Neapolitan School, 17th Century, Allegory Of Africa

Neapolitan school, 17th century

Allegory

Oil on canvas, cm

With frame, 144 x 110

During the sixteenth century the tendency had developed to divide the world into four continents: Africa, America, Asia, Europe. Each of the continents represented one of the quadrants of the world and corresponded to a cardinal point: Europe the north, Asia the east, Africa the south and America the west.

This division of continents was well suited to the rigorous Renaissance mentality of the time, which had divided the world into the four seasons, the four elements, the four cardinal points, the four classical virtues and so on. From the sixteenth century to the eighteenth the personifications of the four continents were an artistic theme that enjoyed wide popularity, from painting to sculpture, from prints and engravings to porcelain services. These personifications could be found on four-sided monuments (such as the fountain of the Four Continents in Trieste and the monument to Cervantes in Madrid) or in front of a single façade. The personified continents very often had feminine attributes and their appearance was based on an iconography that represented every continent: Europe was dressed elegantly and with royal clothes, Asia was dressed in exotic clothes, Africa and America were semi-undressed and were characterized by various exotic attributes.

Pivotal reference for artists in the elaboration of this type of images was the text of Cesare Ripa, Iconologia of 1603. Here Africa is described as a woman wearing an elephant head headdress and is accompanied by some animals, such as the lion, desert scorpion and asps. She holds a cornucopia in her hand, symbolizing the fertility and abundance of some parts of the continent. Other depictions from the Renaissance and Baroque eras depict Africa half-naked or naked, symbolizing the European perception of the African era as a civilised and wild land. Some iconographies of Cesare Ripa’s work depict Africa with light skin, but later the representation with dark skin spread, as it better identified the continent than the other four.

The allegory of Africa proposed here, modelled on Francesco Solimena, mixes the aforementioned iconographic traditions: the female figure in the center is in fact just covered by a white cloth, supported by two cherubs of which one has his face covered by the veil itself. It is flanked by a third putto, which holds the usual cornucopia and an exotic animal, a lion. The elephant is not recalled by the hat as for Cesare Ripa, but is present in the background.  

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