Depictions of America in Humboldt’s Work: The Art Dialogue

- Presentation speakers
  - Elisa Garrido, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Madrid, Spain
Abstract:

Examining the intersection between the Alexander von Humboldt’s work Vues des Cordillères, et monumens des peuples indigènes de l’Amérique (1810) and landscape painting of the nineteenth century, we can note his tremendous artistic legacy, since Humboldt assumed the landscape as the best way of representing Nature. After his travel to America, his publications greatly shaped the visual characterization of American tropical nature and its knowledge, but Humboldt makes picturesque scenes, a term frequently used for referring to the pictorial representation of the scenes of Nature very close to the new sensibility of European Romanticism, in which Humboldt was academically formed. Vues des Cordillères is a work from different contributions and disciplines, which creates a collective document of American space on the move, in a time when America and Europe were exchanging their world knowledge. This paper will explore the depiction of different cultures in one book, through the European imaginary.