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There are going to be substantial differences between various national literatures, though we can try and find some common ground. Roughly, up to, and perhaps during early eighteenth century, the trend of Alpine aesthetics shifted thoroughly. Prima facie, this account has some grounds to stand on, though to take it univocally would be equally mistaken, as the literature even in early modern period accounts for a much more multivariate accounts. Though to precisely characterize the shift in eighteenth century diaries, letters, and literature, and contrasting this to demographical data, would certainly yield interesting results, though I am not aware of any such study being done.

So the passage in question from Gadamer, The relevance of the beautiful Art as play, symbol, and festival.

We remember, for example, how the Alps were still described in travel diaries of the eighteenth century as terrifying mountains whose ugly and fearful wildness was experienced as a denial of beauty, humanity, and the familiar security of human existence. Today, on the other hand, everyone is convinced that our great mountain ranges represent not only the sublimity, but also the exemplary beauty of nature.

Importantly, Gadamer is in the essay writing in German aesthetical tradition, and not doing historical and anthropological work as such.

So, this will be a very rough generalization:

- In the Middle Ages, what we get of positive accounts of "uncivilized" spheres and nature are when these are used as a safe place for lovers, someone pursued by injustice, pilgrimage ( though the attitude here is much more ambivalent, and should be definitely taken differently ), where this aspect of unreachability, lawlessness serves a protection against unjust law, in a place that usually reeks of hostility.

Alpine typology was often seen as almost infernal, like in Miltonic description in Paradise Lost:

Through many a dark and dreary dale
They pass'd, and many a region dolorous
O'er many a frozen, many a fiery alp;
Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens, and shades of death.

And Milton was no exception in this, another prominent English dramatist John Dennis wrote thusly,

But if these mountains were not a Creation, but form´ed by universal Destruction, when the Arch with a mighty flaw dissolv´d and fell into the vast Abyss then are these the Ruins of the old World ... For they are not only vast, but horrid, hideous, ghastly Ruins,...

This kind of symbolical eschatology was specially popular in Anglican millenialism, which found articulation in Burnet´s The Sacred Theory of the Earth;

There is nothing doth more awaken our thoughts or excite our minds to enquire into the caufes of fuch things, than the actual view of them, as I have had experience my felf when it was my fortune to crofs the Alps and Appennim Mountains, for the fight of thofe wild, vaft and indigefted heaps of Stones and Earth, did fo deeply ftrike my fancy, that I was not eafie till I could give my felf feme tolerable account how that confufion came in Nature. .. But fuppofe a man was carrfd aileep out of a Plain Country amongft the Alps, and left there upon the top of one of the higheft Mountains, when he wak’d and look’d about him, he would think him- felf in an inchanted Country, or earn'd into another World, every thing would appear to him fo diiferent to what he had ever feen or imagin’d before. To fee on every hand of him a multitude of vaft bodies thrown together in confufton, as thofe Mountains are; Rocks ftanding. naked round about him, and the hollow Valleys gaping under him, and at his feet it may be, an heap of frozen Snow in the midft of Summer. He would hear the thunder come from below, and fee the black Clouds hanging beneath him, Up on fuch a profpeft, it would not be eaiie to him to perfwade himfelf that he was ftill upon the fame Earth ·, but if he did, he would be convinc’d, at leaft, that there are fome Regions of it ftrangely rude, and ruine-like, and very different from what he had ever thought of before. But the Inhabitants of thefe wild places are even with us·, for thofe that live amongft the Alps and the great Mountains, think that all the reft of the Earth is like their Country, all broken into Mountains, and Valleys, and Precipices ·, They never fee other, and moft people think of nothing but what they have feen at one time or another.

But eighteenth century "positive turn" had some worth precursors, like famously Rhellicanus Stockhornias, Gessner Epistola de Montium admiratione, due to their presence in influential Grant-Carteret´s study from 1904, La Montagne a travers les ages.

In eighteenth century, we get important works like Die Alpen by Haller, Julie, ou la nouvelle Heloïse. Lettres de deux amans, habitans d’une petite ville au pied des Alpes from Rousseau, The Alp from Keate, influential works from Coleridge and Shelley, and oodles of others, with the rise of nature in romanticism and aesthetics of sublimity.