La muerte arquera cruza el Atlántico

Abstract

The iconography of the archer of death, who with his unstoppable arrows threatened the lives of human beings everywhere, emerged in medieval Europe, particularly in the years after the Black Death. The artistic representation of this figure – in emblematic paintings, funeral pyres, hieroglyphics and vanitas — had a major impact on Jesuit and Baroque culture, and influenced American colonial art from the sixteenth century onwards. The allegorical image of America was also armed with bow and arrows. The publication of the surprising book by Fray Joaquin Bolaños, La portentosa vida de la muerte [The Astounding Life of Death] (Mexico, 1792), is the epigone of a symbolic construction that was prevalent on both sides of the Atlantic for three hundred years.