Qualla: Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de Asunción

Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de Asunción: Introduction

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Cmasi, CC BY-SA 4.0. Exile gave Paraguay its first great art collection. Juan Silvano Godoi was a politician from a wealthy family, born in 1850, and the turbulence of his country's politics forced him abroad again and again. Most men in his position counted the cost of banishment. Godoi spent it. Traveling through Europe and the cities of the Río de la Plata, he bought paintings and sculptures, assembling works by Courbet, Murillo, and Tintoretto. When he finally brought it all home, that collection became the seed of the National Museum of Fine Arts of Asunción, founded in 1909 with Godoi himself as its first director.

Image: Cmasi | CC BY-SA 4.0

Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de Asunción: The Collector in Exile

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Cmasi, CC BY-SA 4.0. Godoi inclined toward the painting of his own century, the naturalism and academic style of the late nineteenth century, though his acquisitions reached back to the seventeenth. He bought Italian and French works, sculptures, and pieces from Río de la Plata artists who would matt...

Image: Cmasi | CC BY-SA 4.0

Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de Asunción: Art Against the Odds

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Casalin c, CC BY-SA 4.0. Paraguay's art did not develop the way its neighbors' did. Elsewhere in Latin America, artistic production flowed more or less continuously after the conquest. Here it was repeatedly broken. The skilled crafts of the Indigenous peoples went largely unrecognized during colonizatio...

Image: Casalin c | CC BY-SA 4.0

Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de Asunción: Satire Printed at the Front

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Casalin c, CC BY-SA 4.0. The War of the Triple Alliance, which ravaged Paraguay from 1864 to 1870, crushed almost everything, yet from it came one of the country's most remarkable artistic legacies. Trench journals, edited and printed at the war front itself, carried satirical illustrations of startling ...

Image: Casalin c | CC BY-SA 4.0

Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de Asunción: An Immigrant Imprint and a National School

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Casalin c, CC BY-SA 4.0. Waves of immigrants left their mark on Paraguayan art, several of them European artists. The Italian Guido Boggiani is remembered for documenting Indigenous art; the academic Héctor Da Ponte trained the young; the Frenchman Julio Mornet spent seven years in the country, painting ...

Image: Casalin c | CC BY-SA 4.0