The Santa Clara Museum in Bogotá occupies what was for centuries the church of a community of cloistered nuns. The building is exceptional for a simple reason: almost nothing in it is left undecorated. A single long nave runs beneath a vault covered with painted and gilded ornament, while the walls carry rows of paintings, polychrome sculptures and altarpieces, so that the visitor stands inside a complete decorative programme rather than in front of individual works. Converted into a museum, it now allows what religious use never did, close, unhurried examination of the colonial art of the Andes and of the enclosed life that once unfolded here, behind grilles and screens, in near-total separation from the city. The episode combines architectural filming with a reading of the images: saints, virtues, martyrdoms and the visual vocabulary that shaped devotion in Spanish America.
