THE PHYSICAL PORTRAIT OF THE TROPICS

Alexander von Humboldt's huge engraving of the Ecuadorian mountains Chimborazo and Cotopaxi – considered to be the highest in the world – and of the vertical ecology of the Andes, was published in 1807 as the frontispiece to the first volume of his monumental Voyage en Amerique, entitled Essai sur la géographie des plantes, accompagné d'un tableau physique des pays équinoxiales. Humboldt's ‘Physical Portrait of the Tropics’ offers an extreme, but, nevertheless instructive case of the problems of exotic representation in the Romantic period, and of the contradiction between aesthetic affect and topographical information in mediating the non-European world to a European public, greedy for such images of its distant Others. On the one hand, the ‘Physical Portrait’ solicits an aesthetic response to Chimborazo, the partial ascent of which in 1802 had been, perhaps, the most celebrated episode in Humboldt's five-year expedition to Spanish America. Like the best eighteenth-century landscape traveller-artists, Humboldt claimed to have sketched Chimborazo ‘on the spot’; his field sketches, suffused with his own affective response to the sublimity of the mountain, provided the basis for further published engravings in his celebrated Vues des Cordillères, translated into English by Helen Maria Williams and published in 1814 as Researches concerning the Institutions and Monuments of the Ancient Inhabitants of America, with Descriptions and Views of Some of the most Striking Scenes in the Cordilleras.