Description

Bogotá: Pizano i Perez 1858-1859 – El Mosaico 1860, 1864-1865.

4 years bound in three volumes, all small 4°, each with an original title page:

Vol. 1 – Year 1: December 24, 1858 – December 24, 1859. Issues 1-51 (missing issue 37, 1859!).
VIII, 412 pp. (mispagination: no pages 113-114 as published and so complete, pp. 121-122 numbered twice) contemporary goat binging with blind tooling, gold lines and lettering on the spine (missing issue 37 (1859), a square cut-out to page 303-304 with small piece of text missing, worm holes to the margins of the first page and larger amount of worm holes to last circa 10 sheets in the lower corner with parts of text missing, light water staining, binding with chips and worm holes, larger loss of material to the spine).

Vol. 2 – Year 2: January 7, 1860 – December 29, 1860. Issues 1-51 (complete).
[8 pp.], 408 pp., 7 lithographed plates, contemporary goat binging with blind tooling, gold lines and lettering on the spine (light water staining, staining and foxing to sporadic pages, worm holes to the margins of the last page, binding with chips and worm holes, larger loss of material to the spine).

[No magazines printed between December 29, 1860, and January 13, 1864, due to the civil war].

Vol. 3 – Years 3 and 4 bound together: January 13, 1864 – January 14, 1865. Issues 1-48 (missing issue no. 13). And: January 23, 1865 – November 16, 1865. Issues 1-36 (complete).
[4 pp.], 384 pp., 288 pp., contemporary brown speckled boards and brown goat spine with gilt tooling and lettering (missing issue no 13 (1864), first 8 pages tightly bound together with tears in hinges, stained small worm holes in margins, small tears in margins, pp. 173-174 with a long tear in text, foxing to mostly rear pages, worm holes in last pages with small loss of text, binding rubbed and scuffed with crack in hinges).

 

 

The magazine was published first weekly and later biweekly in 186 issues between December 24, 1858, and November 16, 1865, with a pause in 1862 and 1863 due to the civil war.
The publication bore the same name as influential current gatherings of writers and intellectuals of Colombia, where members presented and exchanged their newly written works. These assemblies replaced the absence of institutions, that would promote arts and literature, and also served as an important connection between people of various backgrounds during turbulent political times in the atmosphere, when most of the social gatherings would be made only on religious holidays, weddings and funerals.

One of the founders and editors of the magazine was José María Vergara y Vergara (1831 – 1872), a prolific Colombian writer and a pioneer of literary history in the country, who authored among others Historia de la literatura en Nueva Granada part I y II (1867), and anthologies Parnaso colombiano and La lira granadina.

 

Lithographed plates by Manuel Doroteo Carvajal Marulanda

The present second volume includes 7 lithographed full-page illustrations, four of which were drafted by a Colombian artist Manuel Doroteo Carvajal Marulanda (1819-1872). The magazine appears to be extra illustrated, as we could not trace these illustrations in other examples nor any mention of them in the literature on El Mosaico.

Manuel Doroteo Carvajal Marulanda (1819-1872), born in La Ceja, was an artist and early Colombian lithographer. He is today mostly known for his sketchbook with historically important views of various monuments and towns of his home country, which is held at Colección Museo del Siglo XIX – Museo Nacional de Colombia. A monography Manuel D. Carvajal Marulanda: la pintura como autobiografía by Juan Luis Mejía on these drawings was published in 2001.

Manuel Doroteo Carvajal’s lithographed work is still little researched. It is recorded, that in 1857 he published a series of four lithographs titled Costumbres Granadinas (Márquez, Juan Ricardo Rey, and Carolina Vanegas Carrasco, 2011, p. 53), which is bound in the present 2nd volume of El Mosaico. The lithographs are exceedingly rare and we could trace a single example in Carvajal’s personal sketchbook (an image published in: Otero, 2020, p. 200).

The crudely executed lithographs depict following somehow cruel scenes, connected with local hunting and fishing:

– A lower-class village boy constructing a floor-birdcage made of wood, with simple houses, a woman with a child and a dog in the background,

– An upper-class hunter lifting a bleeding dead bird’s head during a hunt in the swamp,

– A dear-hunter on a horse dragging a greyhound, unwilling to hunt, by the neck with a string,

– A fisherman falling from an improvised raft into a river.

The following three lithographs in the second volume represent coins and medallions of Colombia and honorary medals of Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela and Peru. The plates were printed by Ayala i Medrano, which were specialized in printing of postal stamps.

These illustrations were prepared by Ezequiel Uricoechea Rodríguez (1834 – 1880) to accompany the article on the same subjects. Uricoechea was an impressive scholar of Basque background, who graduated from Yale Medical School, became Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Göttingen and worked at the Royal Observatory of Belgium, before returning to his native Bogotá, where he published articles on various subjects. During the civil war he returned to Europe, taking up studies in Arabic language. He died suddenly in Beirut, where he traveled to improve his accent.

 

A Note on Rarity

The magazines are exceedingly rare. The British Library (OCLC 503757106) only houses the first two volumes. All the other examples on Worldcat appear to be on microfilms / eMagazines.

The Central Bank of Colombia holds a complete set, which does not include illustrations:
El Mosaico – Hemeroteca Digital Histórica – Colecciones digitales – Biblioteca Virtual del Banco de la República (banrepcultural.org)

We could trace only one other example of the magazines in the trade, sold at the auction (January 2024), with issues 25-50 of the first year, and 1-50 of the second year, without illustrations.

References: Cf.: Restrepo, Andrés. (2003). El Mosaico (1858-1872): nacionalismo, elites y cultura en la segunda mitad del siglo XIX. Fronteras de la historia. 8. 10.22380/20274688.654; (Márquez, Juan Ricardo Rey, and Carolina Vanegas Carrasco. “ Noticias Iluminadas. Arte e Identidad En El Siglo XIX (ISBN: 978-958-8471-47-1) .” Ganador Premio de curaduría histórica 2009, como miembro del Grupo de Investigaciones de Arte Colombiano, GIAC. Fundación Gilberto Alzate Avendaño, Bogotá. Noticias iluminadas. Arte e identidad en el siglo XIX. (2011): p. 53); Otero, J. M. Q., & Pinzón, F. M. (2020). Una página (a mi hija). In J. M. V. y Vergara (Ed.), Museo de cuadros de costumbres y variedades: Tomo II (pp. 197–200). Universidad de los Andes, Colombia. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7440/j.ctv11qdwt0.27.