by Luis Morales Alonso

The pre-Colombian heritage, with the best artistic testimonies evidenced by polychromatic pottery and stone statues, is our main artistic inheritance from the old days dating back to 200BC. During the Colonization, religious paintings and images occupied a privileged place, but there are few convincing examples from that period that we can enumerate; although the main evidence is the urban layout of our colonial towns and some buildings with colonial architecture that have survived during those 500 years.

In fact, our artistic styles were influenced by the development of the arts in Central Europe during the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries. Romantic paintings, portraits, still lifes, flowers and landscapes were developed by Nicaraguan painters from León, the Capital, and Granada, the second most important city and main commercial port of the country until the nineteenth century.