Silver.
Brands:
Porto Silver Contrast Mark by the assayer Alexandre Pinto da Cruz, cited from 1810 to 1820;
Mark of the Porto Master Goldsmith attributable to Francisco da Costa Campos.
_
Short History of the Allegory of the Four Continents:
European artists from the Renaissance and onwards visualized the known world through allegorical figures derived from ancient Egyptian, Greek, and Roman personifications. These allegorical figures often took the form of female bodies and were arranged in series of rivers, oceans, regions, continents and even the cosmos at large.
The first allegories of continents comprised only Europe, Asia and Africa, but when Europeans arrived in the Americas in 1492, these too were incorporated into the existing scheme. Australia/Oceania, which the Dutch first explored in 1606, was never added to the set.
The patrons who commissioned images from four continents and the artists who executed them were part of a wider society marked by colonialism, trade, expanding imperial aspirations, the slave trade, and well-defined racial ideologies. As an expression of dominance, cultures and peoples considered foreign were often pejoratively described in texts and images that used stereotypes to convey the inferiority of those considered “less civilized”.
On the title page of the influential world atlas Theatrum orbis terrarum (The Theater of the World, 1570) by the Dutch scholar and geographer Abraham Ortelius (1527-1598), Europe is seen as reigning supreme over other allegorical figures. This is often shown equipped with all the accoutrements of European monarchical power: a crown, a throne, a scepter and the orb of the world, surmounted by a cross. Pioneering, Ortelius’s illustration demonstrates and reinforces the idea inherent in this allegorical series of the “self and the other”, impregnated by Christian Eurocentrism.
The tradition of personifying the continents as female allegorical figures can be seen in ephemeral works made for triumphal inscriptions and artistic competitions, as well as in maps, coins, engravings and in jewellery. The attributes of the allegories were standardized in the 1593 success: Iconologia (often translated Moral Emblems) by the Italian humanist Cesare Ripa (c. 1555–1622) and supplemented by his contemporaries’ travel accounts.
These allegorical figures mix a “sexualized young woman” (virgin territory) with the symbols and attributes that their creators associated with each continent, and in some cases they were goods to be traded and/or resources to be exploited.
In the first illustrated edition of Iconologia, published in Rome in 1603:
Europe appears dressed in a flowing robe with a crown, sitting among the horns of plenty and surrounded by countless objects that emphasize her sophistication (architectural model or horse), piety (papal tiara or bishop’s miter) and claims to power (crown). , scepter, weapons or cornucopia).
Asia is dressed in a richly trimmed gown, with jewels and a floral crown. This is represented with symbols of commerce and transport: the luxuries of Persian court life (gold and jewels), the fertility of its fields (spices and incense), and a camel to represent Asia’s share in the spice trade—features that have never been seen before. failed to impress the European merchants and ambassadors who visited and traded with the nations of the East.
Africa is shown wearing a pearl and coral necklace and holding a bundle of corn stalks, representing the fertile African lands and coastline, which were an important staple food source in the Roman and later European diet. Closely following the ancient Roman personifications of the continent seen on coins, the figure of Africa is shown beside a lion, wearing a headdress made of an elephant’s head and/or trunk, holding a scorpion, while two double-headed snakes (now understood as an Aztec motif) at her feet. While these ferocious animals demonstrate the exotic dangers of Africa, they were also shipped to imperial Rome as commodities for use in public shows.
America is the only allegorical figure that Ripa portrayed with her breasts bared and waving, an allusion to Europe’s desire to further explore her territory. She wears a feathered headdress and carries a bow and arrows, with a full quiver. At her feet is a severed head pierced by an arrow, conveying her aggressive temper and the common belief that indigenous peoples were aggressive in their entirety. 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 for European poets, writers and artists, Ripa’s text and its allegorical figures were based on classical examples and encompass personifications of virtues and vices, elements, emotions, religious dogmas and even regions of Italy.
Ripa’s sourcebook of Symbols in Iconology was so popular that it was published in nine editions in Italy alone, along with eight separate editions in England, France, Germany, and the Netherlands. Due to the book’s popularity as a reference, Ripa’s depiction of the Continents – and, more importantly, their sometimes completely inaccurate and fantastical associations – became central to most images of Europe, Asia, Africa and America in the 20th century. XVIII. In a series recorded around 1730 by Johann Justin Preissler (1698–1771) from Edme Bouchardon (1698–1762), for example, continents closely follow Ripa’s vocabulary.
While the simplicity and repetition of Ripa’s imagery helped lay the groundwork for some historical misconceptions, it also allowed the artists to be incredibly inventive. In the highly ornate series of four continents engraved by Philips Galle (1537–1612) from drawings by Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger, the Allegory Of America follows tradition: America is depicted as a nude woman wearing a feathered headdress and carrying a club; parrots and other tropical birds, a goat and perhaps a civet surround her. Gheeraerts’ interpretation departs from the norm in one key respect, deftly blending allegorical and ethnographic representation. Enclosed in the lower corners is an Inuit man, woman, and child who were forcibly brought to England in 1576 from the Qikiqtaaluk region of Nunavut, Canada, by explorer Martin Frobisher (ca. 1535–1594). Gheeraerts was in London when the Inuit were exhibited as a curiosity and may even have seen them in person; these also appear in many contemporary drawings and prints by British, Dutch and German artists.
Ripa’s archetypes, however, do not try to differentiate the facial structure or skin color of the four women who represent 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 characteristics have not yet been fully symbolized and assimilated into the language of colonialism and commerce. Throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, even as the transatlantic slave trade accelerated, skin color played an inconsistent role in allegories of continents.
In about 1590, the Antwerp engraver Adriaen Collaert (c. 1560–1618) created The Four Continents, a series of prints based on designs by Maerten de Vos (1532–1603). Antwerp was at the center of international trade and commerce in the early 16th century, profiting greatly from sugar plantations on both sides of the Atlantic that used enslaved Africans as labor. (Antwerp was, however, abandoned by Portuguese and Spanish merchants in the 1540s, lost its prominence, and failed to become a central port for the slave trade.)
In De Vos’s Allegory of Africa, the nearly nude figure of Africa appears in the center of the print, left leg straddling the back of an alligator. Although her skin can still be described as white, her facial features and hair differ from other allegorical continents in the series. Her tight curls are contained in a beautiful curled headdress that frames her features, which are shown in strict profile: short, upturned nose, sunken eyes and full lips.
Sharing these stereotyped traits, but reflecting ever-changing 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 various shades of skin color using different concentrations. of ink. Known as an artist engaged in social commentary, Bosse clearly depicts the African continent as a black woman sheltering from the "untamed heat" of its deserts, as the inscription notes.
The characteristic features that appear in engravings by De Vos and Bosse persisted until the end of the 17th and 18th centuries. They can be found on the porcelain allegories of Asia and Africa from the Manufacture de Vincennes (2012.507), made in France at the height of the transatlantic slave trade.
When Vincennes porcelain was made around 1750, Europeans had already begun to construct the fiction that people all over the world belonged to distinct racial categories that could be discerned by appearance. Historians generally 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 into 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. Although Bernier’s argument is often incoherent.
Bibliography:
Spira, Freyda. “Allegories of the Four Continents.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/alfc/hd_alfc.htm (March 2021)
Arizzoli, Louise. “James Hazen Hyde and the Allegory of the Four Continents: A Research Collection for an Amateur Art Historian.” Journal of the History of Collections 25, no. 2 (2013): 277–86.
Davies, Surekha. Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human: New Worlds, Maps, and Monsters. Cambridge Social and Cultural Histories 24. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016.
“The Four Continents” from the Collection of James Hazen Hyde. New York: Cooper Union Museum, 1961._
Horowitz, Maryanne Cline, and Louise Arizzoli, eds. Bodies and Maps: Early Modern Personifications of the Continents. Intersections, Vol. 73. Leiden: Brill, 2021.
Hyde, James Hazen. L’iconographie des quatre parties du monde dans les tapisseries. Paris: Gazette des beaux-arts, 1924.
LeCorbeiller, Clare. “Miss America and Her Sisters: Personifications of the Four Parts of the World.”
Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, n.s., 19, no. 8 (April 1961): 209–23.
Leitch, Stephanie. Mapping Ethnography in Early Modern Germany: New Worlds in Print Culture. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
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Lowe, Lisa. The Intimacies of the Four Continents. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015.
Romberg, Marion. “Continent Allegories in the Baroque Age—A Database.” Journal 18, no. 5 (Spring 2018).
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