Into the White: The Renaissance Arctic and the End of the Image (Zone Books) - Hardcover

Heuer, Christopher P.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1942130147 ISBN 13: 9781942130147

Publisher: Zone Books, 2019

Synopsis

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.

Into the White uses five case studies to probe how the early modern Arctic (as site, myth, and ecology) affected contemporary debates of perception and matter, of representation, discovery, and the time of the earth – long before the nineteenth century romanticized the polar landscape. In the far North, this book contends, the Renaissance exotic became something far stranger than the marvelous or the curious, something darkly material and unmasterable, something beyond the idea of image itself.

About this title

About the Author

Christopher P. Heuer is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Rochester, author of The City Rehearsed, and coauthor of Ecologies, Agents, and Terrains and Vision and Communism.

Edition details

• Publisher: Zone Books
• Publication date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1942130147
• ISBN 13: 9781942130147
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 256