Alexander von Humboldt's invention of the natural landscape

Abstract

Landscape took on a new meaning through the new science of plant geography of Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1857). In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, “landscape” was foremost a painterly genre. Slowly, painted landscapes came to bear on natural surroundings, but by 1800 it was still not common to designate sites as “landscapes.” Humboldt looked at plant vegetation with a painterly gaze. Artists, according to him, could suggest in their work that an abstract unity lay hidden underneath observable phenomena. Humboldt projected painted landscapes on nature and found its ecological unity. By doing so, he ultimately stripped the concept of landscape from its primary visual meaning.

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Adrienne Ciuffo, Jean-Marc Drouin, Feit en Fictie, Malcolm Nicolson, Joes Segal and Jo Tollebeek for their comments.

Notes

 In his writings in French, Humboldt used the word paysage a couple of times, in the purely visual meaning the word had acquired at the time, namely, to designate the land as it could be apprehended from one point of view. But Humboldt used much more often words like site agreste, pays, lieux, for ensembles we would now call landscapes.

 Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World (London, 1983), 265; James Turner, The Politics of Landscape (Oxford, 1979); John Dixon Hunt, “‘Ut pictura poesis’: The Garden and the Picturesque in England (1710–1750),” in The Architecture of Western Gardens, ed. Monique Mosser and Georges Teyssot (Cambridge, MA, 1991), 231–41.

 Quoted in Henry V. S. Ogden and Margaret S. Ogden, English Taste in Landscape in the Seventeenth Century (Ann Arbor, MI, 1955), 5.

 Renate Fechner, Natur als Landschaft (Frankfurt aM, 1986).

 Turner, The Politics of Landscape, 23.

 Boudewijn Bakker, “‘Schilderachtig’: discussies over term en begrip in de zeventiende eeuw,” in Het Schilderachtige, ed. Caroline van Eck et al. (Amsterdam, 1994), 11–24.

 Ibid.

 Thomas, Man and the Natural World, 258.

 Josua Bruyn, “Toward a Scriptural Reading of Seventeenth-Century Dutch Landscape Paintings,” in Masters of Seventeenth-Century Dutch Landscape Painting, ed. Peter C. Sutton et al., exhibition catalogue Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam, 1987), 84–103; E. de Jongh, Questions of Meaning: Theme and Motif in Dutch Seventeenth-Century Painting (Leiden, 2000).

 Bruyn, “Toward a Scriptural Reading of Seventeenth-Century Dutch Landscape Paintings,” 100.

 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis (Bern, 1946).

 Walter Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (Frankfurt aM, 1963).

 See Charles Rosen and Henri Zerner, Romanticism and Realism (London, 1984), 131–80.

 Quoted in John Dixon Hunt, The Picturesque Garden in Europe (London, 2002), 14.

 A very early metaphorical use (1690) of the word “landscape” (a certain area referred to as “a kind of natural Landskips”) can be found with Erasmus Warren, an obscure theologian, discussed by Marjorie Hope Nicolson in her Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory (Ithaca, NY, 1959; new ed. Seattle, 1997), 268.

 Tom Williamson, Polite Landscapes: Gardens and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (Baltimore, 1995).

 “Wanschaapene boomen, welker takken en loof zich woest en ongeschikt van’t oosten na het westen spreyen; de stammen krom, oud, en geborsten, met veele kwasten en holligheeden begroeid.” Quoted in Bakker, “Schilderachtig,” 20.

 Jonathon Scott, Salvator Rosa: His Life and Times (New Haven, 1995).

 Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory, 25.

 Bernard Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific, 2nd ed. (New Haven, 1985), 67.

 On the development of the concept of the sublime, see Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory, chapter 7.

 Barbara Maria Stafford, Voyage into Substance (Cambridge, MA, 1984).

 Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory; M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism (New York, 1971); D. G. Charlton, New Images of the Natural in France (Cambridge, 1984); Stafford, Voyage into Substance.

 Thomas, Man and the Natural World, 266.

 Richard Mabey, Gilbert White: A Biography of the Author of the Natural History of Selborne (London, 1986), 158, 166; Ann Payne, Views of the Past: Topographical Drawings in the British Library (London, 1987).

 Quoted in Anthony Pagden, European Encounters with the New World (New Haven, 1993), 111.

 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Les rêveries du promeneur solitaire” (1782), Oevres complètes 1 (Paris, 1959), 1063.

 Alexander von Humboldt, Ansichten der Natur (Stuttgart, 1969), 73–4.

 Alexander von Humboldt, Cosmos, 5 vols., trans. E. C. Otté (London, 1849–52), vol. 2, 456.

 Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (London, 1995), 61.

 Quoted in Josef Schmithüsen, “Was ist eine Landschaft?,” in Das Wesen der Landschaft, ed. Karlheinz Paffen (Darmstadt, 1973), 156–74, 169.

 Alexandre de Humboldt and A. Bonpland, Essai sur la géographie des plantes (Paris, 1805), 17.

 Malcolm Nicolson, “Alexander von Humboldt: Humboldtian Science and the Origins of the Study of Vegetation,” History of Science 25 (1987): 167–94.

 Michael Dettelbach, “Global Physics and Aesthetic Empire: Humboldt's Physical Portrait of the Tropics,” in Visions of Empire: Voyages, Botany and Representations of Nature, ed. David Philip Miller and Peter Hanns Reill (Cambridge, 1996), 258–92.

 Humboldt, Ansichten der Natur, 11, 12.

 Alexander von Humboldt, Personal Narrative of a Journey to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent, ed. Jason Wilson (Harmondsworth, 1995), 82; [translated from Relation historique du voyage aux régions équinoxiales du Nouveau Continent (Paris, 1814), vol. 1, 363].

 Pablo Diener, “Humboldt und die Kunst,” in Alexander von Humboldt: Netzwerke des Wissens, exhibition catalogue (Berlin, 1999), 137–53.

 Humboldt, Cosmos, vol. 2, 452. See also Diener, “Humboldt und die Kunst,” 140.

 Humboldt, Cosmos, vol. 2, 449.

 Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific, 203.

 Ibid.

 Hugh Honour, Neo-classicism (Harmondsworth, 1977), 169.

 Alexander von Humboldt, Ideen, quoted in H. Beck and W.-H. Hein, Naturgemälde der Tropenländer (Stuttgart, 1989), 27.

 Humboldt, Cosmos, vol. 1, 61.

 B. Scholz, “Diese ästhetische Behandlung naturhistorischer Gegenstände,” in Romantiek en historische cultuur, ed. Jo Tollebeek et al. (Groningen, 1996), 81–104.

 Botanist-geographers active in the first half of the nineteenth century, including Alphonse de Candolle, collected huge amounts of data that they presented in giant folded tables. The practitioners of this Tabellenstatistik had the feeling that they were still awaiting “their Newton.” See Janet Browne, The Secular Ark (New Haven, 1983).

 Humboldt, Cosmos, vol. 1, 36.

 Ibid., 37.

 Humboldt, “Ideen,” in Ansichten der Natur, 75.

 Ibid., 77. Alexander von Humboldt: Views of Nature or Contemplation of the Sublime Phenomena of Creation, trans. E. C. Otté and Henry G. Bohn (London, 1850; facsimile reprint, New York, 1975), 220–21.

 Ibid, 221 (77).

 Schelling discusses the shortcomings of the hypothetical method in his Einleitung zu dem Entwurf eines Systems der Naturphilosophie, 4: Von der Möglichkeit einer Speculativen Physik (1799).

 Humboldt, Cosmos, vol. 1, 29.

 And for that reason should be distinguished from the inductive method, for which Humboldt has not much respect (Cosmos, vol. 1, 17, 42).

 T. F. Mitchell, Art and Science in German Landscape Painting 1770–1840 (Oxford, 1993), 32.

 Barbara Maria Stafford, Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine (Cambridge, MA, 1991).

 Mitchell, Art and Science in German Landscape Painting 1770–1840, 32.

 Humboldt, Cosmos, vol. 1, 359, 44.

 Ibid., 457.

 Payne, Views of the Past, 51, 57.

 On Payen, see Marie-Odette Scalliet, “Natuurtonelen en taferelen van Oost-Indië, in Indië omlijst,” exhibition catalogue Koninklijk Instituut voor de Tropen (Amsterdam, 1998), 39–90.

 J. Terwen-de Loos, Nederlandse schilders en tekenaars in de Oost, Catalogue Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam, 1972). Most of Payen's paintings are in the Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde in Leyden.

 Barbara Novak, Nature and Culture: American Landscape and Painting, 1825–1875 (London, 1980), 19.

 Diener, “Humboldt und die Kunst,” 150.

 Novak, Nature and Culture, 35.

 Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 3rd ed. (New Haven, 1982), 83–4.

 Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific, 205–6.

 Robert Rosenblum, Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition (London, 1975), 152.