Into the White: The Renaissance Arctic and the End of the Image by Christopher P. Heuer
English | May 24, 2019 | ISBN: 1942130147 | True PDF | 256 pages | 16.8 MB
European narratives of the Atlantic New World tell stories of people and things: strange flora, wondrous animals, and sun-drenched populations for Europeans to mythologize or exploit. Yet between 1500 and 1700 one region upended all of these conventions in travel writing, science, and, most unexpectedly, art: the Arctic. Icy, unpopulated, visually and temporally "abstract," the far North - a different kind of terra incognita for the Renaissance imagination - offered more than new stuff to be mapped, plundered, or even seen. Neither a continent, an ocean, nor a meteorological circumstance, the Arctic forced visitors from England, the Netherlands, Germany, and Italy, to grapple with what we would now call a "nonsite," spurring dozens of previously unknown works, objects, and texts - and this all in an intellectual and political milieu crackling with Reformation debates over art's very legitimacy.