National Museum of Colombia

The National Museum of Colombia (Museo Nacional de Colombia) is the National Museum of Colombia housing collections on its history, art, culture. Located in Bogotá downtown, is the biggest and oldest museum in Colombia. The National Museum of Colombia is a dependency of the Colombian Ministry of Culture.

The museum houses a collection of over 20,000 pieces including works of art and objects representing different national history periods. Permanent exhibitions present archeology and ethnography samples from Colombian artefacts dating 10,000 years BC, up to twentieth century indigenous and afro- Colombian art and culture. Founders and New Kingdom of Granada room houses Liberators and other Spanish iconography; the round room exhibits a series of oleos from Colombia painting history.

History
The National Museum is the oldest in the country and one of the oldest in the continent, built in 1823. Its fortress architecture is built in stone and brick. The plant includes arches, domes and columns forming a sort of Greek cross over which 104 prison cells are distributed, with solid wall façade. It was known as the Panóptico (inspired by the Panopticon prison) and served as a prison until 1946. In 1948, the building was adapted for National Museum and restored in 1975.

Building
Designed by Danish architect Thomas Reed in 1850, but constructed in 1872, the Panóptico was Colombia's largest and most important prison until it was replaced by La Picota prison in 1946. After the last prisoners were transferrered to the new facilities, the Panóptico underwent two years of renovations so it could properly to the new prison, the national government

Collection
Unlike other national museums, the National Museum of Colombia is not divided into different institutions that focus on particular collections. For that reason, the museum divides its collection into four main categories: Archeology, art, ethnography, and social history.

Art
The Art Department is in charge of the paintings, sculptures, drawings, engravings, photographs and videos in the museum's collection. The investigation of these objects emphasizes artistic narratives about the geography, nature, regions and people of Colombia. Likewise, it reveals the symbolic power of the image in the processes of religious and political domination. The collections reveal the transitions from a classical academic language towards new aesthetic expressions of national art. The interest in beauty, the encounter with plastic expression through bright color and loose brushstrokes, the search for identity in indigenism, the international projection of local artists and the development of conceptual communication accounts for the richness of this collection.

Drawing
The drawing area includes works by artists and scientists: painters, sculptors, miniaturists, geographers, caricaturists and architects, through techniques such as charcoal, pencil, ink, pastel, watercolor and miniature; The latter is an important section of the collection, made up of 92 pieces. Aware of the specificity of this collection, the National Museum of Colombia created the Cabinet of Drawing and Graphic Arts and the Cabinet of Miniatures, two rooms equipped for the exhibition of this type of works, in which selected works are temporarily exhibited to make them known to the public.

Painting
About 900 paintings

Paintings by masters Débora Arango, Fernando Botero, Enrique Grau, Ignacio Gomez Jaramillo, Santiago Martinez Delgado, Alejandro Obregón, Omar Rayo, Andrés de Santa María, and Guillermo Wiedemann are part of the Permanent Collection.

The museum houses Escena campesina (1575), a rural scene panel painting by Flemish painter Marten van Cleve.

Selected exhibitions

 * 15 June 2006 – 17 September 2006: The Chinese Terracotta Army: An Immortal Army