ABSTRACT
In the Western world there has been since antiquity a tradition of viewing art as the mirror of nature. However, the idea of aesthetically appreciating nature itself is sometimes traced to a less ancient origin: Petrarch’s novel passion for climbing mountains simply to enjoy the prospect. Yet even if the aesthetic appreciation of nature only dates from the dawn of the Renaissance, its development from that time to the present has been uneven and episodic. Initially, nature’s appreciation as well as its philosophical investigation were hamstrung by religion. The reigning religious tradition could not but deem nature an unworthy object of aesthetic appreciation, for it saw mountains as despised heaps of wreckage left by the flood, wilderness regions as fearful places for punishment and repentance, and all of nature’s workings as poor substitutes for the perfect harmony lost in humanity’s fall. It took the rise of a secular science and equally secular art forms to free nature from such associations and thereby open it for aesthetic appreciation. Thus, in the Western world the evolution of aesthetic appreciation of nature has been intertwined with both the objectification of nature achieved by science and the subjectification of it rendered by art.
