09.26.2019-11.16.2019
Conquering the Alps
The concept of conquering mountains originated in the eighteenth century. Prior to that, the Alps held no interest for travellers. Indeed, they were considered to be dangerous and they thus inspired terror. However, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) introduced a new way of perceiving mountainous landscape in Julie ou La Nouvelle Héloïse to a European audience: he inculcated in his readers a desire to admire the Alps from the shore of Lake Geneva and to follow in the footsteps of Julie and Saint-Preux, the heroes of his epistolary novel. In fact, Rousseau was one of the first authors to include a description of landscape in his writing. In letter XXIII of the first part, Saint-Preux describes to his lover, Julie, the delight he took from a ramble in Valais in which he was exposed to the power of natural forms and energies exhibited by mountains, torrents and waterfalls. Rousseau had taken inspiration himself from a pre-existing idea, that of the Alpine Myth, which appeared in literature for the first time in the work of the Swiss writer Albrecht von Haller (1208-1777) in his poem Die Alpen (1729). In this work, Albrecht had transplanted the classical myth of the Golden Age to the Swiss Alps by imagining a mountain population whose hearts were purer than those of their city-dwelling contemporaries.
The development of tourism (a direct consequence of the birth the Grand Tour) and the new appetite for mountain-spotting attracted many travellers to Switzerland from the second half of the eighteenth century. In addition to tourists, the mountains also began to interest the scientific community, thanks in no small part to the influential Voyage dans les Alpes, a work by Horace Bénédict de Saussure (1740-1799), which was published in four volumes from 1779 to 1796.
The natural power of the Alps continues to captivate the nerves of modern travellers. We are simultaneously seduced and thrilled by the elegant grandeur of its peaks as we follow in the footsteps of those past explorers who felt compelled to see with their own eyes the glories they had been pointed towards by the ink and paper of Rousseau et al.
Artists:
L.A.G. Bacler d’Albe, Jean Dubois, Carl Hackert, Johann Peter Lamy, Jean Antoine Linck, John Ruskin, Marquardt Wocher
image
JEAN-ANTOINE LINCK (Genève 1766 – 1843)
Vue du Mont-Blanc, des Aiguilles du Midi, des Blaitieres, du Géant, du Glacier du Tacul, prise du Sommet du Rocher du Couvercle
Gravure au trait à l’eau-forte et à l’aquatinte aquarellée sur papier vélin, vers 1800
36 x 47,6 cm