The Vatican Museums reveal the treasures of the Muiscas

“Sparkling, precious gold from distant times...” Thus begins the magnificent book about the “Ors précolombiens du Musée profane” (“Pre-Columbian Gold of the Profane Museum”), edited by Jean-François Genotte, presented on November 27 at the Vatican Museums.

It’s an unexpected presence in the popes' museums: what are these large pectorals of gleaming alloys, with chiseled eagle beaks, these enigmatic figures—deities, bird-men, caciques, or shamans—from distant times and lands doing in Rome?

In recent years, Western museums' collections of “early art” have come under fire. Some countries and descendants of indigenous peoples have questioned the conditions under which these collections were assembled and have often demanded their return. These post-colonial tensions have not spared the popes' collections, as evidenced by the recent donation of 62 indigenous objects from Canada, even if this cannot be considered a restitution.

Most of the Vatican's pre-Columbian gold comes from the great Muisca civilization, which inspired the myth of Eldorado—actually based on a shamanic ritual—and ruled over what is now Colombia.

In this region, the Spanish conquistadors engaged in outright looting, which filled the coffers of European rulers. But the pre-Columbian gold on display in the Vatican Museums tells a very different story.

The first to bring pre-Columbian artifacts to Rome were Spanish Dominican friars, missionaries in the “New World.” The cargo arrived in 1531 with Father Domingo de Betanzos, who was visiting Rome to convince Pope Clement VII to grant independence to his province in Mexico. 

Why did this religious figure offer the pontiff objects that the Church considered idolatrous? “The emphasis is on their extraordinary technical quality, which shows that the indigenous people are not devoid of genius,” points out Davide Domenici of the University of Bologna. “This demonstrates rationality and humanity, and therefore the possibility of conversion,” he explains.

This assertion was not self-evident for the Church at the time: it wasn’t until six years later, in 1537, that Pope Paul III, in his bull Sublimis Deus, asked missionaries to evangelize the indigenous peoples of America—and at the same time condemned their enslavement. The Dominicans' gifts, intended to support missionary work, continued until 1564, with those brought back by Father Juan de Cordova.

It was in this context that, over the centuries, many objects from South America were brought back to the popes and eventually became part of the Vatican Library's collections. This is the case, for example, with the priceless wooden masks and statuettes of the Tayrona culture – a pre-Columbian people of Colombia – brought back in 1692 by the Augustinian friar Francisco Romero, who offered these shamanic artifacts to Pope Innocent XII.

A century later, perspectives began to change, as shown by the pioneering studies of Father Jose Domingo Duquesne, the son of French immigrants to Colombia. He published the first studies on Muisca grammar and the Muisca calendar, proof of the existence of an ancient, complex, and structured civilization in Colombia.

The idea, Davide Dominici points out, was to draw on this “Muisca mythos” to create a “patriotic history” and thus a “nationalist discourse,” detached from allegiance to the Spanish crown. This autonomy began to take shape in 1810 with the start of the Spanish-American wars of independence.

The Muisca heritage thus became “proof of the past greatness” of Colombia, which gained independence in 1819 and went on to become the “center of a cultural diplomatic policy,” explains Davide Dominici. The book by Jean-François Genotte, assistant in the Anima Mundi ethnological collections department of the Vatican Museums, tends to show that most of the artifacts owned by the Vatican Museums were donated by the Colombian government on the occasion of the Vatican exhibition organized in 1887-88 by Pope Leo XIII to mark the pontiff's priestly jubilee.

In 1893, on the 400th anniversary of the “discovery” of America, Miguel Antonio Caro, then vice president of Colombia, presented three gold pectorals to Leo XIII, which are now the jewels of the Vatican collection. “Today, we can imagine that at least one of these pectorals, saved from the conquistadors' gold rush, was once worn by a great Muisca sovereign, probably during the Eldorado ceremony,” marvels Jean-François Genotte.

Their preservation, the Frenchman points out, was made possible thanks to the Vatican's diplomatic relations with the nascent Colombia, but also to “the pontiffs' interest in non-European cultures.”