I Have Landed (16 page)

A far more important, but basically ill-founded, tension—the supposed conflict between art and science—dominates our current scholarly discussion of Church and his views about nature and painting. This tension, however, can only be deemed retrospective, a product of divisions that have appeared in our society since Church painted his most famous canvases. Church did not doubt that his concern with scientific accuracy proceeded hand in hand with his drive to depict beauty and meaning in nature. His faith in this fruitful union stemmed from the views of his intellectual mentor Alexander von Humboldt, a great scientist who had ranked landscape painting among the three highest expressions of our love of nature.

Church sent
The Heart of the Andes
to Europe after its great American success in 1859. He wanted, above all, to show the painting to Humboldt, then ninety years old, and who, sixty years before, had begun the great South American journey that would become the source of his renown. Church wrote to Bayard Taylor on May 9, 1859:

But Humboldt died before the painting arrived, and Church's act of homage never bore fruit. Later in 1859, as
The Heart of the Andes
enjoyed another triumph of display in the British Isles, Charles Darwin published his epochal book,
The Origin of Species
, in London. These three events, linked by their combined occurrence in 1859—the first exhibition of
The Heart of the Andes
, the death of Alexander von Humboldt, and the publication of
The Origin of Species
—set the core of this essay. They present, in my view, a basis for understanding the central role of science in Church's career and for considering the larger issue of relationships between art and the natural world.

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:

“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:

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:

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: