The Giant Mountains as a perfect mountain landscape in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century

Abstract

At the end of the 18th century, the new idea of the mountain landscape as an ideal and beautiful landscape emerged in Central Europe. This cultural process was conditioned by the contemporary aesthetic concepts of the Sublime and the Picturesque, related to the development of a new cultural and social practice of education of the eye (described in the book of Peter De Bolla The Education of the Eye: Painting, Landscape, and Architecture in Eighteenth Century Britain, 2003). In a Central European context, the model of the mountain landscape was found in the Krkonoše mountain range, and travelogues, analysed in our case study, have contributed to its establishment.