ABSTRACT
In the first chapter of this volume we saw that the mountain received relatively little aesthetic attention in Classical and biblical literature. Among the few examples of real aesthetic focus a handful were positive, but the majority were either negative or at best neutral judgments of the mountain’s aesthetic qualities. The second chapter, ‘Geographia, prospectus, pictura’, next traced the development of an idea of the mountain and the mountain landscape as objects worthy of aesthetic appreciation in the 16th and 17th centuries. This process took place in the space between new, progressive ways of looking at nature and the landscape in geographical and artistic contexts. When the mountain became the object of aesthetic consideration in key examples such as Conrad Gessner’s Epistola de Montium Admiratione (1541) the texts provide clear evidence of an emerging positive aesthetic attitude towards the mountain. ‘Theologia et Philosophia Naturalis’ traced the increasingly spirited debate over the origins and function of the mountain in theological and natural philosophical texts from the mid-16th to the early 18th century. Here too, the progressively concentrated study of the mountain made its aesthetic properties more easily accessible to Early Modern thinkers. The texts showed how aesthetic concepts could cross over from theory to observation and vice versa: A thinker’s aesthetic conception of nature could be motivated by his theoretical position on its creation, for example, or a theorist could develop a hypothesis on the origins of the world based on his aesthetic ideas about nature.1 When these cognitive factors were combined with an ability to conceive of the mountain as an aesthetic object in first-hand engagement with the Swiss Alps, we saw a developed aesthetic appreciation of the mountain emerge in the Itinera Alpina (1723) of Johann Jakob Scheuchzer.
