East-West Theories of Nature: Petrarch’s Mountain, Chinese shanshui 山水 and Being out of Time

Abstract

Christians of the Middle Ages saw themselves as being in continuity with classical Rome thanks to the translatio imperii and the translatio studii. No figure better exemplifies this continuity than Petrarch (1304-1374), and yet his letter detailing his ascent of Mont Ventoux on April 26, 1336 has been interpreted as a turning point in Western intellectual history. This paper explores culture’s interaction with materiality to show how the physical experience of mountains alters the early-modern observer’s experience of space and time. It explores the failure to appreciate the natural world (and to delight in it) that is apparent much earlier in the Chinese tradition. Although up to the Han dynasty, nature was viewed, as it was in the West, as a hostile and dangerous place for human beings, poets and painters from as early as the Six Dynasties (222-589), started to appreciate and aestheticize nature. The worship of nature reaches a climax in the poetry and painting of the Chinese Middle Ages where the emphasis is on the contemplative and panoramic, the aesthetic and meditative. Petrarch’s ascent puts him out of time, marking the beginning of a European appreciation of nature that is ultimately mediated by Chinese culture and metaphysics.