Colonial Mural of an Elephant Hunt
Allegorical Fresco with Elephants and Climber
Fantastical Rhinoceros
Diana the Huntress with Stag
Duranta erecta “Golden Edge”
Sedan Chair and Travel Chest
Carved Wooden Choir Balcony with Caryatids
Spanish Bargueño Desk
Devotional Niche with Saint Figure
Bromeliad and Firethorn
Anthropomorphic Ceremonial Vessels
Colonial Courtyard Garden
Colonial Dining Room
Wattle-and-Daub Roof Structure
Yucca Plants
Arched Interior Niche Window
Monkeys in the Tree
Lantana camara
Armored Chest
Allegorical Winged Figure
Athena and the Gryphon
Andean Fuchsia
Manierist Ceilings and Symbolic Imagery at Casa del Fundador
In the coffered ceilings of the main hall appear animals, flowers, trees, cornucopias, and other symbols characteristic of Manierism. This artistic movement, situated between the Renaissance and the Baroque, arose in Italy and spread through Europe and the Americas in the late 16th and early 17th cc.
Manierist painters, influenced by Michelangelo, sought expressiveness and delighted in the unusual and artificial. They depicted mythological figures, symbolic animals, exotic plants, monstrous beings, and hybrid forms. In the Casa del Fundador, the style appears in tempera paintings on plaster, some based on printed illustrations then circulating in the Hispanic world. These paintings date to the period of Doña Menda de Figueroa’s second marriage to Don Juan Núñez de la Cerda. Hidden by a 19th-c. ceiling, they were uncovered and restored between 1964 and 1969.
Manierist painters, influenced by Michelangelo, sought expressiveness and delighted in the unusual and artificial. They depicted mythological figures, symbolic animals, exotic plants, monstrous beings, and hybrid forms. In the Casa del Fundador, the style appears in tempera paintings on plaster, some based on printed illustrations then circulating in the Hispanic world. These paintings date to the period of Doña Menda de Figueroa’s second marriage to Don Juan Núñez de la Cerda. Hidden by a 19th-c. ceiling, they were uncovered and restored between 1964 and 1969.
Creeping Beauty
Allegorical Scene with Crowned Figures and Neptune
Petaca
Allegorical and Heraldic Ceiling Frescoes
Dining Room Furniture
Heraldic Mural with Cornucopias and Putti
Wild Man with Club
Colonial Kitchen Hearth
Don Juan de Vargas Scribe House MuseumMuseo Casa del Escribano Don Juan de Vargas
Don Juan de Vargas Scribe House Museum preserves a late 16th-c. home where Tunja’s colonial power was exercised as much through paperwork as through display. Its most enduring legacy is a Mannerist ceiling program (c. 1590–1620), painted in tempera on plaster, where classical gods, heraldry, Christian emblems, and imagined creatures—often traced from European prints—were reassembled into a New Granada language of status and protection. Hidden by a 19th-c. false ceiling and restored in the 1960s, it remains a rare domestic record of belief and aspiration.
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