In this article, published two months after the death of Santiago Martínez Delgado (1906–1954), Gabriel Giraldo Jaramillo (1916–1978) pays tribute to Martínez Delgado’s work and to Vida, a magazine to which he contributed as an illustrator and editor. In this text, Giraldo Jaramillo—a researcher and author of works about Colombian art from the colonial period through the 20th century—focuses on Martínez Delgado’s Congreso de Cúcuta [Congress of Cúcuta] (1945–48), a mural made at the Capitolio Nacional, the seat of the national congress, for the opening of the IX Pan-American Conference (1948) that would result in the creation of the Organization of American States (OAS). As a historian well versed in the canon of artistic renderings of history, Giraldo Jaramillo endorses the praise that the work received in the late 1940s that helped to place Colombian historical painting on the same level as monumental works from the rest of South America, such as paintings by Tito Salas (1887?1974) in the Capitolio Federal, the seat of the Venezuelan congress in Caracas. Praising Martínez Delgado’s work meant breaking the general silence surrounding the Batalla de Boyacá [Battle of Boyacá] (1926), the triptych that artist Andrés de Santamaría made for a wall that would later be occupied by Congreso de Cúcuta. De Santamaría’s work was widely criticized for what was seen as a degree of modern expressiveness unbefitting the depiction of a heroic scene. De Santamaría’s triptych was replaced by Martínez Delgado’s work.
A man of many interests, Santiago Martínez Delgado did a great deal of work as an illustrator, decorator, painter, advertising art director, university professor, writer of stories and scripts for radio, researcher into the iconography of Colombian forefathers, defender of Colombian culture, and creator of murals. He discovered his vocation as a mural artist while in Chicago, and he eventually made the mural La evolución cultural de Colombia [Cultural Evolution of Colombia] for the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair.
