European artists from the Renaissance onward have visualized the known world through allegorical figures derived from ancient Egyptian, Greek, and Roman personifications (25.190; 1984.178). These allegorical figures often took the form of female bodies and were arranged in series of rivers, oceans, regions, continents, and even the cosmos. Early allegories of the continents comprised only Europe, Asia, and Africa (43.85.17; 43.85.18; 43.85.19; 43.85.20), but when Europeans reached the Americas in 1492, it too was incorporated into the existing schema. Australia, which the Dutch explored first in 1606, was never added to the set.
The individuals who commissioned images of the four continents and the artists who executed them were part of a broader society marked by colonialism, commerce, expanding empirical aspirations, the slave trade, and changing gender and racial ideologies. As an expression of dominion, cultures and peoples considered foreign were often described in derogatory terms in texts and images that used stereotypes to convey the inferiority of those deemed less civilized. On the title page of the influential world atlas Theatrum orbis terrarum (The Theater of the World, 1570) by the Netherlandish scholar and geographer Abraham Ortelius (1527–1598), Europe is seen reigning supreme over the other allegorical figures. She is equipped with all of the accoutrements of European monarchical power: a crown, a throne, a scepter, and the orb of the world surmounted by a cross. A first of its kind, Ortelius’s illustration demonstrates and reinforces the idea inherent in this allegorical series of the self and the other that is steeped in Christian Eurocentrism.
The tradition of personifying the continents as female allegorical figures can be seen in ephemeral works made for triumphal entries and pageants as well as in maps, coins, prints, and the decorative arts. The attributes of the allegories was standardized in the runaway 1593 bestseller Iconologia (often translated as Moral Emblems; 43.121) by the Italian humanist Cesare Ripa (ca. 1555–1622) and supplemented by contemporary travel accounts. These allegorical figures merge a sexualized young woman (virgin territory) with the symbols and attributes that their makers associated with each continent, in some cases commodities to be traded and resources to be exploited.
In the first illustrated edition of Iconologia, published in Rome in 1603, Europe is shown dressed in a flowing robe with a crown, seated between horns of plenty, and surrounded by numerous objects that emphasize her sophistication (architectural model, horse), piety (papal tiara, bishop’s miter), and claims to power (crown, scepter, weapons, cornucopia). Asia is garbed in a richly embellished dress, jewels, and a floral crown. She is shown with symbols of commerce and transportation: the luxuries of Persian court life (gold and jewels), the fruitfulness of her gardens (spices and incense), and a camel to represent Asia’s participation in the spice trade—aspects that never failed to impress the European merchants and ambassadors who visited and traded with the nations to the East.
Africa is shown wearing a pearl-and-coral necklace and holding a sheaf of cornstalks, representing the fertile African lands and coastline that were an important source of staples in the Roman and later European diet. Following closely ancient Roman personifications of the continent seen on coins, the figure of Africa is shown standing next to a lion, wearing a fantastical headdress made of an elephant’s head and trunk and holding a scorpion, while two double-headed snakes (now understood as an Aztec motif) writhe at her feet. While these fierce animals demonstrate the exotic dangers of Africa, they were also shipped to imperial Rome as commodities for use in public spectacles.
America is the only allegorical figure Ripa depicted with her breasts bared and beckoning, an allusion to Europe’s desire to further explore her territory. She wears a feather headdress and carries a bow and arrows, with a full quiver in reserve. At her feet is a severed head pierced with an arrow, conveying her aggressive temperament and the commonly held belief that Indigenous peoples were all cannibals. The figure is also shown with a tropical reptile, associated with the climate of South America and the Florida coast that European explorers first encountered.
Influential to European poets, writers, and artists, Ripa’s text and its allegorical figures were based on classical examples and encompass personifications of virtues and vices, the elements, emotions, religious tenets, and even regions of Italy. Ripa’s sourcebook of symbols in the Iconologia was so popular that it was published in nine editions in Italy alone, along with eight separate editions in England, France, Germany, and Holland. Due to the book’s popularity as a reference, Ripa’s representation of the continents—and, more importantly, their sometimes completely inaccurate associations—became foundational for most imagery of Europe, Asia, Africa, and America into the eighteenth century. In an engraved series made around 1730 by Johann Justin Preissler (1698–1771) after Edme Bouchardon (1698–1762), for example, the continents closely follow Ripa’s vocabulary (53.600.2407; 53.600.2408; 53.600.2409; 53.600.2410).
While the simplicity and repetition of Ripa’s imagery helped lay the groundwork for some very consequential misconceptions, it also enabled artists to be incredibly inventive. In the highly ornamented series of four continents engraved by Philips Galle (1537–1612) after drawings by Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger (ca. 1520–1590; 59.654.52; 59.654.53; 59.654.54; 59.654.55), the Allegory of America hews to tradition: America is portrayed as a naked woman wearing a feather headdress and carrying a club; parrots and other tropical birds, a goat, and perhaps a civet surround her. Gheeraerts’s interpretation departs from the standard in one key aspect that cleverly blends allegorical and ethnographic representation. In the lower corners, he included an Inuit man, woman, and child who were forcibly brought to England in 1576 from the Qikiqtaaluk Region of Nunavut, Canada, by the explorer Martin Frobisher (ca. 1535–1594). Gheeraerts was in London when the Inuits were exhibited as curiosities and may even have seen them in person; they also appear in many contemporary drawings and prints by British, Dutch, and German artists.
Ripa’s archetypes, however, make no attempt to differentiate the facial structure or skin color of the four women representing the continents. This physical uniformity is likely derived from the notion of a classical Western ideal, in which a fetishized white woman, often shown in a state of undress, could be used to represent whatever subject was being allegorized. The homogeneity of the figures suggests that, unlike the various commodities and natural resources that surround them, women’s bodies and their various identifying features had not yet been fully symbolized and assimilated into the language of colonialism and commerce. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, even as the transatlantic slave trade accelerated, skin color played an inconsistent role in the allegories of the continents.
In ca. 1590, the Antwerp engraver Adriaen Collaert (ca. 1560–1618) created The Four Continents, a series of prints after drawings by Maerten de Vos (1532–1603). Antwerp had been at the center of international commerce and trade at the beginning of the sixteenth century, profiting greatly from the sugar plantations on both sides of the Atlantic that used enslaved Africans for labor. (Antwerp was, however, abandoned by Portuguese and Spanish merchants in the 1540s, lost its prominence, and did not become a pivotal port for the slave trade.) In de Vos’s Allegory of Africa (49.95.1516), the nearly naked figure of Africa is shown at the center of the print, left leg akimbo, riding on the back of an alligator. Even though her skin can still be described as white, her facial features and hair diverge from those of other allegorical continents in the series. Her tight curls are restrained in a beautiful wrapped headdress that frames her features, which are shown in strict profile: a short, upturned nose, deep-set eyes, and full lips.
Sharing these stereotypical traits but reflecting constantly shifting ideas of how to represent physical and ethnic differences, Abraham Bosse’s (1602/04–1676) near contemporary series of the four continents depicts the allegorical figures with varying shades of skin color by using different concentrations of parallel lines and webs of crosshatching. Known as an artist engaged in social commentary, Bosse clearly shows the continent of Africa as a Black woman (59.654.47) shading herself from the “untamed heat” of her deserts, as the inscription notes.
The characteristic features that appear in de Vos and Bosse’s prints persisted into the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They can be found in the porcelain Allegories of Asia and Africa by the Vincennes Manufactory (2012.507), made in France at the height of the transatlantic slave trade. When the Vincennes porcelain was made, around 1750, Europeans had already begun to construct the fiction that people across the globe belonged to distinct racial categories that could be discerned from appearance. Historians typically trace this modern understanding of the word “race” to a 1684 essay by the French physician and traveler François Bernier (1620–1688) entitled “A New Division of the Earth by Different Species or Races of Men.” Bernier outlined what he understood to be four or five different categories of humans, each defined by unique physical characteristics, such as skin color and facial structure. Even though Bernier’s argument is often incoherent, his belief that humanity could be sorted according to visual features exemplified a mode of bodily typology that was coming to play an increasingly important role in European consciousness.
The Met’s Collection of Allegories of the Four Continents
Many of the works at The Met that represent allegories of the four continents—including tapestries, decorative arts objects, drawings, and prints—come from the collection of James Hazen Hyde (1876–1959), which was amassed during the first decades of the twentieth century. Hyde envisioned his collection as a means to learn about geography, history, ethnography, and botany, among other things. The most choice examples from his collection, which spans from the mid-sixteenth to the late nineteenth century, came to The Met as a bequest in 1959; the balance of the collection remained in New York but went to the New-York Historical Society, the Cooper Union Museum (now the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum), and the Brooklyn Museum.
Hyde was a wealthy American and the only surviving son of Henry Baldwin Hyde (1834–1899), the founder of the Equitable Life Assurance Society of the United States (now known as Equitable Holdings Inc.). James was only twenty-three when he inherited the majority shares of his father’s insurance company and became one of its directors. In 1905, after throwing an excessively extravagant party inspired by the court festivities of Versailles under Louis XVI, James left New York for Paris. His passion for French culture stemmed from his study of French literature and theater at Harvard University. He fashioned himself after the more traditional model of the European aristocrat collector or amateur and acted as a sort of cultural ambassador between France and America throughout his life.
Hyde not only collected works of art but also wrote extensively on the allegories of the four continents. In a 1924 letter to the French industrialist Gaston Menier about an article he was writing, Hyde recounted the moment and the objects that sparked his enduring fascination with the subject. It was in Menier’s collection of tapestries, seen a decade earlier, where Hyde had encountered the remarkable set of four tapestries designed by Jean Jacques François Le Barbier (1738–1826) for the Beauvais Manufactory in 1789 (1978.404.1; 1978.404.2; 1978.404.3; 1978.404.4). Commissioned by Louis XVI (1754–1793), this set was supposedly intended as a diplomatic gift to President George Washington (1732–1799), but the French Revolution intervened. The allegory of America is represented in a completely innovative manner, shown now as an almost fully clad woman dependent on the protection of the female personifications of Liberty and Minerva, the goddess of war and wisdom, whose shield carries the fleur-de-lis of France. Hyde was particularly interested in America’s fight for independence as it demonstrated the connection between the nation of his birth and his adopted country.
Hyde’s collection sought to document the allegories of the four continents in an encyclopedic way across media and to demonstrate the developments and changes in the manner with which European artists and patrons imagined their own identity in relation to the broader world from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries. This series of images celebrated the power of Europe over the entire world, declaring its authority and justifying imperial and colonial policies. Hyde also sought to define himself through the collection, to create a world of his own that he controlled—much like the Europeans who invented the conception of allegories for the four continents.