La disincarnazione dello sguardo. Dal suave al sublime

The aesthetics of the sublime are canonically associated with the spectacle of shipwreck that Lucretius included in the second proem of De rerum natura. Yet, in the verses that immediately follow, Lucretius himself proposes a variation of spectare that he considers even more intense and that coincides with the experience of those who observe the world from above. This article aims to identify, in the oblivion and misunderstanding of this variation, a symptom of the way in which the view from above is recoded through the chronicles of early aerostatic photography, leading up to the era of drones and images of the destruction of Gaza, hypothesizing that such a process can be understood in the newly auratic and expropriative perspective of the so-called technological sublime.