ABSTRACT
Alexander von Humboldt’s promotion of landscape painting, in particular scenes of tropical American vistas, was rooted in a belief in the potential of the genre to represent a holistic view of several unities—the unity of organisms in ecosystems, of nature and human life, of art and science, and of the entire cosmos. This chapter defines Humboldt’s vision of nature’s ecological web as an intensely picturesque aesthetic construct. That is to say, Humboldt would rely on pictures and visual analogies to describe his belief in the web of nature in its diversity. To value Humboldt as simply a naturalist whose findings influenced the way artists painted the natural world ignores the fact that Humboldt’s own scientific approach was intensely pictorial and aesthetically defined.
