Painting Noise with Silence: Nineteenth-century Sonorous Descriptions and Visual Representations of the Tequendama Cascade

Abstract

This article considers the concept of silence in visual representations of the particular case of the Tequendama Falls in Colombia. During the nineteenth century, the notion of sound became an active part of the pictorial act and of the sublime landscape experience. The text highlights the way that, in images of the Tequendama, the roaring sound is represented through aesthetic and for-mal decisions that compensate for the noise and bring silence to the surface as part of the contemplative act of the observer of the work of art. Through a brief account of nineteenth-century romantic aesthetics and significant literary descriptions of travelers who emphasized in their memoirs the noise of the cataract, as well as using visual descriptions of this landform, this article proposes a new view-point on these canonical images of the collective memory of Colombian art history.