In a recent review in the prominent Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet, Christian Abrahamsson discusses Into the White: The Renaissance Arctic and the End of the Image by Christopher Heuer. Click here to learn more about the book. Click here to read the Swedish language review. A translated excerpt appears below:

“Unlike the discovery of the New World, the literature on the exploration and colonization of the Arctic is much less extensive. Even though it is a constantly growing field. In several respects, therefore, the American art historian Christopher Heuer’s Into the White: The Renaissance Arctic and the End of the Image (Zone Books) is a pioneering work. Heuer’s overall purpose is to account for what the encounter with the Arctic landscape did with the vision and understanding of the image and perspective. He believes that the Arctic and the exploration of the Arctic meant an encounter with an iconoclastic landscape in important respects, an antithesis to the landscape understanding created in Renaissance Europe. The Arctic was all that the well-ordered geometric landscape was not.”