The Artist on the Mountain

For most of the history of civilization, artists and philosophers had no business being on the mountain. At the very top, people believed gods resided—gods one should by no means come too close to while the world was being shaped—and if they weren’t actual gods, then they were spirits that brought misfortune upon humanity. Further down, near springs, there were occasionally nymphs and gnomes, but they, too, rarely had good intentions. Since ancient times, nature as a whole had been viewed, at best, as something to be exploited and thus left to the researchers—Pliny is the best example. Socrates’ statement to Plato is well known: “Give me the benefit of the doubt, my dear friend, for I am eager to learn the truth, but fields and trees have nothing to teach me; rather, it is the people who live in the city.” In other words: Athens was the center of knowledge and productive discourse, but also of the arts; later, Rome; then Florence and Venice, and so on, as the history of civilization tells us: this is where the music played, both literally and metaphorically.

And then came April 26, 1335, when the writer Francesco Petrarca—who had found himself in Avignon during the Schism and was living in a small house on the banks of the Sorgue—decided to climb Mont Ventoux with his brother. Everyone knows this monstrous mountain from television, when once a year the poor cyclists of the Tour de France struggle to pedal up its barren slopes in the bright sunlight—but in Renaissance times, the mountain was not barren, but covered with dense scrub: everywhere there were dreadful blackberry vines and thorny plants, and not a single path to be seen far and wide that would have made their ascent any easier. No wonder that the contents of the letter—which Petrarch dictated immediately after the descent as an account to one of his patrons and which has gone down in world history—led people to doubt: it would have been impossible for a single person to climb the mountain back then! Whatever the truth may be, the account of the ascent of Mont Ventoux decisively changed our Western relationship with nature. For the first time, landscape was regarded as an aesthetic phenomenon. From that point on, there were not only the rapidly developing natural sciences—and, in their wake, the use and exploitation of nature—but also the contemplation of nature, images of nature, and immersion in it—a movement unparalleled in all aesthetic forms, which—thank God—has not fallen silent to this day: without this constant engagement with nature, we would have remained one-dimensional beings, not worth mentioning.