How the far North offered a different kind of terra incognita for
the Renaissance imagination. European narratives of the Atlantic
New World tell stories of people and things: strange flora,
wondrous animals, sun-drenched populations for Europeans to
mythologize or exploit. Yet, as Christopher Heuer explains, 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 "non-site," 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. In Into the White, Heuer uses five case studies to
probe how the early modern Arctic (as site, myth, and ecology)
affected contemporary debates over perception and matter,
representation, discovery, and the time of the earth-long before
the nineteenth century Romanticized the polar landscape. In the far
North, he argues, the Renaissance exotic became something far
stranger than the marvelous or the curious, something darkly
material and impossible to be mastered, something beyond the idea
of image itself.
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