Allegory of America 1582 - 1594

Jan van der Straet, called Stradanus, made this drawing, Allegory of America, using pen and brown ink with brown wash, heightened with white, over black chalk underdrawing, around 1587. It’s an image that encapsulates the fraught encounter between Europe and the Americas. Stradanus, working in Florence, visualizes “America” as a reclining, indigenous woman, passively encountering a European explorer. The ship and navigational tools signal a dawning age of exploration, alongside the dispossession of indigenous people, symbolized by the background scene of cannibalism. The image offers an insight into how Europeans conceptualized America through a lens of exoticism, colonialism, and nascent scientific curiosity. The figure is based on a European idea of a classical Venus, while the native flora and fauna are noted with an ethnographer’s eye. This image, as well as other allegories of this kind, have their roots in the “Nova Reperta,” or “New Discoveries,” series, a larger project of prints that depict technological advancements and geographical discoveries. Art historians explore how the visual codes and cultural references of the time intersect with the complex social dynamics of colonialism and the politics of imagery.