In a recent article in Art News on the state of Renaissance Art History, Maria H. Loh discusses Christopher Heuer’s Into the White: the Renaissance Arctic and the End of the Image.Click here to learn more about the book. Click here to read the full article. An excerpt appears below:

“For scholars and students in the interrelated fields of history, art history, literature, and philosophy of the Renaissance, along with modern and contemporary art and climate history, Christopher P. Heuer’s thought-provoking book Into the White: The Renaissance Arctic and the End of the Image (Zone Books, 2019) is a must-read. Unlike traditional narratives of arrival and conquest in the Americas, the age of polar navigation, as Heuer demonstrates, coincided with the austere whitewashed aesthetics of Protestant iconoclasm. The objects of study here include illustrations of coastlines, navigational maps, idols carved out of driftwood, and other abstractions of the natural world. On the surface, Into the White is about the representation of the baffling emptiness that blinded unprepared European explorers. At a deeper level, it is a philosophical inquiry into confrontations with the unknown and the unfathomable. Without haranguing its reader, it touches almost effortlessly on some of the most urgent concerns we have today about global warming, identity politics, and the political ramifications of conflating science and fiction.”