UCLA

The story of landscape’s emergence in early modern Europe occupies stacks of shelving in art-historical libraries, yet a critical framework for the period’s Alpine pictures has never been proposed. This oversight can be attributed in part to the Alps’ ill-suitability to existing paradigms in the study of landscape. Unlike thoroughly researched city and countryside views, Alpine landscapes do not conform to an interest in the vernacular nor to burgeoning notions of civic pride. Depictions of the Alps are thematically, stylistically, and technically idiosyncratic, demanding new explanatory models that might begin to accommodate the artworks’ conceptual density. Excavating the linked histories of art and science, this dissertation argues that Alpine pictures produced from the fifteenth century to the turn of the nineteenth century were an essential condition for evolving perceptions of the earth. My research establishes how landscapes—often characterized as ideologically innocuous forms of art—in fact galvanized new epistemologies. Artists’ inventive renderings of colossal, jagged, and perplexing topographies instigated manifold perspectives, including the radical notion that the earth might possess its own history, one that predates the human drama. I therefore posit an active relationship between Alpine landscapes (pictures of the earth) and the flux of questions, orientations, approaches, intuitions, observations, inferences, and theories that would cohere under the disciplinary category of geology (the scientific study of the earth).

Geology is an innately visual science, and sections, maps, and diagrams played a dominant role in the discipline’s beginnings. But how much more instrumental were images to geocentric thought, I ask in this project, when such thinking was undisciplined? Before it had a name, institutional parameters, or discursive conventions, the “geologic” would have appeared in unruly, experimental formats. And before the Alps were aestheticized under Romanticism—also in the decades around 1800—pictures of the Alps were sites of intense, unruly experimentation, as I strive to show in my analysis. The interval of early modernity, I argue, is one in which picturing the Alps and analyzing the earth were coextensive gestures, as yet ungoverned by disciplines or aesthetic categories. As the need to gain deeper knowledge of the earth—and to thereby pursue remedial action on the earth’s behalf—becomes ever more present and dire, my research sheds light on how early modern Alpine pictures transformed geological thinking and radically expanded epistemological horizons.