PAINTING THE NATIONAL HISTORY: REPRESENTATIONS ON THE INDEPENDENCE OF COLOMBIA, 1830-1880

Abstract

Independence and the abrupt onset of the republic resulted in the urgent need to build a nation. The loss of references with the European metropolis was the trigger for the nascent republic to seek to legitimize itself from its own past. The nineteenth century reinvented its own history: the pre-Hispanic, the colonial and the Independence were reread from the republic, and used to legitimize elites, parties, rulers, politicians, constitutions, and wars. The emergence of new themes in the arts such as portraits, allegories and battles were the first attempts to build an iconography to legitimize the nascent new republic based on ruptures and continuities with the viceregal culture. This text concentrates on the conformation of the first images made by painters to represent Independence between the years 1830 to 1880.

Keywords:
Cultural history; history of art; social representations; national heroes; Independence of Colombia; history of Colombia; Colombian painters.