Alexander von Humboldt

An Explorer’s Explorer

This story originally appeared in the June 2021 podcast of Exploring Atlanta…

Friedrich Georg Weitsch painted Alexander von Humboldt’s portrait in 1806 after the scientist’s return to Europe from South America. In the background, Weitsch shows Venezuela’s Orinoco River, which Humboldt had explored. Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen / Photo by Klaus Goeken / Art Resource, NY

“Humboldt was one of those wonders of the world who appear from time to time, as if to show us the possibilities of the human mind.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt (14 September 1769 – 6 May 1859) was a German polymath, geographer, naturalist, explorer, and proponent of Romantic philosophy and science. Humboldt's quantitative work on botanical geography laid the foundation for the field of biogeography. Humboldt's advocacy of long-term systematic geophysical measurement laid the foundation for modern geomagnetic and meteorological monitoring.

Between 1799 and 1804, Humboldt travelled extensively in the Americas, exploring and describing them for the first time from a modern Western scientific point of view. His description of the journey was written up and published in several volumes over 21 years. Humboldt was one of the first people to propose that the lands bordering the Atlantic Ocean were once joined. He was the first person to describe the phenomenon and cause of human-induced climate change, in 1800 and again in 1831, based on observations generated during his travels. Source: Wikipedia

Click on image to enlarge. One of Humboldt’s many groundbreaking illustrations came out of his five-year voyage to Central and South America with the French botanist Aimé Bonpland. In 1802, Humboldt and Bonpland ascended Chimborazo, a volcano just below the equator that was believed at the time to be the highest mountain in the world (at 20,564 feet, it’s more than 8,000 feet shorter than Mount Everest). The pair documented the mountain’s plant life, from the tropical rainforest at its base to the lichen clinging to rocks above the tree line. The image above, which Humboldt called Tableau Physique in the French version of his original publication, organizes these observations in an intuitively visual way, showing Chimborazo in cross-section, with text indicating which species lived at different elevations on the mountain. Columns of text on either side of the Chimborazo cross-section indicate precipitation, humidity, and other measurements Humboldt took at various elevations. “He’s trying to think about how all these elements of the landscape fit together and impinge on one another,” Schulten says. In contrast to scientists before him who’d used maps and illustrations primarily to describe and summarize their findings, Humboldt used his visualizations to look for explanations, she says. — Source: Smithsonian Magazine

Although Humboldt’s name has practically vanished, his ideas have not. Many of his new ideas simply became an accepted part of what we know about this planet; others were superseded by his colleagues and successors. However, between the 1820s and 1850s Alexander von Humboldt was one of the most widely admired public figures in the world.

Humboldt, who died at 89, traveled on four continents, wrote more than 36 books and 25,000 letters to a network of correspondents around the globe. He had an infectious personality and boundless curiosity, surrounded himself with some of the leading minds of his era and never stopped talking. Charismatic, annoying, exuberant, caustic, but undeniably relevant, Humboldt straddled the enlightenment penchant for wanting to know everything about everything and the establishment of modern scientific methods designed to query that accrued knowledge. Source: Smithsonian Magazine

Frederic Church painted Heart of the Andes as his final homage to naturalist Alexander von Humboldt. This immersive 2.5D digital experience offers extreme close-up views of Church's South American landscape. The must-watch video above is narrated by SAAM curator Eleanor Jones Harvey, who takes viewers on an immersive journey to discover the connections between Humboldt's ideas and Church's ambitious painting. Discover more about Humboldt's influence on American art with the SAAM exhibition "Alexander von Humboldt and the United States: Art, Nature, and Culture". — Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington D.C.)

Photos from the Humboldt exhibit in Washington…

From: Alexander von Humboldt and the United States: Art, Nature, and Culture" — Smithsonian American Art Museum. Photos by ATLsherpa (click on image)

From: Alexander von Humboldt and the United States: Art, Nature, and Culture" — Smithsonian American Art Museum. Photos by ATLsherpa (click on image)

"Heart of the Andes is a visual summation of Humboldt's influence on Frederic Church and a testament to the explorer's deep and sustained influence on American art." — Smithsonian American Art Museum

In the video above, Andrea Wulf — author of The Invention of Nature — articulates beautifully the life of Alexander von Humboldt and the extraordinary impact he had on mankind.