Louise Arizzoli

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. The new book Bodies and Maps: Early Modern Personifications of the Continents, co-edited by Maryanne Cline Horowitz and Louise Arizzoli, opens up questions about early modern politics, travel literature, sexualities, gender, processes of making, and the mobility of forms and motifs.

Between the two World Wars, James Hazen Hyde (1876-1959), a wealthy American citizen living in Paris, gathered a fascinating and unique thematic collection which traced the theme of the Allegory of the Four Parts of the World, across time and media.
This paper will discuss issues of art collecting through the little-known example of James Hazen Hyde, who came from a wealthy New York family and used his capital to acquire art objects as well as social standing. Although of a younger generation, Hyde belonged to the circle of Gilded Age collectors such as Isabella Stewart-Gardner, the Huntingtons, Frick and J. P. Morgan. This paper will look, however, at a later moment in Hyde’s life through the analysis of the relationship he built with the Metropolitan Museum of Art between the years 1946 and 1959, when he decided to bequeath his collection to American museums. This paper will use primary sources such as his diary, his correspondence with museum curators at the Metropolitan Museum and his will. These documents will help unveiling Hyde’s complex relationship with his objects, which progressively moved from personal consumption to a larger and more ambitious project of the building of the American cultural heritage.

Between the two World Wars, James Hazen Hyde (1876-1959), a wealthy American citizen living in Paris, gathered a fascinating and unique thematic collection which traced the theme of the Allegory of the Four Parts of the World, across time and media. His collection brought together around 400 artworks from the mid-sixteenth to the early twentieth century– mainly decorative art objects, tapestries, drawings and 800 prints displaying Europe, Asia, Africa and America embodied as female figures holding a variety of attributes. Hyde’s collection is also worthy of notice for its specific focus on images of America. As an American expatriate in France for thirty-five years, Hyde attempted to reconnect with his country of birth through collecting objects with representations of America throughout the ages.
His interest for this allegorical theme resulted in him collecting not only rare objects all over Europe but also to document them with an extensive library and photographic archive, and to explore the iconography of his chosen subject in several scholarly articles. Even if now the collection is divided among several institutions, a significant part is preserved in New York, with groups of works housed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New York Historical Society, the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, and the Brooklyn Museum. The 10,000 volumes composing Hyde’s library were donated to the city library of Versailles and in the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, a few months before Hyde decided to return to the United States during World War II.
New York, 1876-1905
James H. Hyde was born in the wealthy New York Society of the Gilded Age; he was the only son of the millionaire head of the Equitable Life Assurance Society, Henry Baldwin Hyde. In 1899, after the death of his father, he inherited the majority of shares of the insurance company, but the dissipated life he had been living until then, made him ill-suited for the burden of responsibilities with which he was faced. In 1905, he sold the shares of the company and decided to move to France for good, where he started his activity as an art collector. Collecting was a way for him to affirm his social status within the new environment of the Parisian cultural élite as well as it surely provided a source of creative intellectual fulfillment.
Paris, 1905-1941: The Collecting years
The ninety-three volumes of his journal, preserved at the New York Historical Society in New York City, constitute the main evidence for reconstructing Hyde’s life as a collector between the two World Wars in France. Hyde’s journal proves to be crucial as it gives accounts of his research on art objects, his travels and findings, and sometimes it relates the details of a purchase or the frustration of the missed acquisition.
It was by means of travelling that Hyde began to shape his connoisseurship and his taste. He traveled extensively around Europe and defined his travel as “Voyages d’étude” (study travel), as these trips were planned months in advance, with meticulously prepared itineraries. To undertake the encyclopedic project of collecting exclusively Four Continents allegories, Hyde cultivated in those years a solid network of people who helped him. He sought the advice of eminent art historians, asked librarians and curators in public institutions to look for material that could be of interest to him concerning this theme. He also kept regular correspondence with antiquaries and art dealers in auction houses all over Europe to signal him about new objects on the market representing the continents, and he received at home objects for approval.
I will choose significant examples of people that participated to Hyde’s network: Carl Tancred Borenius (1885-1948) in London; Ludwig Pollak (1868-1943), Eugenie Sellers Strong (1860-1943) and Bartolomeo Nogara (1868-1954) in Rome, Jacques Seligman (1858-1923) and Nathan Wildenstein (1851-1934) in Paris. I will also analyze specific transactions of important objects for Hyde’s Four Continents collection and see in detail how the deal was made.
New York Again, 1941-1959
    Later in his life, Hyde, like many people who gathered important collections, decided to bequeath his own to a public institution, as he wanted to secure for posterity the main achievement of his life. His bequest to American museums is tied to the complex issue of his return in the United States during World War Two, and to the repatriation of his collection after the war. After he found his way back to New York in 1941, Hyde progressively changed his mind regarding his material possessions, and started to feel the need to separate from his cherished objects in order to partake in the larger and more ambitious project of the building of the American cultural heritage. In 1947, he then started to organize the donation of his collection to important New York institutions, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with which he had established a privileged relationship over the years, following the model of other American collectors. His bequest was finalized after his death, in 1959.

My paper focuses on a group of allegorical representations of America produced in the Netherlands at the end of the sixteenth century and examines how the interrelation of image and text participates to the creation of an original but polemical image of the New World, which reveals the European perception of the Other and quest of identity.

James Hazen Hyde (1876-1959) gathered the most comprehensive and diversified collection of artworks representing the Allegory of the Four Parts of the World from the mid-sixteenth to the late nineteenth century. He also launched the studies on this iconographical theme in the Arts with well-researched articles. Hyde was born in New York but spent a major part of his life in Paris. This paper investigates Hyde’s complex personality as a collector and sees how his beginnings in the New York society of the Gilded Age and his subsequent transplantation into the Parisian milieu affected his collecting practices. Indeed Hyde embraced the model of the amateur, whose personal life is not divided from his work, making his collecting habit his main activity. This paper will also argue that Hyde’s collection was intrinsically linked to the process of writing and, more specifically, to the writing of art history.

Etienne Clémentel is primarily known in France for his carrier in politics during the Third Republic; but he also was an art collector, patron of artists of his time, and an artist himself. He was a painter since his earliest years but his multifaceted talents and interests brought him to explore early color photography, through the means of stereoscopic autochromes. Clémentel remained an amateur photographer, whose photographs lie on the edge between art and documentation, while questioning the viewer's perception of reality. This study focuses on a collection of images now divided between the Musée d'Orsay and the Musée Rodin in Paris. It looks at the friendly reportage he did of his friends, Auguste Rodin and Claude Monet, at the records he left of his private and public life - his wife and children, his houses, his witness of World War I - and also at a well-documented trip he made throughout Italy in the summer of 1914.

of the Four Parts of the World is a masterpiece of eighteenth-century Neapolitan painting. 1 It has a prestigious history, a royal patronage and is now preserved at the Eskenazi Museum of Art at Indiana University, in the United States (Gealt 278; Arizzoli [Fig. 1]). The canvas was executed in 1738 for the Royal Palace of Naples to celebrate the wedding of Charles of the House of Bourbon with Maria Amalia of Saxony and was conceived for the ceiling of a private space close to the King's bedroom. 2 The canvas is one of the few surviving pieces of the cycle commissioned for the King's wedding, and provides us with a significant example of how a royal wedding suite would have been decorated during this time period. Solimena's allegory also represents visually the development of the iconography of the Four Continents in the eighteenth century, a moment that can be considered the golden age for this subject (Schmale et al.; Romberg). The Four Continents as an iconographical theme became popular during the Renaissance, a little less than a century after the discovery of the New World. The concept of embodying abstract concepts-like geographical knowledge for example-is much more ancient however, starting with Classical Greek civilization. That is when and where we find the earliest examples of allegorical representations of the European (Wintle) and African continents (Hyde 253-4). As we move through the Middle Ages, the three known continents, Europe, Asia and Africa, are often embodied through the Magi or the wise men coming from the East to worship the newborn Christ (Kaplan). Indeed, with the addition of the fourth continent, America, the Renaissance had reinvigorated this ancient theme, and established a rigid hierarchy among the different parts of the known world. Solimena's painting takes part in the development of this tradition that displays four female figures wearing outfits and holding specific attributes characteristic of their land. Europe was consistently shown as a queen leading the rest of the world, for its supremacy in warfare and the arts but also as head of the Church. Asia had been second within the hierarchy since the Renaissance, and this continent was displayed with a camel, and with an incense burner. Africa and America were considered inferior and were shown partially nude. They were categorized as the unknown and monstrous Other: America, for example, often is carrying pieces of human limbs to represent its practice of cannibalism. A detailed discussion of Solimena's painting will show how the artist adhered to a long-lasting convention but also how he introduced something new to the traditional iconography.

Since the early years of its discovery, European artists were fascinated by the New World and attempted to provide visual representations of America in all media. Yet the images they produced were not entirely freed from medieval conventions and from the fear for the unknown; the new continent was then often depicted as a frightening cannibal. Traditionally, as she always had been considered as the youngest and less civilized among the continents, America had been placed at the bottom of a rigid hierarchy of which Europe was considered the leader. However, around the years of the American war of Independence, a radical change occurred in the way she was represented: the fearsome and uncivilized savage transformed into a noble maiden. She finally was given princess-like attributes and considered as an equal. The images of America taken into examination -roughly dated between 1770 and 1790 - belong to a fascinating collection gathered by James Hazen Hyde (1876-1959), between the two World Wars in Paris. Although, he was born in Gilded Age New York, James H. Hyde expatriated to France in 1905, and there started his collecting activity. Historical relations between France and America had always been a matter of interest to Hyde and he had a particular attachment to the period of America’s struggle for independence, in which the link between his country of birth and his country of adoption was ennobled by friendship. An examination of some key artworks in Hyde’s collection, will provide new insight in the artistic innovations occurred in the iconography of the image of America, at the end of the eighteenth century.

Etienne Clémentel is primarily known in France for his carrier in politics during the Third Republic; but he also was an art collector, patron of artists of his time, and an artist himself. He was a painter since his earliest years but his multifaceted talents and interests brought him to explore early color photography, through the means of stereoscopic autochromes. Clémentel remained an amateur photographer, whose photographs lie on the edge between art and documentation, while questioning the viewer’s perception of reality. This study focuses on a collection of images now divided between the Musée d’Orsay and the Musée Rodin in Paris. It looks at the friendly reportage he did of his friends, Auguste Rodin and Claude Monet, at the records he left of his private and public life - his wife and children, his houses, his witness of World War I - and also at a well-documented trip he made throughout Italy in the summer of 1914.

Marietta Robusti was the first daughter of
the famous Venetian painter of the Renaissance,
Jacopo Tintoretto. She was certainly
a recognized artist during her own time, and
her portraits were appreciated not only in
Venice but also throughout Europe. Her work,
however, never received extensive attention
in modern times because she spent all of her
short life in the workshop of her father, as
one of his main assistants. While attributions
remain problematic, this paper aims to rediscover
her likeness within the paintings of her
father Jacopo and of her brother Domenico.
The individualized features of her face can
in fact be recognized in a group of paintings,
dating from the late 1570s and the mid-1580s.
It is thus possible to think that she played
a role that was diverse and more complex
than has usually been believed. She not only
was Tintoretto’s talented assistant, but she
also was, most likely, a source of inspiration
for her brother and her

James Hazen Hyde (1876-1959) gathered the most comprehensive and diversified collection of artworks representing the Allegory of the Four Parts of the World from the mid-sixteenth to the late nineteenth century. He also produced a number of well-researched studies on this iconographical theme. Hyde was born in New York but spent a major part of his life in Paris: this paper investigates his complex personality as a collector and sees how his beginnings in New York society of the Gilded Age and his subsequent transplantation into the Parisian milieu affected his collecting practices. Indeed Hyde embraced the model of the amateur, whose personal life is inseparable from his work: tending his collecting habit constituted his everyday activity. This paper will also argue that Hyde’s collection was intrinsically linked to the process of writing and, more specifically, to the writing of art history.

European artists and writers visualized the known world through personifications holding attributes related to each continent. After its discovery, America was added to the figures of Europe, Asia, and Africa. Allegories developed, reviving the Greek habit to depict abstract concepts in the human form. During the sixteenth century, continent personifications started to appear in pageants, atlases and prints, and became a very popular iconographical motif throughout Europe in all artistic media. These figures clearly show the way Europeans perceived the rest of the world - often characterized as a stereotypical Other – and were generally designed to express Europe’s belief of its own superiority, as well as its quest for a newer global identity.

We are welcoming papers for a session at the Renaissance Society of America, New Orleans, 22- 24 March 2018, dealing broadly with visual, literary and cartographical representations of the continents in the early modern world, from different regions of Europe. We would also welcome presentations on ancient and medieval sources for the continents’ iconography--the themes of Europa and the Bull, Africa with elephant tusk headdress, Asia with incense burner, and the Adoration of the Magi; transformations in America from cannibalistic to civilized; personification of cities and rivers, as well as travel accounts, early modern maps, and literary descriptions of the known and unknown continents. We would also welcome papers dealing with non-western perspectives – artistic or cartographical – on Europe. This call for papers would like to expand on the sessions of RSA held in Chicago 2017.

Please send proposals to Louise Arizzoli (larizzol@olemiss.edu) and Maryanne Horowitz (horowitz@oxy.edu). Include in your proposal: name and affiliation, paper title (max. 15 words), abstract (max. 150 words), and a brief CV (max. 300 words; in ordinary CV format).
Email proposals as soon as possible, but no later than May 25, 2017.
Applicants will hear whether paper proposal fits in this group submission by 4 June, for the RSA submission deadline of 7 June 2017.

European artists and writers visualized the known world through personifications holding attributes related to each continent. After the discovery of America, America was added to the figures of Europe, Asia, and Africa. Allegories developed, reviving the Greek habit to depict abstract concepts in the human form. During the sixteenth century, continent personifications started to appear in pageants, atlases and prints, and became a very popular iconographical motif throughout Europe in all artistic media. These figures clearly show the way Europeans perceived the rest of the world - often characterized as a stereotypical Other – and were generally designed to express Europe’s belief of its own superiority, as well as its quest for a newer global identity.

We are welcoming papers for a session at the Renaissance Society of America, Chicago, 30 March-1 April 2017, dealing broadly with visual and literary representations of the continents in the early modern world, in all media and from different regions of Europe. We would also welcome presentations on ancient and medieval sources for the continents’ iconography--the themes of Europa and the Bull, Africa with elephant tusk headdress, Asia with incense burner, and the Adoration of the Magi; transformations in America from cannibalistic to civilized; as well as travel accounts, early modern maps, and literary descriptions of the known and unknown continents.
Please send proposals to Louise Arizzoli (larizzol@olemiss.edu) and Maryanne Horowitz (horowitz@oxy.edu). Include in your proposal: name and affiliation, paper title (max. 15 words), abstract (max. 150 words), and a brief CV (max. 300 words; in ordinary CV format).
Email proposals as soon as possible, but no later than May 25, 2016.
Applicants will hear whether paper proposal fits in this group submission by Sat. 4 June, for the RSA submission deadline of Tues. 7 June 2016.

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: 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.