Colombia

The New Kingdom of Granada was a gold economy in the most literal sense. Until a mint was established at Santafé in the 1620s there were almost no locally struck coins, and people paid each other in gold dust and small nuggets from the placers of Antioquia, Popayán and later the Chocó, weighed out by the castellano or peso de oro of about 4.6 grams. Because purity varied with the mine, contracts always specified carats: the rough mine gold called oro corriente ran 12 to 13 carats, buen oro about 20, and the royal treasury kept its books in fine gold of 22.5 carats. This makes New Granadan sums unusually easy to read as metal, since the unit of account was itself a stated weight and fineness of gold. What survives is largely notarial — the protocol books in Tunja and Bogotá preserve the contracts, obligations, dowries, inventories and wills in which painters, gilders, sculptors and carpenters agreed their prices — and between the 1580s and the 1700s these cities supported a dense trade of painters whose fees were written down in ordinary legal language.

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Angelino Medoro’s Fee for the Paintings and Gilding of the Mancipe Chapel, Tunja 1598

The Roman painter Angelino Medoro, who worked in the New Kingdom of Granada between about 1587 and 1592 before moving on to Quito and Lima, decorated the burial chapel that the conquistador Pedro García Ruiz and his son Captain Antonio Ruiz Mancipe built onto the Iglesia Mayor de Santiago in Tunja. In his will of 29 July 1598 Ruiz Mancipe itemised what the chapel had cost him: 250 pesos de oro de veinte quilates to Medoro for two large framed and gilded canvases of the Agony in the Garden and the Descent from the Cross, for painting the window glass and gilding the tribune, choir and sacristy doors, and a further 150 pesos for a large Virgen de la Antigua. The peso de oro was not a coin but a weight of unminted gold, one castellano of about 4.6 g, here at 20 of 24 carats, so the figure is a direct weight rather than a currency conversion. For scale, the same will records 500 pesos de oro for the 13,000 leaves of gold consumed in gilding the chapel, and 1,020 pesos for the altarpiece sculpture.

~1,533.3g

Archivo Histórico Regional de Boyacá (Tunja), Notarías de Tunja, Notaría 2, leg. 65, ff. 179r–180v, “Testamento del capitán Antonio Ruiz Mancipe” (Tunja, 29 July 1598); Parra-Cárdenas, Juan David. Historia de un sepulcro: la Capilla de los Mancipe en la Iglesia Mayor de Santiago de Tunja, 1569–1620. (Universidad de los Andes, 2019); Vargas Murcia, Laura Liliana. “Pintores en el esplendor de Tunja: nombres de artífices para salir del anonimato (siglos XVI y XVII).” Historia y Memoria 15 (2017).