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Contemporary assessments of mountains, especially the Alps, give no
impression of how they were perceived in bygone times, when James
Howell, a diplomat travelling around 1622, referred to them as
"terrible warts” and utterly useless. In his famous Diary, John Evelyn
named the Alps a huge gravel pit, banished from the beautiful valleys
of Lombardy by nature, and to Thomas Burnet they were the result of the
deluge and a warning from God, as he stated in his "Tellurius Theoria
Sacra” published 1681: As a punishment, he had used them to deface the
surface of the earth. The mother of all atrociousness was, unto him,
the Alps. The discomfort emanating from high mountains was subsequently
on the increase and stayed solid with many authors into the middle of
the18th century. In 1730, Joseph Spencer, a friend of Alexander Pope
and James Thomson, wrote: "I would really love the Alps if there were
no mountains there”. With averseness, travellers often mention exactly
those views, which later on caused great enthusiasm, and even Johann
Gottfried von Herder is said to have closed the curtains when
traversing the Alps. In the 60s of the 18th century, enthusiasm for the
Alps was on the rise among writers inspired by Gessner and Rousseau,
and Ossianic authors. The urge to experience an overpowering nature, as
had been formulated in Edmund Burkes Theory of the Elevated in 1757, is
thus reflected by numerous landscape paintings from the period, which
in the panorama of the Swiss Alps perceived an adequate motif for
expressing such a sensation. Hence, unto the aesthete Johann Georg
Sulzer, they were still wild and barren, yet they inspired him to
ponder the Power of nature.
Dr. Annette Frese
Kurpfälzisches Museum der Stadt Heidelberg |
