Since antiquity, artists have visualized the known world through the female (sometimes male) body. In the age of exploration, America was added to figures of Europe, Asia, and Africa who would come to inhabit the borders of geographical visual imagery. In the abundance of personifications in print, painting, ceramics, tapestry, and sculpture, do portrayals vary between hierarchy and global human dignity? Are we witnessing the emergence of ethnography or of racism? Yet, as this volume shows, depictions of bodies as places betray the complexity of human claims and desires.
Bodies and Maps: Early Modern Personifications of the Continents opens up questions about early modern politics, travel literature, sexualities, gender, processes of making, and the mobility of forms and motifs.
Contributors are: Louise Arizzoli, Elisa Daniele, Hilary Haakenson, Elizabeth Horodowich, Maryanne Cline Horowitz, Ann Rosalind Jones, Paul H. D. Kaplan, Marion Romberg, Mark Rosen, Benjamin Schmidt, Chet Van Duzer, Bronwen Wilson, and Michael Wintle.
Maryanne Cline Horowitz, Ph.D. (1970), is Professor of History, Occidental College, and Associate, Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, University of California, Los Angeles. She won the Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History of the American Philosophical Society for her
Seeds of Virtue and Knowledge (Princeton, 1998), and served as Editor-in-Chief of the
New Dictionary of the History of Ideas (Charles Scribner's Sons, 2005).
Louise Arizzoli, Ph.D. (2013) is an Instructional Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Mississippi. She has published on the iconography of the Four Continents in the arts and on the history of collections and the art market, including “James Hazen Hyde and the Allegory of the Four Continents: A Research Collection for an Amateur Art Historian” (
The Journal for the History of Collections, 2013).
Acknowledgements List of Illustrations Notes on the Editors Notes on the Contributors
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Introduction (2): Allegories of the Four Continents Today: Assessing Contemporary Contributions Louise Arizzoli
Part 1: Personifications of the Continents and Issues of Race and Gender
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Gender and Race in the Personification of the Continents in the Early Modern Period: Building Eurocentrism Michael Wintle
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Exotic Female (and Male) Continents: Early Modern Fourfold Division of Humanity Maryanne Cline Horowitz
Part 2: Cartographical Origins of Early Continent Personification
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The Pre-History of the Personification of Continents on Maps: Earth, Ocean, and the Sons of Noah Chet Van Duzer
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Magi, Winds, Continents: Dark Skin and Global Allegory in Early Modern Images Paul H.D. Kaplan
Part 3: Personifications of the World in Italian Frescoes
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Casting the Continents: Sacred History and Spiritual Odyssey in the Camposanto of Pisa Hilary Anne Haakenson
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Portraits of the World – The Four Continents at Palazzo Farnese in Caprarola: The Figurative Code, Sources and Comparisons Elisa Antonietta Daniele
Part 4: Continent Personifications in Maps and Book Illustration
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Why were there no Continental Allegories in Renaissance Venice? The Amerasian Personifications of Giuseppe Rosaccio Elizabeth Horodowich
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Worlds Apart: The Four Continents and the Civitates Orbis Terrarum Mark Rosen
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When Allegory Met History: Allegories of the Continents on Costume-Book Title Pages in the Late Sixteenth Century Ann Rosalind Jones
Part 5: Popularization of Continent Personifications in the Eighteenth Century
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The Visible Church – The Discourse on an Ecclesia Triumphans and the Four Continents in Parish Churches of Baroque Southern Germany Marion Romberg
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The Rearing Horse and the Kneeling Camel: Continental Ceramics and Europe’s Race to Modernity Benjamin Schmidt
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Collecting the Four Continents: James Hazen Hyde (1876–1959), an American in Paris Louise Arizzoli
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Afterword: Ornament and the Fabrication of Early Modern Worlds Bronwen Wilson
Index Nominum
All interested in maps and allegories in the early modern period as well as European’s perceptions of other continents from the age of exploration to the eighteenth century. Keywords: cartography, visual arts, Renaissance, age of exploration, art history, encounters, ornament, maps, ethnography, racism, costumes, America, Asia, Africa, Europe.