"European artists from the Renaissance onward have visualized the known world through allegorical figures derived from ancient Egyptian, Greek, and Roman personifications.

Early allegories of the continents comprised only Europe, Asia, and Africa but when Europeans reached the Americas in 1492, it too was incorporated into the existing schema.

(often) These allegorical figures merge a sexualized young woman (virgin territory) with the symbols and attributes that their makers associated with each continent, in some cases commodities to be traded and resources to be exploited.

America is the only allegorical figure...depicted with her breasts bared and beckoning, an allusion to Europe’s desire to further explore her territory. She wears a feather headdress and carries a bow and arrows, with a full quiver in reserve. At her feet is a severed head pierced with an arrow, conveying her aggressive temperament and the commonly held belief that Indigenous peoples were all cannibals.

(the) archetypes, however, make no attempt to differentiate the facial structure or skin color of the four women representing the continents. This physical uniformity is likely derived from the notion of a classical Western ideal, in which a fetishized white woman, often shown in a state of undress, could be used to represent whatever subject was being allegorized."

https://archive.org/details/iconologia00ripa/page/n493/mode/2up