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.
