An exploration of the ways early modern European artists have visualized continents through the female (sometimes male) body to express their perceptions of newly encountered peoples. Often stereotypical, these personifications are however more complex than what they seem.

Contents

1 Introduction (1): Rival Interpretations of Continent Personifications
2 Introduction (2): Allegories of the Four Continents Today: Assessing Contemporary Contributions

PART 1 Personifications of the Continents and Issues of Race and Gender
3 Gender and Race in the Personification of the Continents in the Early Modern Period: Building Eurocentrism
4 Exotic Female (and Male) Continents: Early Modern Fourfold Division of Humanity

PART 2 Cartographical Origins of Early Continent Personification
5 The Pre-History of the Personification of Continents on Maps: Earth, Ocean, and the Sons of Noah
6 Magi, Winds, Continents: Dark Skin and Global Allegory in Early Modern Images

PART 3 Personifications of the World in Italian Frescoes
7 Casting the Continents: Sacred History and Spiritual Odyssey in the Camposanto of Pisa
8 Portraits of the World - The Four Continents at Palazzo Farnese in Caprarola: The Figurative Code, Sources and Comparisons

PART 4 Continent Personifications in Maps and Book Illustration
9 Why were there no Continental Allegories in Renaissance Venice? The Amerasian Personifications of Giuseppe Rosaccio
10 Worlds Apart: The Four Continents and the Civitates Orbis Terrarum
11 When Allegory Met History: Allegories of the Continents on Costume-Book Title Pages in the Late Sixteenth Century

PART 5 Popularization of Continent Personifications in the Eighteenth Century
12 The Visible Church - The Discourse on an Ecclesia Triumphans and the Four Continents in Parish Churches of Baroque Southern Germany
13 The Rearing Horse and the Kneeling Camel: Continental Ceramics and Europe's Race to Modernity
14 Collecting the Four Continents: James Hazen Hyde (1876-1959), an American in Paris
15 Afterword: Ornament and the Fabrication of Early Modern Worlds
Index Nominum