Mountain Aesthetics in Early Modern Latin Literature

William M. Barton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781138228641
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315391724
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In the late Renaissance and Early Modern period, man's relationship to nature changed dramatically. An important part of this change occurred in the way that beauty was perceived in the natural world and in the particular features which became privileged objects of aesthetic gratification. This study explores the shift in aesthetic attitude towards the mountain that took place between 1450 and 1750. Over the course of these 300 years the mountain transformed from a fearful and ugly place to one of beauty and splendor. Accepted scholarly opinion claims that this change took place in the vernacular literature of the early and mid-18th century. Based on previously unknown and unstudied material, this volume now contends that it took place earlier in the Latin literature of the late Renaissance and Early Modern period. The aesthetic attitude shift towards the mountain had its catalysts in two broad spheres: the development of an idea of 'landscape' in the geographical and artistic traditions of the 16th century on the one hand, and the increasing amount of scientific and theological investigation dedicated to the mountain on the other, reaching a pinnacle in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. The new Latin evidence for the change in aesthetic attitude towards the mountain unearthed in the course of this study brings material to light which is relevant for the current philosophical debate in environmental aesthetics. The book's concluding chapter shows how understanding the processes that produced the late Renaissance and Early Modern shift in aesthetic attitude towards the mountain can reveal important information about the modern aesthetic appreciation of nature. Alongside a standard bibliography of primary literature, this volume also offers an extended annotated bibliography of further Latin texts on the mountains from the Renaissance and Early Modern period. This critical bibliography is the first of its kind and constitutes an essential tool for further study in the field.

1The mountain in Latin: literary heritage

Vides ut alta stet nive candidum
Soracte, nec iam sustineant onus
Silvae laborantes, geluque
Flumina constiterint acuto?¹

Do you see that Soracte stands white
with deep snow and that the woods burdened down
can’t support their load, and that the rivers
too have frozen solid with sharp ice?

The opening lines of Horace’s Odes I.9 make for a convenient introduction to the literary heritage of the mountain in Latin because in many ways Soracte represents a typical mountain image in Classical literature in this passage. Soracte, known today as Soratte, stands in the province of Rome, Italy. Despite its relatively small stature in comparison with the neighbouring Apennines and the Alps to the north, the 691-metre-high ridge is certainly prominent in its surroundings. For the Romans then, Soracte was a mons.² Although frequently and correctly translated as ‘mountain’ in English, the two words are not exactly equivalent. Mons can refer to any heaped-up mass, from argenti mons, ‘a mountain of silver’, to a heap of stones on the back of a wagon.³ In this figurative sense, the use of mons does not differ much from the way that the word mountain is used in English. In one important aspect, however, the use of mons in Latin does diverge from the English mountain: It does not necessarily single out a particular peak. For this reason the Jura mountain range located to the north of the western Alps and which spreads over the borders between France, Switzerland and Germany, could be called mons Jura.⁴ Olympus, similarly, refers to a range of 52 peaks of which the highest, Μύτικας, ‘the nose’, reaches 2918 metres of altitude. Soracte itself is a case in point since the mons is in fact a ridge with several peaks.

This breadth in the use of mons is not to say that Latin does not have terms to designate peaks, ridges and ranges, however. Arx can mean ‘peak’, while iugum is the saddle of a mountain.⁵ Dorsum can take the meaning of ‘ridge’ and scopulus, rupes and cautes all refer to varieties of ‘cliff’ or ‘outcrop’.⁶ But the specific meanings of these words were not always necessarily employed: With the exception of cautes all these words could also be used in Latin with an extended meaning to refer to what an English speaker would call a ‘mountain’. The breadth of meaning among the words referring to the mountain and its parts extends to what appears to be an important distinction in referring to mountains in English: even collis, ‘a hill’, can also be used to refer to what are usually montes, ‘mountains’ in Latin.⁷

This said, mountains are always—in both languages—high places, at least in relation to their immediate surroundings. In Horace’s lines it is not Soracte, which is altus, ‘tall’, rather the snow on the mountain, which is alta, ‘deep’. But the polyvalence of the word altus in Latin works nicely in Horace’s opening line: The word designates something ‘high’, ‘deep’ or ‘thick’. Although grammatically dependant on nive in Horace’s lines, the association of the word with Soracte through enallage would not be incongruous in this context.⁸

It will not seem too naïve to say, then, that the majority of the things commonly written about the mountains in Latin are directly related to its height. This is to say that for the Romans, although the mountain did come to represent more than just a high mass of earth, their ideas did not often progress more than one or two removes from the notion of their altitude. The point at which these ideas do change and develop in Latin will be the focus of this study’s subsequent chapters.

One notion consistently associated with the mountain through its height—as much by the Romans as in the attitude towards the mountain that later developed—is the snow-capped peak. As Horace puts it, alta stet nive candidum / Soracte, ‘Soracte stands white with deep snow’. The mountains of Italy and the Alps are to this day often pictured dusted with snow. Indeed, many of them are actually capped with ice and snow throughout the whole year. Related to the mountains’ white peaks is the gelu acuto, ‘sharp ice’, that frequently accompanies the snow. Associated with the ice in turn—just as in Horace—are the flumina, ‘rivers’, which have their sources in the mountains, and which frequently also figure in descriptions of the mountain in Classical Latin.

Were an ancient prepared to brave the cold, or find a mountain without the typical snow-capped peak, and ascend it, he might do so to gain a view. Ascents were undertaken less frequently for the purposes of appreciating the scene than to carry out a military reconnoitre, or occasionally in the name of research or curiosity. But most ancients climbed the mountains out of the necessity of travel. Travel was often an essential part of waging of war and it is for this reason that a large number of the texts that contain Classical reactions to the mountain environment come from travel accounts or from works concerning military exploits.

Another important aspect of high ranges and peaks in Classical literature is their association with divinity. Indeed, Soracte was no exception to the mountains’ connection with the Gods. In his Aeneid, Vergil describes Apollo as the custodian of the mountain: Summe deum, sancti custos Soractis Apollo, ‘highest of the Gods, Apollo, guardian of holy Soracte’.⁹ The connection between the Gods and the mountain was a cornerstone of Classical mythology and this theme will be accordingly explored in some depth below. Through its association with the Gods and their mythological past, the mountain in Classical literature is frequently also represented as ancient, timeworn or long-standing.¹⁰ This aspect of the mountain’s image also transfers over to the human sphere when the mountain is represented as a primal human domain, another characteristic surveyed later on in this chapter.

Returning to Horace’s Soracte, we can pick out another part of the Classical image of the mountain in the first line: that of stability. Soracte stat. Commenters have—rightly—made something of Horace’s choice of stare in relation to the mountain. It has been said, for example, to bring out the ‘fixity and strength’ of the mountain, or to represent its ‘prominence and permanence’.¹¹ This idea is closely bound to that of size. The mountain’s mass—as well as its altitude—create an impression of immovability and stability that we still associate with it today. This is a straightforward idea to grasp, just as the mountain’s related role as a border or boundary. From a geographical point of view it is easy to see why, for the Romans, separated from the rest of Europe by the literally massive Alps, and the Greeks, in a similar position with the Balkan range, considered the mountains a natural border. Indeed, this idea naturally persists today.

The role of the mountain as a border overlaps with the idea of demarcating the outside, the fringe or the ‘Other’. The mountains make for difficult terrain to move through, cultivate or inhabit and so frequently represent the area outside the civilised towns or cities in Classical literature. This is especially true when the mountains are—like Soracte—wooded, for the forest came to represent a quintessential locus inamoenus for the Romans.¹² The etymology of the modern Romance words for ‘wild’ or ‘uncultivated’ offers an interesting perspective on the symbolism of the forest in the Roman mind: French sauvage; Spanish salvaje; Italian selvaggio; Portuguese selvagem, for example, have all acquired the meaning ‘wild’ and ‘untamed’, as well as the sense of the English ‘savage’ with the force of ‘brutal’, ‘cruel’ or ‘fierce’. They are derived from the Latin silvaticus, an adjective from silva with the sense ‘of or connected to the forest’. Even in Classical Latin literature the related word silvestris carried more weight than simply ‘sylvan’ and could convey a meaning similar to that of the later Romance words.¹³ The mountain, in reality as well as in Classical literature, is commonly wooded, and the forested mountain could be considered a category of its own: situs … silvestris et montanus, ‘a wooded and mountainous place’.¹⁴ The adjective from mons, though lacking the history and modern day success of its partner silvestris, also acquired, through frequent association, some semantic weight outside of its straightforward sense. Montanus, for example, could be combined with asper in Caesar’s homines asperi et montani, ‘rude mountain men’, to add the force of ‘wild’ and ‘uncivilised’ to the phrase.¹⁵

The positive side of the mountain’s connection to the area outside of civilisation, and to the woods, brings us back to Soracte’s flumina. The mountains were a place to find and gather raw materials in the Classical world. They stored water in the form of snow and ice, which in turn gave birth to the rivers. They were also, as we have remarked, frequently convered in forests, whose timber and other natural products kept the ancient housed and warm, as well as mobile.

A further idea related to the mountain in Classical literature is suggested in the first word of Horace’s Soracte Ode: vides, ‘you see’. The mountain is an object almost always identified by being seen. The visual quality of the mountain’s representation in literature explains in part this study’s focus on the aesthetic appreciation of the mountain. It certainly clarifies the emphasis in the material that follows on the way that the Classical literary tradition represents the mountain aesthetically.

The aim of gathering this material here is not to compile a comprehensive collection of all the references to the mountain i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Note on Neo-Latin texts
• Introduction
• 1 The mountain in Latin: literary heritage
• 2 Geographia, prospectus, pictura
• 3 Theologia et philosophia naturalis
• 4 Aesthetics of nature: the case of the mountain mentality change
• Appendix
• Annotated bibliography
• Bibliography
• Index