As The Language of Continent Allegories demonstrates, new digital technologies facilitate the integrated analysis of architecture and works of art in situ and regionally, as well as those less commonly studied. Mapping technologies including GIS (geographic information systems) are being used with more frequency to enable the collection, organization, and analysis of art historical data. One particularly successful example is the interactive journal project Artl@s, created by art historians Catherine Dossin and Beatrice Joyeux-Prunel (centered mainly on modern and contemporary art historical topics). Early useful studies and discussions of similar undertakings may be found in Dear, Ketchum, Luria, and Richardson’s GeoHumanities: Art, History, Text at the Edge of Place (2011). Familiar, accessible, and geographically oriented applications such as Google Maps or timeline-centered ones such as Historical GIS and Timeline have provided for some time now humanities scholars with straightforward, easy-to-use means of mapping distribution and frequency of visual phenomena across time and space. While its chief audience is scholars of (mainly European) Baroque arts and architectures, this volume may also attract the attention of those interested in exploring these technologies and their application to humanities scholarship more generally.

Although not all contributors to Schmale, Romberg, and Köstlbauer’s volume rely on digital or spatial-temporal technologies for the presentation of their subjects, and while each essay has its merits, attention should be drawn to the editors’ database project, A Discourse and Art Historical Analysis of the Allegories of the Four Continents in the South of the Holy Roman Empire and Its Documentation in a Hypermedia Environment (2012–16), which serves as the foundation for the volume itself. Coeditor Marion Romberg’s contributions, drawn from her doctoral research, represent this intersection most directly.

Taken together, the contributions trace the beginnings and proliferation of the allegorical representation of the continents in immovable works of late Baroque art located across an area defined as the southern realms of the Holy Roman Empire to the eastern frontier (Lower Austria, including Vienna), and from the Main River to the north, to the South Tyrol. The volume responds to and expands on Sabine Poeschel’s fundamental typology study Studien zur Ikonographie der Erdtiele in der Kunst des 16.–18. Jahrhunderts (1985). The 2015 Rotterdam International Congress for Eighteenth-Century Studies led to the inclusion in the volume of material specifically on Jesuit activity in Japan and elsewhere.

The essays form three themed sections, largely geographically determined: first, “Fundamentals”; second, “The Language of Continent Allegories in the Southern Holy Roman Empire”; third, “The Language of Continent Allegories from Warsaw to Gorizia.” Forays outward in specialized studies whose regional emphasis ranges from the European to the global include Haruka Oba’s chapter, “Using the Past for the Church’s ‘Present’ and ‘Future’: The Remembrance of Catholic Japan in Drama and Art in the Southern German-Speaking Area.” While the scope of the volume (beyond what the volume’s title suggests) is welcome, the conceptual geography would have benefited from more deliberate and rigorous discussion by the editors and individual authors so that the volume as a whole, rich in detail and fascinating case studies, would convey an even greater coherence of method and message. Doing so would mitigate the somewhat vague, overarching prefatory research question, “What did continent allegories actually mean to people living in the Baroque age?” (7). A readership less well acquainted with what could be argued is East-Central European material, for example, may wish to understand what these sections share historically and conceptually with the wider area under consideration, as well as how the interpretation of that material may be inflected by the specific historical and local circumstances that characterize place and patronage.

While each chapter merits study, general and specialized readers alike might gain from an exploration of the open-access website that houses the database connected to the volume: http://continentallegories.univie.ac.at. The database, a necessary supplement to the overall topics and a few individual chapters, is well organized and contains excellent, high-resolution color photographs that supplement the research in the volume. This provides the added benefit of expanding beyond the confines of a work published in a traditional manner with a necessarily limited number of reproductions; it does not include all material represented in the volume (e.g., East-Central European examples). Searchable via place, a timeline, and index (using Iconclass codes for standardization), the database allows the reader to compare multiple images at the same site, or more than one artist active at a given site. It is a useful vehicle for connecting spatial-temporal material to narrative, with the caveat that the data presentation in the volume sometimes weighs the discussion down and subsumes the main ideas; at other times it provides insight into time-space phemonena. One of the main contributions of this well-researched volume is the editors’ participation in the further refinement of these useful and often groundbreaking methodologies.