to the right is a part of the upper surface of the berg. To that succeeds a inner gorge, running up between alpine peaks. In front is the main portion of the berg, exhibiting ice architecture in its vaster proportions. Thus the beholder has around him the manifold forms of the huge Greenland glacier after it has been launched upon the deep, and subjected, for a time, to the action of the elements – waves and currents, sunshine and storm.
Figure 1 Frederic Edwin Church, The Icebergs (1861–3), Dallas Museum of Art
Church trains the viewer’s eye by detailing aspects of the scene. He believes that the audience needs this. For at least two reasons. On the one hand, the iceberg is a spontaneously pictorial object. But the variety of its lines must be shown. Otherwise, the viewer risks becoming bored with so much uniformity. On the other hand, the beauty of the iceberg is intriguing. The proportions of the iceberg throw Archimedes’ principle into doubt. The mass seems very heavy. And yet it floats! It is so light, almost airy. How can the combination of weight and weightlessness be represented?
The painter has observed the bergs closely. He knows that their plasticity is a challenge. Their straight lines intertwine and their curves overlap. The icebergs constantly alternate foregrounds and backgrounds. They compose volumes that seem eternal. Then they dissolve into the air and the ocean. The massive ice cubes metamorphose into small balls of volatile flakes.
Church wants to control these ambivalences. He directs the gaze into a well-defined space. Better still, he plays with the frame, making the ice occupy three sides of the painting. He freezes the icebergs in their materiality and makes a stationary image from an inanimate, hieratic world that is ice in every direction, except for on high, where it opens onto a horizon tinted with the sun of a peaceful late afternoon. This framing of ice by ice, saving one side for the source of the light, has only one purpose: to make the spectators understand that the real texture of icebergs is that of light. In the eyes of the painter, it is light that reshapes the forms.
A boulder can be seen on the right-hand side of the painting. This is not an aesthetic whim. The art historian Timothy Mitchell has shown that Church was taking a stand in a scientific controversy between Louis Agassiz and Charles Lyell from 1845 to 1860. The debate between the two scientists centred, among other things, on the exact nature of ‘erratic’ rocks and the role of icebergs.
Agassiz defended the thesis of an ancient global glaciation in his famous Études sur les glaciers and several other lectures. During a primordial ‘ice age’, the Earth was covered, and the so-called erratic boulders, which often adorn the sides of glaciers, were signs of this. Lyell proposed another theory in his no less famous Manual of Elementary Geology. On several field trips he had examined many deposits on shore that came from beached icebergs. He deduced that these alluvia corresponded to the rocky conditions of the continents. His opinion was that part of the Earth, including the North American plate, had not been covered by ice but, rather, submerged. Then as the water had receded, the continents reappeared and the icebergs had carried boulders from the land. The ‘floating mountains’ solved the riddle of rocks scattered far from any ice mass.
Lyell’s hypotheses influenced many explorers. They looked for evidence that icebergs carried pieces of rock. By the 1860s, however, empirical evidence confirmed Agassiz’s arguments. His rival eventually abandoned his theories of iceberg ‘rafts’.5
Church’s painting has gone through several versions and many variations. Long forgotten, it is now a much prized work. It is not only a tribute to Franklin and the strange beauty of ice, it is a nod to a geological argument about the Ice Age. Off the coast of the island of Newfoundland in the summer of 1859, Noble saw icebergs as the monuments representing the whole world. The artist painted his canvases imagining that these sublime masses carried the debris of a once sunken planet.
The reign of the sublime
Church went north with a mind full of books. Like most of his contemporaries, he was aware of travelogues and scientific writings. But at the forefront of his thinking were the now popular reflections of Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant on the sublime. In these theories of the previous century, the canonical examples are those of a mountain whose snowy peak pierces the clouds, of a storm breaking, or of a storm seen from the shore. The fictional viewer experiences a paradoxical feeling of a fear of dying while remaining in safety. All five senses warn one of the risks. At the same time, one feels infinitely free. One’s reason finds strength in confronting an idea of the absolutely immense, even of the unlimited. At a safe distance, one might assume that one’s life is not really in danger.
These ideas were widely disseminated among the international community of polar explorers. Confronted with icebergs, everyone feels the same contradictory emotions as those described by philosophers when faced with raging waves, lightning in the sky or alpine snow. Adventurers are both terrified and amazed, overwhelmed and exhilarated. They rediscover their dual nature as sentient and spiritual beings. They feel both fragile and powerful, both mere mortals and true demiurges. In Church and Noble’s time, the spectacle of the iceberg was already over-coded by theories of the sublime.
Another argument recurs in this interpretive framework: titanic forms bear the imprint of a higher principle. Kane described the Arctic as ‘a landscape such as Milton or Dante might imagine – inorganic, desolate, mysterious’. He was careful to add: ‘I have come down from deck with the feelings of a man who has looked upon a world unfinished by the hand of its Creator.’ The spectacular appearance of the icebergs is a reminder of the humble condition of humans. The drifting boulder is ‘one of God’s own buildings, preaching its lessons of humility to the miniature structures of man.’6 The theme is an old one. Long before the beginnings of polar exploration, the iceberg was seen as a work of providence.
We are in Ireland, in the sixth century.
A monk tells another monk about his voyage in a stone trough, as in the legends of the Breton saints. He evokes a remote, isolated and magical island. All shrouded in fog, it is hidden from inquisitive eyes and unvisited by storms. On this land, nothing happens as elsewhere: nature is luxuriant, time slows down, no one feels any material need. Faced with so many marvels recounted by his own godson, Mernoc the monk, Brendan de Clonfert decides to make the same journey. After months of meticulous preparations, he and his fourteen companions embark on a small boat made of wood and leather. They set off towards the Northwest in search of paradise.
In their frail curach, the pilgrims huddle around the single mast. The voyage is full of hazards and miracles. They come across birds singing divine hymns and drink sleeping potions. They inadvertently cook meat on the backs of gigantic dormant fish and are attacked by sea monsters.
One day, a crystal pillar appears. It seems very close, yet it takes them three days to reach it. When Brendan looks up, he cannot see the top of the transparent pillar, which is lost in the sky. Gradually, other pillars appear. At the very top, a huge platter sits on four square legs. A sheet with thick, undulating mesh as far as the eye can see envelops it. The monks think they are looking at an altar and a tapestry. They tell themselves that this is the Lord’s work.
Brendan notices a gap where their boat could slip through. He orders his companions to lower the sail and mast. They gently row into the crevice and find themselves inside a huge reticular mass. Corridors stretch out endlessly. The colours in the walls are shimmering, changing from green to blue. Shades of silver sparkle. Their fingertips graze a material that feels like marble. At the bottom of the water, they see the ground on which the diaphanous block rests. The sun is reflected in it. There is bright light, inside and out. Brendan takes measurements. For four days they calculate the dimensions of the sides. The whole thing is several kilometres and as long as it is wide. The pilgrims can’t believe it.
The next day, they discover a flared bowl and a golden plate adorning the edge of one of the pillars. Brendan is not surprised.