Bodmer_Publication

a bush on the right, and the like. (See also Vignette II). The aim here is to represent
the organic unity of a landscape, and it is permissible to speculate that the oval
shape of the vignettes, with its soft outlines (a technique favored by the early nineteenth
century) supports this effect. The composition communicates, and is
intended to communicate, the domestication of the landscape. Again and again,
we come across pastoral elements, and the landscape does not for nothing display
traces of agriculture. But there are also picturesque views, which appropriate
something that is strange, and thus not per se “beautiful.” (As in Tableau 5.)
In all these cases, the image communicates through its aesthetic that, and how,
the human mind knowingly masters the object represented. It can, however,
also communicate that the intellect has reached its limits.
3. The Sublime
Humboldt is not so naive as to believe that his time has come close to understanding
nature fully. On the contrary, such a complete understanding is ultimately
unthinkable for him, because nature is change: once, he seeks recourse to
Goethe’s notion of metamorphosis (21 – 22). And precisely this concept protects
him against a linear view of history that, based on an acknowledgement of progress,
would make of the present the end of history. Even the most progressive
science comprehends the world, for him, only in the concrete horizon of a vaster
incomprehension. It understands that it does not fully understand, and it derives
its last, greatest pleasure from this state of affairs. The experience of such limits is
usually discussed in terms of the sublime, a primarily aesthetic concept. And Humboldt
struggles with this concept, both explicitly and implicitly. He does so explicitly
several times, when he uses it (together with the notion of the picturesque,
with which it merges in unclear ways in his writings) to talk about the validation of
the pleasure of cognition and when that forces him to engage Burke’s definition
of the sublime. 20 Implicitly, he struggles with it as he addresses the achievements
of foreign cultures that, for him, represent a lower stage in the development of
Culture. To them, knowledge is accessible in the shape of “dumpfe Ahndungen
und unvollständige Inductionen,” dull intuitions and incomplete inductions (5).
The term Ahndungen (or Ahnungen) has a lot of shades of meaning that would in
English have to be rendered separately as premonitions, intimations, forebodings,
foreshadowings, and the like, and it is associated with a profound wonder that
leads one into the vicinity of the sublime. 21 This is why “dumpfe Ahndungen” have
considerable value for Humboldt, even though they must be overcome in the
course of history: cultures merge with others and are vanquished by others, in
one sense or other. Here, there are in Humboldt’s thinking the seeds of a conflict
that will have to be addressed later.
The sublime, once again, has to do with unity, but in the last analysis this is the
all-encompassing unity of Nature. In art, therefore, it is above all landscapes that
are sublime: no longer “made” but “experienced,” in their overpowering oneness, as
composed and arranged as they may in fact be, and as much as the light, for example,
may be manipulated. The strangeness of a landscape favors such a perspective,
or it almost appears to demand it, and the New World, as a strange world, offered
itself as the place of the sublime, particularly during the nineteenth century.
Such representation conveys ideological value to a place, and Bodmer is appreciated
in the US at least as much for his landscapes as for his great Indian portraits.
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