Frederic Edwin Church’s great landscape painting, The Heart of the Andes.
As a professional scientist, I hold no credentials for judging or interpreting Church’s paintings. I can only say that I have been powerfully intrigued (stunned would not be too strong a word) by his major canvases throughout my life, beginning with childhood visits to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in my native New York City, when The Heart of the Andes, medieval armor, and Egyptian mummies grabbed my awe and attention in that order.6
But if I have no license to discourse on Church, at least I inhabit the world of Humboldt and Darwin, and I can perhaps clarify why Humboldt became such a powerful intellectual guru for Church and an entire generation of artists and scholars, and why Darwin pulled this vision of nature up from its roots, substituting another that could and should have been read as equally ennobling, but that plunged many votaries of the old order into permanent despair.
When Church began to paint his great canvases, Alexander von Humboldt may well have been the world’s most famous and influential intellectual. If his name has faded from such prominence today, this slippage only records a curiosity and basic unfairness of historical judgment. The history of ideas emphasizes innovation and downgrades popularization. The great teachers of any time exert enormous influence over the lives and thoughts of entire generations, but their legacy fades as the hagiographic tradition exalts novel thoughts and discards context. No one did more to change and enhance science in the first half of the nineteenth century than Alexander von Humboldt, the cardinal inspiration for men as diverse as Charles Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace, Louis Agassiz (whom Humboldt financed at a crucial time), and Frederic Edwin Church.
Humboldt (1769–1859) studied geology in his native Germany with another great teacher, A. G. Werner. Following Werner’s interest in mining, Humboldt invented a new form of safety lamp and a device for rescuing trapped miners. Early in his career, Humboldt developed a deep friendship with Goethe, a more uncertain relationship with Schiller, and a passion to combine personal adventure with the precise measurements and observations necessary to develop a science of global physical geography. Consequently, recognizing that the greatest diversity of life and terrain would be found in mountainous and tropical regions, he embarked on a five-year journey to South America in 1799, accompanied by the French botanist Aimé Bonpland. During this greatest of scientific adventures, Humboldt collected sixty thousand plant specimens, drew countless maps of great accuracy, wrote some of the most moving passages ever penned against the slave trade, proved the connection between the Orinoco and Amazon rivers, and established a mountaineering record (at least among westerners inclined to measure such things) by climbing to nineteen thousand feet (though not reaching the summit) on Chimborazo. On his way home in 1804, Humboldt visited the United States and had several long meetings with Thomas Jefferson. Back in Europe, he met and befriended Simon Bolívar, becoming a lifelong adviser to the great liberator.
The Icebergs, by Frederic Edwin Church.
Humboldt’s professional life continued to revolve around his voyage and the meticulous records and diaries that he had kept. Over the next twenty-five years he published thirty-four volumes of his travel journal illustrated with 1,200 copper plates, but never finished the project. His large and beautiful maps became the envy of the cartographic world. Most important (in influencing Church and Humboldt’s other disciples), Humboldt conceived, in 1827–28, a plan for a multivolume popular work on, to put the matter succinctly, everything. The first two volumes of Kosmos appeared in 1845 and 1847, the last three in the 1850s. Kosmos, immediately translated into all major Western languages, might well be ranked as the most important work of popular science ever published.
Humboldt’s primary influence on Church can scarcely be doubted. Church owned, read, and reread both Humboldt’s travel narratives and Kosmos. In an age when most painters aspired to a European grand tour to set the course of their work and inspiration, Church followed a reverse route, taking his cue from Humboldt. After his apprenticeship with Thomas Cole, Church first traveled, at Humboldt’s direct inspiration, to the high tropics of South America, in 1853 and 1857. In Quito, he sought out and occupied the house that Humboldt had inhabited nearly sixty years before. He painted the great canvases of his most fruitful decade (1855–65) as embodiments of Humboldt’s aesthetic philosophy and convictions about the unity of art and science. Even subjects maximally distant from the tropics bear Humboldt’s mark of influence. The Icebergs and Church’s general fascination with polar regions closely parallel Humboldt’s second major expedition, his Siberian sojourn of 1829. Church did not visit Europe until 1867, and this cradle of most Western painting did not provoke a new flood of great creativity.
We can best grasp Humboldt’s vision by examining the plan of Kosmos. On the first page of his preface, Humboldt states the grand aim of his entire work:
The principal impulse by which I was directed was the earnest endeavor to comprehend the phenomena of physical objects in their general connection, and to represent nature as one great whole, moved and animated by internal forces.
“Nature,” he adds later, “is a unity in diversity of phenomena; a harmony, blending together all created things, however dissimilar in form and attributes; one great whole animated by the breath of life.” This twofold idea of natural unity forged by a harmony of internal laws and forces represented no mere rhapsodizing on Humboldt’s part; for this vision expressed his view of natural causation. This view of life and geology also embodied the guiding principles that animated Church and that Darwin would tear down with a theory of conflict and balance between internal and external (largely random) forces.
Volume one of Kosmos covers, on the grandest possible scale, the science that we would call physical geography today. Humboldt ranges from the most distant stars to minor differences in soil and climate that govern the distribution of vegetation. (Kosmos is fundamentally a work in geography, a treatise about the natural forms and places of things. Thus, Humboldt includes little conventional biology in his treatise and discusses organisms primarily in terms of their geographic distribution and appropriate fit to environments.)
Kosmos takes seriously, and to the fullest possible extent, Humboldt’s motivating theme of unity. If volume one presents a physical description of the universe, then volume two—an astounding tour de force that reads with as much beauty and relevance today as in Church’s era—treats the history and forms of human sensibility toward nature. (The last three volumes of Kosmos, published many years later, present case studies of the physical world; these volumes never became as popular as the first two.) Humboldt wrote of his overall design:
I have considered Nature in a two-fold point of view. In the first place, I have endeavored to present her in the pure objectiveness of external phenomena; and secondly, as the reflection of the image impressed by the senses upon the inner man, that is, upon his ideas and feelings.
Humboldt begins volume two with a discussion of the three principal modes (in his view) for expressing our love of nature—poetic description, landscape painting (need I say more for the influence upon Church?), and cultivation of exotic plants (Church made a large collection of dried and pressed tropical plants). The rest of the volume treats, with stunning erudition and encyclopedic footnotes, the history of human attitudes toward the natural world.
Humboldt embodied the ideals of the Enlightenment as well and as forcefully as any great intellectual—as Voltaire, or Goya, or Condorcet. If he lived so long, and past the hour of maximal flourishing for this philosophy, he remained firm in his convictions, a beacon of hope in a disillusioned world. Humboldt conveyed the Enlightenment’s faith that human history moved toward progress and harmony based on the increasing spread of intellect. People may differ in current accomplishments, but all races are equally subject to similar improvement. In the most famous nineteenth-century statement of equality made by a scientist (see also essay 27), Humboldt wrote:
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p; While we maintain the unity of the human species, we at the same time repel the depressing assumption of superior and inferior races of men. There are nations more susceptible of cultivation, more highly civilized, more ennobled by mental cultivation than others, but none in themselves nobler than others. All are in like degree designed for freedom.
In expressing his liberal belief in progress, Humboldt contrasts his perception of unity with the standard views, based on division and separation, of such social conservatives as Edmund Burke. For Burke and other leaders of the reaction against liberalism, feeling and intellect must be treated as separate domains; emotion, the chief mode of the masses, leads to danger and destruction. The masses must therefore be restrained and ruled by an elite capable of mastering the constructive and empowering force of intellect.
Humboldt’s vision, in direct contrast, emphasizes the union and positive interaction between feeling and analysis, sentiment and observation. Sentiment, properly channeled, will not operate as a dangerous force of ignorance, but as a prerequisite to any deep appreciation of nature:
The vault of heaven, studded with nebulae and stars, and the rich vegetable mantle that covers the soil in the climate of palms, cannot surely fail to produce on the minds of these laborious observers of nature an impression more imposing and more worthy of the majesty of creation than on those who are unaccustomed to investigate the great mutual relations of phenomena. I cannot, therefore, agree with Burke when he says, “it is our ignorance of natural things that causes all our admiration, and chiefly excites our passions.”
Romantic nonsense might proclaim a superiority of untrammeled feeling over the dryness of accurate observation and measurement, but the Enlightenment’s faith in rationality located highest truth in the mutual reinforcement of feeling and intellect:
It is almost with reluctance that I am about to speak of a sentiment, which appears to arise from narrow-minded views, or from a certain weak and morbid sentimentality—I allude to the fear entertained by some persons, that nature may by degrees lose a portion of the charm and magic of her power, as we learn more and more how to unveil her secrets, comprehend the mechanism of the movements of the heavenly bodies, and estimate numerically the intensity of natural forces. . . . Those who still cherish such erroneous views in the present age, and amid the progress of public opinion, and the advancement of all branches of knowledge, fail in duly appreciating the value of every enlargement of the sphere of intellect, and the importance of the detail of isolated facts in leading us on to general results.
Humboldt viewed the interaction of feeling and intellect as an upwardly spiraling system, moving progressively toward deep understanding. Feeling excites our interest and leads us to a passionate desire for scientific knowledge of details and causes. This knowledge in turn enhances our appreciation of natural beauty. Feeling and intellect become complementary sources of understanding; knowing the causes of natural phenomena leads us to even greater awe and wonder.
Thus do the spontaneous impressions of the untutored mind lead, like the laborious deductions of cultivated intellect, to the same intimate persuasion, that one sole and indissoluble chain binds together all nature. . . . Every imposing scene in nature depends so materially upon the mutual relation of the ideas and sentiments simultaneously excited in the mind of the observer.
Humboldt rooted his theory of aesthetics in this idea of mutual reinforcement. A great painter must also be a scientist, or at least committed to the detailed and accurate observation, and to the knowledge of causes, that motivate a professional scientist. For the visual arts, landscape painting becomes the principal mode of expressing the unity of knowledge (as poetry serves the literary arts and cultivation of exotic plants the practical arts). A great landscape painter is the highest servant of both nature and the human mind.
Church accepted Humboldt’s aesthetic theory as his own guide (and why not, for I think that no one has ever improved upon this primary statement of humanism). Church achieved primary recognition and respect as the most scientific of painters (when such a designation implied admiration, not belittlement). Critics and connoisseurs viewed his penchant for accuracy in observation and rendering, both for intricate botanical details in his foregrounds and for geological forms in his backgrounds, as a primary source of quality in his art and as a key to his success in awakening feelings of awe and sublimity in his viewers.
I do not, of course, say that Church attempted, or that Humboldt advocated, a slavish rendering of particular places with snapshot accuracy. Humboldt did stress the value of colored sketches from nature, even of photographs (though he felt, in the nascent years of this art, that photography could only capture the basic forms of a landscape, not the important details). But Humboldt realized that any fine canvas must be conceived and executed as an imaginative reconstruction, accurate in all details of geology and vegetation, but not a re-creation of a particular spot:
A distinction must be made in landscape painting, as in every other branch of art, between the elements generated by the more limited field of contemplation and direct observation, and those which spring from the boundless depth and feeling and from the force of idealizing mental power.
None of Church’s great tropical paintings represent particular places. He often constructed idealized vantage points so that he could encompass all life zones, from the vegetation of lush lowlands to the snow-clad Andean peaks, in a single composition. (For example, although Church’s most famous painting of Cotopaxi includes no lowland plants, most of his other canvases of this great volcano feature palm trees and other luxuriant plants that do not grow in such proximity to the mountain.) Moreover, though likely with no conscious intent, Church did not always depict his geological background accurately. Volcanologist Richard S. Fiske discovered that Church painted the symmetrical cone of Cotopaxi with steeper sides than the actual mountain possesses. We may, however, view this “license” as a veering toward accuracy, for Humboldt himself had drawn Cotopaxi with even steeper slopes!
Humboldt’s influence over Church extended well beyond general aesthetic philosophy and the value of science and accurate observation. One may identify landscape painting as the principal mode of glorifying nature in the visual arts, but which among the infinitude of earthly landscapes best captures the essence of wonder? Humboldt replied with the aesthetic conviction that still motivates such modern ecological movements as the battle to save the rain forests of the Amazon. Maximal diversity of life and landscape defines the summum bonum of aesthetic joy and intellectual wonder. This maximal diversity thrives in two circumstances that enjoy their greatest confluence in the High Andes of South America. First, the vastly greater diversity of vegetation in tropical regions marks the equatorial zone as immensely more varied than temperate areas inhabited by most Western peoples. Second, diversity will be greatly enhanced by a range of altitudes, for the sequence of lowland to mountaintop in a single district may span the entire panoply of lowland environments from equator to pole, with an equatorial mountaintop acting as a surrogate for the Arctic. Thus, the higher the mountains, the wider the range of diversity. The Himalayas might win our preference, but they lie too far north of the equator and do not include zones of tropical lowland vegetation. The Andes of South America became the premier spot on earth for landscape painting, for only here does the full luxuriance of the lowland jungle stand in the shadow of such a massive range of snow-clad peaks. Humboldt therefore chose South America, as did Darwin, Wallace, and Frederic Edwin Church, much to the benefit of art and history. Humboldt wrote:
Are we not justified in hoping that landscape painting will flourish with a new and hitherto unknown brilliancy when artists of merit shall more frequently pass the narrow limits of the Mediterranean, and when they shall be enabled, far in the interior of continents, in the humid mountain valleys of the tropical world, to seize, with the genuine freshness of a pure and youthful spirit, on the true image of the varied forms of nature?
One of Church’s
versions of Cotopaxi, showing the full range of environments from tropical lowland vegetation to the snow-clad volcanic peak.
When Church was still a small boy, Humboldt’s travel writings also played a major role in setting the life course of a young English graduate who planned to become a country parson (not from any particular zeal for religion, and probably to maximize time for avocational interests in natural history). But Charles Darwin veered down a different course to become one of history’s most important intellectuals—and Humboldt served as his primary influence. Darwin read two books that focused his interests upon natural history in a more serious and professional way: J. F. W. Herschel’s Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural History and Humboldt’s Personal Narrative of the South American voyages (1814–29). As an old man, Darwin reminisced in his autobiography:
[These books] stirred up in me a burning zeal to add even the most humble contribution to the noble structure of Natural Science. No one or a dozen other books influenced me nearly so much as these two.
Moreover, directly inspired by Humboldt’s views on the importance of tropical travel, Darwin hatched a plot to visit the Canary Islands with some entomologist friends. Darwin involved his mentor, botanist J. S. Henslow, in the plan, and this decision led, clearly if indirectly, to Darwin’s invitation to sail on the Beagle, the beginning and sine qua non of his rendezvous with history. Mathematician George Peacock asked Henslow to recommend a keen young naturalist to Captain FitzRoy, and Henslow, impressed with Darwin’s general zeal and desire for tropical travel, suggested his young protégé for the job. The Beagle spent five years circumnavigating the globe, but the trip had been conceived primarily as a surveying voyage to South America, and Darwin spent the bulk of his time in and around Humboldt’s favorite places. More than mere accident underlies the fact that the twin discoverers of natural selection, Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, both cited Humboldt as their inspiration, and both made their most extensive, youthful trips to South America. On April 28, 1831, as Darwin prepared for the Beagle voyage, he wrote to his sister Caroline:
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