by Helmut Smith

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Mountains

by Helmut Smith

Joined Jul 2020
Published Books 1

On his return trip home from the Holy Land in 1488, Friar Felix Fabri says to his travelling companion: “Never would a person who sees the Alps from afar believe that in the mountains and under the settled snow a voluptuous paradise confronts the durable winter and the permanent masses of ice.”

Fabri announced a novel sensibility. Nowadays, we all agree that the Alps are majestic. But this aesthetic appreciation is largely an eighteenth-century invention, when Europeans first came to think of the mountains as sublime.

In the 1480s, when Fabri wrote, this sensibility was no less strange than that the earth should revolve around the sun or that new continents lay across the wide oceans.

Ptolemy, for example, had called the Alps “the waste land of the Helvetians,” and throughout the Middle Ages, travelers approached the peaks with a mixture of fear, awe, and disgust. No one went out of their way to climb the mountains. And cartographers neither named nor mapped them.

The mountains owe their aesthetic discovery in the postclassical west to the Renaissance. The story begins in the fourteenth century. However stylized or even fictional, Petrarch’s ascent of the slowly sloping Mount Vessoux in 1336 counts as the first Alpine climb since ancient times. Yet Petrarch only marveled at what he saw below him, and quickly admonished himself for his lapse into exhilaration. When he reached the summit, his knapsack copy of Augustine’s Confessions miraculously fell open to book ten, paragraph 15: “And men go about to wander at the heights of the mountains, and the mighty waves of the sea, and the wide sweep of the rivers, and the circuit of the ocean, and the revolution of the stars, but themselves they consider not.”

If Petrarch took the first, hesitant steps, it would be more than a century later before Leonardo da Vinci ascended Monbosa (likely Mount Rosa) in 1511, a mountain so high “it lifts itself above the clouds; and snow seldom falls there,” DaVinci made the climb for no other reason, he tells us, than to see the view and experience the atmosphere of the higher altitude. Of “Monbroso,” we read in his notebooks: “the base of this mountain gives birth to the 4 rivers which flow in four different directions through the whole of Europe. And no mountain has its base at so great a height as this, which lifts itself above almost all the clouds; and snow seldom falls there, but only hail in the summer, when the clouds are highest.”

As da Vinci was already in his lifetime a star in the learned world, others soon followed. Joachim von Watt, more commonly known by his Latin name Vadian, was one of them. In 1518, the learned mayor of St. Gallen climbed Mount Pilatus near Luzern, where according to legend the ghost of Pontius Pilate found his perch. In the fourteenth century, six monks had been put to chains for even considering the climb. But Vadian, who early on had perceived the significance of the Atlantic discoveries, was widely valorized as a seeker of truth.

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