In the eighteenth century, important developments took place as some of the modern sciences, such as geology and geography, started to emerge from traditional natural history. However, it was difficult to differentiate one field from another, and some fields that we regard as clearly separate and independent today might have been treated as representing only different features of the same issue.142 Consequently, the boundaries between differ-ent branches of science were not very distinct, and it was still common for scientists to work in several fields; for instance, both Alexander von Hum-boldt and Charles Darwin took a great interest in geology, although it was not their primary engagement. At the end of the century, there was enough
139 Bowler & Morus 2005, 5; Olson 2008, 87−88.
140 One of the forces that contributed to this change was Comte’s positivism.
Bowler 1997 [1992], 182; Tiitta 1994, 21;
Bowler & Morus 2005, 95–96; Olson 2008, 87–88.
141 Bowler 1997 [1992], 182.
142 Bowler 1997 [1992], 101.
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information available about the history of Earth to establish a system based on field investigation, and different kinds of findings, such as fossils, started to gain importance in theoretical speculations.143 Besides this, a battle was being waged between two competing hypotheses about how Earth’s sur-face was formed: Neptunism and Plutonism, later known as Vulcanism.
Before 1770, Earth was considered static and fairly young.144 The German mineralogist, Abraham Gottlob Werner (1749−1817), who was teach-ing at the minteach-ing school in Freiberg, supported Neptunism, which posited that Earth’s crust had been formed in stages out of a primordial ocean, so Earth was originally covered by water, and each stage was represented by a distinct rock formation. Neptunism was supported by so-called cata-strophists, many of whom believed that the biblical flood was a geological fact that could be proved.145 In the nineteenth century, Neptunism was re-placed by Vulcanism (or Plutonism) as a dominant intellectual theory. Ac-cording to this theory, the rocks forming Earth were formed in fire by vol-canic activity which caused the rising of new land masses. In the 1830s, the English geologist Charles Lyell (1797−1875) published his Principles of Geology (1830–33), in which he introduced the concept of nature’s uniformity. Accord-ing to this methodology – that is uniformitarianism, which Lyell promoted together with his predecessor James Hutton (1726–97) – Earth’s surface was in a state of constant transformation caused by volcanoes, earthquakes and erosion. The supporters of this theory were called uniformitarians.146 Hutton presented his theory of Earth to the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1785, but the two-volume complete version, The Theory of Earth, was not published until 1795. Here he put forward the provocative argument that the history of Earth could be found in natural history, and he ignored the biblical account of the Creation. Hutton focused on the processes forming Earth’s crust, and for him it was enough that God had created a world which kept maintaining itself forever.147 As a matter of fact, he argued that there was no evidence to support the Creation account at all, and therefore the problem concern-ing the origin of the world could not be solved with the help of geology.148 Thus Hutton and Lyell’s own religious values had an impact on their scientific thinking although their ideas remained mostly within the English-speaking world, and the timescale the geologists worked with at the end of the nine-teenth century was still much shorter than it is today. Nonetheless, Lyell’s books were widely read, just as Humboldt’s Cosmos, and these two scientists actually corresponded with each other actively, as well as meeting
person-143 Before the seventeenth century, fos-sils were believed to be remains of some animals that had drowned in the Flood. Edelman 1990, 49, 140;
Bowler 1997 [1992], 101.
144 Mitchell 1993, 8.
145 Bowler & Morus 2005, 104.
146 William Whewell used the term ‘uni-formitarianism’ first in 1832. Lyell de-veloped it from Hutton’s gradualism.
Bowler 1997 [1992], 212; Mitchell 1993, 181; Bowler & Morus 2005, 104, 122.
147 Klonk 1996, 77; Bowler & Morus 2005, 121.
148 Edelman 1990, 151.
ally several times in order to exchange ideas and opinions on scientific is-sues.149 Lyell’s ideas changed the direction of geology, but Alexander von Humboldt gave his ideas common currency.150
During the Romantic era, the outline of Earth’s history was writ-ten anew and the forces of nature were re-evaluated. Along with geogra-phy, geology started to develop as a separate discipline. Actually, the nine-teenth century has been referred to as the heroic era of geology. It was a time when not only the timescale of Earth’s history expanded enormously, but also Earth’s crust became an object of scientific study.151 According to geognosy152, for instance, Earth’s history was displayed on its surface, and it was visible in the different mountain types that demonstrated historical changes.153 At this time, science and the arts interacted, and many scientists were inspired by Romanticism. They wanted to go beyond the observation of details and thus create theories describing the universe as one harmoni-ous entity.154 Mountains, trees, sky and clouds in paintings were no longer seen merely as symbols or potential allegories. Timothy F. Mitchell indicates how the ‘Golden Age’ of geology took place at the same time as the devel-opment of Romantic sensibilities, which concerns the half-century around 1780–1830. In addition, Mitchell states that natural phenomena were be-lieved to have had a direct impact on cultural history, and how new ideas, formed by 1840, conveyed new images and meanings to landscape paint-ing, and by mid-century, a fairly radical new landscape imagery had been formed.155 At this point, Werner’s geognosy had been replaced by new ideas, and the sense of geological time simply expanded vastly. The reason for this change in landscape painting, as stated by Mitchell, was the discovery of geological time.156 Mitchell, moreover, argues that the abandonment of Neptunism led to a new form of landscape art. He regards the year 1830 as a milestone prior to which Neptunism represented the special ideas that in-formed the artworks. Through the change of paradigm into Vulcanism and uniformitarianism, the importance of rain, wind and water as decisive fac-tors in the transformation of Earth’s crust, causing erosion, became evident.
Also the idea of continental drift was introduced.157 This change of paradigm produced new motifs in artworks: artists started to depict the manifesta-tions of the long history of the planet by painting boulders, sedimentary rocks, volcanoes etc. This also caused a shift in the history of landscape in Germany towards naturalism. Instead of idealisation and abstraction, the views depicted were closer to everyday experiences.158 Besides, a similar
de-149 Bowler & Morus 2005, 104; Lubowski-Jahn 2011, 325.
150 Humboldt compared different moun-tain forms in different parts of the planet and found out that the outline of a mountain was based on how the mountain had emerged. If there was a similar emergence process, the mountains looked similar. Löschner 1982, 245.
151 Bowler 1997 [1992], 180.
152 According to Collins English Diction-ary, geognosy is the study of the ori-gin and distribution of minerals and rocks in the earth’s crust. It was super-seded generally by the term geology.
153 Mitchell 1993, 109, 179.
154 Bowler 1997 [1992], 189.
155 Mitchell 1993, 2, 8.
156 Mitchell 1993, 180.
157 The change of paradigm did not hap-pen overnight, nor did everybody approve of it. For example, Goethe and Carus did not accept the new paradigm, but held on to Neptunism.
Mitchell 1993, 7, 181.
158 Mitchell 1993, 190.
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velopment took place in the United States where enthusiasm for geology became widespread, and artists were among the first that were attracted to geology, as the American scholar Rebecca Bedell has written.159 To my mind, the discovery of geological time and its impact on the arts explains the great number of sketches and studies depicting similar motifs of stones, boulders and rocks over and over again in the oeuvre of landscapists both in Dresden and in Düsseldorf, and likewise it can be seen in the production of Werner Holmberg and Magnus von Wright.