Teresa Tejada describes the mural with a religious theme that artist Juan Antonio Roda painted in the dome of the apse of the church Nuestra Señora del Sagrado Corazón in Bogotá. Tejada discusses the formal values of the work, which she asserts makes use of a wide range of figurative and abstract resources. Particularly impressive about this mural, she states, is its ability to work with the technical and formal factors imposed by the architecture of the premises where it is located. Tejada also mentions the quality of the mural’s drawing.

This article is of interest because of where it was published and the work it discusses. It was written by Colombian artist Teresa Tejada (born 1928) when she was working as an architectural designer and taking the course in Modern art that Marta Traba (1923–1983) gave at the Universidad de América (Bogotá, 1957). It was in that educational context that the journal Prisma emerged. The publication was directed by Traba—an Argentine critic—who discussed with her students the topic each issue would address as well as which articles to publish. Indeed, Tejada’s article was published in an issue that dealt solely with Modern religious art; other articles in that issue discuss Vence Chapel (France), the stained glass in the Chapel of the Apostles (Bogotá), and the problems of Modern religious art in general. Prisma was concerned with integrating architecture and art, a topic of increasing interest throughout the region at the time. This issue of the journal, though, discusses specifically how new visual and iconographic resources were being used in religious art, which has a longstanding tradition in Colombia.  

José de Recasens, a Catalan businessman, commissioned Juan Antonio Roda, a Spanish artist living in Colombia, to make the mural in 1956. According to comments by Roda compiled by Martha Segura in the catalogue to a retrospective of his work organized by the Banco de la República in 1992, the mural, with its innovative pictorial approach, was eschewed by some of the church’s benefactors from the outset. They objected, for instance, to “angels with insect wings and human bodies” or a depiction of the baby Jesus as an ordinary child. Indeed, Roda explains that since 1963 the mural has been covered with layers of plaster.  

The mural was created in order to decorate an architectural surface rather than to effect artistic integration by bringing different visual media—painting, sculpture, and architecture—together in a single conception. Nonetheless, Roda’s painting did become part of the architecture while also reinforcing the spirit of the building and highlighting the architectural qualities of the space.