Interlude: Geo-Poetics: The Alpine Sublime in Art and Literature, 1779–1860

Summary

There is nothing in Nature more shapeless and ill-figur'd than an old Rock or Mountain.… They are the greatest Examples of Confusion that we know in Nature; no Tempest or Earthquake puts things into more Disorder.” This account of the Alps by Thomas Burnet in The Sacred Theory of the Earth (1684) typifies seventeenth-century impressions of mountains as spectacles of horror and chaos, or as excrescences of a cursed upheaval consequent to the expulsion from Eden. In Milton's Paradise Lost (1667) the fallen angels roam an infernal Alpine topology:

Through many a dark and dreary dale

They pass'd, and many a region dolorous

O'er many a frozen, many a fiery alp;

Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens, and shades of death.

More equivocal post-medieval imaginations had fathomed mountains either as abyssal diabolic chasms or holy summits for ascetic purification. From mountain purgatories to John Ruskin's notion of Alpine paradiso terrestre there is a radical perceptual and conceptual leap. The pinnacles that are in Ruskin's redaction “the beginning and the end of all natural scenery” affirm vertiginous virtue in the scale of the beauty and moral quality of art, architecture, and society. His aesthetics of the Alpine sublime may be summed up in the architectonic formula: “Mountains are the cathedrals of the earth.”