Muisca art

This article describes the art produced by the Muisca. The Muisca established one of the four grand civilisations of the pre-Columbian Americas on the Altiplano Cundiboyacense in present-day central Colombia. Their various forms of art have been described in detail and include pottery, textiles, body art, hieroglyphs and rock art. While their architecture was modest compared to the Inca, Aztec and Maya civilisations, the Muisca are best known for their skilled goldworking. The Museo del Oro in the Colombian capital Bogotá houses the biggest collection of golden objects in the world, from various Colombian cultures including the Muisca.

The first art in the Eastern Ranges of the Colombian Andes goes back several millennia. Although this predates the Muisca civilisation, whose onset is commonly set at 800 AD, nevertheless, some of these styles persevered through the ages.

During the preceramic era, the people of the highlands produced petrographs and petroglyphs representing their deities, the abundant flora and fauna of the area, abstract motives and anthropomorphic or anthropo-zoomorphic elements. The self-sufficient sedentary agricultural society developed into a culture based on ceramics and the extraction of salt in the Herrera Period, usually defined as 800 BC to 800 AD. During this time, the oldest existing form of constructed art was erected; the archaeoastronomical site called El Infiernito ("The Little Hell") by the catholic Spanish conquistadors. The Herrera Period also marked the widespread use of pottery and textiles and the start of what would become the main motive for the Spanish conquest; the skilled fine goldworking. The golden age of Muisca metallurgy is represented in the Muisca raft, considered the masterpiece of this technology and depicts the initiation ritual of the new psihipqua of Muyquytá, the southern part of the Muisca Confederation. This ceremony, performed by xeques (priests) and caciques wearing feathered golden crowns and accompanied by music and dance, took place on a raft in Lake Guatavita, in the northern part of the flat Bogotá savanna. Accounts of such ceremonies created the legend of El Dorado among the Spanish, leading them on a decades-long quest for this mythical place.

The rich art elaborated by the Muisca has inspired modern artists and designers in their creativity. Muisca motives are represented as murals, in clothing and as objects found all over the former Muisca territories as well as in animated clips and video games. The art of the indigenous inhabitants of the Altiplano Cundiboyacense is well studied by many different researchers who published their work right from the beginning of colonial times. The conquistador who made first contact with the Muisca, Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada, wrote in his memoires about a skilled and well-organised civilisation of traders and farmers. Friar Pedro Simón described the relation between art and the religion and later contributions in the analysis of the various artforms have been made by Alexander von Humboldt, Joaquín Acosta and Liborio Zerda in the 19th century, Miguel Triana, Eliécer Silva Celis and Sylvia M. Broadbent in the 20th century and modern research is dominated by the work of Carl Henrik Langebaek Rueda, Javier Ocampo López and many others.