Free Mountains of the Mind by Robert Macfarlane

and great animals, long extinct, walked up the craggy sides of cliffs, in remote ages. The more we know of Nature, in any of her aspects, the more profound is the interest she offers to us.’
    As well as being excited by the spans of time uncovered by geology, the nineteenth-century imagination was aroused by the concept of geophysical force – the inconceivable power necessary to knead sandstone like pastry, to collapse trees into shiny seams of coal and to crush marine life into blocks of marble. Romanticism had left the collective nineteenth-century nervous system attuned to appreciate excess, and this inherited lust for the grandiose and the gigantic in part explains the enthusiasm with which geology was embraced.
    In mid-century Britain, John Ruskin read widely in the writings of geology, and in turn began to write brilliantly himself about the slow-motion drama of mountain scenery. The 1856 publication of Ruskin’s
Of Mountain Beauty
was, like the appearance in 1830 of Lyell’s
Principles
, a seminal moment in European landscape history. ‘Mountains are the beginning and end of all natural scenery’, pronounced Ruskin at the outset, and he brooked no quarrel with that statement throughout the rest of the book. Where Lyell was a teacher, Ruskin was a dramaturge. Before his gaze, the landscape offered up the stories of its making. Meditating on the nature of granite, with its medley of minerals and colours, Ruskin dreamt of the violence inherent in its making: ‘The several atoms have all different shapes, characters, and offices; but are inseparably united by some fiery, or baptismal process which has purified them all.’ Basalt he perceived to have at one stage in its career possessed ‘the liquefying power and expansive force of subterranean fire’. Seen through the optic of Ruskin’s prose, geology became war or apocalypse; the view from the top of a mountain became a panorama over battlegrounds upon which competing armies of rock, stone and ice had warred for epochs, with incredible slowness and unimaginable force. To read Ruskin on rocks was – and still is – to be reminded of the agencies involved in their making.
    In America, too, between 1820 and 1880 there emerged a dynasty of landscape artists – Frederick Edwin Church foremost amongthem – who drew their inspiration from the dramatic natural scenery of the States. While they were clearly influenced by the British triumvirate of Ruskin, Turner and John Martin, these painters were filled also with a distinctively American desire to express both awe at and pride in the landscape of their country: to celebrate God’s chosen land. To this end, they produced immense and often lurid canvases of American wildernesses – the red rock citadels of the desert states, the mountainous throne-rooms of the Andes, the flaring skies and mirror lakes of the Rockies, or the vaporous magnificence of the Niagara Falls. Their giant pictures emphasized the puniness and transience of man: often one or two minuscule human figures can be seen in a corner of the canvas, dwarfed by the massive profiles of the landscape. These artists were also thoroughly versed in botany and geology: some of the pictures contained so much landscape detail that, when they were first exhibited, viewers were supplied with opera glasses so that they could see the extraordinary geological accuracy of the painting – a reminder of how intertwined were geology and representations of mountains.

    Oil painting is an appropriate medium to represent the processes of geology, for oil paints have landscapes immanent within them: they are made of minerals. Oil paints were first devised in the fifteenth century, when Flemish painters – the van Eyck brothers foremost among them – tried mixing linseed oil with various natural pigments, and found they had created a substance which was not only more vibrant in colour, but also more malleable in terms of drying time than traditional egg tempera. Many of