Tríptico de la infamia de Pablo Montoya como cuadro barroco

Portraying three different artists who were victimized by the Catholic monarchies in the agitated sixteenth century, the historical novel Tríptico de la infamia (2015) by the Colombian author Pablo Montoya can be regarded as an ekphrastic transposition of the iconography of the anti-Spanish Black Legend. Montoya’s narrative triptych does not only display and decode an imagery that revolves around the atrocities that took place in the context of the wars of religion in the Old World and the horrors of the colonizing enterprise in the New World, it also revisions history by means of a visual language. Indeed, the imaginative recreation of the artists’ lives through their visual chronicles triggers a writing of the past in which the dialogue between literature, painting and images archived in the collective memory leads to a reinterpretation of the past which makes present what it remembers.