2023-04-24 13:24:18
Dhe landscape was invented in one day at the end of April. In 1336, the Italian poet Francesco Petrarch set out to climb Mont Ventoux, which he had always imagined when he was a child in Avignon. The ascent is extremely arduous, and when the hikers finally reach the top and the clouds lie below them, Petrarch is so overwhelmed by the sight that he is speechless.
The idea of climbing a mountain just to look down and enjoy the view had never occurred to anyone before. Since then, Petrarch has been regarded as the first mountaineer and as a pioneer of a new, contemplative, aesthetic relationship to nature, as the inventor of the landscape.
Jacob Burckhardt’s turning point
The Swiss art historian Jacob Burckhardt gave Petrarch’s summit tour a prominent place in his classic “The Culture of the Renaissance in Italy” from 1860: “The discovery of the scenic beauty” is the chapter in which it is said about Petrarch that he had “the pictorial importance of a landscape from its usability”. Landscape is not just nature, somehow a more or less random addition of fields, forests, mountains, valleys and rivers, but the subjective perception of a whole.
In Kant’s famous formulation, this is characterized by “disinterested pleasure” – from which it follows that any practical, professional, inquiring view misses the landscape. The farmer does not see a landscape, but fields with good or less good soil, the Rhine boatman does not see a river landscape, but a transport route with a certain water level. To put it bluntly: If you look as a beneficiary or as a scientist, you won’t see the forest for the trees.
However, anyone who perceives a landscape as such and does not simply see terrain, resources or obstacles automatically makes an aesthetic judgment: “That is beautiful”. Paradoxically, this also applies and especially when this landscape is “disfigured”: because that, anything that disturbs the overall impression, such as a wind turbine or a radio mast, requires an aesthetic view of the whole. If you drive through some areas in Brandenburg on the Autobahn, you might think that some landscapes only come into view because of their extensive wind turbine cultivation.
For the emergence of the modern concept of landscape, however, more was necessary than just the idle mood of poets or painters. Because before industrialization there was much more unused, intact nature (even if every landscape is already a cultural landscape and untouched nature is a myth). So why does landscape – in art, for example – appear at a time when people in Central Europe were making more and more use of nature on a large scale and were not encountering it freely and “without interest”?
The great age of landscape art – from Dutch Baroque painting to Romanticism – ran parallel to its submission to human ingenuity: through the extraction of mineral resources through mining, the development of space through canal projects and an expansion of the road network that existed in Europe in this dimension last existed in ancient Rome.
In a 1963 essay entitled “Landscape. On the function of the aesthetic in modern society” a momentous thesis was put forward: in modern times, landscape replaces what used to be the closed cosmos of ancient or Christian world views. It is a kind of compensation for the disunion with nature that man inevitably has to endure in modern times. As a price for liberation from the immediate context of nature, i.e. an existence as a farmer, shepherd or fisherman, which is completely in harmony with and dependent on nature, for the urban, functional-rational people of the modern age, nature is no longer a whole into which he is unquestionably involved, for better or for worse.
Augustine admonishes the wanderer
Interestingly enough, Ritter also takes on Petrarch’s ascent of the Ventoux, but he interprets it differently than Burckhardt. Because why doesn’t the poet describe the beauty of the view from the summit, which he has laboriously climbed as the supposed first? At the top, Petrarch reads the following in Augustine’s “Confessions”: “People go and marvel at the peaks of the mountains and the boundless floods of the sea, the far-flowing streams, the fringe of the ocean and the orbits of the stars, but they Petrarch falls silent because he realizes that he is forgetting himself in the admiration of “earthly things”: only the inside of one’s own soul is really worth contemplating, namely God.
According to Ritter’s argument, up to the threshold of modern times, human reflection, i.e. the “theory” of the philosophical tradition, was always directed towards the whole cosmos of nature, towards a divine order in which heaven and earth belong together. At best, people only dared to climb a mountain because it was the seat of the gods or a place of revelation. Under the dissecting gaze of modern natural science – through telescopes, prisms and microscopes – the whole disintegrates into individual parts and is thus made technically usable. With the new Copernican worldview, objective knowledge of nature and everyday, “naive” experience diverge: we still see the sun rise and set and the stars circle around us.
Ritter’s point is that in the aesthetic view of landscape the Copernican turn is reversed, for the divided human being heaven and earth are still united: “Landscape is the whole of nature insofar as it belongs to human existence as a ‘Ptolemaic’ world,” says Ritter , which here refers to the “Letters on Landscape Painting” by the romantic painter and philosopher Carl Gustav Carus. Carus, who was friends with Goethe, Caspar David Friedrich and Alexander von Humboldt, had defined landscape art as “earth life pictorial art”. “Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer” or “Kreidefelsen auf Rügen” do not show nature as a geologist or meteorologist would see it, but a landscape that aestheticizes the subject back into a pre-modern entity.
Although landscape painting has continued to develop through the Impressionist revolution and the symbolist charges, the romantic longing for the restoration of lost unity characterizes the popular feeling for nature to this day. If not in art, then definitely in tourism, something that Ritter already criticized in his mild polemic against the “brochure landscape of travel”. Anyone who drives to the Königsstuhl in Rügen today or takes a boat trip on the Rhine has Caspar David Friedrich or William Turner in the back of their minds or in their smartphone media library.
But the enduring effect of Romanticism is easy to understand if one understands its historical core as compensation and worldview repair: the mastery of nature has progressed enormously. In clinging to a whole that has long since faded into mathematical abstraction, the talk of landscape has always had a nostalgic or even openly conservative streak. This is independent of their specific design, i.e. of the political or social question of whether gigantic wind turbines for the energy transition really have to be set up en masse in the Allgäu. Landscape always includes the artificial, the man-made, even the industrial. If one follows Ritter’s compensation thesis, the achievement of aesthetics lies in the fact that it reconciles and integrates what is divided, and also reintegrates a symbol of distance from nature, such as the windmill, into the human horizon.
Successful landscape painting (or poetry) is therefore not simply a timeless idyll that fades out industrial chimneys, canal constructions, locks, collieries, but allows all of this to become part of the landscape. Think of William Turner’s painting Rain, Steam, Speed - The Great Western Railway, which is nothing short of an icon of the modern age. Or Vincent van Gogh’s “Bridge of Arles”. Many examples show that the industrial progress of yesterday appears to later generations as an idyll of today, from the windmills and locks to the colliery towers in the Ruhr area. The black-and-white photographs of disused industrial plants by Ernst and Hilla Becher, which have become classic, can also be read as landscape paintings.
At the historical beginning of the landscape stands the disunion from nature. This division has put us in a position at the end of the fossil age, where we are forced to stop the destruction with huge wind farms. Aesthetics are no longer enough to save. It may irritate our usual view, maybe even destroy the comforting idyll in which outdoor fans and city-weary people could still find themselves illusory: in the mirage of an untouched nature, eternally existing in harmony with man. However, the concept of landscape has always contained the fundamental contradiction that man only enjoys nature that he at the same time subjugates.
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