Fig. 4. Woodcut showing American cannibalism
and other Indian customs in Amerigo Vespucci’s
German translation of his letter to Piero Soderini,
published as Disz büchlin saget wie die … by
Johannes Grüniger in Strasbourg in 1509. Courtesy
The Newberry Library, Chicago (VAULT Ayer 112
.V5 1509).
America, holding bow and axe, is seated on an armadillo. The
savagery of this land is also shown in the cannibalism scene in the
background. By echoing elements already included by Maarten de
Vos, America in Vrients’s world map is very far from the Arcadian
America in Barendsz’s design (figs. 5 and 6).
In 1593, Cesare Ripa published his Iconologia overo Descrittione
Dell’imagini Universali cavate dall’Antichità et da altri luoghi, a book
of emblems organized alphabetically that contributed to a great extent
to fixing the iconography of the four continents. The first edition of the
Iconologia was published without images, and the second, this time
with 684 concepts and 151 woodcuts, appeared in Rome in 1603.
Many editions and translations into different languages followed
(plate 16), and the Iconologia became an extremely influential source
in the depiction of allegorical figures in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries and in various art forms. The scorpion, the lion, and the
necklace in Ripa’s Africa are repeated at the marginal iconography of
the double-hemisphere world map published in Leiden around 1720
by Pieter van der Aa (1659–1733; plate 17).
This later work shows that two centuries after the four continents
appeared in the borders of Münster-Holbein’s world map (plate 9), the
subject was still popular in cartography. Although it reached certain
standardization, nuances and differences were introduced from one
map to another. Europe is still associated with symbols of power,
and in Van der Aa’s world map she also leads in the arts, as by her
feet there are a press, two pages with scribbled text, and a painter’s
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