This research by Juan Camilo Rojas Gómez, voted best graduate study in Colombian colonial history in the social sciences by a young scholar, focuses on two colonial painting cycles in the Viceroyalty of Peru: the late sixteenth-century ceiling paintings ornamenting principal rooms in the house of royal scribe Juan de Vargas and the early seventeenth-century ceilings of the great hall and main room of the manor belonging to Tunja's founder, Gonzalo Suárez Rendón, commissioned by his descendants.

By closely observing the paintings from a perspective that considers the cultural conditions under which they were created and viewed, the author seeks to understand the way colonial Tunja produced and projected images designed for public display even in allegedly private spaces. Meant to persuade and exalt, these paintings spanned the ceilings of rooms used for receiving guests and functioned as visual instruments charged with political, social, and religious power in the colonial order.

Much has been written about the Tunja ceiling paintings. Related yet also distinct, the pictorial cycles feature a jumble of animals and plants, human and mythological figures, religious and heraldic elements, classicizing architectural forms, and grotesques, as well as hunting themes set in landscapes. The author embraces early and recent studies treating the identification of style and attribution, visual sources, iconography, and correlation with written sources. His approach, though, also goes on to consider each of the images in the painted ceiling mural, their space and place, their arrangement and placement, format and layout, in relation to the other elements.

Rojas Gomez argues that the lavish ceilings are generally understood as decorative, to the detriment of their symbolic power. In contrast, viewing the ceilings in light of seventeenth-century humanist culture enables the author to analyze how the Tunja paintings operated within colonial culture. Chapter 1, “Rhetoric, Painting and Memory,” analyzes the conception of painting and its relationship with rhetoric and memory throughout the Hispanic world. It reviews the history of rhetoric and theories of perception, especially through art treatises, to determine the use of rhetoric as a place of memory in painting and drawing. He follows with a brief historiography of ars memoriae, linking rhetoric and memory to show the Tunja ceiling paintings as artifacts of persuasion rather than simple decoration.

Chapter 2, “Allegorical Thinking and Baroque Culture,” reveals the themes the ceiling paintings intend to impress upon viewers. By setting these mannerist paintings in their cultural and historical contexts, Rojas Gomez proposes that their contents and meanings belong to Baroque practice, understood as a system employing allegorical thinking to create social order. An apparently ritualistic genre painting on the manor-house ceilings in fact reveals the interconnectedness between language and image, establishing the prominence and use of allegories and emblems in Tunja colonial society. Chapter 3, “House, Loci of Prestige and Honor,” a cross-reading of themes deployed in the images, explores the complex ways in which the ceiling paintings were approached by viewers and ventures an innovative account of their meaning that considers the period's political situation. By evoking the brave acts of virtuous men, their military services, their titles, and their lineages through iconographic programs with ideological and formal links to Europe, the elaborate decor, the ceiling and wall paintings, and perhaps even the folding screens were visual devices designed to emphasize colonial public life even in a supposedly private sphere.

Using approaches and techniques developed in current image studies while assessing social practices surrounding the use of images to explain the ceiling paintings, this study proffers the possibility of understanding long, complex chains of cultural associations and meanings belonging to colonial social practices. Together, the three chapters and the appendix, “Multiplex emblemata,” present Rojas Gomez's approach: to break away from focusing on the paintings’ primary themes and explore the various interpretations established by the mixture of images from different sources in order to pursue the question of how meaning was generated, produced, and projected.