“[...]The large canvas, more than ten by five feet, and set in a massive frame, stood alone in a darkened room, with carefully controlled lighting and the walls draped in black.”
“Church did not doubt that his concern with scientific accuracy proceeded hand in hand with his drive to depict beauty and meaning in nature. his fait in this fruitful union stemmed from the views of his intellectual mentor Alexander von Humboldt, a great scientist who had ranked landscape painting among the three highest expressions of our love of nature.”
“In an age when most painters aspired to a European grand tour to set the course of their work and inspiration, Church followed a reverse route, taking is cue from Humboldt.”
“Church achieved primary recognition and respect as the most scientific of painters [...] But Humboldt realized that any fine canvas must be conceived and executed as an imaginative reconstruction , accurate in all details of geology and vegetation, but not a re-creation of a particular spot [...] None of Church’s great paintings represent particular places.”
“[...] I would go further and argue that this vision may now be even more important and relevant today than in the era of Humboldt and Church. For never before have we been surrounded with such a confusion, such a drive to narrow specialization, and such indifference to the striving for connection and integration that defines the best of in the humanist tradition. Artists dare not hold science in contempt, and scientists will work in a moral and aesthetic desert - a most dangerous place in our age of potentially instant destruction - without art. Yet integration becomes more more difficult to achieve than ever before, as jargons divide us and anti-intellectual movements sap our strength. Can we not still find inspiration in the integrative vision of Humboldt and Church?”
from Stephen Jay Gould, “Art Meets Science in The Heart of the Andes: Church Paints, Humboldt Dies, Darwin Writes, and nature Blinks in the Fateful Year of 1859″ in “I have Landed”, Vintage, Random House, 2003.
