Review of Christopher Heuer Into the White
Extract: The subject of this intermittently rewarding book is a fascinating one: European Renaissance travels in, and descriptions of, the Arctic, and how these might (or might not) relate to the canon of Renaissance art. It musters a beguiling collection of material: published accounts of icebergs...
| Published in: | Oxford Art Journal |
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| Format: | Article in Journal/Newspaper |
| Language: | English |
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Oxford University Press
2021
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| Online Access: | https://doi.org/10.1093/oxartj/kcab019 https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:740f04a6-8df2-4821-ac82-cf953b7126e9 |
| Summary: | Extract: The subject of this intermittently rewarding book is a fascinating one: European Renaissance travels in, and descriptions of, the Arctic, and how these might (or might not) relate to the canon of Renaissance art. It musters a beguiling collection of material: published accounts of icebergs and harsh overwinterings, haunting narratives of remote sanctuaries crowded with carved wooden figures with blood on their mouths, engravings and broadsheets reporting on the north and its inhabitants. One of the most fascinating subjects is the nineteenth-century discovery of bundles of prints that were abandoned in 1596–1597 on Nova Zembla by Dutch explorers, prints which congealed and froze in lumps of papier-mâché into the Arctic soil, to be recovered in the twentieth century and, in part, conserved and painstakingly, painfully re-separated into their irreparably damaged original sheets (why?) by Rijksmuseum conservators. Also of interest is a glance at the encyclopaedic, illustrated account of the north. |
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