New Literary History · 1985 · 26 citations · 0 references
HumanitiesArt HistoryAestheticsAmerican ArtLatin American HistoryArt CriticismVisual ArtsAndean CivilizationsCalvinist LiteratureNineteenth-century American ArtParochial CulturePrimeval HistorySublime ImagerySublime Landscape
IN 1855 the American artist Frederic E. Church paints the Andes of Ecuador, a South American landscape that has been read by critics from the nineteenth century to the present as an emblem of American national destiny. Church presents us with a primeval creation scene, a nature that is pristine and untouched, except, perhaps, by the violating eye of the painter and beholder, who appropriates the power of an Andean landscape to the purposes of his own vision. And that vision, as David Huntington has elegantly shown, is a parochial one: a mid-nineteenth-century reformed Calvinist version of birth and resurrection.1