Swiss reliefs

In Switzerland, the art of landscape models reached its first height. Why Switzerland? Well, one reason may be the mountainous landscape that made it difficult to represent it on maps. On a flat map, the vertical dimension never can be shown as clear as with a relief. But this challenging landscape enforced the cartographer and soon in the 19^th century, the Swiss maps were considered as the best maps of the world. The Swiss cartographers thereby benefited from the great French tradition in cartography, as several Swiss were engaged in the French army. Moreover, the young Swiss nation, founded in 1848 consisted of different ethnic groups, belonging to different religious denominations and speaking four distinctive languages. So it was important to create a national feeling. To hit this target, maps and reliefs were perfect means. They displayed the landscape and its structure as well as the boundaries of the nation. So they had the function of a bracket keeping the nation together. Thus, reliefs and maps were favoured either by the state and the public. [1]

The oldest preserved terrain model of the Swiss Alps has been created by Franz Ludwig Pyffer von Wyher (1716 – 1802), a lieutenant general in France, who returned back to his birthplace in Switzerland after his retirement from the French army. During 24 years, he shaped a part of the central Swiss Alps around Lucerne and set the starting point for a long and successful terrain modelling tradition in Switzerland. In contrast to the previous models, his model was not designed for military purposes, but only due to topographic interest. [2]

Whereas today commonly a terrain model is shaped after the contour lines of a map, the approach at the end of the 18^th century was inversely. The rich fabricant Johann Rudolf Meyer (1739 – 1813) decided to map the whole area of Switzerland. For this purpose he engaged the Alsatian geometrician Jean Henri Weiss (1758 – 1826) and Joachim Eugen Müller (1752 – 1833), a carpenter of the alpine village Engelberg. The latter created a stunning terrain model of a great part of the Swiss Alps which served to create the best part of the “Atlas Suisse par Meyer et Weiss”, the best map of Switzerland during the first half of the 19^th century [3].

A first height reached the art of terrain modelling in Switzerland towards the end of the 19^th century. Prerequisites for this evolution were several new technical achievements like reliable maps of the whole country such as the Dufour map, first sheets of the “Siegfriedatlas” and a series of surpassing maps edited by the Swiss Alpine Club SAC, further the invention of photography, the upcoming alpinism and the strengthened scientific interest of geologists. That the art of relief modelling is reaching such a height.

One important promoter of terrain modelling was Albert Heim (1849 – 1837) professor of geology at the ETH and the University of Zurich. He created for example plaster reliefs displaying geomorphologically typically landscapes for use in schools, but most relevance reached his encouragement of young students to create models. Under his influence, a lot of impressive relief works were created between 1880 and 1930.

One of these students was Xaver Imfeld (1853 – 1909), after Eduard Imhof (1895 – 1986), the famous professor of cartography of the institute of cartography in Zurich, the world’s best modeller ever [4]. He created for example a brilliant model of the famous Swiss mountain Matterhorn in the large scale of 1:5,000. His masterpiece was a relief of the Jungfrau group in 1:2,500 which was a showpiece for the Jungfrau railway at the World exhibition in Paris 1900.

Due to a large amount of photographs, these models could be modelled much more realistic than ancient ones. Especially for nearly vertical rock faces, a map can not provide information for a large scale relief. Outlines of the terrain are indispensable of course, but photographs contain much more details, especially it is not necessary to depict all details in the field.

But for small scale models, it may be sufficient to generate a model only based on the contour lines of a map. For this reason, at the end of the 19^th century, a pantograph was invented to create terrain models efficiently. This method allowed milling out a model from a block of plaster, when using the contour lines of a map to guide the milling cutter. By using this method, Charles Eugène Perron (1837 – 1919) created a plaster relief of the whole area of Switzerland in 1:100,000.

In Switzerland, the art of plaster terrain models reached a last height due to Eduard Imhof, who created two great large scale models of the mountains Bietschhorn and Grosse Windgälle for the Swiss national exhibition 1939 in Zurich [5].