Truth or beauty? Painting, photography, memory, history

Abstract

In the framework of an ongoing research on the work of José Gil de Castro (Lima, 1785-1837), an artist who portrayed the American revolutionary leaders (José de San Martín, Simón Bolívar, Bernardo O’Higgins, among others), this essay poses a question on the function and critical literature on the painted portraits of the heroes and protagonists of national histories, before and after the invention of photography. Which ones raise up the collective memory and which do not, how symbolic efficacy is activated and deactivated from different representations of a face through time, are some of the questions raised here.