Antonio Steel of the Cross

Antonio Steel of the Cross. Colombian painter, architect and poet. His archaic style is an extension of mannerism. One of his most notable works is La Virgen del Rosario Bogotá , Iglesia de las Aguas.

Summary

[ hide ]

  • 1 Biographical summary
    • 1Trayectoria
    • 2 Carrots
  • 2 Sources

biographical synthesis

He was born in Santa Fe de Bogotá beginning in the 17th century . He is the son of the Spanish craftsman Alonso Acero, who settled in the Las Nieves neighborhood of colonial Santa Fe, and the brother of fellow craftsmen Bernardo, Jerónimo and Juan de Dios.

Trajectory

He taught his trade as a painter in a neighboring house. He made pictorial works for the convents of Las Nieves , San Diego and Las Aguas , as well as buildings in other towns, such as Tunja, Mongui, Fúquene and Pamplona.

As an architect, he founded the first hermitage of Monserrate, for which he also made portraits and other paintings. He is one of the characters in the novel “The Prodigious Desert” and “The Desert Prodigy”, by his friend Pedro de Solís y Valenzuela, which defines the beginning of the genre on the continent, being in turn the first novel to be wrote in the Spanish-American area.

His work is considered one of the last cases of artistic composition in clear harmony with the rules of Romanist classicism in Colombian painting of the 17th century . The almost unreal landscapes and unstable spaces in many of his paintings, however, show that the compositional balance in his style is closer to Mannerism , a trend developed simultaneously with the time of his work. It is a classicismthat seeks to emulate the manners of the great Renaissance masters, a recognizable gesture in this author, whose robust figures usually occupy the entire painting and contrast with other small figures in the distance, in paintings where the curly lines, the discordant ink colors and unnatural light predominate. Antonio Acero de la Cruz was also interested in architecture and poetry, of which some of his works have been published.

Death

He died in Bogotá in 1667 .