Church's "Heart of the Andes"

Something that I posted on Facebook three years ago. During the first week of March 2020, Beth and I visited New York and then flew to Tucson to see our daughter Emily. But during that time, the pandemic was heading toward lockdown. It was weird and worrisome to be away from home as grocery stores were running out of soap and paper products. The three of us had one bottle of hand disinfectant to go around.  

This is Frederic Edwin Church’s 1859 painting “The Heart of the Andes,” in the Metropolitan Museum o Art. Run away now if you don’t want to read the following historical daydream, LOL… Still here? Okay. Thanks for your patience….. Alexander von Humboldt, whose 250th birth-anniversary was last September, influenced a generation of young scientists, writers, and artists with his journals of exploration of the Caribbean and Latin and South America. He was one of the last great scientist polymaths, not only writing on several areas of science; he also caught people’s imagination with his uniting of scientific investigation with aesthetic truth, emotional health, and moral uplift. He reclaimed the ancient Greek word "cosmos" for modern thinking. So… artist Church, famous among the Hudson River School painters, was so inspired by Humboldt’s vision, that he personally retraced Humboldt’s journey through Ecuador, took detailed notes and sketches of the landscape and fauna, and painted this idealized landscape that includes a variety of Ecuadoran plants and climates, with the snow-covered Chimborazo volcano in the background. (Humboldt had been the first European to attempt to reach the Chimborazo peak, not quite making it but reaching an inspiring height.) Church displayed “The Heart of the Andes” to great acclaim beginning in April 1859. Church planned to ship it to Berlin so that Humboldt could see it himself—airdrops to each others’ phones being sadly unavailable in 1859 LOL—-but the great old man died before the plan could begin. Even the famous paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould wrote an article about “The Heart of the Andes,” noting that another Humboldt disciple, Charles Darwin, ironically helped to specialize science differently than Humboldt’s encyclopedic approach. But the pleasure and inspiration of scientific investigation do remain. It was meaningful, nerdy happiness for me to visit this painting within a year after I got to see both Ecuador and also Humboldt University for the first time. 

This famous painting is in the same room.