Historia Mínima de Colombia by Jorge Orlando Melo

It was not until the 19 th century that the Chorographic Commission-1850-59 made an attempt to document the republic and some Indian monuments (rock art) which were included as one way of getting to know the territory. Since the Colonial period (16 th to 19 th centuries) there has been incomplete data collected on the existence of pre-Columbian rock art sites, where Colombian Indian communities left their thoughts, and with them the language they used to represent them, painted or engraved on rocks in their territorial lands. Understanding the motives that led to the creation of these “graffittis” may help shed some light on the nineteenth-century’s need to craft its national history through the creation of official portraiture even if this involved vandalizing millenary indigenous representations in order to construct a certain type of historical tale through images and monuments that would overwrite the aboriginal past with the hispanic tradition. These can be studied through a critical approach of the shaping of cultural memory and the preservation of the past conceived in the nineteenth-century and the beginning of the twentieth. This article studies the reasons that led to the official commissioning of these portraits by a conservative government and that are currently protected by national heritage laws because they were painted prior to 1920. Two of these notables were liberal Presidents of the Republic and three of them were generals fighting civil wars in liberal armies between 18. These paintings portray five liberal dignitaries from nineteenth-century Colombian history. At the Piedras del Tunjo Arqueological Park in Facatativá, Colombia, there is a particular rock shelter colloquially called “The President´s Rock” where visitors can find pre-Hispanic rock art that dates back 12,000 years and that coexists with a series of six oil portraits commissioned in 1915 to an unknown artist.

Historia Mínima de Colombia by Jorge Orlando Melo