Archeologists tell us gold was not used as currency in Colombia before the Spanish Conquest, but it was used as an adornment for persons of high status within the various societies that lived in the Andean valleys of what was to become New Granada.
The various tribes used assorted symbols and styles to express their veneration for the important people who lived among them and expressed their search for meaning in life by illustrating their gold adornments with their creation myths and veneration for assorted animals.
The gold museum in downtown Bogotá is renowned among travelers and you can see why. It is a modern four story building packed with cases displaying gold items and pottery, statuettes and articles from daily life explaining how peoples thousands of years ago lived and what they believed.
Admission is free on Sundays though Layne and I both rented the audio tour beautifully narrated in fluent grammatical English (available in Spanish, French and Portuguese recordings too). Frankly the four halls of exhibits are overwhelming and you could spend days in this magnificent place.
One theme that came up and I suspect will be seen over again as we cross the Andes is the vision of life as a duality of experience. Apparently a common belief seen in this mountain range the length of South America is the search for juxtaposition.
These ancient beliefs saw everything in terms of opposites: male/female, night/day, good/evil and so forth. Furthermore there was the attribution of animal characteristics to humans, panthers abd bats among the favorites.
The gold is beaten thin and sometimes mixed with copper ore to give it a reddish tint and the artists then made body adornments for their leaders.
To describe this place as overwhelming is a gross understatement. We come as westerners to these places with our own expectations of gold.
I of course thought of the Atocha exhibits at the Mel Fisher Museum in Key West. The gold plundered here ended up there an arc of history connecting two distant places.
But gold for us is wealth and status and preservation of status in a very different way. Each tribe in different corners of this vast mountainous country had their own rites and symbols but they all south meaning and tried to give purpose to their lives by creating myths and illustrating them in the permanent form that is imperishable gold.
It is possible I suppose to try to imagine what might have been going through the mind of this Muisca man admiring the ancestral art.
Masks, nose rings, breast plates for men and women, life and death all on display. I’m not really the right guide for this sort of place because the more I see attempts to give meaning or permanence to life the less I understand.
But this extraordinary building deserves the praise that is heaped upon it.
Elegant sophisticated and functional. For those still stuck in ancient stereotypes this is also part of modern South America.
No surprise then that there was a line to get in as we waited for the precise ten o’clock opening hour.
If you are 60 years old it’s always free admission. Imagine that as a resident of Bogotá, the ability to just stop by of an afternoon to ponder history and the meaning of life.
Or to ponder the permanence of gold.
Or the inevitability of death.
Fernando Botero died in 2023 after a long and much appreciated life as one of Colombia's most famous artists. Throughout the 20th century he delighted himself with his humor and his ability to mock artistic convention and to make us the viewers think twice about what we’d imagined we know.
He’s best known for his statuary, vast bronze pieces of people and animals as collections of bubbles, rotund exaggerations of life. There is a huge outdoor collection of these bronzes in his home town of Medellin which we will see I hope in a couple of weeks.
This Bogotá museum funded by the Colombian National Bank with free admission to all (!) has a few bronzes but it’s mostly an exploration of paintings and drawings the artist donated for this permanent display.
There he is below, toying with the human form:
Or joking around with La Gioconda, Madonna Lisa better known as Mona Lisa as you’ve never seen her. And yes her eyes follow you around the room as they do in the much smaller less ebullient original in the Louvre.
Botero loved still life’s but not like traditional spare images of across and an orange and a pear. Botero painted a huge basket piled high with Colombian tropical fruits a huge explosion of color.
Life couldn’t contain him. Check out this cheeky picture of a woman in a bath tub and the artist busting in on her:
After two months driving around this country I like the Colombian touches in the backgrounds, the tile roofs, the church spires, the hints of his homeland. Below more fruit and to the right his portrait of Cezanne in Botero style.
Abundant fruit with cutlery, fruit to be enjoyed and huge chunky guitars and couples dancing (sometimes with two left feet!) are his themes.
On the darker side Botero did not shy away from depicting Colombia’s civil war. The founder of the FARC - Colombian Armrd Revolutionary Front - Manuel Marulanda who happily died in 2009 paving the way for peace talks:
A car bomb Botero style:
And a depiction of the Mejor Esquino Massacre, 3rd of April 1988, that saw 28 people murdered including a ten year old boy in a misplaced fight between Colombian paramilitaries in the Civil War.
And yes he is quite popular…is Botero.
The Botero is part of a huge complex of assorted artists housed by the bank. Too many for one visit but bound to inspire curiosity.
And as a reminder of home we have a touch of St Petersburg with a piece by Salvador Dali on display.
Apparently Botero liked the snowbound landscapes of Maine artist Neil Welliver father of the well known actor Titus.
Well worth the time to visit, even on a one day -two museum tour. Exhausting but satisfying.
Up next: walking Bogotá on a Sunday which was quite the experience.
