In this essay, Francisco Márquez analyzes Miguel von Dangel’s work La Batalla de San Romano, a version of a work of the same name by Renaissance painter Paolo Uccello. For the Chilean critic, this contemporary piece largely represents an “allegory of excess” as it depicts multiple forces and opulent forms in the history, mythology, and nature of the Americas. This painting by von Dangel brings together the themes that recur throughout his production—nature, Christ, evil, God, death—formulated in baroque, gothic, fantastic, and expressionist terms. Márquez analyzes each of these elements and categories separately, concluding that this work is a “paradoxical revelation of the Americas.”

In this essay, Chilean critic and historian Francisco Márquez (b. 1943) analyzes Miguel von Dangel’s work La Batalla de San Romano, a version of a work of the same name by Renaissance painter Paolo Uccello. The text forms part of the book Miguel von Dangel y la Batalla de San Romano (Caracas: Fundación Polar, 1993), which includes as well an extensive chronology of the artist, fragments of his diaries, and some of his stories. Márquez provides a thorough study of this work and itemizes the motifs it encompasses. He conveys the idea of an absolute work that brings together recurring conceptual and formal elements in the production of this German-born Venezuelan artist. Márquez’s extensive analysis is useful to understanding the artist’s career up to the time of its writing. It analyzes other paradigmatic works by von Dangel as well and draws analogies between them. Márquez establishes different levels of formal and conceptual categories to describe von Dangel’s symbolic universe—a baroque and timeless space with many facets and a sense of “excess” that provides a totalizing vision of the Americas insofar as it encompasses geography, history, myths, wildlife, and vegetation. Márquez asserts that von Dangel passes judgment on good and evil, the sacred and the profane, violence and salvation. For this study, Márquez looks to notions from the disciplines of history, literature, philosophy, anthropology, and the visual arts, making many references to Latin American authors in relation to topics like “the Americas” and “the Latin American”—their nature, history, and mythology—and drawing parallels between them and concepts in von Dangel’s discourse. Finally, Márquez makes references to the criticism of the artist’s work and establishes contrasts between his language and the language of other artists. [For other critical texts on von Dangel’s work, see in the ICAA digital archive María Luz Cárdenas’s essays “La Batalla de San Romano de von Dangel (I) y (II)” (doc. no. 1154028 and doc. no. 1154092, respectively), both published in 1990; Julio Ortega’s foreward “La iridiscencia del ojo de la materia o cómo leer un objeto artístico procesal” (doc. no. 1155251), published in 1997; Axel Stein’s “Interview with Miguel von Dangel” (doc. no. 1102348), published in English in 1998. See as well Yasmín Monsalve’s “Mi obra ha tenido que luchar contra muchos prejuicios: un premio nacional visto con la luz de Petare” (doc. no. 1102125); among other texts].