What did it mean to be a humanist in colonial spaces of the Spanish and Portuguese Empires? This talk approaches the question of humanism through specific case studies that consider artistic and literary production, and which serve to highlight a transregional approach that goes beyond the center-periphery model. At the same time, it emphasizes the paradoxes of humanist identities in conflicted spaces of hybridity –often with an immediate past or present of not just physical but also cultural violence—and their cosmopolitan readings and representations of the Classics in their specific colonial contexts.

Patricia Zalamea is Associate Professor of Art History at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia, where she was the Dean of the School of Arts and Humanities between 2015 and 2021. Her fields of study include Colonial Latin American art, Global Renaissance art, the reception of Classics in a Colonial context, history of the print, and portraiture. She has published numerous articles and chapters on art and cultural heritage in Colombia and has a forthcoming book on early modern printmaking titled Originales múltiples (Ed.Uniandes). Her next book project centers on the paradoxes of humanist identities in Colonial Latin America (16th-19thcenturies) through a diachronic and transregional perspective.