Geoscience Reference
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a metaphor for the cruel, violent and sudden eruption of a
peace-loving nation.³6 However, when it and
Chimborazo
came
to London in 1865, Church was praised by the
Art-Journal
in
terms that struck a decidedly fresh note:
At length, here is the very painter Humboldt so longs
for in his writings; the artist who, studying, not in our
little hot-houses, but in Nature's great hot-house bounded
by the tropics, with labour and large-thoughted particu-
larity parallel to his own, should add a new and more
magnificent kingdom of Nature to Art, and to our
distincter knowledge.³7
What caused Church to chime so directly with Humboldt
was the German scientist's assertion in his
Cosmos
(first volume
published 1845) of the intricacy of the connections throughout
nature, and the interdependence of one part - geology, plant
life, animals - upon another. Church wrote home in high excite-
ment describing the flora and fauna, the cactuses taller than trees,
multitudes of birds, the huge wasps' nests 'some as large as
bushel baskets' and the overwhelmingly rich abundance of nature
with which the landscape teemed.³8 Humboldt's evocation of the
vastness of the earth, of its age, and of the eternal rhythms of
nature that he experienced in South America, gave Church the
intellectual foundation for his own 2.4-metre (8-foot) canvases.
With Church's paintings of
Cotopaxi
and
Chimborazo
the subject
of volcanoes in art has fully emerged from its literary strangle-
hold and rococo disdain of scientific reality. Pattern is no longer
dominant over principle.
John Ruskin, fully at home when talking of art, but dis-
comfited when addressing scientific matters, used volcanoes to
create a metaphor for his own anxiety when writing of geolog-
ical turmoil in the fourth volume of
Modern Painters
(1856):
The experience we possess of volcanic agency is not yet large
enough to enable us to set limits to its force; and as we see
the rarity of subterraneous action generally proportioned to
