Abstract
The allure of gold -golden objects, golden rivers, golden cities -has long loomed large in our collective imagination.For Colombia, the birthplace of the legend of El Dorado, gold has been a central part of its historical, cultural, and artistic legacy.Vasco Núñez de Balboa, leading an expedition along the Atrato River in northwestern Colombia in 1512, wrote of a local chief (the cacique Dabaibe) who commanded vast riches and oversaw a smelter worked continually by a hundred men, from which came many curious artifacts.Another golden legend emerged from the fertile basins of the Cordillera Oriental, near Bogotá, about a Muisca chief who, covered from head to toe in gold dust, was ferried to the center of Lake Guatavita on a golden raft.Gold, cast by pre-Hispanic cultures, gilded onto Spanish altarpieces, and alluded to in Eduardo Ramírez Villamizar's 1958 mural El Dorado, has been a constant element in the art produced within the borders of what is today Colombia.But, as the authors of Historias del arte en Colombia vividly illustrate, gold is just one of many media used by artists to engage with and respond to their diverse and dramatic environment.