Jewelers routes

20 January 2016

The Gold Museum in Bogota

Colombia’s tainted reputation explains the Bogota Gold Museum ’s lack of renown, but it does possess the largest pre-Hispanic gold work collection of the world.

Par Ludovic Leonelli*.

 

 

The museum has 35,000 gold objects dating from 500 BC until the Spanish conquest, but only 5% are exhibited. Among the major pieces, a jaguar mask in hammered and folded gold foil, a large seashell, a warrior’s helmet or a pectoral-piece depicting a bird-man.

 

The museum has an entire room dedicated to its most outstanding gold piece measuring only 20 cm high and 10 cm wide. It represents a raft of bamboo or reeds, from which a Muisca leader surrounded by servants throws gold and emeralds into a Guatavitan lake. This ceremony gave rise to the myth of El Dorado, which aroused the Europeans’ thirst for gold and drove them in search of the lake, which really does exist in Colombia.

 

Muiscas, Tolimas, Calimas, Nariño, Quimbaya (who used the lost wax technique), Zinu or Tayronas: all Colombia’s indigenous communities are represented by body ornaments like rings, pectorals, nose ornaments , necklaces, pendants and loin covers. Created for the caciques and village chiefs, many were found in tombs or sarcophagi carved into tree trunks. Some communities thinking they were children of the sun, believed these objects ensured protection in the afterlife.

 

Throughout the rooms one finds the classic oppositions of sun / moon, masculinity / femininity and land / water. The motifs include abstract figures or animals, long-beaked birds, pelicans, fish, frogs, jaguars, cats, butterflies and bats called “black suns” by the Indians. The hybridizations are beautiful, like the one found in an aerodynamic sculpture of a fish and a bird. These Hispanic societies excelled in metamorphosis, the mixing of the human, the animal and the divine. Thus a man-jaguar attempts to appropriate the strength, flexibility and spirit of the animal by wearing a golden jaguar mask or its pelt, or by tattooing the face to resemble it, or by wearing long nails like its claws.

 

The anthropological dimension is inseparable from the aesthetic one, although it must be said, no piece is as sophisticated as the mask of Tutankhamen … The visitor had come for gold but left full of questions about Columbian societies without writing.

 

*Ludovic Leonelli (journalist and author of La Séduction Baudrillard published by l’École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts).

 

Related article:

Mochica jewelry at the Larco museum

Most popular articles

10 must-see stones at the Mineralogy Museum of Mines Paris - PSL

This charming museum was created at the end of the 18th century by scientists from the École des Mines. Today, it also delights aesthetes and jewelry...

All aboard for "Peru - A golden heritage » with Carole Fraresso and Aracari Travel

This exclusive 12-day jewelry itinerary has been developed by Carole Fraresso, a doctor of archaeomaterials, specialist in Andean goldsmithing and creator...

In Toyokoro, the Jewelry Ice Beach

On this beach in Otsu, Hokkaido, shards of ice glisten in the sunlight like precious stones.

Place Vendôme: the photo collection of jeweler Lorenz Bäumer

Exactly 30 years ago, Lorenz Bäumer launched his company and set up shop on Place Vendôme. At the same time, he began a collection of photos dedicated to...

Schmuckmuseum Pforzheim: Art Nouveau jewelry – a collection within a collection

You have to go back to the origins of the Schmuckmuseum Pforzheim’s collection to understand the great richness of this section dedicated to Art Nouveau.

The Lalique Museum, the artist’s glass universe

650 objects, including about sixty beautiful pieces of jewelry, give visitors a rich insight into the growing importance of glass in the work of René Lalique.