Discourse and art historical analysis of continent allegories

The focus in the scope of this project lies on all immobile continent allegories on fresco, stucco, sculpture, tiles, and paintings. Thus it concerns places within castles, cloisters, town houses, gardens, public places, and above all churches. Based on prior investigations of the project team which indicated a remarkable density (unexplained till this day) of up till now 322 continent representations in the Southern Part of the Holy Roman Empire - continent allegories exist, of course, also somewhere else, but not in such a density and social dispersion -, as well as based on a summary of the present, mostly art historical research, it becomes apparent that as the Europe research suggested for almost a decade, continent allegories can be ascribed a far higher source value from a discourse- analytic perspective. Discourses visualized by pictures may under certain conditions reach broader parts of society than pure word-ext discourses or highly complex art products, which are accessible and understandable only to a small circle. We find continent allegories at places, which, separate or together (such as in churches) were accessible to quite different society groups and, as shall be shown, were understood by them. Contrary to other allegories the iconography of the continents permits the artist to play with "exotic" and foreign vocabulary at places beyond the profane area like, for example, in village churches. This happens in a way, that they become bearers of additional information independent of their allegorical meaning such as flora and fauna, people and animals of each continent. The first objective of this project is a systematic survey within the area of investigations as well as detailed processing of the continent allegories in a hypermedia surrounding in view of a variety of approaches by different disciplines. The objective, in contrast to present digitization or interlinking projects, must not be merely the provision of a big data pool. An interactive database should originate which prepares the sum of an only difficultly accessible source corpus in a way that the user gains interactively essential insights into presence, common characteristics, and differences as well as into the historically functional-communicative role of the iconography of the continents within the investigation area. Similar to a catalog raisonné or categories of art specific survey within national borders the focus on a specific iconography should facilitate and promote comparative studies of the most different kind. The second objective should be the closing of a research gap in the Europe research based on the provided source corpus. The focus lies on the question posed by Peter Burke thirty years ago about "the social history of the consciousness of Europe". The solution to the problem of the European consciousness and its social width and anchorage in certain epochs can be mainly found by investigating European discourses. European consciousness generates European discourses, European discourses signal European consciousness, make them public, and contribute to further promoting European consciousness. As a topos continent allegories bring together discourses from various primary sources; as a topos they concern different social classes. Hence, continent allegories are a particularly suitable starting point for a systematic investigation, which wants to analyze European discourses and European consciousness among different, not least also popular social classes.

During the late Renaissance around 1570 humanists developed a new shorthand way of representing the world at a single glance: personifications of the four continents Europe, Asia, Africa and America. While the continent allegory as an iconic type had already been invented in antiquity, humanists and their artists adapted the concept by creating the four-continent scheme and standardizing the attributes characterizing the continents. During the next 230 years until ca. 1800, this iconic scheme became a huge success story. The four continent allegories were represented in all known media and were present both in the public sphere and in peoples homes. The peak of the continent allegories popularity was reached in the 18th century. As elements of a pictorial language they were interwoven with texts, dogmas, narratives and stereotypes. Thus the project team found itself asking: What did continent allegories actually mean to people living in the Baroque age?Notably though not exclusively this question is the topic of a research project on continent allegories carried out between 2012 and 2016. The project team approached the subject in a new and systematic fashion: Firstly, a clearly defined geographic area consisting of the southern part of the Holy Roman Empire was chosen, ranging from Freiburg in the Breisgau to the eastern frontier of Lower Austria including Vienna. The northern limit of the study area is constituted by the Main River, the southern one by South Tyrol. Secondly, the project studied continent allegories in immovable media like fresco, stucco and sculptures within abbeys, palaces, parks and gardens, townhouses and most importantly in churches. The systematic survey conducted by the project team identified 407 instances of continent allegories in the south of the Holy Roman Empire. To facilitate the systematic and detailed analysis of all identified instances of continent allegories, a database was developed and is now open access: http://erdteilallegorien.univie.ac.at. This database allows for using the collection of sources for various research interests: iconography and iconology, reception of aesthetics, cultural history, social history, history of identity, history of science, etc.Further results of this research project can be found in the anthology The Language of Continent Allegories in Baroque Central Europe (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag 2016).and in the Marion Rombergs doctoral thesis Die Welt im Dienst der Konfession. Erdteilallegorien in Dorfkirchen auf dem Gebiet des Fürstbistums Augsburg im 18. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag 2017).