Pablo Matzel and his giants

Abstract

This research is part of a larger project whose main purpose was to generate knowledge about part of the corpus of artistic cultural assets kept by the Museo de La Plata. The aim was to document this heritage and to deepen the study of the collection curator, to add historical and artistic content in support of the collection, in addition to locating it in space and time within the Historiography of local and national art. To this end, our interdisciplinary work integrated the contributions with historical, theoretical, methodological and technical content from the fields of Art History and Museology. Within this framework, we analyzed the only oil mural painting (1.86 x 3.28 m) by artist Pablo Matzel (-1926), made for the Museo de La Plata: The Mastodon and the Glyptodonts (ca. 1921). This analysis builds on the historical and cultural dimensions of the representation of prehistoric fauna, recovering the situations that brought about the encounter between the motif and the public. The mural by Matzel, whose works are mainly recognized in the field of scientific illustration, is inscribed in the naturalist tradition and is part of the Museum's collection, which entails reading the representations in the articulation between science and art. In the second half of the 19th century, any worthy museum needed to possess specimens of the gigantic fossil mammals from South America. The Museo de La Plata boasted an important variety of fossil remains of the true giants that Buenos Aires province could offer to the world. The work studied here expands this material dimension by presenting itself as a place to observe the construction and circulation of multiple and diverse knowledge types.