This text, by the Venezuelan poet and journalist Manuel Rodríguez Cárdenas (1912−91), can be considered as a secondary artistic interpretation of the postcolonial yaracuyano [from Yaracuy] myth of María Leonza (or Lionza). In 1946, another poet, Víctor Alberto Grillet, had dedicated an article to the pictorial image made by Pedro Centeno Vallenilla of the “Queen” María Lionza and who had also devoted several of his paintings on the topic highlighting their eroticism. Alejandro Colina (1906−73) created one sculptural version, and there is also a little known painting made by him of of María Lionza with her children (Galería de Arte Nacional). The “prominent sexual” nature of the myth—exalted by Cárdenas Rodríguez—is encrypted in the amphora in the sculptural form of a woman’s hip, from where the Olympic fire will burn. For the artist himself, the hoofed animal symbolizes strength, while the buoyant forms of the feminine figure were expressions of pure intelligence, dexterity, and agility. It is understood that such values were related as an excuse for the monument for the IV Olympic Bolivarian Games. Over the years, the myth of María Lionza became a syncretic urban cult and the work of Colina—because of its location facing the East Freeway (Caracas)—became the icon of the “miscegenation” of the city. It is the most popularized version of the “organic national myth” (Cárdenas Rodríguez).
As well as illustrating his article with the work (that was still at the workshop of the sculptor), the text is important in showing how the myth would attract other artists, highlighting the early recognition of its future transformation. The monument was authorized and mandated expressly by Cárdenas Rodríguez, the director of the Ministry of Culture and Labor and was funded by the Ministry of Education for the National Institute of Sports (organizing the games). The architect Carlos Raúl Villanueva—creator of the “Ciudad Universitaria de Caracas”—was given the job of assigning the location of the statue in mutual agreement with the sculptor: (close to the newly-completed stadiums). In the mid-1960s, due to the widening of the freeway, the statue changed location; Colina took advantage of the two hundred meter displacement to soften the snout of the hoofed animal and change the amphora that had served as a torch to a coccyx, clearly outlining its character of sexual myth. The text of Manuel Rodríguez Cárdenas has not been reproduced, at least in complete form.
For additional information on this matter, see in the ICAA digital archive the other text by the author, “¿Se derrumba María Lionza?” (doc. no. 1155464).
