grandeur the film keeps in view, and the dog in the hillside’s shadow rises each time it returns. Phil castrating bulls bare-handed has a dreadful plainness. The pond is the warm height: a man alone with a handkerchief, the one moment he is soft. The braiding of the rope at night, with a cigarette passed between them, is quiet and terrible at once, since the viewer half knows. Jonny Greenwood’s score lifts and frays the scenes. What holds it at 8.0: the height is a sustained unease more than repeated summits, and the ending lands as a chill rather than a peak.
Philip Johnson · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Elevation is quiet, and it comes often. It comes at dusk, when the glass turns to mirror from outside and the lit room hangs in the dark trees; in snow, when the room seems to stand in the open with a fire burning; in the reflections that lay the trees over the glass so that inside and outside cannot be told apart; and in the calm of the room itself, where the landscape changes and the room does not. The approach on the diagonal and the first sight of the corner give a small, real moment of arrival. Frequency is high: every season and hour remakes the room. Height is held: there is no grandeur, no dread and almost no scale; the register is one, serenity in a frame; and the Brick House, by design, gives nothing to lift the spirit but its vaulted room, which is charm rather than height.
Balkrishna Doshi · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Elevation here is not grandeur but a repeated, cumulative beauty. The corridor seen down its length, with bars of sun falling through the pergola beams onto stone and floor; the shadowed galleries opening suddenly onto a planted court; the views across and down where one walk crosses another above: these recur along almost every route through the campus. It rises often rather than high. There is no single overwhelming moment, no space that stops the visitor, and where light and planting do not carry them the rough granite and the stained concrete can read as plain. The frequency is real and high, the height moderate, and the figure credits a work that rewards almost every walk through it without a summit.
John Wood the Younger · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Elevation here is beauty, broad and calm, never terror, and it comes as one great effect: the front seen from the lawn or the park below, the colonnade running round the half-ellipse in low light, the columns closing up toward the ends and opening at the centre as the curve turns away and back. It comes again on the approach from Brock Street, where a narrow street gives suddenly onto the whole sweep, and it renews along the pavement, the perspective changing at each step. The height is real, among the finest urban prospects in Britain. Frequency holds the figure: the elevation is concentrated in the front and the view from it; behind the door each house is a well-proportioned terrace house and nothing more, and the backs offer none.
Pallava, under Narasimhavarman II · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
The elevation is one image, and a high one: the slender stepped tower rising from a low rock with nothing behind it but sea and sky, seen at dawn from the beach or, as the mariners saw it, from the water. The paired towers, one tall and one lower, make the silhouette move as one walks round it. The worn sculpture, softened by centuries of salt to shapes like weathered rock, adds a second register, the made thing returning toward nature. What holds the axis is frequency. The interiors are cramped cells that elevate by intimacy if at all; the enclosure and its Nandis are small in scale; the building rises chiefly in one view and one light. It is a single summit, repeated, not a building that rises room after room.
Peter of Illyria, under Pope Celestine I · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Elevation is of one kind and it is steady: the calm of a long, high, bright room. From the narthex the eye runs down two files of white columns to the apse, and the light from the clerestory and apse windows falls evenly on the marble. It is grandeur by proportion and clarity, not by size or dread, and it is met at every hour the church is open, which counts for frequency. What holds the axis is that the register never changes: there is no second effect, no ascent, no great vault. Sainte-Chapelle (8.8), with its walls of glass, and the Pantheon (9.3), with its sphere, rise higher. This rises often, but not far.
Maurice Ravel · Music
7.9 · Tier III
Height is real, and it is late. The last statements, with the brass massed and the whole orchestra drawn in, and the turn to E major with its collapse, are among the most overwhelming climaxes in the orchestral repertoire, and the collapse is terror as well as release. Frequency is the cost, by design. For most of the work the elevation is beauty, not transport: the bassoon at the top of its range in the third statement, the oboe d’amore, the horn, celesta and piccolos sounding as one new instrument in the ninth. The rubric counts beauty, and these are beautiful. But the first two thirds of the work are a pleasure rather than a height, and its sublime is concentrated in perhaps its last three minutes.
Agnes Martin · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
The elevation is real and of one kind: a quiet, radiant transport. The gold at the scale of the body changes with light and with the viewer’s movement, darkening and brightening across the square, so the painting is never seen the same way from two positions; the incised lines catch light differently from the leaf around them and appear and disappear. Close to, the grid is an exact and fragile web; from across a room it softens into a shimmer. There is a grandeur here that her pale pencil grids do not have: the gold confronts as well as recedes. What holds the axis is kind and range. There is no terror and no drama, the height is sustained rather than repeated in summits, and it depends on light and presence, so that in reproduction much of it goes.
James Cameron · Film
7.8 · Tier III
Terror and a hard grandeur, reached often. The nest, its walls built of resin and bodies, with a cocooned colonist begging to be killed, is the first height; the massacre seen on the helmet monitors in the armoured carrier, the screens failing one by one while the lieutenant freezes, is a second, horror by mediation. The tracker counting down with nothing in the corridor, and then the ceiling, is the film’s best single image of dread. The Queen revealed by Ripley’s light, tethered to her egg sac and rising, is grandeur in the creature’s own register, and the power loader is the cathartic peak. The figure is held by range: the elevation stays almost wholly in fear and its release, there is little beauty, and the sublime of scale belonged more to the earlier film’s derelict.
Pierre Koenig · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
The elevation is real and comes at one place, again and again: the glass corner of the living room standing out over nothing, the floor seeming to stop at the air, and the city spread below to the horizon, a plain of haze by day and a field of lights by night. The pool at the edge carries sky and city into the house’s own ground. The plan earns it, for from the street the solid walls withhold the view until the turn. Frequency is high: every room toward the view takes part. Height is moderate to good, and the register is one, a calm and airy suspension, more delight than awe, without the darkness or weight of the higher architectural sublime. The view itself is the site’s gift, framed rather than made, and the figure holds at 8.0 for that.
Fariborz Sahba · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Elevation is real and frequent outside, more measured within. The approach across the gardens, the white petals rising over still water, and the building lit at night are the elevations most visitors carry away, and they recur from every side, because the figure is the same from every side. The scale is calibrated to grandeur without terror, the petals standing about as high as a building of ten storeys over flat land and pools. Inside, the inner leaves gather into a converging, ribbed crown, light falls from the glazed top, and the room is still: a second, quieter height. But the ribs and stepped inner surfaces are the structure’s working rather than an orchestrated space, and the room does not rise to the outside’s height of feeling.
Rem Koolhaas (OMA) · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Elevation comes in several places and in different registers. The large hall is the height: a long gilded room, its walls patterned in an enlarged grain that reads as gold at a distance and as print close up, with the undulating glass at each end turning daylight into a soft, rippling field behind the players. The approach gives a second kind: the white solid seen across the Rotunda, abrupt and crystalline, then entered by a steep stair that climbs into its body. Inside, stairs and terraces give sudden views out through cuts and down into the hall. What holds the axis: the register is wit and vertigo more often than transport, and the secondary spaces are bright and tight rather than elevating.
U2 · Music
7.8 · Tier III
The record rises on five or six of ten tracks. The title track’s first two minutes, slogans dissolving into a wash before the band enters and the song lifts, are a real arrival. Lemon reaches a cool, dancing transport. Stay is the warmest height, a melody that keeps opening as it climbs over a guitar figure that rings rather than drives. The First Time rises quietly, by withholding. The Wanderer reaches the dreadful kind: an aged voice over a pulsing synthesizer, a pilgrim among ruins. Numb accumulates rather than rises; Babyface, Some Days Are Better Than Others and most of Daddy’s Gonna Pay stay level, and Dirty Day climbs only partway.
David Lynch · Film
7.8 · Tier III
Elevation is frequent and of two kinds, dread and pity. The dread: elephants in slow motion over a falling woman; the curtain drawn back at the fairground on a figure the camera does not show, while Treves’s eyes fill and a single tear runs; the night porter’s mirror held up to Merrick’s face. The pity: the Psalm carried on alone past its lesson; Merrick standing in a theatre box to an audience turned toward him; the model church finished with its spire. But much of the height is lent. John Morris’s score swells where the images would suffice, and the close leans on Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings, a borrowed piece that carries its own grief and does the most work in the film’s last rise.
I. M. Pei · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Height and frequency are both real. The knife edge at the southwest is the strongest single moment: a wall of marble narrowing to a blade, seen from Pennsylvania Avenue or from the Mall, with the authority of cut stone and the strangeness of a ship’s prow. Inside, the visitor enters under a low ceiling and the court opens upward, light falling through the tetrahedral frame onto the marble walls, the bridges crossing in the air; the elevation recurs as one climbs and looks back. The cascade in the concourse is a smaller lift. The register is clear, bright and grand, never terrible. What holds the axis: the galleries fall to the register of good rooms, some cramped; the court’s effect is single and quickly learned; and grandeur sometimes reads as a corporate lobby.
Andrew Haigh · Film
7.8 · Tier III
Elevation is frequent and of one warm, aching kind, with dread at the edges. Adam seeing his father across a common, and following him home without a word, is the first height, an ordinary suburban afternoon turned uncanny. The kitchen conversation, and the family round the Christmas tree singing the Pet Shop Boys, rise by understatement. The farewell, the parents fading while the light in the room changes, is the summit of the parents’ strand. The last scene is the film’s highest: “The Power of Love” played to protect a dead man, the camera drawing back from two bodies to a star field. Dread lives in the tower’s empty corridors, the alarm at night and the discovery of Harry’s body. Held at the figure because the summits are prepared by tenderness more than by scale, and the club passage is level.
Arcade Fire · Music
7.8 · Tier III
Elevation comes often and is mostly of one kind, the transport of a dance that will not stop. The title track builds over seven minutes from a nervous pulse to the entry of Bowie’s voice and a saxophone-led climax, the record’s first height. Here Comes the Night Time rises twice: the opening frenzy of carnival percussion, then the slowed verse that explodes again. Awful Sound reaches a wide, choral climax after its long build. It’s Never Over drives through the dialogue of the two singers to a real exultation, and Afterlife, the warmest height, lifts its question on a rhythm that keeps rising. The dreadful kind is rarer; the slow Night Time reprise and the descent of the second disc touch it. Level stretches are many for a record this long.
Damien Hirst · Visual art
7.7 · Tier III
The elevation is real and of two temperatures. In the first room butterflies emerge from the surface of a white painting and fly through a white room in warm, humid air: wonder, of a kind few galleries give, the painting literally giving birth, and it recurs through the run, since the room keeps hatching. In the second, the cold counterpart: wings that will never move, pressed flat in hard colour, a beauty made of corpses. What holds it: the register stays at wonder and a chill, without grandeur; the dread is the dread of still life rather than of terror; and part of the wonder is the wonder of any butterfly house. The frame of the painting turns it into an argument more than it raises it.
Maya (Puuc) · Architecture
7.7 · Tier III
Height and frequency, both real. From the plaza the oval mass rises without the terraced rhythm of most Maya pyramids, its rounded ends making it read as one swelling body rather than a stack, and its height commands the city. The east stair is steep enough to be a terror as well as a grandeur, its steps narrow and the summit hidden from the foot. The west is stranger and more intense: a climb between columns of masks toward a doorway that is a mouth. From the summit the hills, the Nunnery and the Governor’s Palace lie below, a view that orders the city. The elevation recurs, but it is of one kind and wholly outside: the sanctuaries are small corbelled rooms and give little. High and recurrent, and narrower in kind than the buildings at the summit of the desk.
Paul Abadie · Architecture
7.7 · Tier III
Elevation is real and frequent, and almost all of it comes from outside. The white mass on the summit, seen across Paris from the Gare du Nord and the boulevards, rises in every weather and pales further in the rain; at dusk and under floodlight it is the city’s lantern. The climb toward it, and the view of Paris spread from its steps and from the gallery of the dome, are among the grand experiences of the city. Inside, the dome’s height and the gold of the apse, Christ with open arms over the choir, carry some lift. But the interior is heavy, dim and broken by masonry, and the near view shows coarse, repetitive ornament. Height from afar, less near at hand.
R.E.M. · Music
7.7 · Tier III
The record rises on five or six of eleven tracks, and twice high. Losing My Religion builds from the mandolin figure to the strings over the last verses, a climb of anxiety rather than joy. Country Feedback is the summit: a slow dirge over organ and pedal steel, the voice raw at the close, a desolation that lands. Half a World Away reaches a wistful height on strings; Low sustains a dark, hushed hover; Belong lifts from spoken verses into a wordless choral refrain; Me in Honey closes in a warm, shambling rise. Endgame is lovely without height. Radio Song, Shiny Happy People, Near Wild Heaven and Texarkana have energy, sweetness or charm, not elevation, and the kind is mostly melancholy and close.
Danny Boyle · Film
7.7 · Tier III
Elevation is frequent, and of both kinds. The dreadful: the causeway at night, the tide running and the Alpha closing under flares; the first slow, swollen infected crawling in a field; Isla delivering the child of an infected woman, who must then be killed. The grand and the tender: the bone temple at sunset, its tower above an England gone back to grass and deer, and Kelson painted in iodine like a figure from another age; Isla’s death in the temple and her skull set on the tower, the one moment the film holds still. The montage cut to “Boots” lifts the first crossing into something between march and dirge. Held below the upper reach because some rises are effects of montage more than of action, and the coda drops from elegy into a garish brawl that the height around it does not survive.
Robert Eggers · Film
7.6 · Tier III
The film rises often and in both registers. The dreadful: the raid on the Rus village in long continuous takes, men herded into a burning hall; the berserkers’ wolf-howling rite by firelight; the barrow fight with the undead keeper of the sword. The grand: the initiation under the earth, father and son barking as dogs before the Fool and the tree of kings with its fruit of men; the Valkyrie bearing Amleth toward Valhalla. The summit is the naked duel at the volcano’s rim, two bodies in black ash and lava light. The height belongs to the world more than to the man, and that holds the axis at 8.0.
Robert Eggers · Film
7.5 · Tier III
Elevation of the dreadful kind, and it recurs: the coach that comes for Thomas at the crossroads at night; the castle seen across snow; the first meeting with Orlok, a voice and a bulk before a face; Thomas waking to find the creature feeding on him; the empty ship drifting into Wisborg with its dead; the shadow of a long hand passing over the town, made in homage to Murnau and earned here; the rats pouring through the streets; Orlok at Ellen’s breast as the sky pales, and the two bodies in a grey dawn. The blue nights and candlelit rooms sustain the register between peaks. Held under the summit because several peaks restage the source’s images, and the grotesque at times lowers rather than raises.
Moshe Safdie · Architecture
7.3 · Tier III
Elevation comes often and is of one kind: spectacle, never terror and seldom awe. From across the bay, three towers carrying a long hull fifty-five storeys up are a figure of real grandeur at the scale of the city, and at night, lit, they read at a distance few buildings reach. On the SkyPark the vanishing edge of the pool, with the financial district and the Strait beyond, is one of the most famous views of its century, and the cantilevered deck projects the visitor into the air. Inside each tower the atrium rises between a straight wall and a leaning one, a slot narrowing upward with its own vertigo. What holds the axis: the exaltation repeats, it is a view more than a space, and the rooms and corridors are ordinary hotel.
Yousef Abdelky · Architecture
7.3 · Tier III
Height is real and it recurs, which is what the axis asks. Elevation comes in the great court, white marble under hard sun and open to the sky, the domes massed at its far side; at the pools, where the arcades stand on their own reflection; and in the hall, where the room under the main dome and the lit names on the qibla wall carry a crowd. It recurs by day and by night. The lighting turns the building through the month, blue-grey in the dark, and the court reads differently at noon, at dusk and under floodlight: frequency built in. What holds it below the upper band is that the register is splendour, and splendour tips into glitter. Crystal, gilding and inlay at every surface leave the eye little rest, and the hall is less sublime than the court.
Mogwai · Music
7.3 · Tier III
Elevation is the band’s chief good, and here it comes often and in short spans. Auto Rock’s close is a real height of the grand kind, reached by accumulation without a change of material. Glasgow Mega-Snake reaches the dreadful kind at speed. Friend of the Night rises by melody, a warm and plain beauty; I Chose Horses reaches stillness; We’re No Here closes in crushing weight, the sublime of mass; Travel Is Dangerous earns its surge from its quiet verse. The record rises on five or six of ten tracks. What holds the figure is the middle, where three quiet pieces stay level, beautiful without height, and the compression of every build into four or five minutes, which limits how high a build can climb.
Oasis · Music
7.2 · Tier III
Here the record is strong. Height comes often: Wonderwall, whose strummed figure and cello lift into a chorus that lands on a held, unresolved promise; Don’t Look Back in Anger, whose piano opening gives way to the record’s broadest chorus; Cast No Shadow, quieter, rising on slide guitar and close harmony; Morning Glory, height of the dreadful kind, a wall of guitar beginning under the sound of a helicopter; and Champagne Supernova, building from waves and acoustic guitar to a long, heavy plateau and back to the sea. Five or six of ten songs rise. What holds the figure from the top is kind: the height is almost always the same height, the massed chorus of stacked guitars and voice.
Édouard Manet · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
The painting refuses elevation, and the question is only whether it reaches some register. What it reaches is a hard, cold beauty and a shock. The whites are its height: sheet, pillow, shawl, wrapping paper and the servant’s pale pink dress, each a different white, laid side by side against black. The bouquet is the one passage of release, a burst of loose paint inside the paper. The body under flat light, ivory and slightly yellow, is beautiful as a fact, not as an ideal. The shock of the look, which the first public met with laughter and fury, is a kind of transport, though not grandeur or terror. Against this stand one instant at one temperature, deliberately prosaic, with no rise across the field, and a right side dark to the point of illegibility. The height is real and not high, and it comes seldom.
Michel de Montaigne · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The book refuses the high style on principle. Its ideal is the ordinary life, “with order, but without miracle and without extravagance” (III.13), and its register is a gentleman’s table talk. Height comes, in a low key: the friendship of I.28, compressed at last to “Because it was he, because it was I”; the fall from the horse in II.6, a near death watched from within; the Apology’s humbling of man as the most calamitous and frail of creatures; the peasants of III.12 meeting the plague of 1585, some digging their own graves; the long close of III.13. These are among the great passages of European prose, but they are spaced across a book of level talk, and frequency counts.
James Boswell · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The register is comic and conversational, and its delight is constant; elevation in this axis’s sense is rarer. The book rises where Johnson’s own voice is at its height: the letter to Lord Chesterfield of 1755, with its patron who “encumbers him with help”; the talk on the fear of death; the prayers and late meditations; the account of the death gathered from others and rendered with restraint. The Wilkes dinner, a reconciliation contrived that becomes real pleasure, has a comic grandeur of design. But many pages are flat, catalogue, correspondence and the biographer recording his own questions, and the heights that come are owed largely to Johnson’s words, which Boswell transmits. Height is real; its frequency is moderate.
Henry Fielding · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Fielding’s register is comedy, and elevation comes chiefly as comic grandeur, which stands lower on this axis than transport or terror. It recurs. The battle in the churchyard over Molly Seagrim (IV.8) is a Homeric combat in a Somerset parish; Sophia’s entrance (IV.2) is announced with a mock invocation of the winds that is also a real hymn to a woman; the Upton night rises to a farce of almost architectural scale. Partridge at Garrick’s Hamlet (XVI.5), terrified of the Ghost and contemptuous of an actor who behaves as any man would, is the comic height of the book. The dreadful height is brief: Tom in the Gatehouse, told he may have lain with his mother (XVIII.2). What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is that the book never stays elevated: its ironic narrator keeps the reader from the heights he builds, and dread comes once, and briefly.
Gustave Courbet · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Elevation is present in one place and recurs only faintly, and this is the lowest of the twelve. The height is the centre: the bright landscape on the easel, the nude’s pale body and the falling white sheet against the brown dark, the boy’s upturned face, the cat; a small radiance at the middle of a wide gloom, the painter as the one lit act in the room. A quieter height is the woman seated on the floor at the left nursing her child, poverty given monumental stillness; Baudelaire absorbed in his book at the right edge has a reticent grace. What holds the axis here is that the rest is matter of fact by intention: the flanks are a gathering, the upper half is murk, the whole is argued rather than raised, and no grandeur of scale is felt as transport. Height real, frequency low, register narrow.
Nicolas Poussin · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Elevation is real and of one register: grave serenity, a hush, the elegiac. It rises at the inscription, where the finger touches the letters and the shadow of the arm lies across them; in the woman, upright and still at the right edge, the coolest and most monumental figure, a statue that breathes; and in the late light over the landscape, the warm sky behind the dark trees. The register never changes. There is no terror, since the skull has been taken away, no transport by scale and no burst of colour. It is a cabinet picture with figures a little over half life size, and its elevation is that of a meditation rather than a revelation. One quiet note, sustained: the work’s intention and the axis’s limit.
Paul Cézanne · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Elevation is real and of one kind: a grave, monumental stillness, the sense that two men at a table have the permanence of masonry. It comes in the two masses leaning toward each other like the halves of an arch; in the bottle’s narrow light between them; in the hands, heavy and quiet. There is no transport, no terror and no grandeur of scale. The canvas is small and the register narrow and warm, brown, ochre and blue-grey, and the whole picture is one sustained note rather than several summits. The height is moderate and the frequency low: the lift is there in kind and does not recur, which is what holds the axis lowest of the eleven the Universal Minimum governs.
Paul Auster · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The register is cool and the elevation is of one kind, dread, which comes several times. Peter Stillman the younger’s long speech at the start of City of Glass, a man raised in a dark room talking in broken and incantatory phrases, is the trilogy’s first height. Quinn’s months in the alley, his body wasting while he watches a door, and his last days in the empty apartment with the light failing, rise to a cold terror held across pages. The elder Stillman’s death from the Brooklyn Bridge is reported, not shown, and the restraint gives it weight. In Ghosts, Blue’s discovery that Black has been watching him is a quiet vertigo. Held low because the prose rarely rises with the matter, recording at an even level that serves the work but caps its heights, and The Locked Room reaches for a climax behind a door that it cannot open.
Denis Villeneuve · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent and of the cold, awed kind. The first sight of the vessel over the valley, a dark lens standing on its edge in low cloud; the ascent into the shaft, where gravity turns and the team walks up a wall into the dark; the white screen and the mist behind it, and the first limb pressed to the glass; the first logogram, a ring of ink blooming in the air. Richter’s piece over the opening and the close lifts the domestic into elegy, and the summit is Louise alone with Costello in a white field. Held below eight because the height is gathered in the shell: the base camp, the briefings and the plot in China are flat, and the one register is sustained more than varied.
Rembrandt van Rijn · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The elevation is real and of one register, gravity. The red of the carpet glowing under the black coats is a warmth close to transport; the faces, lit from the left and shadowed under the hat brims, are each a small summit of attention, and the chairman’s, steady and grave, is the height of them. The instant of the rising man charges the stillness. But there is no grandeur of scale, no terror, none of the darkness and light that elsewhere in late Rembrandt lift a whole field. The height recurs across six heads and the carpet, and its range is narrow: the elevation of seriousness, held over one table. It sits above a cabinet picture’s delight and below works that rise again and again across a room or a vault.
Bernardo Rossellino, for Pius II · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Pienza does not overwhelm and does not try. Its elevation is of another kind, and it recurs: the moment of entering from the street, when the square widens and the white front of the cathedral stands against the sky; the two openings beside it, where the floor of the town gives onto the valley and Monte Amiata; the interior of the cathedral, a hall of nearly equal vessels filled with light from tall windows, which Pius by his own account wanted as a house of light; the loggias of the palace, where the garden hangs over the drop. These are moments of serene height and of surprise, repeated across a small compass. What holds the axis at its figure, with The Encompassed the lowest on the page: there is no single space here that transports, and against the Pantheon (9.3) or the Sainte-Chapelle (8.8) the reach of feeling is plainly lower. The figure credits frequency and composure, not grandeur.
Rembrandt van Rijn · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Elevation is real and of one register, a grave, cool awe. The corpse lies in a pale, greenish light against the dark of the room, flesh painted as no longer living, and that light is the painting’s one height. The second is the instant of attention: three leaning heads converging on the opened arm, the hush of a demonstration at its point. Tulp’s raised hand, the fingers curled in the air, is the lesson’s small summit, an idea made visible. The height does not recur across a range. There is no grandeur of scale, dread is held back by decorum, and much of the canvas, the hats, ruffs and dark coats, is portraiture rather than elevation. A real sublime of death and knowledge, narrow in frequency.
Quentin Tarantino · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
The elevation is frequent and mostly of one kind, the jolt: exhilaration and dread turned on a cut. The adrenaline needle driven into Mia’s heart, the household’s terror played as farce, is the most famous. The twist at Jack Rabbit Slim’s, Travolta and Thurman dancing to Chuck Berry under a fake 1950s sky, is a beauty of a lighter order. The pawnshop basement, “bring out the gimp”, and Butch’s choice among the weapons on the shop floor build dread into something like a rite. The summit is Jules’s last reading of the Ezekiel passage in the coffee shop, the gun held on Pumpkin and the same words now turned on himself; the film stills and rises. Held below the top because the height is chiefly the height of shock and style, and elevation rarely reaches feeling for longer than a scene.
Luis Buñuel · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Buñuel’s register is dry, comic and cold, and the film rises seldom, but it rises high. The dread of the first morning, when the open archway becomes a wall nobody names, is real and grows. The bear standing in the empty, lit hall has the strangeness of a dream image held steady. The severed hand crossing the floor is the film’s one plain horror, staged with almost no emphasis. The last image, sheep filing into the cathedral while shots sound in the square, has a terrible grandeur. The peaks are sharp and they return through the confinement. What holds the axis here is spacing and method: the comedy of manners flattens transport on purpose, in the waiter’s staged fall and the quarrels over a water pipe, and elevation comes as nightmare met with a shrug.
Alvar Aalto · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Elevation is real here, and deliberately small. The chamber is the summit: a dark brick room, high for its footprint, its roof held on the fanning timber trusses, its light entering high. Arrival up the brick stair, in shadow, makes the room more than it measures. The turf stair, coming up out of the pines onto the green court, is a second moment of a softer kind. Elsewhere the building does not rise. Offices, corridors, the library and the flats are humane and modest, and the court is a place of quiet rather than height. Two moments, one of them strong, in a building that wants calm more than transport: the height is good, the frequency low.
Milan Kundera · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
The register is cool, ironic and lucid, and elevation comes rarely and late. The seventh part is the height: Karenin’s illness and death in the country, the dog’s smile, Tereza’s recognition that her love for the dog is the only selfless love the book contains, and the last dance at a hotel at the end of an evening, read in the knowledge, given in the sixth part, that the two are already dead. Earlier heights are of dread and strangeness: Tereza’s dream of naked women marching around a pool, and her photographs of the tanks in Prague. Tomas on a bench in Zurich deciding to return is a small elevation of choice. Between these the book stays by design at the level of the essay and the erotic comedy. The height is real and spaced, and that holds the axis lowest of the twelve.
Euripides · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
The heights are real and few. The maid’s report of Alcestis at her marriage bed is the tenderest thing in the play; her own lyric, seeing the ferryman call from the lake and the dark come over her eyes, has dread in it. The ode to Necessity is the cold summit: the chorus has gone through letters and up into the heights and found “kreisson ouden Anankas”
“nothing stronger than Necessity”. The unveiling, a man taking a silent woman’s hand against his vow, is a strange elevation the stage rarely gives. Against these the play spends its middle, by design, on a quarrel and a drunk guest’s sermon. The mixed register is the work’s choice, and it lowers the frequency of elevation, which the axis counts.
Nan Goldin · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Elevation is real and of two kinds. The lyric: Goldin’s colour, red light on skin, the gold of a lamp in a dark room, the flash that makes a face burn against black, and pictures of couples in bed that reach a stillness close to devotion. The dreadful: the battered self-portrait, the heart-shaped bruise, the faces in hospital and on the morning after. In the slideshow the music lifts these moments into song, and the projected light gives them a scale and a glow no print matches; the sequence rises again and again rather than once. What holds the axis is height. Most frames are snapshots of ordinary nights, their elevation intimacy more than transport, and the pull of the whole is cumulative, closer to the ballad than to grandeur.
David Cronenberg · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The register is dreadful elevation, and it rises often. Max presses his head into the swollen screen and Nicki’s lips; the videocassette pulses in his hand; the opening in his abdomen takes his hand to the wrist; the gun grows cables into his forearm; Convex splits open in the showroom; the set in the ship bursts with entrails before Max follows its picture. Howard Shore’s score, synthesised textures over strings, gives a cold and continuous pressure that holds the heights together, and from the first broadcast to the last shot the film climbs rather than resting on one scene. Held below 8.0 because the heights are often admired as made things before they are felt, the red clay room is grim rather than terrible, and the dread of the middle slackens into thriller procedure.
George Orwell · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
The register is plain by design and elevation is rare, but it comes. The opening, the Italian militiaman at the officers’ table in the Lenin Barracks, whose face Orwell says he will not forget, carries a pure, grave feeling for a stranger. The arrival in revolutionary Barcelona has an exaltation the prose earns by its flatness. The night attack on the Fascist parapet, in bombs and mud, rises. The wound is the summit, of a cold kind: “Roughly speaking it was the sensation of being at the centre of an explosion”, and then the calm with which he takes himself to be dying. The close, the train through southern England into “the deep, deep sleep of England”, reaches a quiet dread that still carries. Between these the long stretches by intention do not rise, and the political chapters do not. Several real heights in a mostly level work.
Michelozzo · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Elevation here is gravity, not transport: in the front seen down the long straight of the Via Cavour, rough blocks at eye level and the cornice throwing its shadow over the street, a wall that reads as one mass; in the step from the street into the courtyard, from shade and stone into an arcaded square of light and measure; and in the Chapel of the Magi, a small dark room whose intimacy is the condition of the frescoes’ splendour. It never seeks terror. Frequency is moderate: the upper floors are Riccardi rooms, the gallery’s elevation belongs to its painting, and the lengthened front slackens the force of the first block.
Wifredo Lam · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Elevation is real and of one kind: an uncanny, crowded dread mixed with a fierce vitality. It comes at first sight, the field filled to every edge with bodies that are also plants and no sky to rest in; it comes in the heads, the crescent face and the masks, which look out without eyes one can meet; it comes in the scale, figures at or above life size before which the viewer stands as before a thicket. The colour lifts it, cool blue and green against warm ochre and orange, a forest lit from within. What holds it is the evenness: one intensity throughout, with no summit moment and no turn. It is the sublime of density and strangeness, not of space.
Anselm Kiefer · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The elevation is real and of one register, a cold dread. The path draws the eye up the centre into a darkness that has no end in the picture, and the viewer is set at its mouth, where the legions stood. The snow gives a pale light against the black trunks, and the red on it is the shock, small and repeated, so that the elevation comes in more than one place along the path, and the canvas is large enough to hold the viewer before it. What holds the axis is range: one temperature, one depth, one dread, and no second register. And the names lower it where they stand: a roster in white is a document laid across the sublime, by design, and it keeps the viewer reading rather than transported.
Damien Hirst · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The elevation is terror, and it is real. Approached from the front, the open jaw and the rows of teeth come at the viewer at head height, the body behind them longer than a person and seemingly in motion, the light bluish-green in the fluid. For a moment the glass is forgotten, and that moment is high. What limits the axis is frequency. The work rises once, at first sight from the front. Seen from the side it becomes a long specimen in a frame; on return the terror is known and does not recur at the same pitch; and the decay of the first shark, visible for years, damaged even the first moment for those who saw it. A single summit in an otherwise cool object: high, but held below works that rise again and again.
Norwegian builders · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Height is real, and it comes in one place. At the north portal the great beast and the thin snakes wind across the planks with a tension and speed that make the wall seem to move: a summit of carving in wood. The site gives a second, quieter lift, the dark church on its headland above the fjord with the mountains across the water. Inside, the raised central room gives the nave a height its plan does not have, and the carved capitals catch what light comes in. But the building is small, its interior low-lit and largely refitted, and the elevation is not sustained through it as it is through a great church. Held at 7.9 by frequency: one summit in timber, and a second of setting.
Bruce Springsteen · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
The record rises often, and mostly in one register, the lift of the stadium. The title track is its height: Max Weinberg’s snare struck like artillery, Roy Bittan’s synthesiser riff repeated until it becomes a siren, the voice at the limit of its range, held through a long drummed coda that does not resolve. Dancing in the Dark rises by restlessness, a man sick of himself sung to a dance beat. Bobby Jean swells into Clarence Clemons’s long solo. I’m on Fire reaches a hushed height by the opposite means, and My Hometown a quiet one. Cover Me, Darlington County, Working on the Highway and I’m Goin’ Down stay at the level of good bar-band energy, and much of the height is the same height.
Billy Wilder · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Elevation here is exhilaration, and it recurs: the chase of a hearse by a squad car that opens the film; two unsteady pairs of legs in heels on a station platform; the tango, Daphne and Osgood passing a rose between their mouths, cut against Joe and Sugar on the yacht, which rises to comic grandeur by sheer rhythm; the motorboat at the close. Monroe’s “I’m Through with Love”, sung in the dim ballroom after Junior has gone, is the single moment of pathos, and the kiss Joe gives her, still in Josephine’s clothes, crosses farce with something like grief. That is the one height that is not comic. What holds the axis: the rest is delight, frequent and high, and delight does not reach the terror or grandeur of the axis’s summit.
Martin Amis · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
Elevation comes often, and nearly always as the comic sublime: the voice at full pressure, a riff on a hangover or a city that rises past comedy into a rapture of disgust. The tennis match with Fielding Goodney, in which Self is humiliated by a man in perfect health, is a set piece at that height. The scene in which his father presents him with a bill for the cost of his upbringing is comedy at the edge of horror. The chess game with the author, where Self begins to see what has been done to him, rises to real dread; the failed suicide is bleak and strange. What the book does not reach is beauty or grandeur: Martina Twain’s world of books and calm is drawn as the height Self cannot see, and it is the flattest writing in the novel. Height is frequent, and of one kind.
David Fincher · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The register is velocity and wit, and elevation is not its usual mode; when it rises, it is cold. Mark’s run back across Harvard at night after the break-up, through quads and streets under a piano figure and an electronic hum, raises a solitary humiliation to something like dread. Henley is a bravura of another kind: the twins losing a race by a few feet, the Edwardian world made a toy by a shallow focus, Grieg pressed into a pounding electronic march. Eduardo’s entrance into the Palo Alto office, soaked and quiet, is the film’s one hot summit, and the last refresh a small, exact desolation. Held below the other governed axes by frequency: between these moments the film moves on talk, brilliantly and on the level, and two hours carry four or five summits.
Peter Behrens · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Elevation comes at two points and is held between them. Along Berlichingenstraße there is real grandeur: the march of tapering stanchions down to their pins, the tilted glass between, a rhythm that reads as a colonnade drawn in engineering. The Huttenstraße gable is monumental in the other register, heavy and frontal, a pediment made of the roof’s own polygon, the glazed screen like a vast window into a sanctuary. Inside, by the record and the photographs, the hall is a long nave of light under the faceted roof, its scale given by the cranes. The height is genuine but cool: the effect, sustained along the long side, is dignity more than awe, and the building does not transport as the great sacred interiors do.
Johnny Cash · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
Elevation is real and comes several times, mostly of the dreadful kind. The opening is the record’s height: “Hello, I’m Johnny Cash”, the band’s first beat and the roar of the room, a singer’s arrival among the condemned. “The Long Black Veil” reaches a cold, still height, a dead man narrating his own hanging. “25 Minutes to Go” turns comedy into dread as the count falls; “Green, Green Grass of Home” lifts at its turn; “Greystone Chapel” ends on a plain, raised note of grace; “I Still Miss Someone” has a quiet tenderness. Five or six of sixteen tracks rise. The comic run, the showpiece and “Jackson” have energy more than height, and the rough voice rarely soars: the elevation comes by situation and plainness, not by musical ascent.
Han Gan · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The height is real and concentrated: the turned head with its rolled eye and flaring nostril, the mane standing like flame, the forelegs caught mid-stamp. There is a transport in seeing so much force held in so few lines on so small a sheet, and a small terror in the eye. But the axis counts frequency as well as height, and the work rises in essentially one moment and one place, the head and forequarters. The rear of the body is quieter, and the field has no second register. One summit, high, in a small work: below the recurring elevations of The Starry Night (8.9) and Water Lilies (8.6), a little above The Swing (7.8).
Eva Hesse · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
As made, the work reached a quiet height: eight tall, pale sheets with light passing through them, standing in file like banners or veils in a room. The height is gentle and sustained across the eight rather than spiked in one place, and it recurs as the viewer walks the row and the sheets overlap and part. Now the latex has turned amber to brown and the sheets read as old vellum or tanned hide; the elevation has grown graver, a relic’s rather than a veil’s, and it is still there. What holds the axis below 8: the register is intimate and withheld, it reaches neither terror nor grandeur, and the scale is that of a person standing, not of a space that overwhelms.
Leon Battista Alberti · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Elevation comes, but not often and not to the highest. The front, seen square from the street, is grave and heavy, its arches deep in shadow and its columns on their tall base like a triumph halted. The flank, a procession of dark arches with plain sarcophagi set in them, is among the most solemn passages in fifteenth-century building, a portico of the dead along a public street. Inside, the chapels glow with pale carved stone, figures in floating, flattened drapery that seem barely to touch their ground. But the nave between them is a timber-roofed friars’ hall, the stump denies the front its culmination, and the room at the east end that was to be the summit of the visit does not exist.
Buster Keaton · Film
8.1 · Tier IV
Elevation here is astonishment, and it rises often. The double rising from the sleeping body and walking down the aisle into the light; the first cuts of the montage, when the bench he sits on vanishes and he falls into traffic, a moment of real vertigo in the form; the billiard game in which every shot misses the explosive ball by impossible margins; the dive through the window that leaves him dressed and gone; the motorcycle ride with no driver, across a gap bridged by two passing trucks, the frame holding him small and fast in open country. Keaton’s unchanging face makes the wonder colder and larger. What holds the figure is its kind: delight and amazement, seldom terror or grandeur, and the waking frame is level and small.
Sei Shōnagon · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
The book rises often and never far. The opening four seasons are a height of their kind and have been learnt by heart for centuries: purple-tinged clouds trailing over the brightening ridge at dawn, fireflies in the summer dark, crows flying home at autumn dusk, frost and braziers in the winter morning. The newcomer’s first sight of the Empress’s hands in the lamplight, their colour against her sleeves, is a moment of transport. At Xianglu Peak wit and the white world meet in one gesture. Rain hangs on spider-webs like threaded white beads. The elevation is a miniaturist’s, frequent, exact and small in scale. The dreadful is all but absent and grandeur is refused by design, which holds the axis below the higher bands.
Donna Tartt · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
Elevation comes, in a cold register. The first sentence, “The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation”, sets a dreadful calm that the book sustains. The murder at the ravine, in a late spring snowfall, Bunny falling backward with something like surprise, is its summit of terror. Julian’s seminar on the Dionysian, with its “Beauty is terror”, states the sublime the book seeks, and the bacchanal, told after the fact, keeps its awe by being withheld. Richard near death in the frozen warehouse, and the last scene in the hotel room, with the gun, Richard wounded and Henry’s suicide, are real heights. What holds the axis below eight is frequency and register: long stretches of Book II are social comedy and nervous suspense, the narrator’s manner is cool and slightly ornamental, and the book reaches the sublime it describes less often than it names it.
George Stubbs · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The elevation is grandeur and a controlled alarm, and it is constant rather than recurring, because the picture has one moment. The life-size rearing animal in a void overwhelms at close range: the forelegs folded in the air above the viewer’s head, the great curve of the neck, the flare of the nostril, the eye. The plain ground takes away every measure but the viewer’s own body, so that the scale is felt rather than read. Something near to Burke’s sublime of power is here, the strength of a creature that is not ours. Held short of the high band because the height is of one kind and one instant: no tenderness or terror stands beside the grandeur, and the beauty of the coat is of the same order as the power.
Denys Lasdun · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Elevation comes in more than one register. On the terraces at dusk, with the river, St Paul’s and the City opening downstream, the strata frame one of the great public prospects in London. In the Olivier the fan of seats falls toward the open stage with the gravity of an amphitheatre cut into a hill, and a full house there is an assembly on a scale few modern theatres reach. The foyers, lit at night through their long glass walls, layer people above people across interpenetrating floors. The register is grave and horizontal, never transporting. What holds the axis: the concrete closes and darkens as often as it lifts, much of the inside is low, dim and repetitive, and close at hand the exterior is mass and grain more than height.
Oscar Niemeyer · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Elevation here is lyrical and light, not grand, and it comes above all from outside: the white parabolas reflected in the lake; the run of arches at the rear; the swelling curve of the nave seen from the side, rising from the ground without base or cornice. The tower, widening as it rises, gives a small lift against the low vaults. Inside, the single vault gathers toward the sanctuary, and the space is intimate rather than transporting; much of what moves visitors there is Portinari’s painting, which is not scored. The building rises often, but within a narrow register, grace and play more than awe, and it does not reach for the heights of the great sacred interiors, nor try to.
Eddie Adams · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Elevation of the dreadful kind, at one height. The image reaches terror: a man at the threshold of death, the threshold itself made visible, the face distorted not by fear but by the impact, and the wince of the bystander repeating it. The response is a held breath and a recoil, and it dulls with familiarity more slowly than one would expect. But frequency counts as well as height, and this is a single summit in a single frame: no second rise, no ground of beauty against which the terror plays, and the street, the light and the figures at the edge are plain press reportage. It is horror more than transport, shock more than grandeur.
Athenian (architect unrecorded) · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Elevation here is quiet, and it is beauty rather than grandeur. The temple rises most in its completeness. Walked round, it is the one Greek temple of the mainland whose colonnade and entablature still close on all four sides, so the experience of the peripteros, light passing through a row of shafts and shade in the coffered walk, can still be had whole, as almost nowhere else. That beauty is real and recurs at every side. What holds it below the upper band: the proportions are a little heavy and dry beside the Parthenon’s; the interior is now a dim vaulted room with no image in it; and grandeur is not in its reach. A building of steady grace, not of transport.
Steven Spielberg · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Elevation comes often and is chiefly of one kind, transport by speed and danger. The boulder down the passage; the figure in the doorway of the bar against the fire; the sunbeam striking the miniature city in the Map Room as Williams’s Ark theme rises, the film’s most beautiful passage; the slow descent into a chamber floored with snakes, lit by torches thrown down; the truck chase, sustained for minutes, with Jones dragged beneath the chassis. The summit is dreadful: the Ark opened on the island, the spirits rising beautiful and then deathly, the faces melting, the column of fire, the lid falling back with a sound. The last shot, the crate lost among crates, is a cold height of its own. What holds the figure: most of the height is the thrill of a ride, delighted rather than deep, and the dread is gathered into the last minutes.
John Singer Sargent · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The elevation is real and of one kind: a cold, statuesque height, the human figure carried to the formality of an idol. The white of the shoulders and arms against black satin and brown ground is one sustained contrast that does not drop anywhere on the canvas, so that the height is not a moment but the whole figure at once. The profile, the nose, ear and jaw drawn as on a medal, is the summit point; the arm curving back to the table is the second. There is no warmth and no terror, and the axis is indifferent to which; but the range is one register of hauteur over one figure, an elevation of glamour more than of grandeur.
Peter Eisenman · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Elevation comes, and it is dreadful. It comes on entry: at the street the stelae are knee high, a field of blocks; a few steps in, the ground has fallen and the concrete stands two and three times a person’s height, grey and silent, in corridors where the sound of the city drops away and figures appear and vanish at the crossings. It comes again below, in the Room of Names, where a name and a life are read in the dark, and in the Room of Dimensions, where a child’s note lies lit underfoot. Frequency across a visit is good. What holds the axis: the register is one, oppression and disquiet; the effect depends on entering, and on the hour and the crowd, thinning at noon in summer when the field fills with play and photographs; and the height at the centre is the height of a narrow passage, not of vastness.
David Cronenberg · Film
7.9 · Tier III
Elevation is dreadful and frequent, with tenderness inside it. The inside-out baboon is the first rise, a shriek of the grotesque in a clean room; then come the hairs on the back, the fingernail peeled in the mirror, the ear that falls, the cabinet of shed parts shown with a lecturer’s pride. Howard Shore’s score, operatic from the titles, gives them a tragic height. The summit is the last image, the fused creature lifting the shotgun to its own head and asking without speech. What holds the figure: many of the rises are effects whose height is shock rather than awe, the drop of vomit on a doughnut among them, and the bar sequence is flat. The summit is earned; the climb is uneven.
Jean Nouvel, with Architecture-Studio · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
The building rises at a few moments, and they are real. Behind the south wall on a bright day the patterned light across the floors is a beauty of a high order of its kind: cold, exact, changing with the hour. The cleft, a slot of sky and a glimpse of Notre-Dame between two sheer faces, is a fine spatial event. The roof terrace gives one of the great views of central Paris, though that elevation is the city’s, borrowed. The book tower turning in its glass has a quiet grace. Between these moments the building is cool and correct rather than elevated, and no single room rises as a hall or a nave does. Height at the facade, frequency limited, and the figure stays below 8.
Ingmar Bergman · Film
7.8 · Tier III
Elevation is frequent and mostly dreadful. Agnes’s dying is the longest height: Andersson’s breathing turning to cries the camera will not leave, a white bed in a red room. Karin turning to her husband with blood smeared on her mouth is terror played as defiance. The night of the return rises to horror, the dead woman calling for her sisters and Maria tearing herself from her grip, and turns to its opposite when Anna takes her into her lap. Stillness answers it: the park at dawn with its statues in mist, the sarabande laid over two faces, the sisters and Anna in white at the swing. What holds it here is that much of the force is pressed rather than released. The red and the cries are applied hard, and the self-wounding borders on shock.
Wong Kar-wai · Film
7.8 · Tier III
The elevation is warm and light, and it comes often. Faye behind the counter dancing to “California Dreamin’” at a volume that drowns every customer; the first chase through Chungking Mansions, a rush of colour and neon in smeared handheld images; 663 at the counter, still, while the crowd streaks past him; Faye riding the hillside escalator past his window; the last exchange over a napkin at the counter, with the music returning. These are moments of transport in the register of a pop song, and the film knows it. Height is what holds the figure: the film never reaches terror or grandeur, and its summits are of delight and ache rather than of the kind that change what a viewer can bear. Frequent rises, moderate height.
Antony Gormley · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
The elevation is real, of the grand and open kind: a figure twenty metres high with a span of fifty-four, seen from below against weather, or rising over the brow of the hill to a driver going north. It comes again and again, in fog, at dusk, under snow, with the light along the ribs, and frequency counts: it is seen daily by tens of thousands and keeps its effect for many of them. What holds it below 8 is range. The register is single, a calm outward embrace, without terror and without inwardness, and close looking does not add the shifts of scale a great sculpture gives. Near to, it is a large, well-made steel structure, and the sublime of the distant view gives way to engineering.
Frank Darabont · Film
7.8 · Tier III
Elevation recurs, and it is warm. Andy locks the guard in the toilet and puts the duettino from The Marriage of Figaro over the loudspeakers, the yard stops still, and the camera rises over the upturned faces. The beer on the tar roof in the spring of 1949 is a smaller height of the same kind. The reveal tears the poster back to a tunnel; the escape ends with Andy in the creek in the storm, arms raised to the rain, the camera rising above him. Beneath runs a register of dread: the first night, the fat man beaten to death, Hadley’s violence, Tommy shot in the yard. Held from the top because several rises are underlined by the score, and the elevation is consolation more often than transport.
Ptolemaic and Roman builders · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Height and frequency. The elevation of Philae is chiefly that of the whole seen from the water: pylons and colonnades rising from the river among granite rocks, the open kiosk on the shore, an approach by boat that still governs a visit on Agilkia. The image is beautiful, and it recurs at every approach. Within, the rise is lesser. The forecourt is graceful rather than grand; the floral capitals of the colonnades and the pronaos give a varied richness; the darkening approach to the sanctuary has the quiet gravity of every Egyptian temple, at a modest scale. The Kiosk of Trajan, open columns under the sky, is the complex’s most memorable figure. There is no terror and little grandeur of mass, and the setting that carries much of the axis is now a made island in a reservoir.
Bonanno Pisano (attributed) and Giovanni di Simone; Tommaso Pisano · Architecture
7.7 · Tier III
Two kinds of elevation, both frequent. The first is beauty of a cool and even kind: white marble in banded courses, the gallery arcades catching shadow so that the drum reads as a lattice of light round a solid core, the same figure on every face as one walks round it on the grass. The second is unease: the tower against the cathedral’s verticals is wrong at a glance, and on the stair the body is pulled outward on one side of the spiral and pressed to the wall on the other, the steps worn into hollows. The view from the top is a reward, not a revelation. The scale is modest, and the register is grace and vertigo, not grandeur.
Federico Fellini · Film
7.7 · Tier III
The elevation is real and comes from a low place. Cabiria under hypnosis in the stage light, until the laughter breaks the trance; the pilgrimage, the litanies swelling while she cries out to the Madonna; the walk to the cliff at sunset, where the viewer understands before she does. Then the road: the young people coming through the trees with guitar and accordion, Rota’s theme taken up by them, and Masina’s face, tears, mascara and a smile, turned almost to the lens. That ending is among the great endings of its decade. Frequency counts against the height: between these few peaks the film moves through comic business at street level, by design, and Lazzari’s night is glossy rather than high.
Sahelian builders · Architecture
7.7 · Tier III
The elevation is real and has one source. The tower rising, sheer and spiked, out of a town of single-storey mud houses and then out of the plain is among the strongest images in Sahelian building: an earthen thing as high as a stone tower, its timbers throwing combed shadows in hard light, its taper giving it a force upward that a straight shaft would not have. Seen from below it is grandeur close to terror, a mass at once monumental and fragile. But the axis weighs frequency with height, and there is little else: the hall is a place of use rather than of elevation. One summit, held from many points in the town, places the axis near 8.0 and not above it.
Yorgos Lanthimos · Film
7.7 · Tier III
The elevation is dread, sustained and frequent. The opening close shot of a beating heart in an open chest, under Schubert’s Stabat Mater, sets the register at once. Bob falls on the hospital escalator, seen from high above as he slides down, a child’s body abandoned by its own legs. Martin, bound in the basement, bites his own forearm and then offers it, and the gesture is worse than the beating that prompts it. Long tracks toward rooms where nothing visible happens make the corridor terrible. The last movement, the family bound and hooded and the father blindfolded with a rifle, is grotesque and appalling at once, and the Bach chorus over the diner lifts the cold to a liturgical height. What it lacks is a counter-register: the height is in one key, and the comic flatness sometimes punctures it.
Paul Thomas Anderson · Film
7.7 · Tier III
Height is real and of several kinds. Robards’s monologue on his regret, delivered nearly unbroken from the bed, is the summit in speech; Frank’s collapse at his father’s bedside, the seducer reduced to a son cursing and weeping, is another. The sing-along of “Wise Up” rises by a device the film had not licensed until it uses it, and it lifts. The frogs are grotesque, comic and terrible at once, and the long first act, cut against Brion’s score, builds a mounting dread. What holds the figure is the price of that frequency. It is bought by pitch: Moore’s scenes and some of Macy’s are played at a hysteria that does not lift, and the volume of the whole is so constant that its peaks stand less high above it than they should.
Arcade Fire · Music
7.5 · Tier III
The record rises on four or five of its eight tracks, and its heights are real. End of the Empire I-III is the first: a piano ballad of long phrases that opens into strings and a full band, the band’s most stately elevation in years. Its fourth part reaches a colder height, the voice turned toward the black hole named in its title. The Lightning I, II is the summit: a whispered first part, then the drums enter and the song becomes a long cumulative surge, its refrain “don’t quit on me” carried higher on each pass. Against these, Unconditional I is buoyant rather than elevated, Unconditional II level, and the title song a gentle close more than an arrival.
Guðjón Samúelsson · Architecture
7.5 · Tier III
Elevation is real, and frequent outside. The tower closes the length of Skólavörðustígur like a cliff at its head; from the bay or the hills round the city the front is the one vertical over a low town of roofs; the stepped piers take hard light and snow. Inside, the passage runs from the low entrance under the tower into a tall white nave whose pointed vaults rise without ornament toward clear windows, with the organ’s tall case at the west end, and when it plays its sound fills a hard, resonant room. The register is the North’s sublime, plain and luminous. Held below because the interior has essentially one effect, height and whiteness, and the concrete close at hand is drab beside the figure seen from afar.
Jun Xia (Gensler) · Architecture
7.4 · Tier III
Elevation is real and comes often, and it is of one kind: height. From the Bund the tower rises past its two neighbours in a single turning line, the notch spiralling up its face, the crown often lost in cloud; at night and in haze it is the tallest presence in a city of towers. In the atria glass rises through a dozen floors with the city falling away beyond, and the observation floors look down onto Jin Mao and the World Financial Center, a vertigo not forgotten. The register is grandeur, cool and impersonal, sometimes dreadful in fog. What holds the axis: the elevation belongs to the height more than to the form; the offices and lobbies do not rise; and the turning silhouette, once seen, repeats.
Coldplay · Music
7.2 · Tier III
Elevation is the record’s chief good, and it comes often, almost always of one kind: the full band arriving, warm and swelling, under a held voice. Politik’s opening chords give a hard, grand height at once. Clocks is the summit, its piano figure accented across the bar and lifting at each chorus, a transport made of insistence. The Scientist rises by withholding, the band entering late. Warning Sign and the title track build to wide choruses, and Amsterdam’s release is the most earned height. Green Eyes, A Whisper and most of God Put a Smile upon Your Face stay level; Daylight climbs partway. The heights are real and seldom reach dread or grandeur.
William Gaddis · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Elevation is rare by design, in a book of voices that interrupt one another. The opening, two old women’s talk of money and death, begun “in a voice that rustled”, has a dry grandeur. The passages of narrative prose that carry the reader between scenes, through streets, trees and weather on land being cleared for development, are the book’s lyric heights, the only places where the noise stops. Gibbs reading from his abandoned book on the mechanisation of the arts has a drunken eloquence. The comic sublime is the apartment itself, choked with the cartons of JR’s companies while a tap runs and the radio talks. But the heights are few and the register mostly flat, and that holds the axis lowest of the twelve: it is the form’s cost on this axis, and not a failure of power.
Sigmund Freud · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The book is exposition, and most of it is level: argument, instance, objection, answer. That level country is what holds the axis at 7.8, the lowest of the deep axes. It rises in a handful of places, and there it rises high. The burning child that opens the seventh chapter, the dead son appearing to his sleeping father to say “Vater, siehst du denn nicht, daß ich verbrenne?”, while in the next room a candle has in fact fallen on the body, is one of the great uncanny pages of its century. The passage on Oedipus and Hamlet reaches a cold grandeur about destiny and the reader. The preface to the second edition, naming the book as a reaction to the death of Freud’s father, and the closing paragraph, on the wish that moulds the future into the likeness of the past, both rise. Frequent for a treatise; rare for a book on this desk.
Salvador Dalí · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Elevation is real and of one kind, the cold uncanny, a dread without an object. Its forms: the far cliffs in a gold light so clear that the dream seems lit from outside it; the wide, almost empty foreground in deep shadow, which gives a canvas a third of a metre wide the scale of a coast; the watch on the branch, hanging like cloth, which stops the eye each time; the sleeping creature, neither animal nor face; the ants on the closed watch, the one motion in a stilled world. The register recurs across the field. What holds the axis is size and height together: the uncanny is intimate rather than overwhelming, and the melting watch has grown familiar enough to be read as a design before it is felt as a strangeness.
Lewis Carroll · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Elevation here is wonder, and it comes often but low. The fall down the well is slow enough for Alice to take a jar from a shelf and wonder whether she will come out among the Antipodes (chapter I); the loveliest garden is seen through a door too small to enter; the Cat fades until only the grin is left, “a grin without a cat!” (chapter VI); the pack of cards rises into the air as she wakes (chapter XII). The prefatory poem and the sister’s reverie reach for a different height, the elegiac, and the closing paragraph, imagining the grown woman who keeps her childhood’s heart, is the book’s one long-held lyrical note. Wonder counts as elevation. What holds the figure below eight is the register: comic throughout, it refuses transport whenever transport threatens, and the fall ends in a heap of sticks and dry leaves.
George Orwell · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The register is a plain fairy-tale voice, comic and level by design, and the book is not built to rise often. It rises in three places. At the end of chapter VII, after the confessions and the killings, the animals huddle on the knoll; the narration enters Clover’s thought at length for the only time, and they sing “Beasts of England” slowly, just before it is banned. In chapter IX Boxer is driven away in the knacker’s van while Benjamin, the one who reads, at last raises his voice, and the animals cannot make Boxer hear in time. The last sentence, “already it was impossible to say which was which”, is a cold height that closes the book on dread. What holds the axis in the high sevens is frequency: between these moments the comedy and the deadpan keep the elevation down.
Joel Coen and Ethan Coen · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
The register is deadpan, cold and comic, and elevation is not its usual mode; when it rises, it rises through the white of the plain. The opening is the first summit: a white field without horizon, out of which a car towing another car emerges under Burwell’s theme, grave and wide. The second is the overhead shot of Jerry crossing a snow-covered car park to his iced car and scraping at the windscreen in impotent rage, a man seen from above as small as he is. Dread rises at the highway killings in headlights and at the woodchipper in daylight. This is the lowest of the eleven axes the minimum covers, held there because the summits are few and spaced, and the long middle is comedy of manners and procedure, exact and level.
Aristophanes · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
The play rises, but not often, and its height is chiefly of beauty rather than grandeur or terror. The procession of the initiates through the meadows of the dead, with its hymns to Iacchus, to Demeter and to the light of the mysteries, has a real radiance. The parabasis turns from jokes to a grave address to the city on the eve of disaster, and the close, with torches, the chorus’s prayer and Aeschylus leaving his chair to Sophocles, ends in something like ceremony. Most of the play’s energy is comic exhilaration instead: the frogs’ chorus, the duels of parody, the weighing of verses. Exhilaration is not the sublime as this axis measures it, and a comedy is not charged for being one; but the height is reached a few times, not sustained.
Walter Gropius · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Elevation here is clarity and lightness, a cool register. It comes at the glass corner of the workshop wing, where the wall turns with no pier and the floors seem to float inside a transparent volume, most of all when it is lit at night; at the bridge, a building carried over a road; at the stair of the workshop wing, seen through the glass; at the balconies stepping up the front of the studio block. Frequency is moderate: the vocational school wing and much of the interior are plain by intent, and many who visit find the building more modest and more domestic in scale than its photographs. There is no grandeur and no dread, and the building is not credited for a height it chose not to attempt.
Giuseppe Terragni · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Elevation here is clarity and taut light. The entrance front, its deep grid of empty cells throwing shadow beside a sheer marble plane, is a sight of real force, cold and exact. The hall under its glass-block ceiling, light falling evenly into a room ringed by galleries, has a sober grandeur at modest size. The register is single: measure, light, restraint. There is no ascent and no climax in the route, and no terror unless the visitor brings it; the empty hall waiting for a crowd has an undertone of menace that the building does not build. The scale is civic and modest, a four-storey block beside a cathedral that rises in elevation of the other kind. It rises front by front, more than once, but never far.
Evelyn Waugh · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
One of the three lowest of the twelve. Waugh’s method refuses elevation, and the axis is indifferent to the reason. The book rises in a cold register, and more than once. On the evening of the child’s death Tony, unable to grieve in any form the house allows, plays animal snap with Mrs Rattery, a guest in the house. In the forest his fever shows him the City as Hetton transfigured, the whole Gothic dream seen as a hallucination. And the last scene with Mr Todd reaches true terror: a man sentenced to read Dickens aloud forever to a captor who cannot read, while in England his death is reported and his memorial unveiled. It is one of the great dreadful closures of the English novel. What holds the axis here is frequency: for long stretches the book is brilliant social comedy, flat by intention.
Tadao Ando · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Elevation here is quiet and real. It comes in the sky framed as a rectangle above the court; in raking light sliding down the concrete; in rain falling into the middle of the house. On a plot this small the effect is stronger than its means suggest, and it recurs daily and through the seasons, so frequency is in its favour. Height is the limit. The house does not rise to the grandeur, terror or transport of the Pantheon’s oculus (9.3), or of its own architect’s later Church of the Light (8.5), where a cross of light burns in a dark room. The street front’s mute wall has severity more than height. The register is one, and it is a quiet one.
Adolf Loos · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Elevation here is warm and contained. It comes in the rise from the dim entrance into the living hall; in the green veining of the Cipollino marble under the light; in the diagonal views up into the dining room and the lady’s room, a house that opens in depth as one climbs; and at the top, on the roof terrace, in the opening that frames the Castle. Frequency is good, for the Raumplan is built as a sequence of such reveals. Height is held low. A private house of this size has no vastness and no dread; its register is one, enclosed luxury, comfort and discovery; and the exterior, by design, gives almost nothing. The elevation is of intimacy, not grandeur.
Wes Anderson · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
The elevation is rationed, and it comes at a few exact points. Margot stepping off the bus in slow motion to Nico’s “These Days” is a summit of a quiet kind, the one moment the film lets its distance go. Richie in the bathroom, to Elliott Smith’s “Needle in the Hay”, is the dreadful summit: the shave, the cut, hard edits, blood in the basin, a sudden drop through the comic surface. Richie and Margot in the tent, a record playing, hold a tenderness, and the funeral closes on a grace note. Between them the register is level by design, deadpan and tableau under an even voice, and much of what the film reaches is poignancy rather than transport.
William Gaddis · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
A cold book, and it means to be. Its elevation has two sources. The descriptive passages between the calls, the light on the river, the bare trees, the wind in the house’s ornament, the seasons turning outside the windows Elizabeth looks through, reach a bleak and exact beauty, set against the noise inside. And the ending reaches dread: a woman dead alone in a house full of other people’s papers, while the world outside moves toward a war her family’s money helped to make. Between these the register is comic, abrasive or flat by design, and the heights are few and spaced. The descriptive passages are weighed on their manner and placing, not quoted.
Ancestral Puebloan builders · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The elevation comes in a few kinds. From the cliff top above, the whole D lies open on the canyon floor, every room and kiva legible as one figure, and that view is the building’s summit. On the ground the rises are quieter and repeated: aligned doorways seen through room after room, the banded veneer under raking light, the size of the great kivas, the cliff over the back wall. It is a grandeur of extent and labour more than of any single space, and no one room lifts as the view does. What holds the axis: the ruin, roofless, has lost the darkness and enclosure its rooms once had, and the house is credited only with what its own form makes of canyon and silence.
Marc Chagall · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The elevation is real and of one register: wonder, the lift of a world set free of gravity. The green face against the red and the white head opposite it, enormous and calm, give the canvas a charged, nearly heraldic presence at nearly two metres. The circle at the lower left, a sun or moon in eclipse, opens a cosmic note under the farmyard; the upside-down woman and houses give the small vertigo of flight; the lit sprig in the man’s hand is a quiet height of its own. But there is no terror and no grandeur of the kind a night sky gives, and the transport is gentle, recurring at a constant level rather than rising. It is the sublime of the fairy tale: high in its kind, narrow in range, and held under 8.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
The register is warm elevation, frequent and steady, rarely high. The first elegy’s address to the stones and the high palaces rises, and the turn that closes it, that without love Rome would not be Rome, carries it. The elegy of the north reaches a quiet, smiling grandeur: the lover in Jupiter’s hall, begging to stay among the gods until Hermes leads him down past the tomb of Cestius. It is the nearest the book comes to the sublime. The night of love and verse is radiant rather than lofty. There is no terror here and little grief; the book chose happiness, and the elevation of contentment is real but lower than the summits. Height moderate and frequency good: that is what holds the axis at 7.8, below every figure but The Encompassed.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Elevation is not the film’s usual register. Its register is the flat, held, slightly comic stare, and when it rises it rises from that flatness. Emmi and Ali sit alone among the yellow tables and chairs of an empty beer garden, the waiters watching from a distance, and she weeps that she wishes they were alone in the world while the camera holds them as already alone. The first dance is watched by regulars frozen at the bar; the last dance, the collapse and Emmi at the bedside are held a long time. These are real summits of pathos, but they are few, short and gathered at the joints of the plot, and between them the film is level by design.
Wilkie Collins · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
The book rises by terror and suspense more often than most of its kind, and once or twice to a height. The opening is one of the great entrances in English fiction: Hartright walking to London at night, a hand on his shoulder, a woman in white on the high road, and after she has gone the men from the asylum asking for her. Then Marian on the verandah roof in the rain, listening to Fosco and Percival, and the fever that follows; Fosco’s postscript in her diary, by which the reader learns that the private page has been read; and Hartright in Limmeridge churchyard before the stone inscribed to Laura’s memory, beside the veiled woman who is Laura. The elevation is of dread and recognition, not of tragedy; between the summits lie long plains of investigation.
Frida Kahlo · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The elevation is real and of one kind: a dreadful pathos, the shock of the opened body and the nails, held in check by the stillness of the face. It is reached at first sight and sustained by the gaze, which keeps the viewer from looking away into horror alone. The landscape gives a second and colder note: an empty plain to the horizon, split like the figure, with no one in it, a desolation that widens the pain from the body to the world. There is no grandeur of scale, no transport, and no beauty set against the terror beyond the cool beauty of the column and the polished surface. The height is high in its kind and does not recur in other registers.
James Cameron · Film
8.1 · Tier IV
The register is terror, and it rises often. The opening future, skulls crushed under treads and searchlights over ruins; the arrival in blue electrical light at the observatory; the advance through the police station, one figure moving room by room over Fiedel’s metallic pulse; the self-surgery at the sink, the eye cut out and dropped; the endoskeleton rising from the tanker’s fire, stripped of its human form; the half-machine dragging itself after Sarah across the factory. The coda turns terror to a grave calm, a car driving into the desert under gathering cloud. Held where it is because the elevation is of one kind, dread and its release, and because at the summits the means show: in the factory the stop-motion endoskeleton reads as a model, and the height is reached and briefly undercut.
Built for Bishop Bernward · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Elevation is real and steady, and modest in height. The interior is broad, light and calm: white walls, the alternation running in a slow beat down the nave, the two crossings opening at either end like rooms of their own. The painted ceiling is the one place of richness, a sky of figures over a plain stone room, and its colour against the white is the building’s strongest moment. Outside, the massing on its hill, towers grouped at both ends, gives the town a skyline of real grandeur. Held here because the register is serenity, not transport: no great height, no light dramatised, no passage from dark into brilliance. Its frequency is good, since the whole interior holds one even mood.
Henri Cartier-Bresson · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The elevation is real and of one kind: suspension. The figure hangs in the air with his double hanging beneath him, and the eye holds its breath with him. It is a lyric height, close to dance, and the posters make the comparison plain. There is beauty in the ripples and in the black silhouette against grey water, and a small terror in the certainty of the splash that never comes. But the axis weighs height and frequency, and this is one moment by definition, held as an instant rather than recurring. The setting, a muddy yard of debris, is deliberately low, and the comedy of a man in a hat jumping a puddle keeps the picture nearer to wit than to transport.
Bichitr · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The elevation is of one kind: splendour. The great disc of sun and moon behind the emperor’s head, wider than his body is broad, gold against the dark ground, is the height of the picture and is genuinely radiant. The hourglass, its sand running beneath the throne, carries a second and colder note, of time against power. Beyond these the picture does not rise. The figures below are portraits, finely made and still, and the scale, a page held in the hand, keeps transport intimate. Height is real and occurs about twice; its frequency is low and its register narrow, and the axis stands there.
Pablo Picasso · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The elevation is real, cool and of one kind: grave stillness, a melancholy grace. The pale rose and ochre of the ground against the blue and terracotta of the costumes, the girl’s slippers and the Harlequin’s diamonds, the woman’s profile under her hat: these give a quiet transport, the beauty of bodies at rest in an emptiness, and it recurs across the canvas in a light that touches every figure equally. What it does not reach is height. There is no terror and no grandeur, and no moment where the picture rises above its own register. Sustained quiet beauty stands below the repeated rises of The Starry Night, at 9.2 on this axis.
Rachel Whiteread · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The elevation is real and of one kind: a cold, funereal, uncanny grandeur. A grey mass stands alone on cleared ground with the shape of a house and none of its openings, the scale of a dwelling at the density of a tomb. The photographs of it in winter light, against the towers beyond, carry a dread close to the sublime of ruins, and the fireplaces and the stair, legible on the outside, give a recurring small shock: the familiar seen from the wrong side. There is a stillness in it near the mausoleum. What holds the axis is frequency and register: one effect, sustained rather than renewed; a response often closer to unease and recognition than to transport; and a work known now only in reproduction, which carries the image and not the weight.
Gerhard Richter · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The elevation is real, cool and quiet, and of one register. It comes in the contrast at the centre of the field, warm pattern and pale hair against the dark grey, which gives the figure a presence out of proportion to its plainness; in the turn itself, held at the instant before the head comes round or goes further; and in the grey, which reads as depth rather than wall, an opening she looks into. What holds the axis: there is no grandeur of scale, no terror, and no recurrence of summits across the field. The canvas rises once and holds that height, by stillness rather than by event, and it has one higher moment and a flatter remainder.
Claude Monet · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
One height, reached once: the orange disc in the grey-blue, and its broken path down the water toward the viewer. The note is quiet and exact, a single saturated colour in a field of greys, and because the sun sits near the sky’s own value it seems to hang and flicker rather than shine; there the canvas lifts. The register is warm against cold, beauty without terror. There is no second summit: the boats are silhouettes, the port is haze, the sky above the sun is weak brushing, and height counts with frequency. Against The Starry Night (9.2), which rises in five places, and Broadway Boogie Woogie (8.0), whose lift is continuous and cool, this is a single real elevation in a small field.
Court of Benin · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The elevation is real and of one kind: a calm and remote gravity. The face is idealised, full in the cheeks, the lips closed and full, the eyes under heavy lids with dark iron pupils that look out level, and the stillness is complete. The ivory’s warm pallor, which in Edo thought carries purity and the colour of Olokun’s realm, gives the face a light of its own. The crown, a lace of tiny heads and fish, adds a second note: a whole world gathered above a single brow. The height returns only by return to the face. Under a foot high and made to be worn, the object cannot reach grandeur of scale, and terror is wholly absent. Transport of a quiet, hieratic kind, high in its range and narrow in it.
Harriet Beecher Stowe · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Elevation comes often and at a known pitch. Eliza crossing the Ohio on the floating ice with her child in her arms is a true summit, terror and transport at once, and the book knows it. Tom’s endurance under Legree rises to a grave height: his refusal to flog the woman in the field, and his death in the shed forgiving Sambo and Quimbo. Cassy’s history, told to Tom at night, is the darkest thing in the book and has real terror. Eva’s death is the book’s most famous elevation and its weakest: its visions and its gifts of her hair are made for the tears they ask for, and the mood is pressed rather than earned. The narrator’s apostrophes to the reader often stand between a scene and its force.
Abraham Darby III; designed by Thomas Farnolls Pritchard · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
In still water the arch and its reflection close into a circle, and the open frames let the gorge be seen through the bridge: a light, dark tracery against wooded banks, iron that reads as drawing. In its own century it was received in the language of the Picturesque and the Sublime, with the smoke and fire of Coalbrookdale beside it, and the crossing opens a view up and down a narrow green valley. What holds the axis is scale and frequency. The span is about thirty metres and the walk over it short; the experience does not grow on the way across. It is one image, seen best from the bank, a beauty of figure more than a transport.
Tibetan, under Songtsen Gampo · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Elevation comes in two registers. Inside, the dark: low chapels thick with lamp smoke and the smell of butter, painted walls, the gilded Jowo at the end of a slow queue; a close, enclosed kind of height, frequent and real along the circuit. Above, the light: the gilded roofs over the flat white and ochre mass, seen from the roof terrace against the mountains and the Potala. The crowd of pilgrims gives these moments a force no empty room has. What holds the axis is the architecture’s own means: there is no great interior volume and no climactic space built to lift, and much of the elevation is carried by the images, the smoke and the people rather than by section and light composed.
Ana Mendieta · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Elevation is sought and reached, intermittently. The summits are real. The white flowers over the body in the stone tomb at Yagul give a still, funerary beauty. The fireworks figure, arms raised, flaring and burning out at night, is a moment of terror and transport, a soul rising as it is consumed. The red silhouette in the sand, the sea entering it and erasing it, is grand in the plainest way: a figure against the force that ends it. These recur across the years rather than standing alone. What holds the axis down is that many pieces are modest by design, an outline in grass seen from above in a casual frame, and the record is often small, flat and uneven in light, so the height lies more in the event than in the image.
Gerhard Richter · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The elevation is of one kind: beauty. The body glows against a darker, cooler ground and comes toward the viewer out of the blur as if out of memory, at about the height of the person who stands before her. The register is warm and quiet: a lowered face, a body neither displayed nor hidden, light on skin softened until it seems to come from within. Height counts with frequency, and there is one summit, the figure. It does not rise again elsewhere in the field; the stair and the ground are the means of its light, not further heights. There is no terror and no grandeur beyond the life size. The softness that makes the beauty also lowers its pitch: the picture soothes as much as it lifts, and before it the response is held breath, not transport.
Joseph Beuys · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The height is real and it is in the images. A standing figure wholly hidden in a cone of grey felt, a crook rising from its top, the coyote circling it or lying beside it, in a bare room in SoHo: a shepherd, a hooded penitent, a tent, a thing with no face, and one of the strange summits of the century’s art. The animal settling beside the man, and the man lying with it, carry a quiet and unforced grandeur; the arrival on a stretcher out of an ambulance has a cold dread. What holds the axis is frequency. Over days most of what passed was waiting, and the record shows elevation at intervals, shaped by the photographer’s choice of frames: dreadful and tender in turn, never sustained.
Sofia Coppola · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Elevation recurs, and it is of one kind: quiet transport. The opening drive through Shinjuku at night, the city’s lights passing over Bob’s tired face. Charlotte in a Kyoto temple watching monks chant, then crossing a garden to a bride under a red umbrella, without a word. The karaoke night, Charlotte singing “Brass in Pocket” in a pink wig, then Bob singing “More Than This”, flat and sincere, while she watches and the film stops for it. The taxi home with her head against the glass. The summit is the ending: the car stopped, the embrace in the Shibuya crowd, the whisper we cannot hear, and “Just Like Honey” rising. Held where it is because the height is never terror or grandeur, and the comic middle lowers its frequency.
Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent and mostly kinetic, rarely transporting. It rises with the chicken breaking loose and the camera running at its height through the alleys; with the circling shot that turns the street back to the sixties; with the Tender Trio robbing a gas truck under a low sun while the poor fill their pans; with Bené’s farewell party under strobe light, where the shot meant for Zé kills the one man who had chosen to leave. The dread of the motel retold and of the hand-or-foot scene is real. Held at the figure because the register is exhilaration more than grandeur: score and cutting push a rush that is often the same rush, and the film rarely stops long enough for awe or grief to open.
Robert Capa · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
There is real height, and of one kind: dread at the threshold. The arms open, the head goes back, the knees give, and the body is held in the one position no one sees from outside. Against the open sky the figure is very small and very alone, and the effect is a cold terror more than pity: there is no wound, no blood, nothing to look at but the moment of being undone. The blur does work here, since the body is already becoming less solid than the hill. What holds the axis is frequency. A single image has one summit, met at once; it does not recur on return, and the response settles into recognition. Ubiquity has worn the image too, which is not charged, but the axis scores what the frame reaches now.
John Constable · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Elevation is warm and recurrent, not high. The sky is the work’s summit: cloud piled over the meadow, lit from the right, giving way to blue, with the shadow of cloud passing over the far fields so that the light is a moving thing. The far meadow in sun, seen past the dark masses of the trees and the shaded water, opens the canvas outward, and that opening is the picture’s one transport. Smaller elevations recur: the reflections in the stream under the cart, and the white flecks on leaf and ripple that make the surface glitter. It is beauty, with nothing of terror or grandeur, and its pitch is even; no passage rises to the overwhelming. The sky is among the finest painted in its century, and the axis credits it without mistaking pleasure for height.
Tiwa builders · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
The elevation is real, of one kind, and comes chiefly from the setting: the north house stepping up in brown terraces against the mountain behind it, the two masses facing each other across the stream, the light on mud walls at evening and in snow. It is a grandeur of mass, colour and endurance, calm and earthbound, and it recurs at every approach, so frequency is credited. What holds it: inside, the rooms are small, low and dark by necessity, and no interior rises or transports. The church is modest and plain. The height is the village seen whole against its mountain, and it is not concentrated anywhere in the building itself.
Pablo Picasso · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The register is pathos and stillness, held at one pitch across the whole surface. There is one height: the head dropped over the guitar and the long hand reaching across, where the figure becomes something like a Pietà without a mother, a body offered to a thing. The cold of the blue against the one warm brown of the instrument is real elevation. But the axis counts how often a work rises as well as how high, and this picture has one figure and one note: it rises once and holds there. It has nothing of the transport of a night sky in motion, and much of its force is quiet. It is the purest in pitch of the Blue Period pictures, and purity is not height.
Yves Klein · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
The elevation is real and of two kinds, met in a single moment. Upward: the arms spread like wings, the chest lifted, the face turned to the sky, a swan dive that reads as flight, the body caught at the top of its arc, where it seems neither to rise nor to fall. Downward: the paving below, hard and near, and the certainty that the next instant is injury. The two pull against each other and the picture holds them in suspension, while the quiet street and the departing cyclist turn the exaltation calm, almost comic. What holds the axis is frequency and scale: one image, one moment, small in its prints and seen mostly in reproduction, where it is striking and also familiar. It rises once, to a real height, and does not rise again.
Wang Shu (Amateur Architecture Studio) · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
The elevation is real and comes in two registers. Close to, the wapan walls have a grave beauty: thousands of fragments in greys, reds and browns, rough and various, under raking light, a surface no other new building of its decades offers. At a distance, the block that breaks into a ridge has a quiet grandeur against the towers of the district, an older scale set into a newer one, and the pool before it doubles the figure. What holds the axis: the sublime here is of surface and silhouette. No interior room on record rises to the walls, and the elevation is steady rather than gathered to a summit. Walt Disney Concert Hall (7.8), whose height rests on its auditorium, stands higher here.
Jean-Michel Basquiat · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
The elevation is of the dreadful kind, and it is real. Facing the canvas, the head is larger than the viewer’s, frontal and staring, its teeth bared: a stare returned by something both alive and dead, with the force of a mask or an icon. The saturated ground and the violence of the black line give it heat rather than chill. What holds the axis is range and frequency. The painting gives one encounter, at once and at full strength, and looking longer deepens the detail of the interior more than it raises a second height. Against a work that rises again and again across a field or a duration, this is one summit, held.
Mike Leigh · Film
7.9 · Tier III
The elevation is dread and a cold, exhausted lyricism, and it recurs. Brian’s building at night, the watchman talking of his cottage and his future while Johnny mocks him through the glass, reaches a desolate grandeur. The woman in the window, her house and the sudden sight of her emptied life turn into terror and pity at once. The long tracking walks under Andrew Dickson’s harp and strings give the city a pulse like doom, and David Thewlis’s monologues lift when the thought runs ahead of the man. The farce of Sandra’s return and the landlord’s scenes lower the frequency, and the last image, the limp down the road toward the camera, is a strong note but not a transport. Height is reached several times and not sustained.
Cy Twombly · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Elevation is real and recurs, and it is violent and scattered. The fire canvas, a mass of red worked as if burning outward, is the cycle’s height. The battle canvases give a frenzy of marks across wide ground that reads as tumult at the scale of the body. The shield’s circle has a severe, emblematic grandeur. The end gives the opposite register, grief as thinning and quiet, so that the elevation runs from fire to ghost, warm to cold, and the walk from canvas to canvas gives it duration. What holds the axis: between the summits stand canvases of lists and sparse marks whose effect is reading rather than transport, and the elevation depends on the room; in reproduction most of it is lost.
Harper Lee · Literature
7.9 · Tier III
The register is comic and domestic, and the book rises in a handful of places only, but those are true heights. The jail at night, where children break a mob by talking. The gallery rising as Atticus leaves the court, “Miss Jean Louise, stand up. Your father’s passin’.”: two sentences, and perhaps the book’s highest moment. The dark walk home from the pageant, its terror given through the sound of a costume and the feel of a hand. “Hey, Boo.” And Scout on the porch, seeing her own street as he saw it through the seasons. The mad dog has a stillness near the eerie. Between these the book does not rise and does not try to: high at three or four points, modest in frequency.
Sesshū Tōyō · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
The elevation is real and of one kind: the quiet of mist and the lift of an image that seems to come into being as one looks. The mountain behind, a pale mass that fades into the paper, is the height; the eye travels up from the dark knot of the shore into nothing, and that passage is a small transport. The dark accents give it force, struck rather than laid, with the shock of a decision. It recurs only at the scale of the sheet. There is no grandeur of size and no terror, nothing of the towering peaks of the Northern Song landscape, which are this tradition’s sublime. It is a lyric height, intense and narrow, and one sheet holds one rising.
Erich Mendelsohn · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Elevation here is strangeness more than grandeur. It comes at the first sight of the tower through the trees of the hill, white and swollen among the brick observatories of the 1870s; in the deep, rounded window openings that seem pressed into the mass; in the approach to the entrance, where the stair climbs into the base as if into a body; and, for those who work there, in the light itself, the sun brought down a shaft into a dark room and spread into a spectrum. Height is moderate. The building is small, and its register is one, tense and organic, with no vastness and no dread. Frequency is fair outside and low within, where the workrooms and the stair are modest; and many who visit find it smaller than its photographs, which carry much of its fame.
Nicholas Ray · Film
7.8 · Tier III
The rises are frequent and several are high. The planetarium, the dome going dark while a lecturer’s flat voice announces the end of the earth and Plato hides under the seats, is the film’s cold summit, and it returns at the close when the same building’s floodlights fall on Plato’s body. The chickie run, two cars racing toward the bluff in the dusk, Judy’s raised arms, a sleeve caught on a door handle, is dread exactly built. Jim zipping his red jacket on the dead boy is the warm height. The stair quarrel is a height of its kind, though shrill. What holds the figure: between the summits the register is often schoolroom and kitchen, and the melodrama’s pitch at times reaches for an elevation it has not earned.
Akira Kurosawa · Film
7.8 · Tier III
Elevation comes as dread and suspense, in single passages. The night of decision: Gondo in shadow at the great window, the city’s lights below. The train: the express on the bridge, the boy on the embankment glimpsed for a few seconds, and Gondo at the washroom window throwing everything he owns into the river valley. The pink smoke rising from a chimney in a black and white world, a single colour, terrible and beautiful at once. The drug quarter, addicts swaying in an alley like the damned of a medieval hell. The coda: Takeuchi’s composure breaking into a scream, the shutter coming down. What holds the figure is frequency. Between the train and the smoke the procedure is level, absorbing and low; the briefings are elevation of no kind; and the heights stand as islands in long, flat stretches of the second half.
Helen Frankenthaler · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
The elevation is of one kind and real: lightness, openness, the lift of a pale field breathing through a stain, the air of a coast in high summer. It comes at first sight, in the bare canvas that reads as light rather than as absence, in the blues and pinks that seem to float in the weave rather than sit on it, and in a scale wide enough to stand inside. It does not reach grandeur or terror, and it does not rise to summits across the field. The brightness is even and gentle, and parts of the canvas, the charcoal and some muddier mixtures in the cluster, are flat rather than lifted. Beside the Water Lilies it is a breeze beside a surround.
Joel Coen and Ethan Coen · Film
7.8 · Tier III
It rises often, and almost always through song. The opening, a chain gang breaking rock to “Po Lazarus” under a white sky, has a gravity the comedy never withdraws. The baptism, white-robed figures walking out of the woods into the river while Alison Krauss sings, is the film’s purest elevation, held long and without a joke until Delmar’s. The sirens washing and singing in the shallows are erotic and menacing at once. Ralph Stanley’s “O Death” over the Klan’s torchlit drill reaches terror inside burlesque, and the flood, with a coffin rising through it, has a comic grandeur. The comedy lands each elevation, and does so by choice, so the frequency is high and the height is checked.
Nas · Music
7.8 · Tier III
Elevation is real, cool and intermittent. The World Is Yours is the summit: Pete Rock’s piano phrase over a drum that rolls rather than hits, and a hook that asks “whose world is this?” and answers with a grant of the world to a boy who owns nothing. The cornet that closes Life’s a Bitch, Olu Dara improvising over the fading loop, is a second height, warm and unexpected. N.Y. State of Mind reaches the dreadful kind: Premier’s dark piano figure and the long unbroken first verse hold a tension close to terror. Memory Lane has a nostalgic lift. Halftime, One Time 4 Your Mind and Represent drive more than rise, and It Ain’t Hard to Tell is brilliance rather than height. Four heights in ten, of two kinds, reached in moments and not sustained: the record’s mode is the street at eye level, and between its heights it holds the ground rather than climbs. That holds the figure below the eight.
Terry Gilliam · Film
7.8 · Tier III
The film rises often, in both kinds. The dreadful: the Red Knight, a horseman trailing flame and red cloth through the trees of Central Park at night in pursuit of a man on foot, is one of the strongest images of terror in an American film of its years; the attack under the bridge is lit by fire. The ecstatic: the commuters of Grand Central at rush hour turn into a waltz around Parry as he watches Lydia cross the concourse, the crowd and the light becoming his love; and at the end two naked men lie on a lawn in Central Park at night, cloud-busting, as fireworks rise over the city. Parry’s telling of the legend on the grass is a quieter height. Held below the eights: the rises are linked by long comic business, and the score underlines some of them.
Martin Scorsese · Film
7.8 · Tier III
The register is cold and glittering, and the elevation comes as dread. The summits: the opening, the car exploding and the Bass figure falling through flames to Bach, a damned soul over a passion chorus; Santoro’s first sight of the cornfield, the beating with bats and the burial of two men alive, filmed without music and without relief; Ginger’s death alone in a motel corridor; the desert meeting, Santoro arriving late among holes dug for other men; the overhead views of the floor, a cathedral of money; and the terrible momentum of the collapse montage. Held at the figure by frequency. The summits gather at the frame and in the last movement; the first hour is exposition, brilliant and level; the long middle of domestic quarrels flattens rather than rises; and much of the film’s force is speed and pressure, which is not the same as height.
The Beatles · Music
7.7 · Tier III
Elevation is warm and frequent, and its height is the height of song, not of grandeur. The opening chord is the record’s most famous moment, a ringing shock that throws the doors open. If I Fell is the summit of beauty: two voices in close harmony over a melody that seems to arrive from another key. And I Love Her lifts quietly, its solo raised a step. Things We Said Today darkens into a minor-mode reverie and brightens at its bridge; I’ll Be Back ends the record on an ache between major and minor; Can’t Buy Me Love has a shouted rise into its chorus. The rest has energy more than height. Five or six of thirteen songs rise, and none reaches transport of the medium’s highest kind.
The White Stripes · Music
7.7 · Tier III
Elevation is frequent and mostly of one kind, the physical lift of a riff struck hard and a voice pushed to its edge. Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground opens on it; Fell in Love with a Girl is under two minutes of pure velocity, the record’s sharpest transport; I’m Finding It Harder to Be a Gentleman rises by slowing, the voice cracking over a lurching groove. I Can’t Wait climbs to the record’s most ferocious release, and The Same Boy You’ve Always Known reaches a wounded height when the song opens out. A gentler kind comes in the hush of We’re Going to Be Friends. What holds the figure: the heights are of exhilaration and ache rather than grandeur or terror, brief by design, and the stretch from Expecting to Now Mary stays level more often than it rises. Under Remain in Light at 8.6, close to Zooropa at 8.0.
Bong Joon-ho · Film
7.7 · Tier III
The film rises often and in more than one register. Dread and grandeur in the axe fight: guards in black hoods, a fish gutted on a table before it starts, the killing halted for the count as the train crosses a bridge at the New Year and then resumed, the tail’s torches passed hand to hand down the line. The cold sublime in frozen cities and a buried aircraft seen from the windows. The terrible in Curtis’s confession at the engine door, in near darkness. Wonder after catastrophe in the last image, a bear on the snow seen by two children. Held at its figure because the front cars trade elevation for satire, the classroom for grotesque comedy, and the engine is talk until the floor is lifted.
Minoan · Visual art
7.7 · Tier III
The elevation is real and of a kind the Bronze Age seldom reaches: transport in motion. The bull at full stretch, forelegs and hind legs flung out in the flying gallop, has a speed no Egyptian image of the period attempts. The vaulter’s body, inverted above its back, its arc answering the arc of the horns, is the picture’s summit and a true one: the instant where weight seems suspended. The danger is felt, the horns at one end and a figure within their reach. Frequency is limited by the single scene. There is one height, held across the whole panel, rather than heights that recur; there is no grandeur of scale and no terror beyond the danger implied. High in kind, one moment, and that moment strong.
Anish Kapoor · Visual art
7.7 · Tier III
Elevation is real and frequent, and changes with every condition the work cannot control: clouds moving across the top as if through it, the skyline drawn into a curve, snow, fog, night lights, a winter sun burning a point on the steel. The great moment is the omphalos: walking under the arch into a hollow where reflections stack, invert and recede, a vertigo in which the self is repeated without end. The scale, nearly six times a viewer’s height, gives presence without menace. What holds it below the eights is register. The work’s characteristic response is pleasure and play, the funfair mirror’s wonder more than awe, and its height is often met with laughter and photographs. It rises often; it seldom rises far.
Takashi Yamazaki · Film
7.7 · Tier III
Elevation is of the dreadful kind, and it recurs. On Odo Island, the creature in the dark among the aircraft and the mechanics thrown like leaves. At sea, the dorsal plates surfacing behind a wooden boat, and a mouth that fills the frame. In Ginza, the plates lighting one by one with a mechanical clicking before the breath, then a white-out, a mushroom cloud standing over Tokyo two years after Hiroshima, and black rain falling on Shikishima as he screams. In Sagami Bay, the theme of 1954 sounding as the Shinden turns toward the creature. Four summits in two hours. What holds it: between them the domestic drama is played on a level, melodramatic register, and the height is spectacle more than transport; only in Ginza do terror and grief reach the same height at once.
Horace Jones and John Wolfe Barry · Architecture
7.6 · Tier III
Height is real, and it comes at one moment above all: the lift, when two leaves of road and steel rise toward the upright and a ship passes between the towers. That is grandeur of a rare kind, a city’s ground opening, and it still draws crowds to the banks. There is a second register in the silhouette: the two towers and the swagged chains seen from the river, from the wharf of the Tower, or lit at night, a figure strong enough to stand for the city. Within, the walkways give a high view down the river and, since 2014, straight down through glass onto the road. What holds the figure is frequency and kind: the elevation is picturesque and theatrical more often than it is sublime, the lift is now occasional, and close to, the Gothic detail is heavy and stock, so that the bridge rises most from a distance.
The Smiths · Music
7.6 · Tier III
Elevation comes several times, mostly warm and rueful, once dreadful. “The Headmaster Ritual” opens on Marr’s chiming open-tuned figure before the band falls in, a real lift, and a wordless falsetto passage rises over it. “That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore” is the summit: a slow waltzing song that ends in a long coda of layered guitars and repeated voice, the one place the record is transported rather than argued. “Well I Wonder” reaches a small private height, nearly still; “Rusholme Ruffians” a giddy one in the fairground swing. “What She Said” and “Nowhere Fast” are energy, not elevation; “Barbarism Begins at Home” has drive and no height; the title track aims at terror and reaches solemnity. Height on three or four of nine, never at the summit of the art.
Robert Motherwell · Visual art
7.6 · Tier III
The elevation is real and of the dreadful, solemn kind. It comes at first sight, from the scale: black masses as tall as a person across a field near three metres wide, so that the viewer faces the procession rather than looks at a picture of it. It comes from the contrast at full strength, the black heavy enough to seem to press, the light bright enough to seem pushed aside. And it comes at the edges, where the brushed, ragged contour gives the masses a living border instead of a cut one. What holds it is that the elevation is one note, sustained across the width rather than rising to repeated summits. No passage lifts beyond the first impression; its grandeur is that of a wall and a cortege, not a transport renewed on looking.
R.E.M. · Music
7.5 · Tier III
Elevation comes often and is warm, lit rather than grand. So. Central Rain is the height: the verses held tight over Peter Buck’s chiming figure, then the chorus breaking open and the closing apology sung again and again until it becomes a lament. Harborcoat lifts on its interlocking voices. Camera is the quiet summit, slow and spacious, Michael Stipe’s voice exposed over guitar that rings and decays, the record’s one real stillness. Time After Time (AnnElise) reaches a droning, suspended height, almost a raga. Rockville rises by another route, a country lift in Mike Mills’s voice and the honky-tonk piano. Second Guessing, Letter Never Sent and Pretty Persuasion have drive more than height, and Little America is propulsive. Five or six of ten tracks rise, and the highest falls short of transport of the first order.
Alex Garland · Film
7.5 · Tier III
The elevation is chiefly dreadful, and it recurs. The mass grave is a long scene of terror sustained by stillness, a question asked over a pit while a man in sunglasses with a rifle decides who is the right kind. The petrol station, a quiet negotiation beside two hanging men, rises to the same pitch at lower volume. There is a strange beauty too: the drive through a burning forest, Jessie leaning from the window into embers that fall like snow, held in slowed time and sound; and the Lincoln Memorial under tracer fire at night. The assault on the White House is the loudest passage and the least elevated, a competent siege of the kind the film set out to estrange. Height and frequency are both real; the summits are local.
Zaha Hadid · Architecture
7.5 · Tier III
Elevation comes often, and at one great height. The atrium is the summit: a tall void where the bands meet, black stairs and bridges flying across it at several levels, daylight falling through the fins of the roof, the concrete walls sweeping past at a height the street did not prepare. The upper galleries, long and lit from above, carry the motion on, and the cantilever ends in a window that turns the whole flow out toward Rome, a release after the enclosure. Seen from the forecourt, the cantilever over the old barracks is strong. The register is exhilaration and speed, cool and grey, rarely awe. The galleries at their plainest are long concrete corridors, and the effect repeats.
Pearl Jam · Music
7.5 · Tier III
Elevation comes on six or seven of fourteen tracks, in two kinds. The driven kind: Corduroy is the height, a slow guitar figure that coils and then breaks into a full-band charge with the voice climbing over it; Not for You builds by repetition to a raw, sustained peak; Last Exit opens on a voice that seems to rise from below the mix. The grave kind: Nothingman lifts in its chorus toward lament over Ament’s bass; Immortality is the deepest, a slow descending figure, a tired voice and McCready’s solo. Better Man earns its lift by withholding it. Held from the top because the fragments stay level by design, two of the fast songs have force more than height, and the highest moments are of the band’s idiom, not beyond it.
Renzo Piano · Architecture
7.5 · Tier III
Elevation is the building’s purpose, and it reaches it often from without. Seen down the river, from the bridges and from far across the south and east of the city, the inclined planes take the colour of the weather, white in haze, steel in rain, a lit blade at dusk, and the open tip seems to dissolve into the sky. The figure changes with every hour and every distance. Within, the gallery gives the second elevation: the whole basin of London to the horizon, the river and its bridges below like a map. What holds the axis: the offices and the hotel rise no higher than good commercial building, the ground floor gives no lift at all, and the sublime is distant and summary, not lived through the body as in a great room.
Deafheaven · Music
7.3 · Tier III
Elevation comes several times, mostly of one kind: the bright, swelling lift of layered guitar. Shellstar rises early, its chorus opening upward and telling the listener what has been kept from the old band, the major-key ascent. Great Mass of Color builds to a real height in its closing section, the drums driving and the guitars thickening into a wall. Lament for Wasps and Other Language reach for long, slow transport and partly find it. The summit is the end of Mombasa, where the scream returns after eight tracks of restraint: terrible and exultant at once, earned by withholding. In Blur, Villain and The Gnashing stay pleasant and level, beauty without height.
David Childs (Skidmore, Owings and Merrill) · Architecture
7.2 · Tier III
Elevation comes, and from a distance often. The eight triangles take the light differently, so that the shaft reads as a faceted crystal, pale at dawn, banded in sun, one face dark and one bright, seen from New Jersey, the harbour and Brooklyn as the single figure of the lower island. Seen from the memorial plaza, rising over the two voids, the height carries a grave weight it does not carry alone. The observatory gives the transport of view that a tower can give. The frequency falls close up. At the street the podium is a mute wall; the top ends in a flat parapet and a bare mast rather than a made crown; the offices are offices. A height of image and of view more than of place.
Molière · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
A comedy of conversation, and its elevation is mostly the high pleasure of wit, which counts but rarely reaches transport. The comic height is the sonnet scene: Oronte’s precious lines, Philinte praising each in turn, Alceste’s verdict that the poem is fit for the privy, and the old song he prefers to it. The cold height comes at the close: the letters read aloud, the suitors leaving one by one, Célimène refusing the wilderness because solitude frightens a soul of twenty, and Alceste’s exit, a scene with a grandeur near tragedy. Between the two, elevation is rare by design, and the axis scores frequency with height. What holds it here, second lowest of the twelve, is that register: the play rises by wit in its first half and by bleakness at its end, and keeps level between.
Walker Evans · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Elevation is withheld by design, and the axis records it. The light is flat and even, the camera frontal, with no drama of sky or gesture. The book rises in places: the tenant farmer’s wife, a face held at a gravity close to the icon; the graveyard at Bethlehem, its cross in the foreground and the mills and houses stacked behind, the dead and the works in one plane, with something of dread; the penny portraits, uncanny at length, a wall of a nation’s faces at a cent each; the plain grandeur of the wooden churches and Greek Revival houses. These are summits of quiet. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the level ground between them: many plates give interest and recognition rather than height, and a work is not credited with what it withholds.
Kazimir Malevich · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Elevation is real and of one kind: the void, cold and absolute, the black as an opening onto nothing or everything. It has one summit and it is the whole work, the moment of standing before the square and finding in it neither picture nor surface but a depth that is not painted. For some viewers that is transport; for many it is nothing, and the canvas does nothing to persuade them. Frequency is the question, and the answer is once: one register, one event, no recurrence and no second summit. The size is modest, not enveloping. And the present surface, cracked across the black so that the field reads as an aged object rather than an opening, takes something of the effect. Below Autumn Rhythm and the Rothko Chapel, which rise again and again.
Ovid · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
The elevation is real and intermittent, and it is pathos rather than grandeur. The heights: Ariadne on the rock, waving her veil at a ship that cannot see her, her cry returned by the empty shore; Dido’s swan singing by the Maeander, with Aeneas’s sword in her lap as she writes; Canace with the sword beside her and her newborn exposed; Medea’s last lines, which hold the murders unspoken in a threat. Hero’s lamp and Leander’s sea lift the double letters once. What holds the axis is frequency. The register is rhetoric, the wit cuts the pathos often and by design, and many letters run level from complaint to complaint without rising. A book that rises in five or six of its twenty-one pieces stands below a work that rises throughout.
Édouard Manet · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
The elevation is dreadful and deliberately muted. The white smoke of the volley at point-blank range is one height: the instant of death taken as a puff of smoke in front of three faces, the event made almost invisible at its centre. The wall is a second, a grey barrier across the whole width under a pale sky, closing off any escape. The sergeant’s calm is a third and colder kind, the horror of routine. But the painting withholds the transport it might have had: no lantern, no lifted arms, no crowd of the dead as in Goya; the light is flat and even, and the palette of greys, blacks, ochre earth and white belts is sober. The restraint is the point, and it costs the axis: height is reached a few times and at low pitch. The work is great without being elevated, and it chose not to be.
David Markson · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
The register is flat by design: declarative, self-correcting, often comic. Elevation comes rarely, and it comes as a cold vastness rather than a lift. The premise itself carries a sublime of emptiness, one woman typing by the sea in a world with no one else in it. The approach of grief, when the son and the grave break through the trivia, is the book’s warm height. The last line, “Somebody is living on this beach.”, is a quiet summit, at once a statement of the obvious and a claim that a self persists. Between these the book stays deliberately level, in a voice that will not raise itself, and the heights are few and spaced.
Li Chun · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Elevation comes, and it is of one kind. The arch is a single low curve of great span, thin at the crown, its haunches opened, so that from the bank the bridge reads as a figure drawn rather than piled: the new moon or the rainbow over the water, the image Chinese writers have long used of it. Beauty is high in that figure and holds in every light. What holds the axis is the register and the scale. It is grace, not grandeur or awe; the bridge is modest beside a temple or a hall; the crossing, on a broad paved deck between balustrades, is a walk over a road, not an ascent; and there is no interior or sequence in which the elevation could recur.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The register is cool, ironic melodrama, and elevation is not its habit. It rises at the ends and once in the middle. At the opening the wall is blown open behind the wedding table, the portrait falls, the registrar runs and the couple sign on the ground in the rubble, with freeze frames under the credits. In the middle, Hermann stands in the doorway and the bottle is brought down on Bill, a terror played almost calmly. At the close a cigarette is lit at the stove, the gas is left open, and the commentator’s voice rises to the winning goal as the house goes up. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: the long middle, of office, prison visits and the house, is level and dry, and the film distrusts transport on principle.
Roman · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The elevation is real and of one kind, a cool and composed grandeur. The raised arm and the level gaze give the figure command of the space before it; the idealised face, showing neither age nor feeling, has the distance of a god, and the scale a little over life completes it. The breastplate, read close, has its own small height: the sky spread like a cloak over the deed is a fine image of a world opened above an act. But the height is cold and single, with no transport, no terror, nothing overwhelming. The figure rises once, as a presence, and holds that one note; the reliefs reward attention rather than lifting it. Against the delight of The Swing at 7.6 it reaches a higher register, grandeur, at about the same frequency, and stands a tenth above.
The Kinks · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
Elevation is real, warm and small, and it recurs. Big Sky is the record’s one reach for grandeur: a sky that looks down on human trouble and is too large to care, sung over a slow, ringing build, and it lifts. Village Green rises by beauty, oboe and strings framing a melody of plain regret. Sitting by the Riverside drifts as a waltz and then swells, in Mellotron and piano, into a short dizzy surge, the record’s strangest height. Animal Farm has an open, rolling lift. Elsewhere the register is low by design: comic, sketched, conversational, music hall. Several songs touch beauty and one the sublime, and the chosen smallness is recorded, not charged. It stands below Songs of Leonard Cohen at 8.4 and Let It Bleed at 8.7.
J. G. Ballard · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
The register is the cold sublime of dread, and it rises often, though at one temperature. The opening image sets the key: a doctor, calm, eating a dog on his balcony. The heights that follow are images more than scenes: a bottle falling from a party above onto Laing’s balcony; the swimming pool drained and filling with rubbish and the dead; the lifts stalled and the stairways barricaded; Wilder, naked and painted, making his ascent to a roof where the women and children have gathered; the last view of the lights failing in the neighbouring block. The flatness of affect is deliberate, and it gives the horror its peculiar calm. The same flatness holds the axis down. There is no change of register, no warmth to measure the cold by and no elevation of beauty, and the dread is sustained more than intensified, so that the heights come close to one another in kind, and few stand clear of the plain on which they sit.
Mike Nichols · Film
8.1 · Tier IV
The elevation is comic first and, at a few points, larger. Benjamin motionless on the airport walkway against a white wall as the opening song begins; the view through the diving mask with only his breathing on the soundtrack; the cut from hauling himself onto the raft to landing on Mrs. Robinson in the hotel bed, one movement that makes the summer one surface; Benjamin at the glass above the church, arms spread, shouting “Elaine!”; and the bus. The church has real transport, half exhilaration and half horror. What holds the figure is frequency and register: much of the best work is precise deadpan comedy, an elevation of a lower order, and the long middle at Berkeley has no summit at all.
Edward Hopper · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The elevation is real and of one kind, a quiet one: the hush of an empty street in early light, the sense of a held breath. It is reached at once and held evenly, in the light lying along the cornice and the window ledges, in the long shadows of the pole and the hydrant across the pavement, in the warm brick against the pale sky. There is no transport by scale, no terror and no grandeur; the canvas is a long easel picture and the facade is two storeys high. The dark block at the upper right and the shopfronts dark at their depth give the calm an undertow without raising it to dread. The stillness does not rise to summits; it holds.
Egyptian (New Kingdom) · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The elevation is of one kind, solemn and still, and it recurs. The judgment has grandeur by order: the great balance at the centre, Osiris in his shrine at the end of a procession, the gods above in a row like a tribunal. Its height is gravity, not transport. The convention keeps every figure calm, and even Ammit is held in profile and at rest. The second height is the Opening of the Mouth, where the women kneel at the mummy’s feet with their hair loose and their arms raised, and the convention bends to admit grief. The restraint of the style is a choice, and it limits frequency and height together.
David Mackenzie · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
The register is dry and comic, and elevation comes in a few places, each of them real. The land gives most of it: Nuttgens’s wide flat country under hard light, oil pumps nodding in empty fields, a grass fire on the horizon with cowboys driving cattle before it. Dread rises at the last robbery, when the town’s citizens come out armed and Tanner turns a rifle on their truck, and highest on the ridge, Tanner alone above the valley firing down at the law, then dying in the scrub. The porch is the last height, two men speaking quietly with violence held under the words. Held where it is by frequency: the heights are short, the comic and procedural stretches long, and the score at times supplies a lift the images have not earned.
Kallmann McKinnell and Knowles · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Elevation is real and of one kind: weight held overhead. The crown of precast bays, broader than the floors beneath it, hangs over the approach and throws a deep band of shadow; the great piers stand under it like the legs of a stoa raised to the scale of the city; seen from Cambridge Street across the falling plaza, the whole mass reads as a fortress on a hill. Inside, the central hall, brick underfoot and raw concrete rising through several levels under light from above, has a grave, cave-like grandeur. Those are the summits, and between them lie corridors and counters of ordinary bureaucratic dimness. The register is single, severity and mass, and for many who use the building the weight reads as oppression. The height here is heaviness more than rising.
Jordan Peele · Film
7.9 · Tier III
The register is satirical comedy rising to dread, and the summits are real. The hypnosis is the height: the spoon on the teacup, Chris falling through black into the Sunken Place, the room shrinking to a far-off screen above him, a new image of terror. Then Georgina at the mirror, smiling and refusing through her tears; Walter running at Chris out of the dark; the auction seen in silence from the lake; Andre’s nosebleed under the flash. Michael Abels’s score, with its Swahili chorus, gives the film a voice of warning older than its plot. Held at its figure by frequency and by design: the comedy, Rod’s above all, releases the dread deliberately, and the violence of the last act is the genre’s, satisfying more than elevating.
Hakka builders (Jiang clan) · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Elevation is real and of one register. From outside, the drum rises blind out of a valley of fields, heavy and closed, a fortress of soil. Through the gate the court opens: galleries of timber climb in tiers, the lower rings step down toward the hall, and the sky is cut into a circle overhead. From the hill the roofs make rings within rings, the image that has carried the building’s fame. The height comes at the threshold and holds there; the rest is domestic and ordinary, right for a house but limiting frequency. The materials are humble, earth, fir and tile, and the grandeur is of number and order. It is never terrible and rarely transporting.
Roman, under Augustus · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Its elevation is of one kind, the beauty of proportion. Seen at an angle from the square, the depth of the porch against the closed flank, the slender columns, the fine scroll of the frieze and the crisp shadow of the cornice give a calm and complete beauty that has moved visitors for centuries. It recurs from every point of the square and in every light, and on its podium the building rises well above a standing person’s eye. But the height is limited. Nothing in it is grand or terrible; it does not overwhelm; and the interior, as it now stands, offers no elevation of its own. A small building, perfectly made: the axis scores the beauty high and the transport low.
Wassily Kandinsky · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Elevation is present and of two kinds, which is the painting’s design. The dark disc in its graded halo has a cold grandeur, a round body that seems to hang in light, the nearest the canvas comes to the cosmic. The yellow half has the opposite lift, a bright sharpness that advances. Their meeting across about two metres gives a real moment of transport at first sight. What holds the axis is height and frequency. Away from the disc the field is busy rather than elevated: the small forms are lively and exact, and the eye moves among them with interest, not awe. There is no terror and no scale beyond the body’s reach. One summit, a second of lesser height, and a lively middle between them.
Apollodorus of Damascus (attributed) · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Elevation comes at two places. The hemicycle seen from the forum floor rises as a curved cliff of brick, three storeys of arches and pilasters closing the view, the hill made architecture, and its grandeur is repeated along the whole curve. The Great Hall’s six cross vaults, lit along the clerestory and floating on their corbels, give a light, high interior unusual for a working building. Between these the climb through terraces and along the street gives the pleasure of a city section laid open, picturesque more than sublime. The atmosphere of the ruin, open terraces, a medieval tower above and the forum below, belongs to its survival rather than its making and is not credited here. A building that rises twice, well, with flat ground between.
Vilhelm Hammershøi · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
The elevation is real and of one kind: a quiet, cool transport, the stillness every account of these rooms reports. It comes at the patch of sunlight on the boards, warm against the grey, the one bright thing, as if the room had been made to hold it; in the turned figure, dark against the pale wall, whose stillness the eye shares; and in the air of the room, a grey light that seems to have weight. A second register is present and faint: an unease, the sense of a room in which something is withheld, close to the uncanny. Height of kind holds the axis here. There is no grandeur, no terror and no transport by scale; the canvas is small, its means few, and the stillness is sustained rather than rising to summits.
Interpol · Music
7.8 · Tier III
The record rises more often than its reputation for polish suggests. Not Even Jail is the clearest height: a slow build over a drum figure that holds back until the guitars lock and the chant lifts, a dark grandeur reached by withholding. Next Exit’s organ opening has a hushed, almost churchly breadth, and A Time to Be So Small closes on a widening swell. Evil’s chorus is a different elevation, the lift of an exactly set hook over a driving bass. Real height comes about four times in ten. What holds it is the middle of the record, which runs level, and a height that is dark and well made rather than a transport: nothing here reaches the coldest heights of the strongest records of its kind.
Alfred Hitchcock · Film
7.7 · Tier III
The heights are real, and they are four. The kiss, carried from the balcony to the telephone to the door without breaking the embrace. The crane at the party, from the top of the great hall down through the guests to the key in Alicia’s closed hand, its height the height of risk. The cup in the foreground of the poisoning, with Alicia’s sight blurring and the mother quiet. And the descent of the staircase, ending on a door that shuts on Sebastian. The cellar builds dread from a dwindling stock of champagne. What holds the axis is what lies between: the Rio exposition is flat, and much of the suspense is suspense of mechanism rather than of feeling.
The Walkmen · Music
7.7 · Tier III
Elevation comes often and at a moderate height. The opening bars of “Juveniles” lift at once, bright guitar over rolling drums, the voice straining upward; “Angela Surf City” reaches a different height by speed, Matt Barrick’s drumming driving the song toward exhilaration. “Stranded” is the warmest summit, the brass rising behind the voice in a slow, swaying lament, and the title track closes on a resigned, open height. “While I Shovel the Snow” rises by withdrawal, nearly still. Against this, “Victory”, “Follow the Leader” and “All My Great Designs” have energy or charm more than height, and the heights are bounded by the record’s scale: no passage reaches transport. Four or five of eleven tracks rise, which earns the figure and holds it.
Martin McDonagh · Film
7.7 · Tier III
The film rises often but in a low register, and its heights are dreadful rather than grand: the severed finger thrown against Pádraic’s door; the donkey’s death and his grief over her, played without irony; the house burning on its headland with Colm inside; Mrs McCormick with her stick over the body in the lake. Ben Davis’s island of stone walls and weather gives the action a weight past its size, and Carter Burwell’s score a fable’s lightness that sets the violence off. What holds the axis is the comic surface, which by design lowers each height as it is reached, returning the film to talk between its peaks.
Dolly Parton · Music
7.6 · Tier III
Elevation is warm and comes several times, always of one narrow kind, beauty and tenderness. The title song rises by plainness: a narrative ballad that never lifts its voice and reaches its height where the mockery is answered and the memory becomes conviction. “My Blue Tears” reaches the high lonesome register of the mountain tradition, the voice alone and bright over spare accompaniment, a real height. “Here I Am” rises as a song of self-offering, and “A Better Place to Live” closes with a hymn-like reach. Against this, “Traveling Man” has energy rather than height, several songs stay level, and the arrangement of the day sometimes cushions a rise that a barer setting would let climb.
The Cure · Music
7.4 · Tier III
Elevation comes often and in several registers, though rarely at great height. In Between Days has a rush of exhilaration, the strum and the synthesiser line racing ahead of the voice. Push is the clearest arrival: two minutes of guitars building before the voice, then a release that lifts the whole side. A Night Like This reaches an anthemic height, and its saxophone solo lifts it further. Sinking reaches the other kind, a slow, dark gravity, and Kyoto Song an eerie suspension. Six Different Ways charms more than it rises, Close to Me is a marvel of smallness, and Screw and The Baby Screams have tension without transport. Five of ten rise, in moments, short of the long swells of Disintegration, whose Sublime stands at 9.1.
Chris Sanders · Film
7.3 · Tier III
The film rises, and often. The opening storm, the robot coming to life among lightning and surf, has grandeur; the first flight and the migration open the image wide over water and cloud, with Kris Bowers’s score carrying the release; the winter blizzard, the animals packed into the lodge while the cold kills outside, reaches a dreadful register for a family film. The painted look gives the island’s seasons a beauty that is constant rather than occasional. Height is held below the top by the manner of reaching it: the elevations are prepared and pressed by the music, the transport is partly engineered, and a scene of grandeur is often followed by a gag that lets the air out.
Édouard Manet · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Elevation is not the register. The picture is cool, frontal and ironic, its light a flat studio light thrown on figures in a wood. Where it rises, it rises through painting: the still life of blue cloth, straw, cherries, figs and bread, laid in with a speed and certainty that give real pleasure; the pale body against the black of the men’s coats, the canvas’s one grand effect; the woman’s look, which has the force of a shock more than of transport. What holds the axis this low: the landscape, which in the Venetian pastoral carried the poetry, is here thin and dark, a scene-painter’s wood, and the bather in the stream floats in it without air. The height is of one kind and it comes seldom. A work may be great without being elevated, and this one is great elsewhere.
Jane Austen · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Austen’s register refuses the sublime: the Gothic and sentimental heights were what her early writing mocked. Elevation here is the height of dramatic recognition and of delight. The ceiling is high enough: the first proposal and the refusal (34), where two people say what they think of each other and the comic surface breaks; Elizabeth’s night and morning with the letter, ending in shame and self-knowledge (36); Pemberley seen across its valley, “and of this place, thought she, I might have been mistress!” (43), and the sudden meeting on its grounds; the news of Lydia (46), the one moment of dread; Lady Catherine routed (56). Delight recurs in nearly every chapter. Frequency is high and counts; what holds the axis low among the twelve is height, which is that of comedy and of the inner reversal, never transport or terror.
Andy Warhol · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The left panel does not elevate and is not meant to: its brilliance is a poster’s. The right panel rises once, and gravely. The black heads clot and smear, some nearly drowned, and toward the right edge they thin out to ghosts, so that the eye reading across the whole passes from glare to dark to almost nothing. Seen across a room at nearly six square metres, the passage carries a real dread, cold and impersonal, the face withdrawing while the grid goes on without it. That is a summit, and it is one: the effect is a single movement read once, and the near view, all flat ink, offers little further rising. Low frequency is what holds the axis.
Egyptian (Early Dynastic) · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The elevation is real and of one kind, a cold, fearful grandeur. The king at full height with the mace lifted over a kneeling man is terror held still at the instant before the blow, and its stillness is the height. The rows of headless dead are dreadful in their order. The wound necks of the serpopards have a strange, solemn beauty. But the object is about 64 cm high, the relief is shallow, and the register is emblematic rather than transporting: the height comes in two or three places and then flattens into procession and labelling. High in its kind and narrow in range, below the canvases that rise across a whole field, and the lowest of the eleven axes the Universal Minimum governs.
English embroiderers (probably Canterbury) · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Elevation is present and of one kind, momentum and grandeur of event rather than transport. It rises at Edward’s funeral procession to the new church at Westminster, the hand of God above the roof; at the comet, the men pointing, Harold on his throne told the news, ghostly ships in the border below; at the fleet under sail, a field of masts and horses’ heads; and above all in the battle, where horses somersault at the ravine, the shield wall stands against the charge and the borders fill with the dead. The length itself, walked, is a grandeur. What holds the axis lowest is register and frequency: the drawing is lively and often comic, the figures small and schematic, and for long stretches, the feasts, the journeys, the parleys, the work moves briskly without rising. It is vigorous far more often than it is sublime.
Richard Linklater · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
The register is level by design, and elevation is not its mode. When it rises, it rises from duration: the cut that turns a boy into an older boy carries a small vertigo the first several times, and at the end a face known for three hours and twelve years gives real transport. The summits are three. The dinner at Bill’s house is dread played in a bright kitchen; Olivia at the table on the day Mason leaves is the strongest scene in the film; the close at Big Bend, light on rock and two young people talking, is its one landscape held for beauty. Between them come cars, kitchens and back yards, played plain, and that low frequency is what holds the axis lowest.
Aldous Huxley · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
The lowest of the twelve. The register is satiric and cool, and most of the book stays there by design; the heights are few, and real. Linda’s death in the Park Lane Hospital for the Dying, with a party of Bokanovsky twins, brought there for their death-conditioning, crowding round the bed and eating chocolate éclairs while John grieves, has a grotesque terror the book earns. The whipping at Malpais and the Savage’s own flagellation at the lighthouse carry a cold dread. The last page is the summit: the hanging body turning slowly, the feet pointing north, east, south and back, a man with no direction left in the world. The crosscut of the third chapter reaches a different height, the vertigo of voices conditioning one another. What holds the axis lowest is frequency: these are islands in a book whose ordinary level is wit and exposition, and a work that rises four or five times stands below one that rises throughout.
James Ensor · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
The elevation is of one dark kind: the grotesque raised to a scale where it becomes dread. Before more than four metres of faces advancing outward the effect is a crush, and the colour, raw reds and yellows against chalky whites, turns the festival toward a fever. There is a second height in the halo, a small disc of light in the middle of the din, the one quiet thing in the field, and it gives the sublime of the overlooked. But the picture does not rise again and again. Much of its surface is comic or caustic rather than elevated; its terror is felt mainly as pressure in the front rank, and its beauty comes in passages of colour, not as a sustained transport. The lack of frequency holds this axis lowest.
Jacob Lawrence · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Elevation is real and comes in a few places rather than across the run. The lynching panel is the height: an empty landscape, a bare branch, a rope, one figure folded over on the ground, and nothing else, a terror made of absence. The handcuffed men, their backs to us and their wrists joined, are a second height of the same cold kind. The first and last panels lift by mass, the crowd as one body pressing one way. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is frequency and size: much of the sequence is held level by design, a register of report, flat colour, the same distance from every event, and a panel the size of a page keeps grandeur out. The restraint is right for the work, and costs the axis.
Francisco Goya · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Elevation is present, and of a strange kind. The first height is the dazzle: the queen’s gold and white gown, the king’s silver and the sash of the order of Charles III, jewels flashing across the whole width of the row, a brilliance of surface Goya never surpassed at this scale. The second is the uncanny: thirteen people facing out of a shallow room, most of them not quite looking at anything, the painter watching from the dark behind them. It is a cold fascination, not transport. It does not rise to grandeur or to dread; the terror Goya could paint is absent, and its premonition is supplied by the viewer’s knowledge of 1808. The height recurs across the costumes, and the range is one register, glitter over unease.
Edgar Degas · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Elevation of one cold, uncanny kind. The face lifted with the eyes almost shut gives a stillness close to trance or to defiance, a child withdrawn into herself while she stands for inspection, and it is the one place the figure rises; it rises again from each side the face is seen. The second height is the uncanny itself, real hair on wax skin, a frisson rather than transport, and the revulsion of the critics in 1881 records it as such. What holds the axis low is what the work refuses: grandeur, beauty in the received sense, scale. It is under life size, in practice clothes, with no terror, no awe and no second register. Strangeness and quiet at a high pitch, narrow in range.
Michael Haneke · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
The elevation is cold and comes as dread, rationed by design. The summit is Majid’s suicide: in his flat, before Georges, he cuts his own throat in a single unbroken static frame, and the shock is total because the film has trained the eye to expect nothing to happen in its long takes. A second height is the farm in 1961, the boy dragged to a car, struggling, seen from far off without music. The rooster’s beheading is a third, and the last shot, which lifts the film into a question, a quieter fourth. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is frequency: between these points the film is deliberately level, kitchens, offices, cars and rooms with books, and its heights are high at two places only.
Filippo Brunelleschi · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The elevation is real and of one kind: grace. Under the run of small domes, between the grey columns and the white wall, the order is calm and light, and the light of the square passes through the loggia unbroken. The effect recurs bay after bay, so frequency is high, and the cloisters repeat it at a smaller scale; the blue and white tondi add a tenderness the stone does not. Height is what holds the axis among the lowest of the twelve. Nothing here is grand or terrible, and nothing rises: the building sits low on its steps, and the upper storey is plain to the point of reticence. Against the Pantheon (9.3), whose one room carries the visitor up, this is a building of composure, and composure is not transport.
Miguel de Cervantes · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
A comic and ironic book, whose height is rare and real. The summit is the night with the witch Cañizares in Montilla: she tells Berganza he may be a witch’s son transformed, anoints herself and lies as dead while the dog drags her into the courtyard, and the prophecy of the dogs’ return to human form, when the proud are cast down and the humble raised by a mighty hand, is grotesque and grand together. Carrizales’s deathbed, the jealous man forgiving and blaming himself, has the dignity of a tragic end in a comic world. La gitanilla has warmth and lightness. Elsewhere the elevation is of wit, and the romances’ reunions please rather than rise. What holds the axis among the lowest of the twelve is frequency: the height comes twice.
Ilya Repin · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The elevation is real and of one kind: the gravity of endurance under a bleaching sky, the line of men advancing like a slow wave, the boy’s head rising out of the bowed file into the light. The width and the heat give it weight, and the group has the mass of a monument made of the people a monument would never show. But it rises in one place and holds one register. There is no transport, no terror, and little beauty in the sky or the river, which are flat and pale by design; the grandeur is moral more than aesthetic. Height is solid and frequency low, and the figure sits above a cabinet delight and well below a sky that burns in five places.
Robert Altman · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Elevation is not the film’s mode, and that holds the axis lowest with The Archetypal Deep. The register is level, ironic and observing. When it rises, the rise is real. The night in the hospital, with Jack Lemmon’s Paul Finnigan talking at length about a betrayal decades old to a son who cannot hear it for his own dying child, is the film’s highest dramatic sustain. Annie Ross’s songs in the club give the film a lament it does not otherwise speak. Zoe Trainer’s death, the cello and the car engine running in the closed garage, is dreadful and cold. Frequency is the charge: three hours hold four or five such moments, and the comic strands deliberately flatten what follows them.
Gerrit Rietveld · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Elevation here is clarity, lightness and delight. It comes at the corner window opened, the room standing in the air with nothing at the corner; on the upper floor with every partition drawn back, light from the rooflight falling down the stair into an open room of coloured floor and white planes; and from the street, planes and lines in balance at the end of a brick row. Frequency is good for so small a house: the upper floor is a sequence of such moments as it is opened and closed. Height is held low. There is no vastness, no dread and no grandeur; the register is one, a lucid serenity, and much of the delight is that of a well-made object, a cabinet scaled up.
Louis Sullivan and Dankmar Adler · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Height is moderate and frequency is low. The building is ten storeys, a small block in today’s downtown, and it does not overwhelm. Its elevation comes in two places. From across the street the unbroken piers carry the eye upward at a speed out of proportion to the height, and the slab cornice stops it hard against the sky: a real effect of lift and arrest, made with modest means. Close up, the terra cotta of frieze and spandrels, foliage turning into geometry and back, gives an intricate beauty that recurs on every floor and along both fronts. Inside there is nothing to set beside it: the interior is a state office building, and was an office building before. The register is dignity and grace, and the axis stands well below the building’s fame.
Henry Moore · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Elevation of one kind: calm grandeur, the monumental reached at a size smaller than a person lying down. It comes when the figure is seen against open ground, as it was made to be, and the knees and breasts rise like the Downs behind it, so that one block holds a landscape; it comes again through the void, where light and the far view pass through the body. There is repose, gravity and a sense of great age. What holds it is kind and frequency: no terror, no transport, little of the overwhelming, a steady quiet lift rather than repeated summits; and indoors, away from the horizon it was carved to face, the scale reads smaller. Serene stature, not the sublime in its stronger senses.
Sumerian, under Ur-Nammu and Shulgi · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Elevation is real and of one kind: grandeur of mass on a flat plain. It comes on the approach across level ground, where the battered walls rise as the only height for miles; at the foot of the stairs, where three flights draw the eye inward and up to one point; and in the solid body itself, earth made into a mountain. The register is weight and permanence, never transport. What holds it is frequency and loss: no interior and so no second experience, one approach, one face, one ascent; a restored lower facade crisp and new beside the eroded stump above, which takes from the first sight; and the summit that gave the climb its end, gone. As it stands the building rises once, and well.
Vincent van Gogh · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The elevation is real and of one register, a dark solemnity. Its places are few and exact: the lamp, a small yellow flame in a room of mud colour, with the whole picture gathered under it; the steam rising from the dish into the light; the girl’s silhouette, a figure made entirely of shadow at the centre of a meal; and the hands, knuckled and enlarged, offered and lifted, given a gravity the faces do not quite have. There is something of a rite in the stillness of the table. What limits it: one instant, one temperature, a narrow room, and passages where the drawing breaks the spell. The colour is withheld by design, and with it the height colour would give.
Raymond Chandler · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
The elevation is melancholy, and more mood than height. The opening encounter reaches it, and so do the dawn drive to Tijuana, the letter with the bill and its request for a gimlet at Victor’s, and the last scene with the man who calls himself Maioranos, whose closing refusal is the summit, and is earned: “So long, amigo. I won’t say goodbye.” Wade’s death and Eileen’s confession are handled for dread and are tense rather than high. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve, level with The Inevitable, is frequency: between these few scenes the register is the wisecrack and the weary simile, which keep the book at the level of wit and sadness rather than transport. The height, when it comes, is moderate and sure.
Egyptian (Old Kingdom) · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The elevation is real, of one kind, and gathered in one place: the eyes. Inlaid so that they catch the light and seem to follow the viewer, they make a figure four and a half thousand years old appear to be looking now. That is a genuine height, an uncanny presence across time. The rest of the figure rises less. The modelling of the hands and the soft torso gives quiet admiration, not transport; there is no grandeur at half life size, no terror, no beauty in the ideal sense the royal statues seek. One summit, sustained by the stillness of the whole figure rather than repeated. Set beside the Bust of Nefertiti at 8.3, whose height is beauty, the Scribe’s is presence alone, and it recurs less.
James McNeill Whistler · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Elevation in one register: grave, still, restrained, the dignity of a black mass near life size against grey. Its places are the profile, head and white cap held against the wall with the eye turned to the edge; the long horizontal of the seated body, which reads as monument more than as person; and the quiet of the whole, which many meet as solemnity. What limits it is that the note is struck once and held: one temperature, no transport, no terror, no rise. The grey is chosen to subdue, and it does. Beside The Starry Night at 9.2 or Las Meninas at 8.7 it does not reach; beside Broadway Boogie Woogie at 8.0 it is quieter and a little lower.
Billy Wilder · Film
8.1 · Tier IV
The register is comedy, dry and bright, and elevation is not its usual mode; when the film rises, it rises in desolation more than grandeur. The opening descent onto the office floor, a sea of desks under fluorescent light, has a cold grandeur of its own. Christmas Eve is the summit: Baxter drinking alone in a bar while Fran, in his bed, takes the pills, and then his discovery of her, the comedy dropping away at once. The night with the doctor and the coffee forced into her are dread played straight. The New Year’s run through the streets and the cork’s report on the stairs give the release. Held at its figure by frequency: long stretches are office farce, elegant and level, and the theme’s strings sometimes supply a feeling the image has not reached.
Piet Mondrian · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
There is elevation, of one cold register, and it is the red. Pure, flat and very large for the field, it presses forward against the white with a force out of all proportion to its means. Against it the blue and the yellow are sparks at the margins, and the black bands give the whole a tension like a held breath. The sublime of the canvas is the sublime of clarity: the feeling that nothing could be otherwise. What holds the axis is height and frequency together. There is one summit, the red, in a small canvas that is seen at once; there is no terror, no grandeur of scale and no second rise.
Ingmar Bergman · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
The register is close, conversational and often dry, and elevation is not its common mode. When it comes it is dreadful or tender, and it comes in the faces: Johan in bed telling Marianne that he has fallen in love and is leaving in the morning, and her composure, which holds through practical arrangements and then fails; the office at night, desire turned to blows on the floor between the desks, and the signature; the last episode’s waking from a nightmare in a dark cottage, Johan holding Marianne, the two speaking more plainly than at any point in their marriage. Nykvist’s close-up makes these heights intimate rather than grand. Frequency is what holds the axis here: a few heights across five hours, much of the first, second and fourth episodes level by design, and the images of Fårö that frame the episodes calm rather than exalted.
Etruscan · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The elevation is real and of one kind: warmth, a steady radiance in two faces that smile at nothing we can see. The height comes in the faces, almond eyes and lifted lips in the archaic manner, alive and remote at once, and in the hands raised above the couch, which hold an instant open for two and a half thousand years. Across a gallery the pair has a calm grandeur: two persons who are dead, lying at their ease as if at a feast. The height does not recur across the object; it is concentrated in two heads and the raised hands, and the lower half gives none. There is no terror and almost no awe; death is present only as the occasion. Elevation by intimacy and serenity, high in its kind and narrow in range: this is the lowest axis but one.
Elena Ferrante · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
The register is kept low by design, and the book rises seldom. It rises in three places. The descent to the cellar and the climb to the ogre’s door hold a child’s terror at its full size. On New Year’s Eve of 1958, during the fireworks war with the Solaras, Lila first feels the outlines of things and persons dissolve, and the book opens for a moment on a fear without a floor. And the day the girls skip school to see the sea and turn back under rain carries the friendship in one failed journey. Elsewhere elevation is refused in favour of propulsion. The refusal is principled, but the axis scores height reached, not height declined, and it is the lowest of the twelve.
Eileen Gray and Jean Badovici · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Elevation here is calm, lucid and intimate. It comes in the main room opening on its terrace to the whole bay; in the white decks and rails above the rocks, so that the house seems moored; in the light of the lantern over the stair; and in the line of the sea drawn by the horizontal windows. Frequency is good, since the house is built as a sequence of framed outlooks. The height is what holds the axis at 7.6. A small house of modest rooms has no grandeur, little terror and one register, and the sea does much of the work; the framing is credited, the bay is the site’s. The murals, loud and figurative, raise no elevation of the house’s own.
Anonymous · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
There is a height and it is of one kind: monumentality in a closed hand. Photographed or seen in its case, the figure reads as massive; the swelling volumes, the bowed head and the blind patterned skull give it a gravity out of all proportion to eleven centimetres, and the faceless head lends it something of awe, a presence that does not look back. Much of what viewers feel before it, the dizzying age, the sense of the first images of humanity, is the span of time and not the carving, and that is not credited here. The work rises once, as a whole, rather than repeatedly through its parts. There is no terror in it and no grandeur of extent. Beauty is present as the satisfaction of the volumes: one sustained height, narrow in range.
Renzo Piano · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Elevation is quiet and frequent. It comes in the galleries, where the light, filtered through the leaves, lies even and alive on walls and floor and moves with the weather; in the courts, where a square of planting and sky opens inside the building; and on the veranda, where the leaves throw a shade like that of a grove over the walk. The register is serenity, never grandeur or dread: a low building of one height, with no climax, no great room and no vista. The chosen restraint is the building’s virtue and the ceiling of this axis together. Height is held low; frequency is good; and what is elevated is often the art the building lights, which is credited only where the light is the building’s.
Hans Holbein the Younger · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Elevation of one kind, gravity: a presence so complete that the panel seems less a picture than a person kept. The height is met in the face, modelled with a steadiness that holds attention without any gesture, and in the sleeves, whose red seems to give off the warmth of the cloth itself; it recurs only in the detail, the links of the collar, the fur, the light on the knuckles. There is no transport, no terror and no grandeur of scale: the panel is about seventy-four centimetres high and asks for nearness, not awe. The response it earns is respect and a kind of hush, sustained across the whole field rather than climbing to a summit. High in the portrait’s kind, and narrow in range.
Sex Pistols · Music
7.9 · Tier III
Elevation of one kind, the dreadful and the exhilarating, on four tracks. Holidays in the Sun drives toward the Berlin wall, the nearest the record comes to grandeur. God Save the Queen has a terrible exultation, the anthem’s name chanted back as a curse and the refusal repeated into a chorus. Anarchy in the U.K. takes its height from the opening declaration and the long guitar break. Bodies reaches horror. The rest holds one level of force, loud, mid-tempo and unvaried, and force is not height: eight of twelve tracks are energy without elevation, and there is no beauty on the record by design. A record that refuses transport is not charged much for lacking it, but the axis records what is there.
Joseph Maria Olbrich · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Elevation comes chiefly in one place: the gold dome above the white block, seen down the Friedrichstraße or across the Karlsplatz, its leaves taking light and moving in the wind against a mass that admits none. It is a moment of real beauty, high and joyful, sacred in its borrowing. Its frequency is low. The entrance block is small; the sides and back fall to plain render; the hall is bright and calm rather than elevating, by intent, since it serves the art hung in it. There is no vastness, dread or grandeur, and the register is festal. A single summit moment in an otherwise modest building scores below a building that rises again and again.
Taddeo Gaddi or Neri di Fioravanti (attributed) · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Elevation is real, and it comes in a few kinds. From the next bridge downstream at evening, the three low arches carrying their irregular cargo of shops and the long regular band of the corridor above make one of the most loved urban images in Europe. At the middle the street suddenly opens to the river and the hills, a release after the close lane of shops. Inside the corridor, the passage over the water with the city framed through small windows is strange and memorable. What holds the axis at 7.6 is register: charm and the picturesque, with a thread of the sinister in the hidden way, never grand and never terrible. The arches are modest in span against a great river bridge, and the roadway between the shuttered fronts is narrow and commercial. Height is moderate; frequency is fair for anyone on the river front.
Chimú builders · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Real elevation, and uneven; this is the lowest of the twelve. It comes at the walls. A corridor between battered mud walls about nine metres high, with only the sky above and no view out, is grand and oppressive at once, and the scale of the whole, compound after compound across the plain toward the sea, is a desert grandeur. The frieze courts at Tschudi, walls covered floor to top in the net lattice with fish and birds running through it, rise again in another register, rhythm and plenitude. What holds the axis here is frequency. Much of the city as it stands is slumped walls and eroded mounds; the elevation that ruin itself gives, a dead capital of mud by the Pacific, is a mood that cannot carry the axis on its own; and the frieze courts a visitor sees are in large part reconstructed. One register, recurring in a few places.
Paula Rego · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
The elevation is cold and nocturnal, and it is real. The moon makes the strand a stage; the long shadows give the dancers the weight of statues; the pale building on the rise has the stillness of a dream. The characteristic note is solemnity at a festive subject, a dance that does not look like joy, and that strangeness rises across the whole width rather than at one point. What holds the axis back is the register itself: the matt acrylic and the deliberate stiffness of the figures keep it earthbound, nearer the uncanny than transport, and there is no terror or grandeur to lift it further. It rises steadily and modestly, not repeatedly to a height.
Gerhard Richter · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
The register is dread and mourning, not transport. The means are scale, four canvases each 2.6 metres high, taller than anyone who stands before them, and a dark range of black and grey, with red that reads as blood and green that reads as the birch wood. The knowledge of what lies under the paint gives these surfaces a weight none of Richter’s other abstractions carries, and the height recurs across four canvases rather than resting on one. But it is one pitch held four times, and it is in large part induced by the title: without it the surfaces would read as strong late abstractions, and some find in them a beauty that sits uneasily with the subject, a cost the work courts and does not wholly master.
Louis Sullivan · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Elevation is real and comes mostly at close range. The cast iron at the corner entrance, leaf, tendril and geometry in deep relief, is as intense as ornament on an American commercial building has been; to stand under it is to stand in a thicket of metal growth. From a distance the white grid has a serene, luminous calm, and the corner cylinder rises as one gesture. But there is no vastness and no interior volume of the first order; the upper storeys repeat without a climax; and the loss of the cornice took away the top’s shadow and its ending. Frequency is moderate: the base along the street, the corner, the calm of the grid. The height is held well below the great works of the desk.
Rem Koolhaas and Joshua Prince-Ramus (OMA/LMN) · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
There is real elevation, more often unsettling than serene. Arriving from Fifth Avenue into the Living Room under the canted glass, with the net running overhead and the platforms hanging above, is a strong civic moment. The Reading Room at the top, under sloping glass with the city and the water beyond, is calm and high. At the atrium edges, looking down through several floors across the slanted skin, there is vertigo; the red corridors of level 4 have a deliberate strangeness, interior and bodily. Against this, much of the building is workmanlike, the spiral reads as a long ramp of shelving rather than a room, and the finishes are raw by intention. The building rises several times; it does not sustain transport.
Jeff Nichols · Film
7.9 · Tier III
The register is dread, and it rises often. The opening, Curtis in his driveway under a thick brown rain, is a quiet terror. The birds massing over a field in shapes no flock makes, the furniture rising in the living room, the figures in the storm reaching into the car for Hannah: each is a sustained height, and David Wingo’s score lets them swell slowly rather than shock. The supper at the Lions Club is a summit of another kind, a man’s terror made public. The opening of the shelter door is the film’s warmest elevation, the beach its last. Held where it is because the dreams share one tonal key, and effects made on a small budget sometimes lower a moment the framing raised.
Andrew Wyeth · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
The elevation is of one kind: an uncanny stillness, the sense of a great distance made out of a small one. It comes at first sight, the figure low in a vast tilted field with the house far above, and it recurs more quietly in the grass, which the eye climbs as she must. The register is dry and cool, a held breath rather than transport. What holds the axis is height and frequency together: there is no second summit, no grandeur of scale and no terror, and the sky, a thin pale band, gives nothing. The panel’s power lies in tension more than in elevation, and once the configuration is grasped it does not rise again at each return.
Jenny Saville · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
The elevation is of the dreadful and the overwhelming, not of the beautiful. Before a body more than two metres high, seen from beneath, the viewer receives a real shock of scale: the knees come forward like architecture, the flesh has the weight of geology, and the small head looks down from far off. That is a genuine physical grandeur, and it is the painting’s whole register. It does not vary or recur in other keys. There is one summit, held across the canvas, and much of it is the shock of first sight, the height that wears most on return; the scored text cools the surface rather than raising it. It stands above Hirst’s skull and Gursky’s river, which rise more by idea than by matter, and below works that rise repeatedly.
Jean-Honoré Fragonard · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
The elevation is real and of one kind: delight, lightness, the lift of the swing itself. The woman at the top of her arc in a burst of pink against the dark trees and the pale sky is a moment of transport, a figure caught where gravity stops for an instant; the slipper hangs in the air above the lover. The light falling on her through the bower is the second height, the garden made a theatre whose one spot is on her. The height recurs only by extension: the foliage glows and churns, the roses foam around the lover. There is no grandeur, no terror and nothing of awe. It is beauty and transport at cabinet scale, high in its kind and narrow in range.
Ai Weiwei · Visual art
7.7 · Tier III
The elevation is of the mathematical kind: a quantity past counting, laid flat under the height of the Turbine Hall, a grey plain that reads at once as land, as ash and as crowd. The hall is used, not merely filled: earlier commissions there rose into the volume, and this one lay down in it, so the sublime is of extent rather than of height. A second summit is the reversal of scale, from the field to one seed in the hand, a small thing finely made among a hundred million like it. What holds the axis is range and frequency: one register, grey and quiet, met once from the bridge or the edge; and after the second day the bodily encounter that would have renewed it, walking on the field and sinking into it, was withdrawn.
P. G. Wodehouse · Literature
7.7 · Tier III
The axis is indifferent to the kind of elevation, and comic transport counts. The prize-giving at Market Snodsbury, at which a drunk and terrified Gussie addresses the assembled school, accuses a boy of cheating at the scripture-knowledge prize and abuses the headmaster’s guests, is among the summits of comic writing in English, and it rises steadily over several pages rather than in a single stroke. The sentences rise often and at small scale: the simile, the transferred epithet, the mangled tag, each timed to a beat. What holds the axis in the middle sevens is the register’s ceiling. There is no beauty that is not also a joke, no terror and no grandeur; the book never reaches the kind of height that changes a reader’s footing, and does not try to. The heights are frequent, real, and of one altitude.
The Stooges · Music
7.7 · Tier III
Elevation here is low and dreadful, and it is real. I Wanna Be Your Dog is the summit: the guitar’s descending riff, the drums driving under it, a single piano note struck through the song without relief, and a voice that does not plead but declares. No Fun reaches a grinding transport in its long final stretch, the guitar breaking loose over a groove that will not change. We Will Fall rises another way, a funeral chant over a viola that becomes, in some of its minutes, hypnotic and grave. The wah of 1969 and Ann’s turn from croon to noise give two further lifts. Against that, the three lesser songs are energetic without height, and the drone’s length dissipates as much as it builds.
Don DeLillo · Literature
7.7 · Tier III
The height is in a few set pieces, and they are strong. The funeral of Brutha Fez, the Sufi rapper, moving through the stalled traffic with its mourners and whirling dancers, is the book’s one moment of shared grief. The riot of the protesters, the limousine defaced, ends in a man setting himself on fire, the one act in the day the market cannot absorb. The film shoot, hundreds of naked bodies lying in the street and Eric lying among them, is an image of strange calm; the last scene, Eric seeing his own death in the crystal of his watch before it comes, is cold and dreadful. Between them the register is the dry talk of the car. Height recurs, and the book’s abstraction keeps it at a distance.
Alejandro González Iñárritu · Film
7.7 · Tier III
Elevation comes often and is almost always ironised. The flight over Manhattan, Riggan stepping off a ledge and soaring above the avenues while explosions and a mechanical bird stage the blockbuster he refused, is a real lift, undercut at once by a taxi driver chasing an unpaid fare. The walk through Times Square turns humiliation into a terrible grandeur, a man in his underwear parting a crowd of phones. The opening-night shot onstage, the pistol real, the audience on its feet, is the one moment of dread unqualified. The drums give rise and fall throughout, and the last shot, a daughter at a window looking down, then up, is a small transport. Height reached many times and seldom held, because the film distrusts its own exaltation.
Lal Chand Ustad · Architecture
7.6 · Tier III
Height is moderate and frequency real, of one kind. From the street the front rises in tiers of small bays to its crest, and in the early sun the pink stone and the depth of the lattices give it a lightness, a building that seems made of openings: wonder at intricacy more than grandeur. Within, the elevation is quieter and more particular: the street below broken into points of light through the jali, the breeze moving through the bays, the city laid out from the upper storeys toward the palace and the hills. The rooms themselves are small and plain, and the rear is ordinary. There is no grandeur of space and no dread. The building delights again and again, outside and in, and does not overwhelm; it stands below the towers and halls that lift by mass and space.
Stuart Rosenberg · Film
7.6 · Tier III
The elevation is of several kinds and comes at intervals. The tarring of the road, the gang driven by Luke into a frenzy of work until they finish early and sit idle in the sun, is a lift of pure exhilaration, cut to Lalo Schifrin’s music. Luke on the table after the eggs, arms spread and belly swollen, is grotesque and solemn at once. Luke alone on his bunk with the banjo, singing “Plastic Jesus” after the telegram, is the warmest summit, grief held under a joke; the church at night, a prayer that meets silence and then car lights in the window, is the coldest. Held where it is by long stretches of genre texture between the summits, and by a last summit underlined rather than earned in silence.
Federico Fellini · Film
7.6 · Tier III
The elevation is real, and of one kind: melancholy rising out of comedy. The storm scatters the beauty contest and the wind tears the decorations as the season ends. The friends stand on the beach in winter before an empty sea. After the carnival ball, where Alberto danced in a dress with a huge papier-mâché head, the costume turns grotesque in the dawn and he weeps. On the pier at night wind and darkness turn Leopoldo’s hope into fear. The departure is the summit: the train moving off, Guido balancing on the rail, the camera passing through the rooms of the sleepers. Rota’s score lifts each of these. But they come mostly at the ends of sequences, and the long stretches between are comedy of manners, broad and level, so the height is occasional and the figure stays with the frequency.
Stephen King · Literature
7.6 · Tier III
Elevation here is dread, and it comes often. The woman in the bath in Room 217, rising toward the boy; the hedge animals that move only when unwatched, and Danny’s flight from them across the snow; the fire hose in the corridor; the elevator running at night with confetti in it; the ballroom filling with the dead of the hotel’s history and the cry to unmask; Jack’s hunt for his son through the hotel with a roque mallet. These are strongly built, and their frequency is high. Their height is lower than their frequency: the effects are of fright more than of awe, and the climaxes are pushed along by explanation and italics rather than left to stand. One moment reaches terrible grandeur. Near the end the father comes back to himself for a moment and tells his son to run, and for that page the book rises above its machinery.
Danny Boyle · Film
7.5 · Tier III
The film rises often, by velocity and spectacle more than by depth. The opening chase of children across the slum and an airfield, cut to Rahman’s percussion, is kinetic elevation. The child Jamal’s plunge into a latrine pit to reach Amitabh Bachchan’s autograph is grotesque comedy carried to a kind of glory. The riot, seen at a child’s height, with a small boy dressed as Rama standing still in it, is the one image of terror that stays. Maman’s spoon over Arvind’s eyes is dread held off screen. Salim’s death in a bath of banknotes, as the last question is put, comes closest to tragic grandeur. Against these the romantic summit, the reunion at the station, is sentiment, and the closing dance is joy outside the story. The height is frequent and seldom deep.
Jeff Nichols · Film
7.5 · Tier III
The film rises several times, and its peaks are earned by the quiet around them. The petrol station, where the night sky rains fragments of a satellite, is terror made beautiful and sudden. The sunrise in the field, where the boy’s eyes pour out a light the men can barely stand, is the film’s best passage of transport, held in Shannon’s and Edgerton’s faces. The final apparition, a city of luminous structures standing over the coastal land, is grand in scale. The height is real and recurs. What holds the axis is the last of them: shown in full and in digital effects, what had been held in faces and light becomes spectacle, and the summit is slightly spent.
André Waterkeyn; André and Jean Polak · Architecture
7.5 · Tier III
Height and frequency both count. From outside the elevation is real and recurrent: the cluster of shining spheres held on a corner over the plateau, apparently balanced on one point, reads at a distance as an impossibility made solid, and the polished steel since 2006 catches sky and sun, so that the figure changes through the day. Inside it rises in two places: the escalators climbing through narrow inclined tubes, a strange and vertiginous passage, and the top sphere’s view over Brussels. Elsewhere the spheres hold exhibition rooms, and the wonder is of the toy and the fair as much as of the sublime: it delights and astonishes more than it awes. Height achieved outside, much of it lost within.
Steve McCurry · Visual art
7.4 · Tier III
The elevation is real and of one kind: the arrest of the gaze, met at once and at any size. The pale eyes against the dark skin and the red cloth carry an intensity that holds the viewer as few portraits do, and it does not fade in reproduction, which is part of why the image reproduced so well. It has a cold edge: the look does not ask for pity but measures, and there is something close to dread in being met so directly by a child who has seen what the picture implies. Against the axis, height and frequency: one effect, struck once and sustained, with no second register and no part of the frame that rises apart from the eyes. And part of the force is the striking colouring of the sitter, beauty she brought rather than height the work achieved.
William Friedkin · Film
7.4 · Tier III
Elevation here is dread, frequent in the second half and scarce in the first. The summits: Merrin’s arrival at night, a figure in a hat under the street lamp in fog with the bedroom window lit above; the arteriogram, terror by clinical procedure; Karras’s dream of his mother on the subway stairs, a white face cut in for frames; the crucifix scene; the exorcism, breath showing in the cold room, the bed rising, two priests reciting while the voice mocks. What holds the axis down: the first hour builds by noise in the attic and a cold room and rises little, and some of the effects, the head turned on a dummy and the green vomit, now read as effects.
The National · Music
7.4 · Tier III
Elevation comes in the band’s register: warm, grave, slow-gathering, never ecstatic. Pink Rabbits is the height, a piano-led ballad in a sway that lifts on its last choruses into a desolate grandeur. I Need My Girl rises by restraint, a repeated guitar figure under a voice that never raises itself. Sea of Love holds the record’s one true eruption, the voice breaking upward over a hammering drum in its last minute. This Is the Last Time and Humiliation each build a long swell, the second on a motorik pulse that holds and holds. Five or six heights in thirteen tracks is good frequency. What holds the figure is altitude: the heights are tender or bruised more than overwhelming, and none reaches the terror or transport of Warszawa on Low.
Luca Guadagnino · Film
7.3 · Tier III
Elevation here is kinetic and erotic, not grand, and the axis is indifferent to kind. The summit is the final tiebreak: the cutting accelerates, the camera takes the ball’s flight and looks up through a transparent court from beneath the players, the score drives, and the rally ends with the two men colliding in the air at the net and Tashi’s shout. That is a real height, the release of the whole film’s pressure in one held moment. Lesser rises are frequent, the hotel room in close shots with the score pulsing and the first cut from the frame into the past among them. The axis stays in the seventies because the height is one register, propulsion, repeated, and the bravura of the last minutes thrills more than it transports.
Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza · Film
7.3 · Tier III
The elevation is of terror, and it comes more than once. The blast at the doorway, heard and felt before it is understood, and the long passage of white noise and smoke in which the wounded are found, is the summit, and it is very high. The fighter jets’ low passes over the street, a show of force with no bombs, rise to a cold grandeur: the whole apparatus of the war reduced to a gesture that frightens and achieves little. The wounded men’s screaming, held without cut, reaches a dreadful pitch that few films sustain. The frequency is good for a short film. What holds the figure is a single register: no counter elevation of tenderness or beauty against which the terror is measured, and the camaraderie of the opening is kept deliberately flat.
Tom Wright (Atkins) · Architecture
7.3 · Tier III
Height and frequency both count. Outside, the elevation is real and recurrent: the white sail standing alone in the sea, seen down the length of the beach in the morning, against the water at sunset and lit at night, is one of the strong single images of late twentieth-century building, and it rises each time it is seen because the sea keeps it apart. Within, the atrium rises once, a void of about 180 metres banded in gold and colour, seen from the lobby, the one interior where the scale of the tower is felt. Then the register drops. The suites, the gilded columns, the fountains and the aquarium belong to delight and display, opulence rather than grandeur; the interiors reach for awe through quantity of gold and arrive at spectacle. The height is achieved from the shore and much of it spent within.
Daniel Defoe · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The book rises rarely, but it rises. The footprint is one of the summits of terror in the novel: “the print of a man’s naked foot on the shore”, one print, alone, and Crusoe runs to his fortress and does not sleep. Beside it stand the beach after the cannibals’ feast, with its skulls and bones; the man descending in flame in the fever dream; the earthquake and the hurricane; the first sight of the wreck after a night in a tree; the green barley springing by the wall, a miracle until he remembers the bag he shook out there. What holds the axis at the line of the Universal Minimum is frequency: the plain style keeps most of the book level, and the long stretches of making and reckoning absorb without elevating, as they are meant to.
August Sander · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The manner is sober and level by intent: the sitter faces the lens, the light is plain daylight, nothing is heightened. Elevation is therefore rare and of one kind, a grave, cold dignity met in particular images. The Young Farmers, turning on a country road with the field behind them, hold a gathered stillness that has lasted a century; the Bricklayer has the monumentality of a figure of labour from an old frieze; the Blind Children, the persecuted and a dead man among the last people reach a quiet dread. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is frequency: across hundreds of pictures most are portraits of decent competence, whose height is interest rather than transport, and the method itself restrains height.
Bret Easton Ellis · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
Elevation is what the book is built to refuse, and the refusal is its law and its limit. A voice that describes a murder in the cadence of a complaint about dry cleaning allows no height, and it is meant not to. What rises does so as horror, in a few places and at real height: the chase through Manhattan, a spree of killing by chance; the late chapters in his apartment, where the killings pass beyond any human measure and the flat inventory of what is done becomes a terror the reader cannot leave; and the last scene, the bar and the sign. Frequency is low by design, and the long middle of dinners and clothes stays at ground level. What holds the axis there is the design itself: a flatness that caps the height it would have to reach.
Richard Linklater · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The register is low and level by intention, and its elevations are lyrical, not grand. The opening, a car gliding into the school car park under “Sweet Emotion”, lifts an ordinary afternoon into an anthem. The beer bust under the moon tower’s light in an empty field is a gathering out of time; the seniors lying on the fifty-yard line at dawn are the quiet summit; and the close gives two more, the road opening ahead under “Slow Ride” and Mitch on his bed with headphones as the morning comes, held still. The paddling and the gun carry a real threat, briefly. What holds the axis: the heights are few, gentle and carried mostly by songs, and the long middle is played flat on purpose.
Geoffrey Chaucer · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
Elevation is reached in two places and touched in a third. The cosmic vision of the dream the narrator reads, the little earth seen from the heavens and the music of the spheres, carries real grandeur, though it is given in summary. Nature on her hill, God’s deputy over generation in Alain de Lille’s figure, is the poem’s one sustained height. The roundel lifts in a lighter register: “Now welcome, somer, with thy sonne softe”
“now welcome, summer, with your gentle sun”. Most of the poem is comedy and debate, deliberately unexalted, and the comedy is its excellence, credited elsewhere; but the axis counts frequency as well as height, and a short comic poem with two or three high moments stands in the middle of the band.
Ralph Ellison · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Criticism rises seldom, and this book rises more often than most. The height is the definition of the blues in “Richard Wright’s Blues”: an impulse to keep the painful details of a brutal experience alive in the aching consciousness, “to finger its jagged grain”, and to transcend it, by a “near-tragic, near-comic lyricism”. “Remembering Jimmy” lifts on the memory of Jimmy Rushing’s voice carrying over the Oklahoma City night; “As the Spirit Moves Mahalia” reaches toward the sacred through Mahalia Jackson; “Living with Music” has the comic grace of a writer at war with the singer upstairs. But the heights are passages within argument, and long stretches, the interviews, the review of Myrdal, the essay on Stephen Crane, are discursive and level. The height is real; its frequency is low, as the form allows.
Damien Hirst · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The elevation is dread, and it is real: a rotting head in clean glass, a cloud of flies, the blue light of the killer and the crack of each death on its grid. The response is closer to awe than to shock, and it recurs, since every death is another strike for as long as the case runs, so the height is not one summit but a continuous low thunder. What holds the axis among the lowest of the twelve is the kind of response: much of it is disgust, smell and fascination, the abject rather than the sublime, and the dread is singular, one note struck again and again, with no beauty and no transport beside it. A cold sublime of attrition, often reached, never high.
Honoré Daumier · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The elevation is of one kind, and it is real: gravity. The old woman, built up from broad masses like a modelled head, sits with a stillness that turns a tired passenger into something monumental; light from the side windows falls on her and on the mother’s bent head, and the dim crowd behind gives that light its weight. It is a quiet height, a solemnity rather than a transport, and it recurs only in the three in front; the crowd is the condition, not a second summit. There is no terror, no grandeur of scale and no lift of colour, which is brown and earth throughout. The axis asks for height and frequency, and the canvas holds one sustained note at a middle height.
Judy Chicago · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
With The Inevitable, the lowest axis, and what holds it there is a difference of scale. There is a real elevation, architectural and ceremonial: the darkened room, the long equal sides lit low, the gold of the names catching the light on the white floor, the goblets in a row, a feast laid for guests who will not come. It works on entry and again at each corner, where the turn of the table shows a whole wing in perspective. The plates hold it less well. Up close, where the work asks to be read place by place, the china painting is often glossy and sweet, the iridescent butterflies of the middle wing are decorative rather than grand, and the relief plates of the last wing are more assertive than elevating. The work rises at the scale of the room and falls back at the scale of the place, and it asks to be read at both.
Built for Ashikaga Yoshimasa · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
The elevation is real and quiet: the dark pavilion over its pond under the hill, the upper room’s cusped windows in evening light, the stillness of a small room facing a garden. It rises in its setting and in particular light, in the modest key it chose. But the buildings themselves rarely reach transport. They have none of the grandeur, terror or luminosity the axis rewards at its upper marks, as the glass of Sainte-Chapelle (8.8) has. Much of what visitors feel here as sublime belongs to the garden, the raked sand and its cone and the hill, which are setting and not scored, and the sand is later. On the buildings alone the figure stays where it is.
Norman Rockwell · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The elevation is moral and of one kind: the dignity of a small upright figure walking in step with grown men, her white dress the brightest thing on the canvas, against a wall that has been defiled. The stride is held at mid-step, so that she is always going on. A second height is the shock of the wall, the slur written large and the red of the tomato running, a small terror set behind a child. The response is a held breath and a tightening, not transport, and it does not recur: once the eye has gone from the girl to the wall and back, the image has given what it gives. The ground is flat and the light even, with no grandeur of light or space.
Canaletto · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The elevation is of the quiet kind. The long cool shadow across the yard, the sudden sunlit band of the far bank and the campanile standing clear into a high sky make one passage from dark to light across the water, and that passage gives the canvas a real lift, a held breath. It recurs smaller across the surface, in the light on the stone blocks and on the house fronts. The scale of sky over the low horizon gives spaciousness. It is beauty, not grandeur or terror, and it is steady rather than climactic: nothing in the canvas overwhelms, and the delight is in recognition and clarity more than in being raised out of oneself. Moderate height, good frequency, level with The Swing at 7.6 within a tenth.
Johannes Vermeer · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The elevation is real and of one kind, a quiet and cool beauty. Light falling across the whitewashed lower walls, the warm red of old brick against a grey and white sky, and four figures absorbed in small things together make a moment of lucid calm, and it recurs across the surface: in the textures of the brick, in the dark of the passages, in the clouds. What holds the axis is range. There is no grandeur, no terror and no height of feeling beyond serenity; the picture deliberately refuses drama. Its beauty is of the plain and close at hand, high in its kind and narrow, below the sky and water of the View of Delft and below the radiance of the great interiors.
Jasper Johns · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
The elevation is real and of one kind: chromatic delight. The field is alive to every edge in hot reds, oranges and yellows broken by blue and white, so dense that at first sight it reads as a single burst. The delight recurs at a lower pitch as the eye moves from name to patch and finds the next contradiction, and from the near view of the strokes to the far view of the whole. What holds the axis is that the work disarms its own height. The colour lifts and the words bring it back to a puzzle; the viewer is set to checking rather than given over, and the irony keeps the brightness at arm’s length. There is no grandeur, no terror and no transport by scale, and the brightness is sustained across the field rather than rising to summits.
Bridget Riley · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Elevation is real, of one kind, and physical: a lurch, a sense of the surface giving way along the fold, a mild vertigo close to the dreadful side of the sublime in miniature. It is sustained rather than single, since the effect does not exhaust at first sight and returns each time the eye crosses the crease. But its height is limited by its kind and its scale. The falling away is felt as an optical event before a body, not as a space the body enters. There is no grandeur and no transport, and the register is cool, almost clinical. It rises to one height and stays there: honest and constant, and lower than a field of colour that holds a viewer in a room.
Muqi · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
The elevation is real, of one register, and quiet: a stillness that becomes, for some who look, a kind of awe at the ordinary. It comes at first sight in the darkest fruit, which holds the eye with an unexpected gravity for a fruit; it comes in the fruit in outline, nearly not there, where the paper is made to read as a body; and it comes in the six together against the empty sheet, which take on the weight of things set before an altar. But it is one height at one scale, sustained across one small field rather than rising repeatedly. There is no grandeur, no terror and no transport by scale. High in its kind and narrow in range.
Tang, under Emperor Gaozong · Architecture
7.7 · Tier III
The elevation is of mass and height: a steep, plain pyramid of brick storeys rising over a flat city, seen from far off, its steady narrowing giving it gravity rather than lightness. From the top storey the city opens in four directions through the arched doors, and that view, which Du Fu’s poem of 752 turns into vertigo and a vision of the empire’s unease, is the one point of transport the building gives. Near at hand the Ming casing is flat and the detail thin, and the interior is a stair between floors. The building rises once, strongly, and is otherwise grave rather than elevating: the summit moment stands high, and it comes once.
Alfred Hitchcock · Film
7.6 · Tier III
The register is domestic, warm and often comic, and dread rises through it at intervals. The rises are exact: the train coming into Santa Rosa under a column of black smoke; the camera moving into Cotten’s profile at dinner as he speaks of the widows, until the face fills the frame; the crane at the library, rising away from the girl at the long table until she is small and alone in the dark room; the waltz, sentimental and Viennese, turned to terror by repetition; the garage filling with exhaust. What holds the figure is frequency. The middle of the film is bright small-town comedy for long stretches, the summits are few and short, and the last of them, the struggle at the train door, is played against a rear projection that shows its seams.
Andreas Gursky · Visual art
7.5 · Tier III
Elevation is real and of one kind: a cold, horizontal sublime, met at scale. At full size the bands fill the field of vision, the river becomes a slab of grey with no beginning or end, and the sky above it is a lid of cloud. The Romantic sublime of German landscape painting, Friedrich’s monk before the sea, is present as a structure: the viewer before a horizontal immensity, with no figure to stand in for him. The response is stillness more than awe, a held breath. What holds the axis is height and frequency: one effect, sustained rather than recurring, and dependent on size; in reproduction the picture is quiet, even dull, and its detractors say so. Subtraction reaches calm more surely than transport.
Robert Zemeckis · Film
7.5 · Tier III
The register is comic and propulsive, and its elevation is exhilaration rather than awe. It rises several times. The first jump in the mall car park: a flash, two trails of fire between the parking lines, a licence plate spinning on the asphalt. The dance, where Marty’s hand fades on the guitar while his parents fail to kiss. The clock tower, a stunt intercut until it becomes a moment of grace, with Silvestri’s brass lifting each summit. What holds the figure: nothing is terrible or grave at length, Doc’s apparent death is reversed, and the summits are all of suspense and joy at one pitch, with the long stretches between them carried by momentum rather than height.
Paul Thomas Anderson · Film
7.3 · Tier III
Elevation comes in two kinds, the ecstatic and the dreadful. The dawn prologue is the first: a car flips over on an empty street, then a harmonium is set down at the curb, and a mundane morning becomes an annunciation. Blake’s colour interludes lift the film out of narrative into pure colour and tone. The summit is Honolulu, the embrace held in silhouette in a hotel archway with “He Needs Me” on the soundtrack. The dread is the supermarket and the warehouse under Brion’s percussion, and Dean’s calls rising to screaming. The axis stands at the middle of its range because the height is gathered at three points, the prologue, Hawaii and the ending, and the stretches between, the pudding errands and the brothers’ attacks, are played level and comic.
David Mackenzie · Film
7.2 · Tier III
Elevation comes chiefly of one kind, the grim grandeur of weather, stone and mass, and it comes often. The opening take is the first height: the camera walks through a whole political order and ends in the slow arc and crash of the trebuchet’s stone against Stirling, the power Bruce kneels to made visible. The night attack at Methven, fires in the dark and men cut down half dressed, is dread well built. Ackroyd’s landscapes, the loch and the island crossing under low cloud, give the flight scale. Loudoun Hill is the summit: horses foundering in a bog under rain, a mêlée that becomes a heap of men in mud. What holds the figure: the film seldom rises through feeling, the private scenes are level, and the single combat is lower than the battle it crowns.
Voltaire · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The book refuses elevation by design, and the refusal is part of its argument: horror is told at speed, in a clause, in the tone of a report, so that the reader feels how a system skates over it. The burned village, the earthquake, the old woman’s catalogue of rape, plague and the half-buttock eaten at the siege of Azov: the dreadful is constant, and held cold. The heights come where the irony stops or turns: the slave’s sentence; the old woman’s wish to die a hundred times while still loving life; El Dorado, beautiful and comic at once; the dervish, indifferent as a universe that does not ask whether the mice in the ship are comfortable. They are few and brief, and that holds the axis lowest of the twelve: the register is low across most of the book, as intended, and the axis counts height and frequency, not intention.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Elevation is not this picture’s register, and the figure says so. Its height is of one kind: vitality, the gusto of bodies crowded into a space and moving, and a plain beauty of colour, the reds and whites of jackets and aprons laid across the brown barn in a rhythm the eye follows down the table. The bride under her crown has a quiet, almost iconic dignity, and that is the nearest the panel comes to transport. There is no grandeur, no terror and no awe; the space is low and the light even. The pleasure is real and recurs across the whole panel, but it is the pleasure of animation and order. That is what holds the lowest axis at 7.4, below the universal minimum, as the subject would lead one to expect.
Herman Melville · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
The book refuses elevation, and mostly gets the effect it wants by refusing it. Its register is cold comedy, and its rare heights are dreadful rather than transporting. They are three. The deaf-mute at sunrise, mocked and jostled, writing his texts of charity and then asleep at the foot of a ladder, has a strange grandeur. The Moredock chapters reach a frontier terror in the backwoodsman who takes the vow and goes alone into the forest, the nearest the book comes to the register of Moby-Dick. The last chapter rises highest: the old man reading his Bible under the solar lamp, the counterfeit detector, the stool that may serve as a life-preserver, the lamp put out and the old man led away in the dark. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is frequency: between the three lie long stretches in which no height is sought. The height, when it comes, is real.
Oscar Wilde · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Elevation in comedy is transport by delight, and the play gives it often. Lady Bracknell’s “A handbag?” (Act I) is one of the great comic heights of the English stage; the tea-table war between Gwendolen and Cecily, fought in sugar and cake under perfect civility, rises steadily to a pitch; Jack’s entrance in full mourning for a brother whom Algernon is at that moment impersonating in the house is a coup of the same order. But the axis asks for height, and the play’s height is always the height of wit: no grandeur, no terror, no beauty beyond the beauty of the sentence, by design. The register never lifts out of the drawing-room and does not mean to. The transport is frequent and real, and of one kind.
Jasper Johns · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Elevation is mostly refused, and the refusal is of the work’s kind. There is beauty, and it recurs across the field: the wax holds each stroke separately, the newsprint glows faintly through it, and the rings, flat as a sign, are alive at every edge of every brushload. There is a cold height in the faces, the more unsettling for their calm: four closed mouths, four noses, no eyes, a row of masks over a mark to be shot at. That chill is real and is the strongest moment the work has. But nothing here is grand and nothing transports, and the scale is that of a person’s torso. Beauty of surface, sustained, and one register of dread, felt by some as height and by others as a dry joke, and not repeated in a second key.
Dashiell Hammett · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
The book’s elevation is cold and rare, and the axis is indifferent to which. Its height is the last chapter: Spade, his face gone pale, setting out his reasons to the woman he may love while the police are on their way; and then the final page, Effie’s recoil from him and the return of Iva, “Well, send her in”, a flat sentence that closes the book like a door. The Flitcraft story has a dry, metaphysical chill. The bird scraped open with a penknife in Spade’s apartment, the fat man’s composure as the treasure of seventeen years turns to lead, is a grand comic deflation. Elsewhere the book is held below transport on purpose: its method is understatement, and frequency counts as well as height. One summit and two lesser rises in a deliberately level run place it below short books whose method is lyric, Jesus’ Son (8.6 here) above all.
Bob Rafelson · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The register is flat, sunlit and comic, and the film distrusts elevation as Bobby does. It rises at four points, and they are exact. The freeway jam, where he climbs onto a truck and plays and the truck carries him off still playing, is comic transport, music lifted out of its class into traffic. The Chopin in the empty room is beauty given and then denied by what he says. The field, the father in a wheelchair against the grey light and Nicholson’s breakdown, is the summit. The last shot, held on the gas station, is a cold height. What holds the axis lowest: between them the bowling, the motels and the family manners are played level by intention, and the axis rewards frequency.
Moisei Ginzburg and Ignaty Milinis · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Elevation here is lightness and light, small in scale. It comes in the long white slab lifted over the garden on its columns, seen through trees from the slope; in the type K’s double-height room, where a wall of window rises the full two storeys and the sleeping gallery looks down into it; in the lit corridor running the length of the block; and on the roof terrace above the city’s trees. The route from corridor to cell to double-height room repeats the same small lift, so frequency is fair. Height is what holds the axis: the building has no grandeur and seeks none, its cells are tight and its F corridors low by design, and its first effect is of modesty and economy.
William Gaddis · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
The register is comic, and the comedy is low in elevation by design. The heights are real and rare. Judge Crease’s opinions rise to a dry grandeur, a mind of the old republic writing against the noise, and the opinion on Cyclone Seven, with its passage on art and utility, is the book’s summit. Once at Antietam reaches for tragic dignity, and the book makes its reader see both the reach and the staleness, which is the point but caps the lift. A late passage of grief, around a death in the family, has weight. For most of its length the book works in the key of exasperation, and its comedy seldom rises past wit into the hilarity of JR. Two or three heights across six hundred pages hold the axis lowest of the twelve.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The work refuses grandeur and offers something small and repeated: cellophane glittering in a corner, the moment of choosing and taking, the taste. The elevation, where it comes, is grief arriving late, when the visitor learns what the weight is and finds the sweet already in the mouth. That turn is real and recurs with each installation and each visitor, so its frequency is high; its height is modest. There is no terror and no transport, and the work seeks neither: its tenderness is nearer elegy than the sublime. It stands well below The Starry Night and the Water Lilies on this axis, and above Fountain, whose Sublime is 6.0. Its quiet height is renewed at each encounter.
Alfred Stieglitz · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Elevation is present, and of a quiet kind. The white gangway against the dark mass of the lower deck has a real graphic force, and the gravure’s deep blacks and soft lights give the scene a gravity beyond a snapshot. There is tenderness below, in the mother and child and the washing, and a held strangeness above, where the watcher in the straw hat is lit and idle. But this is a picture of observation more than of transport. It holds one tone, grave and still, and does not rise again and again; its power works as recognition rather than as awe. The register and the single tone hold it at 7.4, lowest of the twelve after The Encompassed and a tenth under the Universal Minimum.
Joel Coen and Ethan Coen · Film
8.1 · Tier IV
The register is comic, and the elevation is the comic kind, transport through excess and through grace in odd places. A tumbleweed rolls from the desert down to the Pacific under the Sons of the Pioneers; bowling balls travel the lanes in slow motion under the credits; in the first dream the Dude flies over Los Angeles after Maude on her rug; in the second, “Gutterballs”, he sails between showgirls’ legs in a repairman’s suit. The scattering of Donny’s ashes, blown back over the Dude, is the one point where laughter and grief meet. What holds the axis here: the height is of invention and delight rather than of terror, beauty or grandeur, and long stretches are conversation played for rhythm. A work that rises this often on comedy alone sits a tenth below the bar of 7.5.
John Huston · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
The register is cool, quick and ironic, and elevation is not its mode; where the film rises, it rises cold. The elevator gate closing on Brigid, its shadow falling across her face like bars as the car goes down, is the summit and a real one. The last speech, played close and fast with Bogart’s face working against the words, has dread in it. Gutman scraping at the black enamel with a penknife and finding lead, his voice rising and breaking into laughter, is a comic sublime; his suite, shot low with the ceiling in view as Spade is drugged and falls, has a nightmare weight, and Jacoby’s death in the doorway is a shock. What holds the axis is frequency: long stretches are talk in rooms, superbly paced and level, and the score adds little height.
Luis Buñuel · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Buñuel’s register is dry, level and comic, and elevation is not its mode; the axis is indifferent to which elevation, and here there is little of any. When the film rises it rises by shock and the uncanny: the first unannounced change of actress, which unsettles the ground of the picture; Conchita dancing naked for tourists in Seville; the night at the iron gate; the beating; and the last image, a bomb in a Paris arcade after a woman in a shop window has mended a bloodied lace garment. These are strong, and they are few. The long middle is played as a comedy of manners and frustration, elegant and flat by intention, and a level intended is still a level. The doubled actress unsettles some viewers throughout and others not at all, and is not counted as a recurring height. Frequency holds the axis lowest.
Thomas Jefferson · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Elevation is real and modest, and it lives mostly outside the rooms. It comes in the site: the levelled summit, the Blue Ridge to the west, the Piedmont spread to the east, the sky over the oval lawn; in the west front seen across the lawn, low, domed and complete; in the light from the skylights and the tall windows of the parlor; in the terrace walks, which make the roofs of the work into promenades above the trees. The register is charm, ingenuity and prospect, almost never grandeur. What holds it here: the rooms are domestic in scale; the entrance hall is the one room that lifts; and the dome room, which should be the height of the house, is a small octagon under the roof reached by a mean stair. One view of one front carries most of the axis.
Robert Rauschenberg · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
There is one strong effect, and it is real: the shock of the animal, glass-eyed and shaggy, standing in a gallery with a tyre round it, at once absurd, pathetic and oddly grand. The goat’s bulk and the heavy fall of the fleece give the object a presence most assemblage lacks, and the daubed face turns the comedy toward a mask or a victim. That is elevation of a kind, uncanny rather than beautiful. But it is struck once, at first sight, and does not rise again across the work; the platform, looked at closely, gives the pleasure of a worked surface, not transport. The register is wit and estrangement, a single striking image over an intricate but unelevated ground.
Charles and Ray Eames · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Elevation here is light, play and calm, seldom more. It comes in the double-height living room, the one large volume, where the wall of sash and translucent panels takes the light through the eucalyptus and throws moving shadows of leaves onto glass and floor; in the long view along the front, the grid of colour and glass seen against the trees; and in the court, a room open to the sky between the two halves of a life. Frequency is fair, for the shadow of the trees on the glass runs all day. Height is low by design. The rooms are small, the materials ordinary, the register a single one of delight, without grandeur or dread, and many visitors find the house modest, even cramped, against its photographs. A house that refuses monument is not scored for one; the form’s limit is recorded, not compensated.
Gordon Bunshaft (Skidmore, Owings and Merrill) · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
The register is serenity and lightness, and it comes at street level more than at height. Elevation comes in the lifted block seen from the avenue, a long glass volume floating a storey above the pavement on thin columns, with the sky opening in the court; in the slab’s green glass taking the light of the avenue and the colour of the sky; and at night, the whole lit as a lantern among masonry. The height is modest, short now beside its neighbours, and nothing in the building seeks awe or dread. Frequency is fair outside and low within: the office floors are bright and plain, the lobby small. The elegance is real and repeatable, but elegance is not grandeur, and the axis weighs height and frequency together.
Doris Salcedo · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
The commissions before it in the hall had worked its height, Eliasson’s sun the best known. Shibboleth turned the sublime downward. The recorded experience is a small vertigo repeated: a long line of people bent over the floor, looking into a dark that seemed to have no bottom, the fence glinting inside; the fear of a foot caught; the wide empty hall above, now a space over an abyss. The dread is real, the floor one stands on broken all the way through, and it is the axis’s terror rather than its grandeur. Held at 7.4 for height and frequency: one effect, quiet and low, the same at the hundredth metre as at the tenth, and for many visitors a curiosity before it was a fear.
Albrecht Dürer · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
The elevation is real and of one kind: wonder at the living particular, the shock of presence when a painted creature seems about to move. It is quiet, close and sustained; there is no grandeur, no terror and no transport beyond that one held breath before the animal. The height lies in the intensity of attention, a thing made more visible than life usually allows, and it recurs across the surface, at the ear, at the eye, at the forepaws, so that frequency is better than a single summit. But the range is narrow, and much of what viewers call awe before the sheet is admiration of skill, which belongs to The Made. A high mark in the register of intimate wonder, honestly below the sublime of scale or fate.
George Saunders · Literature
7.8 · Tier III
Elevation is rare, and it comes at the ends. The close of the title story is the book’s height: the murdered narrator, now a spirit, moves among the living wishing to enter their hearts and turn them, a pathos the deadpan has held back until then and spends at once. “Offloading for Mrs. Schwartz” reaches a quieter height when its narrator empties himself of his wife for an old woman’s comfort. Terror rises in the title story’s killings and in the violence of “Bounty”. But the dominant register is comic deadpan, which caps height by design, and the grotesque, which trades the sublime for the absurd; between the endings the book stays on the plain, and its heights are few.
Lucian Freud · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
There is elevation, and it is of one kind: grandeur of mass. At full size the body is a landscape, its folds and slopes laid across the sofa like ground, and the response is closer to awe at sheer presence than to beauty. Sleep adds a stillness the waking nudes lack: the figure is wholly absorbed and the viewer wholly excluded, and in that exclusion there is gravity. The heights recur only as passages of flesh, the light across a flank, the shadowed undersides, worked in densities of colour that move from pink toward grey and green. There is no transport, no terror and no lift; the picture is all weight and no flight. Held at this figure because the height is one effect, sustained rather than recurring, and for many viewers it stays at fascination.
Marina Abramović · Visual art
7.7 · Tier III
There is elevation, and it is reported more than shown. For a sitter the gaze could produce a real transport, by many accounts overwhelming. On the first night the record carries a moment that reaches even a viewer at a screen: two people who had parted in 1988 by walking the Great Wall from opposite ends, meeting across a table in silence, both in tears. That is one summit. Elsewhere the height belongs to the sitter, not the watcher. From the edge of the square, and in the record, the work is a long stillness, grave and sometimes tender, with many small rises in many faces. Frequency is high in that small register and height is rare, which holds the axis below the Universal Minimum.
David Fincher · Film
7.7 · Tier III
The film is pitched low by design, cool and even, and its elevation is dread rather than beauty. It rises in a few places: the sugar falling in the alley as Nick kisses Amy, a lit moment later shown to be her record of it; Amy driving south, eating, as her voice lays out the plan and the perfect wife comes apart; the murder of Desi, the white sheets, the blade, the long stillness after; Amy at night on the lawn, soaked in blood, falling into Nick’s arms before the cameras; the last image, her face turned up from the pillow. The score keeps dread under every room. What holds the axis among the lowest is weighed heavily: the rises are few, and the chosen key, sleek satire, keeps the height deliberately short, so that between them dread is kept level rather than raised.
Alfred Eisenstaedt · Visual art
7.5 · Tier III
The elevation is of one kind and one height: transport, an instant in which a war ends in a body. The woman bent in an arc at the bottom of the dip, the white against the dark, the light of a summer afternoon across the square, the smiling faces behind: on first sight the effect is a held breath of joy, and it is real. It does not recur within the image, since one exposure holds one instant. There is no second height, no grandeur of setting in a square crowded and ordinary, no terror, and the margins are flat. Over eighty years the joy has also been weighed down for many viewers by the second reading of the posture, which complicates it without deepening it into the dreadful. One summit moment, high in its kind.
Thomas Gainsborough · Visual art
7.4 · Tier III
The elevation is real and of one kind: beauty of surface. The blue satin shimmers, made of quick, broken, feathery strokes that resolve into cloth only at a distance, lit cold against a warm and darkening land. The stormy sky gives the figure a faint heroic charge, and the small pale face above all that blue gives a moment of tenderness. The height is reached in the costume and held there; it does not recur in other registers. There is no grandeur of scale beyond life size, no terror, no transport of the kind a vault or a field of colour gives, and the landscape adds atmosphere, not a second summit. The bravura of the satin keeps the axis from lower.
Christo and Jeanne-Claude · Visual art
7.4 · Tier III
The elevation is of one kind and sustained: saffron panels moving overhead in wind and low winter light, gate after gate, a ceiling of colour rising and falling along the walk against bare black trees. Frequency is high, since the effect recurs along every walk and at every hour of the sixteen days, and the views from the air and the towers gave a second register, a line of fire threading a grey park. Height is the limit. The response the record shows is delight and wonder more than transport; the effect is beautiful and genial, not grand or terrible; and seen close, the frame is a plain manufactured unit and the panel a cloth, so that the height depends on distance, movement and light. A real elevation, sustained, in a middle register.
Talk Talk · Music
7.3 · Tier III
Elevation comes several times, warm and melancholy. Such a Shame lifts at its chorus, the voice climbing over the drive of the synthesisers and drums. Renée is the quiet summit: a long, nearly still piece over fretless bass and soft keyboards, where Hollis’s voice is exposed and the record finds a tenderness the singles cannot hold. Tomorrow Started reaches a similar suspended height on side two, and It’s My Life has a bright, bittersweet lift. Against this, Dum Dum Girl, The Last Time and Call in the Night Boy have energy more than height, and It’s You, the closer, is earnest more than transporting. Four or five of nine tracks rise; the highest is real, short of what the medium reaches and of the long ascents this band made later.
Woody Allen · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Comedy is the register, and elevation is not its usual mode, but the film rises, and it rises by tenderness. Keaton singing “Seems Like Old Times” in a half-empty club, held in a still frame, lifts it toward grace; the closing montage of the affair to the same song, under Alvy’s voice, gives the film a lament it otherwise jokes away. The lobsters of the first summer have a giddy joy few comedies reach, and Willis’s long walks along Manhattan streets and the river at dusk have a quiet beauty. Dread is touched only, in Alvy’s obsession with death and the night drive with Duane. What holds the axis lowest, with The Encompassed, is frequency: the summits are two or three, and most of the film is wit, which delights rather than elevates.
Gustave Caillebotte · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Elevation is present in one cool register, and not often. It comes in the sudden depth of the square to the left of the post, a breadth of grey space opening toward the prow of the wedge building, rare in a street picture; in the sheen of the cobbles, each stone separately lit, a passage of real beauty; and in the couple, who arrive out of the rain at the viewer’s own size. There is a quiet grandeur in the emptiness and the spacing. What holds the axis here is the register the canvas chooses: grey, ochre and black, composed and urban, with no terror and almost no warmth. Its effect is fascination more than height: one sustained temperature, well held, rising little.
Diane Arbus · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Elevation of one kind, cold: the uncanny, a small dread arising from the ordinary. The figures are children in their best clothes, and the effect is nearer a shiver than grandeur; the eye moves from one face to the other and back, and each return deepens it rather than resolving it, a frequency within one frame that a single image seldom has. What holds the axis among the lowest of the twelve, and below the Universal Minimum, is height and range. No beauty is sought beyond the plain grace of the children; there is no transport and no scale; the even light and the flat ground refuse the photograph’s usual means of lift. Once the difference between the faces has been seen, the dread is understood rather than renewed. A lasting chill, not an elevation in the axis’s higher sense.
Ovid · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
The register is wit, and the book rarely aims at height. Where it rises, the height is real: the noon of 1.5, heat and half-shuttered light and then ecce, Corinna venit, a sensual stillness that later love poetry kept returning to; the plea to the Dawn in 1.13, whose lente currite, noctis equi Marlowe’s Faustus took into the hour of his damnation; the lament for Tibullus in 3.9, the book’s one sustained grave poem; and the proud close of 1.15. Those are four or five summits in forty-nine poems, and irony undercuts or frames each one soon after. Height is occasional and its frequency low, and the axis weighs the two together; it stands two tenths below the Universal Minimum.
Gu Kaizhi (attributed) · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The lowest of the twelve. The elevation is grace, of one register, and it recurs: the fluttering ribbons and long trains of the court ladies, drawn with one unbroken even line, give every figure a lift that is almost flight, and the two ladies walking toward the Instructress at the end are its purest instance. The bear scene is the one moment of danger, and it is real: a beast already on the slope of the dais, a woman with nothing in her hands. What holds the axis is range and kind. The mountain reaches for the cosmic, but its scale is archaic, the archer as large as the slope, and the effect is emblem more than awe. There is no terror held and no transport by size, and much of the scroll is a quiet decorum whose beauty is that of manner.
Meret Oppenheim · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
There is an elevation, of the dreadful and intimate kind: the involuntary recoil of the mouth before a furred lip and spoon, the sense of drinking from a body. Few objects of its size produce a response this physical from an image alone, and the response does not wait on the history; it is immediate in every photograph. It is not beauty in the usual sense, though the fur is soft and pale and the set has a quiet, pleasing proportion. What holds the axis down is range and frequency. There is one effect, the frisson, met at once and in one register, and looking longer deepens curiosity more than transport. Its height is a shiver, sharp and repeatable, and it is the lowest axis of the twelve but one.
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Elevation of the dreadful kind, concentrated in one place. The green face at the right, cropped, its features flattened by light from below, its mouth a red smear, is a moment of shock that nothing else in the painting of its decade reaches: the hall’s pleasure turned for an instant into something near terror. The flame of the red-haired woman’s head and the dark sweep of the rail give a second, smaller lift of colour and line. The rest does not rise and is not meant to; it is observation at eye level, social and unhurried. A single summit moment scores below a work that rises repeatedly, and that is this canvas’s case. There is no grandeur, and the height is one stroke at the edge.
Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
The building has one real elevation, and it is a fine one. At the corner, where the brick stops and the glass turns with nothing behind it, the mass of a three-storey block appears to hang weightless, and the wall becomes a lit volume rather than a load; in the right light the effect is of a weight withdrawn, a cool and exact lift. But it is a single effect, repeated at each corner, on a small block of modest height, and the rest of the complex, the sheds, the chimney, the yard, offers order and decency rather than elevation. Height and frequency both count, and here the height is moderate and the frequency low. The coolness is part of the building’s distinction, and the rubric does not hold a cold register against it; it does not make the effect larger or more frequent.
David Hockney · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Elevation is not the register. The canvas is cool and still by design: a flat sky, a flat pool, a house in midday light with hardly a shadow. What rises is one thing, once: the splash, a burst of white against the flat blue, and the small shock of seeing that the water is thrown up by someone already gone. The moment is real, a little comic and a little uncanny, and it recurs each time the eye leaves the house and comes back to the board. A second, quieter lift is the scale: at about 2.4 metres the blue fields can be stood in front of, and the light is total. Neither reaches grandeur or terror, and the frequency is low; that holds the axis among the lowest. The work does not depend on rising, and is charged for it on this axis alone.
Egon Schiele · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
The elevation is of one kind, intense rather than high: the charge of the gaze, the clash of the orange husks against the pale ground, the hard contour of the head against white. There is beauty in the economy, a head set in emptiness like a written sign, and a faint dread in the eyes. But the picture does not transport. It holds the viewer in a close, tight encounter at small size, and the encounter is nervous rather than exalted. There is no grandeur, and the terror, where it comes, is a flicker of unease rather than awe. One register is sustained over the whole field, reaching real intensity in the head and the berries and not rising beyond them.
Chuck Palahniuk · Literature
7.7 · Tier III
Elevation is rare by design, and the register that refuses it is the book’s identity. There are heights: the opening, a man on the roof of a tower with a gun in his mouth, counting down to a bomb; the narrator weeping into Big Bob’s enormous chest at Remaining Men Together, a grotesque tenderness that does rise; the lye burned into his hand while Tyler forbids him the escape of meditation, terror held across a scene; the clerk Raymond Hessel made to kneel and promise to go back to school, the book’s one moment of a dreadful grace; and the eerie last note in the hospital. But the dominant mode is deadpan comedy and flat fact, which caps height deliberately, the climax on the roof resolves in anticlimax, and the rises are few in two hundred pages.
Mike Leigh · Film
7.7 · Tier III
The register is domestic and comic, and elevation comes rarely, by design. It comes three times. In the café the long take lets a recognition happen in real time: Cynthia’s denial, a memory surfacing on her face, tears, a slow turn to tenderness, all without a cut. At the barbecue the truth breaks over the table, Cynthia’s cry and Maurice’s speech, and the room holds in silence. The garden at the end has a plain grace. Andrew Dickson’s strings lift each of these and sometimes push. What holds the figure is frequency and kind: long stretches of level comedy and irritation lie between the summits, and the height is of tears rather than of terror or transport.
Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun · Visual art
7.7 · Tier III
The elevation is of one kind, tender warmth, and it is real. The two faces pressed together at the apex of the pyramid, lit from the left against the dark, are a moment of grace, and the white of the gown and the warm flesh carry a quiet radiance. The height recurs only within that register: in the light along the mother’s arm, in the child’s hand at her shoulder. There is no grandeur, no awe, no terror and no transport beyond sweetness; and sweetness held at one pitch over the whole surface lowers the frequency of the rise, because the picture never leaves the note it opens on. Beside the lift of The Swing, one kind of height at the top of an arc, this is a lower and steadier warmth: high in its kind, narrow in range.
Alex Proyas · Film
7.6 · Tier III
The film rises often, and its height is gothic, the grandeur of rain, night and fire. Eric’s first walk through his ruined apartment, the white face drawn on in the mirror, the guitar played on the rooftop in the rain, the fiery crow burned into the street outside the boardroom, the crows gathering over the church and the fall onto the gargoyle: these are real images of dread and transport, held in Wolski’s near-monochrome and Revell’s choral and guitar score. What holds the figure is height. Many elevations are made in the grammar of the music video of their years, cut to song and pose, and a pose reaches a shiver more than awe. The emotional summit, Shelly’s return at the graves, is beautiful and slight.
Terry Pratchett · Literature
7.6 · Tier III
The register is comic and the book rises in only a few places, but they are real. The desert, where a god and his believer walk under a sun that does not care. The iron turtle in the plaza, with Brutha bound on it as the metal heats. Vorbis after his death in the desert of the dead, finding that it is only sand and that he is alone with what he has made of himself. And the coda, where Brutha, dead after a hundred years, turns back to lead Vorbis across: a quiet grandeur of mercy that the comedy has earned. Elsewhere the tone is deflating by design; the footnote and the punchline keep elevation at arm’s length. The height reaches high in the coda; the frequency is low, and the axis weighs both.
Arctic Monkeys · Music
7.5 · Tier III
The record’s mode is drive, not elevation, and it is right about itself. There is height in places. When the Sun Goes Down turns from a quiet, almost tender first verse into a surge, the record’s best physical arrival. A Certain Romance lifts twice: in its long opening, drums and a ringing figure clearing the floor, and in the guitar outro after the words stop, the one passage that lets feeling exceed its occasion. The drum opening of The View from the Afternoon is an arrival of a kind. Elsewhere the force is speed, wit and bite: exciting, not elevated. Three or four real rises in thirteen tracks.
Jeff Koons · Visual art
7.5 · Tier III
There is elevation, of one kind: gleam at monumental scale. Under open sky or in a great hall the dog is a giant thing that looks weightless, a toy the height of a room whose surface takes the light and the watchers and bends them round its curves. The effect is real and immediate, closer to exhilaration than awe, with an edge of the uncanny in a membrane that cannot be pricked. What holds it down is range and frequency: one register, high and bright, reached at once and not deepened by looking; and for many viewers the height tips into glossy spectacle, the work’s acknowledged risk. The reflection changes with every site and hour, and that is its one variation.
Jim Jarmusch · Film
7.5 · Tier III
Elevation comes often, and low. The opening is the film’s best height and sets its register: a pigeon’s flight over the city and down to a roof, with RZA’s hollow, tolling beats beneath it, a solitary grace above a ruined place. Ghost Dog’s sword practice on the roof at night, the slow glide of the cars he takes through dark streets to the score, and the final standoff, where Louie fires and Ghost Dog falls with his gun empty while Pearline watches, rise to a quiet, cold elevation. The chosen key is deadpan, and the comedy of the mobsters lets the air out by design. The sublime here is real and frequent in a minor mode, and it rarely reaches terror or transport.
Luca Guadagnino · Film
7.1 · Tier III
Elevation comes as erotic charge, dread and visionary strangeness. The first sight of Allerton across the street, held under a pop song from decades after the film’s year, lifts it from period piece into reverie. The ghost hands are a small sublime of longing, repeated, and they gain force each time. The jungle night is the height: Cotter in her compound, the brew, the two men vomiting, and then the merging of their bodies, grotesque and tender at once, as Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s score turns from pulse to drone. The epilogue’s last movement, the old Lee in a bed with the younger man beside him, is quiet and moving. What holds it: the heights cluster in the jungle and the epilogue, the travel passages are flat, and some of the visionary effects read as illustration rather than vision.
Jasper Johns · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Elevation is not the work’s register, and it would be inflation to find it there. The object is a metre and a half wide, hung at the height of a body, cool in temper, without grandeur, terror or transport, and set against the sublime that New York painting was claiming in those years. What it has is beauty at the near view: the wax holds light in its depth, the reds are not one red, each star is a small brushed event, and print and comic strips surface through the white stripes like things seen under ice. That delight recurs wherever the eye settles, and there is the small shock of first recognition, the emblem where a painting should be. Frequency is high and height is low: no passage rises far, and none is meant to.
John Barth · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
The register is comic, and elevation comes as the comic sublime of excess more than as transport or terror. The heights are real: Burlingame’s long debates on the nature of history and of the self, Proteus speaking; the installments of Smith’s secret history, whose last disclosure is outrageous and complete; the contests of rhetoric and invective; and the hero’s discovery of what his innocence has cost, which reaches a plain gravity late in the book. Joan’s death and the closing epitaph lift the end toward elegy. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is frequency and register: the usual mode is farce at a run, level by design, and for long stretches the book entertains rather than rises. A summit of wonder in a comic epic is possible, as Rabelais and Cervantes show; this book reaches it seldom.
Edgar Degas · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The axis is indifferent to warm or cold, and the canvas has a cold height of one kind: the desolation in the woman’s face, the dull light, the stillness of a room in which nothing will happen. It rises once, in her face and the glass before her, and does not rise again. What holds the axis low is the register the work chooses. It is muted and held, deliberately flattened, with no transport and no terror, and its force lies in exactness, not in elevation. The dread is real, and it is pitched low. Elevation is not what the canvas is for, and the axis records that plainly.
Tarsila do Amaral · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The elevation is of one kind: strangeness, the uncanny made bright. The first sight is a shock of scale, the foot coming at the viewer and the head receding until it nearly vanishes, so that the figure has the presence of a giant and a dreamer at once. The flat blue and the yellow sun give a hard, still noon, a heat without shade, and there is a quiet grandeur in the figure’s mass against the empty sky. But the height is single and reached at once; it does not recur as a field or a narrative lets it recur, and the mood is nearer torpor and wonder than transport or terror. The colour pleases and cools rather than exalts. Arresting more than elevated, it stands lowest of the eleven the minimum governs.
Patricia Highsmith · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
The lowest of the twelve. Highsmith’s register is the low, steady hum of anxiety, and the book’s power lies in duration, not in height. There are moments of cold elevation: the killing in the boat off San Remo, with the oar, the stone tied to the body, the boat sunk and the bloodstain Tom cannot stop thinking of; the long night in Rome with Freddie Miles’s body, walked down the stairs as a drunk; the arrival in Venice, Tom alone in a palazzo rented on a dead man’s money, at something like peace. The pleasure he takes in Europe, its light, its paintings, the boats on the Grand Canal, is given with real feeling, and it is the beauty of a thing stolen. What holds the axis lowest is design: the prose is kept level and rarely rises with its occasions, and the dread is a pressure, not a transport. Height is moderate, and it is infrequent.
Spike Jonze · Film
8.1 · Tier IV
Elevation comes as the uncanny more than as beauty or grandeur. The opening, a marionette dancing its despair in a shabby proscenium, is a small, real transport and the argument in one image. The first passage through the portal, a wet slide into darkness and then the round, blurred sight of another man reading the paper and eating toast, lasts. The summit is Malkovich in his own head, a restaurant where every face is his: comedy reaching horror. The chase through his childhood humiliations is dread, and the last shot is quiet dread. What holds the axis here is frequency and kind: the film is made almost wholly at the level of deadpan, and its heights are brief and comic.
Ovid · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
A comic didactic poem does not aim at elevation and is not charged for its aim; the axis asks how often it rises. It rises in its insets. Ariadne on the Naxian shore, weeping and then terrified by the noise of Bacchus’ rout, and the god coming down from his chariot to claim her, is a true height of brightness and transport. Daedalus fitting the wings, and crying his son’s name over the water, reaches pathos. Cephalus and Procris is the one tragic close, and Ovid lets it stand nearly without a wink. Between them the register is the witty middle style, by intention. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is frequency, not height: three or four rises in the whole poem, each undercut or reapplied as a lesson.
Marcel Duchamp · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Elevation is of one kind, and partial: a kinetic exhilaration, the sense of a cascade, a body pouring down a stair in a rush of hinged wood. It comes at first sight and in the lower half, where the planes gather speed and the arcs swing out. There is a faint unease beside it, a figure of armour or of a mannequin’s limbs moving in a brown gloom, which touches the uncanny. But the palette is dull by choice, the scale is modest, and the painting withholds beauty as a matter of programme; the painter came to describe his turn as one away from painting made for the eye. A work may be great without elevation, and this one chooses to be. It rises once, and not high.
Robert Venturi · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Elevation is not the house’s register; its register is wit. The gable seen square from the drive, wide and shallow, has a monumentality at small scale that is its own, a big front on a little house, and the split, with the chimney standing in the gap against the sky, is a figure of real force when the light is low. Inside, the stair wound tight past the chimney and the arrival in the upper room give pleasure of a compressed, intimate kind. That is the frequency: a handful of moments, most of them on the front. The height is low. There is no vastness, no dread and no transport, and the irony that is the house’s achievement also holds it back from grandeur; many who see it find it plainer and smaller than its fame. The house is great, where it is great, without being elevated, and the axis stands below the Universal Minimum.
Wes Anderson · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
The register is comic and rueful, and it rises at intervals. The heights: the opening montage cut to the Creation’s “Making Time”, where the comedy of a self assembled from clubs becomes something close to exhilaration; Blume alone at his sons’ birthday party, dropping into the pool and staying under, the film’s best image of despair; the war played as a pop opera to the Who’s “A Quick One, While He’s Away”; and the last, the dancers after “Heaven and Hell” turning in slow motion to the Faces’ “Ooh La La” as the curtain draws across, an elevation earned by what was withheld before it. What holds the axis: the lift is almost always lyrical and comic and set to a record, the film rarely reaches terror or grandeur, and long stretches are level by design.
Mary Cassatt · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
The elevation is of one kind and low in pitch: tenderness, stillness, the quiet of the two bent heads, and the beauty of the child’s body drawn with care. There is a real moment of lift where everything converges on the foot in the water, a held instant in which the room’s patterns fall still around one small act. But the picture refuses grandeur on principle. It has no terror, no transport and no awe, and its beauty is that of a well made and steady thing rather than a rising one. The height is modest and it comes once: one moment held, not a work that rises again and again. A painting can be great without elevation, and this one does not seek it.
Jasper Johns · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
There is elevation of one kind, and it is not often high. It is energy: a continent set moving by paint, the borders dissolving and reforming as the eye crosses the canvas, the primaries at full strength at a scale that fills the field of view. The strongest moment is the first sight from across the room, when the whole country is one turbulent surface; some have read a weather in it, storms crossing the states. What holds the axis down is the register. The irony is cool, the source is a school diagram, and the picture refuses grandeur even as it borrows the scale and gesture of a painting that had sought the sublime. There is no terror and little transport: one summit, the whole seen at once, and a level plain of pleasure in the detail.
Arthur Conan Doyle · Literature
7.9 · Tier III
Elevation is real and of one kind, dread, and it comes often in small measure. The vigil in the dark at Stoke Moran, the low whistle, Holmes lashing at the bell-pull and Roylott found with the band about his brow, is the book’s height, and the scream that follows it carries. “The Five Orange Pips” opens in an equinoctial gale that sets the tale’s fatality and ends with the client drowned and the ship lost. The opium den of the Bar of Gold, the locked wing at the Copper Beeches and the hydraulic press closing on Hatherley each rise. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve is that these are the thrills of a well made tale, not transport; about half the book never rises at all, and its other pleasure, the mind at work, is delight rather than the sublime.
Damien Hirst · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Elevation of the dreadful kind, and it is real. The first sight of the cow’s cut face, life size, lit evenly through glass, the stomach, the coiled gut and the fine bands of fat held still in a pale green liquid, is a moment of terror and of a strange beauty, the anatomical plate made actual. The walk between the halves raises it, the body on both sides at one’s own height; in the smaller tanks the calf’s smallness carries the pathos the title asks for. The summit comes twice, once for each animal. What holds it this low is frequency and duration: a shock of recognition, which on return the clinical register and the hard steel take back to display.
Amrita Sher-Gil · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
The elevation is of one low, sustained kind: gravity. The faces have a stillness that approaches the hieratic, and the saturated cloth glows against the dark ground with a contained heat; the effect is closer to dignity than to transport. It recurs across the canvas not as summits but as an even pitch, every face held at the same grave level. The beauty is real, in the colour above all, and in brown flesh set against saturated cloth, a beauty European painting of India had rarely granted. But there is no grandeur of scale, no terror and no release; the axis asks for height and frequency, and the picture chooses one subdued register throughout. It weighs rather than lifts, and the axis stands lowest but one.
Man Ray · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
The elevation is of one kind, and it is beauty more than transport. The back is lit softly and modelled in one long, continuous curve from the turban to the hips; the tonal range is narrow and warm, and the skin has the smooth, sculptural finish of Ingres’s own surfaces. The first response is pleasure in that curve, then a laugh at the marks, then unease at what the laugh admits. The laugh lowers the height: the wit is the point, and it holds the image at the level of delight. There is no terror, no grandeur and no repeated rise, only one quiet summit of form, met once and turned by the joke. The height is present throughout, but it is the borrowed height of Ingres’s flesh, and the image spends it on the pun.
Christopher Nolan · Film
7.8 · Tier III
The register is cool, quick and anxious, and elevation is rare. When it comes it is vertigo, not grandeur: a Polaroid fading in the opening, blood running back up a wall and a shell casing returning to the gun; the black-and-white turning to colour as a photograph develops; Sammy’s wife asking for injection after injection, the film’s one scene of plain pity; Leonard shaving his thigh to tattoo a fact and finding one already there. The close rises, with Leonard’s eyes shut at the wheel. David Julyan’s synthesised score holds a level ache and rarely lifts. What holds the axis low among the twelve is frequency: height is reached two or three times, and the rest is procedure under strain, absorbing and never elevated.
SANAA (Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa) · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Elevation comes often and quietly, and never high. Its kinds: a roof that seems to float on almost nothing; the courts, where the sky is suddenly framed in the middle of the building; the tall boxes, where a white room rises well above the corridor and the light comes from above; the curved glass at dusk, when the whole disc glows on the lawn. The register is serenity and delight. There is no grandeur, no terror and no transport that the architecture itself makes. The sights most remembered by visitors, Leandro Erlich’s Swimming Pool and James Turrell’s room open to the sky, are works of art held in the building and are not credited here. The building is designed to be light, even and unemphatic, and it succeeds, which is a reason to love it and a ceiling on this axis.
Paul Klee · Visual art
7.7 · Tier III
The elevation is real and of one cold kind, the uncanny. Met at its true size, a sheet a little larger than a page of a book, the figure is small, and its effect is a check, a stare returned askew, not transport. The eyes and the teeth give a flicker of dread inside something otherwise naive and almost playful, and that mixture is the sheet’s one height. It rises once, at the first look, and is sustained by the gaze rather than renewed across the field. The pale wash about the figure gives it a faint radiance, and the raised wings a moment of lift. There is nothing of grandeur, scale or terror at full force: a real, single, small sublime.
Sidney Lumet · Film
7.7 · Tier III
The register is hot, comic and frantic, and elevation is not its usual mode. When the film rises it rises in two ways. In public: Sonny at the barricade leading the chant, the crowd surging, money thrown over the barricade, a man made briefly the centre of a city. In private: the will dictated to a teller at night, played almost still, and the telephone call with Leon, two people who cannot help each other speaking across a street. The airport is the summit, and it is dread: the empty tarmac, the engines, the pistol, Sonny held over the hood as the jets pass. What holds the axis among the lowest is frequency and kind: most of the length is nervous comedy, and the heights gather at night and at the end.
Jeff Nichols · Film
7.7 · Tier III
The elevation is mostly of place, and it is frequent if not high. The first sight of the boat in the treetop, a skiff where no boat should be, left by a flood, is the film’s purest image: wonder and absurdity in one. The river at dawn and dusk under Adam Stone’s light, the boys’ small boat crossing wide brown water, the island’s sand and green, return throughout. Dread rises at the snake pit, Ellis falling among cottonmouths, and in Mud carrying the bitten boy through the open; the shootout, with Tom firing from the far bank, has a terrible clarity. What holds the axis is height: the lyric register is warm rather than transporting, the climax is a set piece more than a summit, and long stretches of the middle are pleasant rather than raised.
Yorgos Lanthimos · Film
7.6 · Tier III
The register is deadpan, and its elevations are cold and few. The first hunt, in slow motion through the wet woods to heavy strings, the darted bodies falling in silence, turns comedy into dread. The Heartless Woman’s report of the brother’s death, and David’s walk to the room where the dog lies, is the most frightening scene in the film because no one raises a voice. The Loners dance alone in silence, each to the music in their own headphones. The last shot holds the woman at the table, with the sound of traffic, and cuts before the knife. Height is real in two or three places; between them the tone is held low by intention, and the second movement rises less often than the first. The axis counts frequency as well as height, and frequency is what it lacks.
Robertson Davies · Literature
7.6 · Tier III
The book reaches height in a handful of places, and they are real. The night at Passchendaele, when the wounded Dunstan sees by the light of a flare the face of Mary Dempster on a statue of the Virgin in a ruined church, is its summit and among the strongest scenes in Canadian fiction. Mary Dempster found with the tramp in the gravel pit, and her answer to her husband, has a terrible simplicity. Willie’s return from death, and the boy Paul’s escape with the carnival, carry wonder. The last scene, the Brazen Head’s oracle and Dunstan’s collapse, is staged for awe and nearly reaches it. What holds the axis among the lowest of the twelve is frequency and register: the narrator’s urbane, ironic voice keeps most of the book at the level of comedy of manners and learned anecdote, and the heights are islands in it.
Damien Hirst · Visual art
7.5 · Tier III
There is elevation, and it is of one kind: dazzle against the dark. At White Cube in 2007 the skull was shown alone in a darkened room under guard, the one lit thing in it, and the response reported is closer to stupefaction than to recognition: the light broken into thousands of points over the shape of a face, the brow stone burning, the grin below. Splendour and death in one object is a real claim on the sublime, and at its best the work joins the glitter of the reliquary to the dread of the charnel house. What holds it down is range and frequency: one effect, in one register, seen at once and not deepened by looking; and for many viewers the height tips into kitsch, the work’s acknowledged risk.
David Fincher · Film
7.5 · Tier III
The register is cold, level and comic by design, and the axis counts height and frequency both. There are rises. The Paris shot, after days of tightening, is suspense of a high order, and the shock of the wrong body is real. The Florida fight in a dark house, two men breaking furniture and each other with whatever is to hand, reaches a physical dread the rest of the film withholds. The New York dinner has a quiet terror: Tilda Swinton’s expert tells a joke about a bear and a hunter, knowing what sits across the table from her. Elsewhere the film refuses elevation on purpose: the voice-over deflates, the songs in his ears undercut, and the last confrontation is made small. Three peaks in two hours, each brief, in a film whose idea is that nothing should soar.
Roy Lichtenstein · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
There is a real jolt, and it is physical. At four metres wide the burst is larger than a person, its red and yellow tongues of flame and white centre reading at a distance as pure force, and the word sits in it like a shout. The scale turns a page’s small excitement into something one stands before. But the register is cool on purpose: the contour is even, the dots are uniform, the colour is printed colour, and the painting gives the effect of an explosion rather than the experience of one. It rises once, at the right panel, and the left panel is preparation. One height, sustained by scale and brightness and held deliberately below transport, is what keeps the axis under the Universal Minimum.
Luis Buñuel · Film
7.7 · Tier III
The register is dry comedy, level and deadpan, and elevation is rare by design. When it comes it is cold. The opening tableau after Goya has a gravity the film declines to keep. The sniper is the height: an ordinary man in a suit choosing targets from a tower, shown without music or comment, dread without rhetoric. The prefect’s night in the crypt and the call from a dead woman reach the uncanny, and the last shot, an ostrich staring into the lens after gunfire off screen, is a summit of a strange kind. What holds the axis lowest is frequency: much of the middle hour, the inn and the lecture, rises no higher than a good joke.
Indus Valley (Mohenjo-daro) · Visual art
7.6 · Tier III
The elevation is real, of one kind, and small: a lift of poise and life in a figure that fits in a hand. The tilt of the head and the line from the bent knee through the long body to the raised chin give her a lightness a viewer feels at once, and the response across a century has been delight and recognition rather than awe. There is no grandeur, no terror and no transport by scale; at about 10.5 centimetres there could not be. The height recurs only by extension, in the long arm and the long legs, which carry the same lift. It is one effect, grace and confidence held still, and it does not deepen into the sublime.
Thomas Heatherwick · Architecture
6.8 · Tier II
The elevation is real, and inside it recurs. From the base, looking up, the bowl of interlocking flights and the copper undersides multiply into a lattice of stairs and climbing figures, reflected in the polished steel, and the vertigo of the open bowl at the upper levels was strong as built. From the top the Hudson opens to the west. The register is exhilaration with an edge of dread, and the edge proved literal. What holds the axis: the effect is one effect, the same from every landing; from the plaza the figure is a closed honeycomb that delights or amuses more than it raises; and the mesh laid over the upper climb dims the very openness that gave the height its force.
Cindy Sherman · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The register is cool, deadpan and pastiche, and elevation is not the series’ aim. What rises is suspense and solitude, and it rises often enough to count. A woman with a suitcase on a road at dusk, small against open country, gives dread and openness at once, the empty world of the road film. A woman in the city seen from below against the towers has the vertigo of noir. In the interiors a glance off the frame, or a figure at a window, gives unease. What holds the axis at 7.0, the lowest of the eleven the gates weigh, is that these are small chills at the scale of a photographic print, and the knowingness of the pastiche keeps the viewer half outside each one. No grandeur, no transport.
Harappan builders · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The city rarely rises, and this is the lowest of its twelve. What stands is low walls of brown fired brick, the lanes between them and the sunken rectangle of the Bath. There is an elevation of a cold and level kind, and it recurs across the site: the long straight streets, brick on brick to the horizon, the descent by stairs into the Bath, the sense of order kept across a whole city. What holds it at 7.0: the axis asks for height as well as frequency, and the city offers nothing of the transport of the Pantheon’s room or Sainte-Chapelle’s glass, nor, so far as the record shows, did it seek it. The grandeur visitors feel owes much to age, which is weighed elsewhere, and the stupa that crowns the western mound is not the city’s.
Wes Anderson · Film
7.9 · Tier III
The elevation is concentrated in one scene. On the escape route Fox sees a black wolf on a far ridge and tries to address it; the wolf, after silence, raises a fist in answer and runs off. In a comedy of manners the wild itself appears, mute and untameable, and the film stops for it. There are lesser rises: Fox on a hill against a yellow sky at the opening, the flood bursting through the tunnels, Felicity’s claws across her husband’s face, the fight with Rat staged as a western duel. What holds the axis lowest of the eleven: the rest is charm, deadpan and invention, delightful and rarely transporting, and the film’s own irony keeps most summits low.
Joan Miró · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
The elevation is of one kind and of modest height: delight, the lift of a world in which every object has come alive and is enjoying itself. It comes in the first sight of the room full of signs; again in the window, where the far star and the dark shape open the closed room onto the night; and in the musical notes and the climbing ladder, which give the room an upward motion. There is no grandeur, no terror and no transport by scale. The canvas is under a metre wide and asks to be read at close range, sign by sign, which divides the delight into many small pleasures rather than lifting it into one. The height is real and low, sustained across the surface rather than rising to summits.
Diébédo Francis Kéré · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Elevation is not what the building is built for, and it comes seldom. Its beauty is real and quiet: the thin dark roof floating over the warm earth walls, the deep band of shadow under the oversail, light falling through the ceiling openings into rooms cooler than the air outside, the many fine members of the trusses against the sky. There is one larger moment, in the image of the whole: a long, low building of earth in an open landscape under a hovering roof, a shade made by hand where there was none. It recurs each time the roof is seen against the walls. What holds the axis at 7.0 is the kind of height it is: one of grace and fitness, never of grandeur, dread or transport.
Jeff Koons · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
There is elevation, cold and of one kind. The mirror takes the room and bends it, and the blank head, lit, reads less as a toy than as a helmeted figure, an astronaut or an idol with no face: a small numinous chill in a thing made to be cute. In a gallery it is brighter than anything near it, and its flawlessness has the quality of a relic no hand could have made. What holds it lowest of the eleven axes above The Encompassed is range and frequency. The effect is one effect, given at once and not deepened by staying; the sheen is the height, and the sheen is also what many viewers read as the showroom. There is no terror and no grandeur of scale: the object is a metre high.
Howard Hawks · Film
7.8 · Tier III
The register is velocity, and velocity can transport. The long press-room passages where Hildy writes her story while the room explodes around her, and the climax with the desk, the sheriff, the mayor and Pettibone all in the room at once, rise to an exhilaration few comedies reach. Dread arrives once and is real: Mollie at the window and the jump, played fast and left behind faster. The film does not reach beauty and does not want to; Walker’s images serve the pace and are never held for their own sake. Elevation by tempo recurs across the whole second half, which earns frequency. Height is limited by the form, which rarely pauses long enough for terror or grandeur to register as such: the summits are of momentum rather than of vision.
Sumerian · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
The lowest of the twelve, and what holds it is scale and evenness. The elevation is of one kind, the jewel’s: the deep, saturated lapis ground behind the white shell figures, broken by red, and the long lines of figures across it give the delight of the precious made orderly. There is one rising, the chariots’ charge, the teams gathering speed across the strip until they ride over the dead, force and dread carried by rhythm; the lyre at the feast gives a quieter height. But the figures are a few centimetres tall, the registers are filled evenly, and nothing here gives the transport of a vault, a great relief or a life-size figure. The height is frequent and low.
John Barth · Literature
7.8 · Tier III
The register is comic, and the axis does not forgive that: the comedy caps elevation by design, and the book’s characteristic effect is the pun, the travesty and the bawdy set piece. There are heights. The opening pastoral, the boy among the goats who believes himself a goat, has a lyric strangeness. The descents into WESCAC approach dread and wonder, a hero passing into the machine that can kill a campus, and the third, the union with Anastasia inside the computer and the illumination that follows, is staged as the summit and comes near the mystic sublime the pattern promises. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is frequency: the heights are few in a very long book, Taliped Decanus turns the greatest tragedy of the canon into farce, and the Posttape ends in disenchantment, not transport.
Louisa May Alcott · Literature
7.7 · Tier III
Warm rather than elevated, and the book seldom aims higher. Its heights are few. Jo’s cropped head in “A Telegram”, and her crying in the dark afterwards. The night in “Dark Days” when Jo and Laurie wait for the turn of Beth’s fever. Beth at the piano that Mr. Laurence gives her, a small true height. Above all “The Valley of the Shadow”, where Beth’s death is made quiet and inevitable, without a deathbed speech of the Little Nell kind, though the chapter reaches for the sentimental pieties of its period. Against these the long middle of each part runs at the level of the comic sketch and the household lesson. Height is real twice or three times, and seldom: that is what holds the axis level with the lowest. The book’s force is affection and recognition, which this axis does not measure.
Alphonse Mucha · Visual art
7.6 · Tier III
There is grandeur of one kind: hieratic stillness, a figure larger than the passer-by expects, gold and halo, the gravity of a procession. Seen at its size on a wall the elevation is real, and the ceremonial calm is the sheet’s strongest effect. But height and frequency both count, and the poster has one register, held from top to foot: decorative solemnity. Nothing rises above it to terror, transport or the shock of beauty. The face is composed and a little withdrawn, and the elevation belongs to the costume and the arch more than to the woman. It is a dignified, sustained lift, not a summit.
Frans Hals · Visual art
7.6 · Tier III
The elevation is of one kind, vitality, and it is real: a living face caught in a moment of amusement, the eyes level with ours from under the brim, the elbow advancing. There is a lift in the brilliance of the costume, the gold, rose and silver of the sleeve against the black, and in the lace that turns to light, and that brilliance recurs across the surface. Height is the weakness, not frequency. Nothing in the canvas reaches transport, grandeur, terror or awe. It is delight in a person and in paint, high in its kind and at the scale of a single portrait, with nothing of the depth of feeling that Hals’s own late portraits and Rembrandt’s reach.
Jasper Johns · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Elevation is withheld, and deliberately: the flags answered a painting of the sublime with a subject that admits no transport. What height there is comes from two places. The first is the wax. Laid hot, each stroke sets where it falls, and the red and the white carry a translucent, skin-like depth that rewards the near view: the flag is cool from across a room and sensuous at arm’s length. The second is the stack. The nearest flag is the smallest, and the eye reads it as receding and as coming forward at once, so that the emblem looms with a quiet strangeness. Neither reaches grandeur, terror or awe, and neither recurs across a range: one register, one temperature, and a beauty of surface.
Kehinde Wiley · Visual art
7.3 · Tier III
Elevation is present and of one kind: a cool, arresting intensity. The green is very loud, and the dark suit sits in it with great clarity; the gaze, level and steady, holds the viewer, and before the canvas the life size makes the encounter real. But the work refuses grandeur by design. There is no space, no light falling from anywhere, no scale beyond the body, no terror and no transport, and the decorative ground gives pleasure rather than awe. One register, met at once and sustained rather than recurring: the height is composure, not elevation.
William Hogarth · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The lowest of the twelve, and what holds it there is the series’ mode: satire keeps the eye busy, and elevation needs the eye stilled. One scene reaches height. In Bedlam, Tom, half naked and chained, is held by Sarah in a pose that recalls a deposition or a pietà, and the comedy of the madhouse round him turns to horror. The gaming house has a moment of dreadful energy in the ruined man on his knees, his wig gone and his fist raised; the Fleet has pathos in Sarah’s faint. Elsewhere there is wit, abundance and the pleasure of reading, not elevation. One full height at the end of a long run without it is what the axis places low, and the figure is not compensated by the series’ other strengths.
John Cage · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
Elevation is real but not the work’s own. In a full hall a performance can reach a strange height: a large audience holding still together, the building’s sound coming forward, the moment when the room is heard as a room. But the work supplies no beauty, terror or grandeur of its own. It supplies a condition in which the listener may find them, and often does not; the height depends on the room, the audience and the weather, and the score gives nothing to fix it. Across the whole length there is one sustained state, not repeated rises, and a single summit in a flat span scores below a work that rises again and again.
René Magritte · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Elevation is not what this picture seeks, and the figure says so. There is no grandeur here, no beauty pressed to its height, no terror and no transport. The register is flat by design: a sign painter’s deadpan, a pipe with the tidy highlights of a catalogue, words in a teacher’s cursive. What it gives instead is a small, cold vertigo when the sentence turns the picture over and the floor drops out of the act of looking. It comes once at first sight, and again more faintly each time the ambiguity of the first word is noticed: real, of one kind, closer to wit than to awe. Height and frequency are low by the work’s own choice of register; the figure stays above the bottom because the vertigo is genuine and recurs.
Grant Wood · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The lowest of the twelve, and what holds it there is that the picture does not elevate and does not try to. It is dry, close and precise, a little airless by design: flat daylight, almost no sky, no depth beyond the barn and the spire. Its intensity is the intensity of the stare, which grips the viewer and does not lift him. There is a quiet beauty in the paint, the pale clapboards, the curtain in the pointed window, the glint of the spectacles and of the tines, and a faint chill in the woman’s sideward look; there is no transport, no terror and no grandeur. Arrest is not elevation. The axis is ungated, and a work may be great in other respects without being sublime.
Gerhard Richter · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Elevation is withheld by design. The grey, the amateur source, the ordinary pose and the softening blur all lower the temperature; Richter’s photo-paintings of these years refuse the grand manner, and this one refuses it hardest, since its subject is a man the history painting of the period would have made a hero or a villain. What rises is a cold, quiet dread: the face posed for a family camera, which grows less innocent the longer it is looked at, and the soft dissolve of the figure, which makes the living man look already like a ghost. That height is real and recurs on return. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is that it is one register, small and still, one held note, without grandeur, terror of scale or transport.
Nam June Paik · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Elevation is not refused, but it is held down by wit. There is a real stillness here: a figure that does not move, an image that does not move, and between them a loop of attention that has no end, which in the room can feel like the edge of an infinite regress or like a held breath. That quiet height is the work’s own. But it is one register, reached once and sustained, not rising; the comedy of the setup keeps it from transport, and the apparatus, the cables and the casing are plain. A single summit held level, below works that rise repeatedly.
Robert Altman · Film
7.7 · Tier III
Elevation is not the film’s register, which is cool, quick and amused; when it rises it rises as dread or as virtuosity. The opening take, roving through the studio lot past pitches and gossip, is a lift of pure command. The killing in the Pasadena parking lot at night, a struggle that ends face down in a few inches of water, is the one scene of real terror, and its clumsiness is what frightens. The desert resort, its mud baths and night pool, gives a brief cold sensuousness, and Thomas Newman’s score keeps a low hum of unease under the comedy. What holds the axis among the lowest is frequency: the middle of the film is procedure and lunch, and much of what lifts is admiration of the making rather than feeling.
Jasper Johns · Visual art
7.7 · Tier III
Elevation is not sought; the register is cool and withholding, and what rises is intermittent. The primary colours break out of the grey field in the letters and the bands with a real brightness, and the letters standing from the surface, lit, give a moment of physical wonder as a word turns into a thing and casts a shadow. The cast leg on the overturned chair gives the opposite, a small chill: the body inert, detached and the wrong way up among signs. Neither reaches transport, and neither recurs across the width as a sustained field does; the length gives presence rather than grandeur. What holds the axis among the lowest is that the work seldom rises, and does not depend on rising.
René Magritte · Visual art
7.6 · Tier III
The register is deadpan: flat daylight, a grey sea, a man standing still. What elevation there is comes from the uncanny, the small shock of an apple hanging where a face should be, and from the quiet of the sea behind it, a horizon too calm for the event. The shock is real and lasts. But it is one effect, seen at once, and the painting refuses grandeur, terror and beauty as matters of principle. It is not a flat work: the cloud bank and the sea give an air of weather and distance that lifts it above a diagram. One summit moment, held and not repeated, holds the axis among the lowest of the twelve.
Berthe Morisot · Visual art
7.6 · Tier III
The elevation is of one quiet kind: tenderness, hush, the suspension of a room where a child sleeps. It is sustained across the whole surface rather than gathered to a moment, and the whites of the veil have a real luminous lift; the picture reaches a stillness that holds the eye. It does not rise to grandeur, terror or transport, and it does not try to. On a canvas of one moment frequency is not the question; height is. Beside The Swing (7.8), which carries a single kind of delight high, the hush here is genuine and low in pitch, and this is the lowest of the eleven axes the summit counts.
Harold Ramis · Film
7.4 · Tier III
The register is comic, and elevation comes at intervals, of two kinds. The dreadful: the suicides played as farce until the body is laid out and identified and Phil wakes again to the radio, the gag turned into the terror of an existence that cannot end; the alley at night, where the old man dies in the cold. The warm: the ice sculpture, Rita’s face carved and snow falling as she dances, and the piano at the party. These are real rises. What holds the axis below every other but The Encompassed is frequency and height: the summits are few and brief in long stretches of comedy played level, the score points at feeling more than it raises it, and the comic frame never holds the largest moments long enough to transport.
Vlado Milunić and Frank Gehry · Architecture
7.3 · Tier III
Height is moderate and frequency low. Elevation comes in one view, the corner seen from the bridge or from across the river, where the glass tower appears to lean into the solid one and the river front ripples beside them, and the building looks as if it moved. At dusk, with the glass lit, the effect is strongest. From the rooftop terrace the view over the river to the castle is fine, but that is the city’s height, not the building’s. Under the glass tower at street level the slanting columns give a moment of instability, a lift of surprise rather than awe. The register is wit and delight, warm and buoyant; the building never reaches grandeur or terror, and its offices and hotel rooms do not rise. A single striking image, seen again and again from outside, is what it has.
Quentin Tarantino · Film
7.0 · Tier III
The register is comic talk and dread, and the dread rises in three places. Orange bleeding in the back seat in the first minutes at the warehouse, crying and held by White, sets a floor of pain under the talk. The torture is the first summit: Madsen dancing to “Stuck in the Middle with You”, the camera turning away to an empty doorway while the ear is cut, the radio returning as the scene returns, then the petrol and the shot from the floor. The flashback in which Freddy shoots the woman in the car is a sudden cold drop. The last minute, Orange’s confession and White’s howl, is the second summit. Elsewhere the diner, the Joe scenes and the bickering in the warehouse are played level, and elevation is rare across the whole.
Francis Ford Coppola · Film
6.7 · Tier II
The elevation is real and mostly cold. Clouds race over the city at the opening, the sky made a clock; the Motorcycle Boy comes out of the dark into a street fight as a figure of legend; Rusty James is lifted out of his body above the street after the mugging; the fish are in colour, the only colour in the world, seen by the one man who cannot see it. Copeland’s score gives these a pulse rather than a swell. What holds the axis is that many heights are bought by manner. The shadows and smoke pose, some heights are of style rather than feeling, and the middle of the film flattens into hanging about, which it means to show and sometimes simply is.
Francis Ford Coppola · Film
6.4 · Tier II
When the film rises it rises high, and it rises seldom. The confession holds elevation at a whisper: Pacino breaks on Fredo’s name before a cardinal in a quiet garden. The opera carries four murders to the cadences of Mascagni’s music. On the steps Michael’s scream comes first without sound and then with it, the summit of the film’s dread, and the intermezzo carries his three dances into an old man’s fall in a Sicilian yard. Frequency holds the figure low. The New York hour moves from party to boardroom to festa at one level pitch, the Atlantic City massacre is noise rather than height, and nearly all the elevation is gathered into the confession and the last half hour.
Hannah Höch · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The lowest of the twelve, because elevation is not the register. The energy is comic, centrifugal and aggressive: heads on wrong bodies, figures turned on their sides, a dancer spun loose of gravity. What rises is an intermittent vertigo, as the eye is thrown from wheel to wheel across a large field and finds no ground to stand on. The central whirl gives the one moment close to wonder: a body released from weight and from its head, liberation and decapitation at once. Elsewhere the response is recognition, laughter and the pleasure of decoding. What holds the axis here is the aim: derision, not beauty, terror or grandeur. It stands above works that refuse elevation entirely because the whirl lifts it, at moments, into something stranger.
Bernd and Hilla Becher · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Elevation is refused by method. The grey sky, the even light, the deadpan centring and the repetition all work against transport, and that is the point. What height there is comes in two kinds. A single tower, isolated against blank sky and held in the frame like a specimen, can take on an odd monumentality, at once heroic and absurd, the spherical tanks on their stalks almost figures. And the grid read as a whole yields a quiet, cumulative wonder at variety within one plan, the pleasure of the naturalist’s plate. Neither is a sublime, and neither rises often; the cumulative effect is one effect, steady and cool. The figure describes a work that chose calm, not a failure to reach.
Agatha Christie · Literature
7.7 · Tier III
Elevation comes once, and it is the cold kind. The revelation that the narrator is the murderer, and the Apologia that follows, produce a real vertigo: the whole book turns over in the reader’s hands. The last pages, in which the doctor writes his confession knowing what he will take when he has finished, have a dry chill that lingers, and Poirot’s private offer, a quiet death to spare Caroline the trial, has a hard gravity. Against that, the book does not aim at height. Its register is comic and domestic, its prose plain, its scenes of inquiry brisk and level; there is no beauty of description, little terror before the end, and no grandeur of feeling. Ackroyd’s death is a puzzle, not a loss. One summit, of intellectual surprise more than transport, in a level work holds the axis at 6.6, level with The Encompassed at the foot of the twelve.
Norse · Visual art
7.6 · Tier III
Elevation is not the register of these objects, and the axis is held among the two lowest of the twelve for it. They are small, squat and handled, and the queens’ doleful faces and the warders’ bulging eyes are met as often with a smile as with awe. There is grimness in some: the shield-biters above all, a fury made a figure a few centimetres high, and the kings with drawn swords across their knees in a stern, hieratic stillness. Seen in a case as a company, rows of stern faces, the set reaches a quiet gravity. But the height is low and of one kind, and it does not recur with force: most bishops, knights and pawns stir nothing beyond pleasure in the making.
Shepard Fairey · Visual art
7.3 · Tier III
The register is uplift, and it is achieved once, by one device: the face lifted and lit from the side, gazing up and away, the pose of the visionary the poster inherits from the propaganda print and the saint’s picture. On a wall at poster size, among others, there is a lift; the graphic economy is handsome, and the red and blue against the buff light have a clean, ceremonial force. But the elevation is designed for a glance and a mood, and it does not deepen on looking. Height is moderate and frequency is one: a single effect, multiplied across a city rather than renewed within the image. Beauty is present as graphic finish more than as anything that holds the eye. A poster’s sublime is a lift, not transport, and the axis stands with The Bottomless Well a step above the lowest.
Keith Haring · Visual art
7.3 · Tier III
The elevation is that of a shout: a field of orange at scale, heavy black line, a slogan read at sixty kilometres an hour, and a frieze of figures in convulsion. There is a real charge in meeting it, from the highway or from the court, and the devouring forms carry a cartoon terror. But the idiom keeps that terror light by design. Haring’s line is buoyant, his figures dance even in their torment, and the register is the public poster’s, not the dreadful. The wall rises once, at first sight, and does not rise again on longer looking; the figures do not deepen into dread or grandeur. Beside The Swing, whose beauty is sustained across the canvas, and For the Love of God, a single dazzle and a skull, its single impact stands a little lower. With The Bottomless Well, the lowest of the twelve after The Encompassed.
Jack Vettriano · Visual art
6.5 · Tier II
There is a lift, and it is real for a great many viewers: the couple dancing alone on an empty shore, under a sky that threatens and does not break, is romance carried past the point of sense into the weather. The grey light, the low horizon and the expanse of wet sand give the dancers a smallness and a privacy close to transport, and the wind gives the stillness an instant. That is the height, and it is one height in one register: wistful, cinematic, sweet. It does not recur within the picture, since every part serves the same effect at the same pitch, and it does not deepen on looking. The sky is weather, not grandeur, and nothing approaches awe. Elevation of the kind a popular song gives, achieved and narrow.
Tracey Emin · Visual art
7.5 · Tier III
Elevation is not sought, and what there is runs low and dark. The register is abjection: the dread of a bed that looks like an aftermath, the pathos of small comforts among the bottles, the sense that someone nearly did not get up. At its best the bed has the stillness of a deathbed or a scene after a crime, an emptiness shaped by a body that has gone, and that is a real claim on the dreadful sublime, once. What holds it lowest of the twelve is frequency and depth. The bed is grasped whole at first sight; the chill does not recur or deepen with looking; and for much of its public the response was a laugh or an argument about whether it was art. The dread is in the object, not in a picture of it, and it is single.
Haddon Sundblom · Visual art
7.3 · Tier III
The register is delight, coziness and twinkle. The best pictures have a glow: firelight on the fur and the cheek, the white of the beard against the red, a face that seems to have just laughed. That charm is of a high order and recurs throughout; its height is low. Nothing in the body reaches grandeur, terror or transport; the work’s whole purpose is to keep the reader comfortable, and it succeeds by never rising. There is pleasure here rather than lift. The figure credits steady, well-made delight; no picture in the body astonishes.
Michael Graves · Architecture
7.2 · Tier III
Height is low, and so is frequency. Elevation comes in one place and of one kind: Portlandia, a copper giant reaching down from above the entrance toward the people on the pavement, startling at close range, her outstretched hand giving the street front its one moment of address. The block itself does not rise. It is squat by design, its pilasters press rather than lift, and the keystone of dark glass reads as weight bearing down. Colour on a grey day gives a lift of pleasure, warm and amused, not sublime. Inside, the record before 2020 is of low, dim rooms and a cramped lobby. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve, with The Encompassed, is that the building delights more than it elevates, and delights from its front.
Damien Hirst · Visual art
7.5 · Tier III
The room refuses elevation as a principle of its look: fluorescent clarity, white and pale colour, the regulated rhythm of boxes. What height it has is cold and small. The coloured bottles glow like the windows of an old chemist’s, a domestic and faintly sacred light. The insect-killer’s blue tube and the deaths it makes are the one note of dread, and a quiet one, discovered rather than met. There is a chill in the completeness of the order, a whole wall of remedies arrayed against an enemy who is not shown. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the design itself: the room is built to be clinical, and it is, so that none of this rises far and nothing rises often. It sits above the bare refusal of a single readymade, since the room gives the eye more, and well below any painting that rises.
Wes Anderson · Film
6.9 · Tier II
Elevation is rare and gentle, which is the film’s register, not a fault in kind. The highest point is the end: Dignan in the prison yard turning to walk back into the building in slow motion while his friends watch, to the Rolling Stones’ “2000 Man”, a melancholy the comedy has been preparing. The second is the parting of Anthony and Inez, a love declared across a language they share only in part, through a translator, comic and plainly moving. Fireworks set off in a field are a small, earned joy. The cold-storage robbery reaches comic panic, not dread. Measured on height and frequency, the film rises perhaps three times, never far, and the motel stretch is level throughout.
Banksy · Visual art
7.0 · Tier III
The image produces one effect and produces it reliably: a pang, the small drop of the heart at a red shape going up and away from a small hand. It is real, and it is why the image is loved. It is not elevation. There is no terror, no grandeur and no transport, and the scale is a child’s on a wall at eye level. Nor does the effect recur in a second register or deepen with return: it is the same pang at the hundredth meeting as at the first, and on mugs and phone cases it thins toward sweetness. The one moment the image touched something larger was its shredding at Sotheby’s in 2018, a picture eaten under the eyes of the room, and that height belongs to the event and the later work.
Marcel Duchamp · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Elevation is refused, and the refusal is the point: by Duchamp’s own account the readymades were chosen in indifference to their look, and this one for its offence as much as its plainness. There is an elevation all the same, and it was seen in 1917. In Stieglitz’s photograph the glazed bowl, lit from one side against a dark ground, reads as a shrouded seated figure, and the title of Louise Norton’s essay, “Buddha of the Bathroom”, records it. What holds the axis this low is that the height is the photograph’s more than the object’s: before a replica in a vitrine the response is recognition, a laugh, an argument, not transport. The shock of 1917 was a scandal, not a sublime. One faint summit, once, carried by another man’s camera.
Andy Warhol · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Elevation is refused by design, and that refusal is what holds the axis lowest of the twelve. The register is deadpan: the cans are frontal, evenly lit, centred, without shadow or drama, and the hand that made them hides itself. What lift there is comes from the set, not the canvas. Seen as thirty-two, rank on rank, the cans take on a still, hieratic presence that some viewers liken to a wall of icons; the effect is real and faint, closer to a litany than to transport. Before any single canvas the response is recognition and a smile. There is no terror, no grandeur of scale, each canvas the size of a small window, and no summit that recurs. The axis sits where the work’s own coolness puts it, at the foot of the range for a work of its standing.
James Montgomery Flagg · Visual art
7.2 · Tier III
There is a moment near the uncanny: the eyes that follow, the finger that seems to leave the sheet, the old face set hard. Met on a wall at full size, the effect is a jolt rather than a transport, a small dread of being singled out. The axis is indifferent to the kind of elevation, and the response is real; but it is one effect, brief, and the same each time. There is no grandeur in the figure, whose stiffness is the point, and no beauty is sought; the colours are the flag’s colours and lift nothing. The height reached is low and does not recur within the image, and this is the lowest of the twelve.
Maurizio Cattelan · Visual art
6.7 · Tier II
Elevation is refused, and the title says so: the register is the comic, the gag of the banana and the slapstick of the peel. There is a small visual pleasure, a curve of yellow on a white wall crossed by a diagonal of grey tape, a clean graphic sign that photographs well, and it was the sign that circulated. But before the object the response is a laugh, a shrug or an argument, not transport, beauty or dread, and the crowds at Miami Beach came for the scandal and the price. The one approach to something larger is the browning fruit, a faint vanitas, and the instructions cut it short by replacing the banana before it can rot. That is what holds the axis lowest of the twelve: no summit at all, by design.