Manuel María Paz

Biography

Codazzi died in 1859 in the arms of his friend Manuel María Paz, and the work of the Comisión Corográfica came to a complete halt.

Paz was born on 6 July 1820 in Almaguer, in the province of Cauca, the son of Domingo de Paz and Baltazara Delgado. He had a brother, José Miguel, and a sister, Carmen. He studied the humanities in his native town, and on 29 December 1839, still very young, he went to Popayán and joined the guard as a soldier. As a private he took part in several civil wars of the Republic of New Granada and distinguished himself by his bravery. Promotions followed one after another, and in 1848 he became a colonel.

Military service did not keep him from drawing and making maps. In 1848, at an art exhibition, he showed a work called “Mesa Revuelta” (“Mixed Table”), which the selection jury admired highly. What it depicts is not recorded in any document, so I will not describe it.

In 1852 he married Felisa Castro; they had six children: José Domingo, Felisa, Francisco, María, Ana María and Julián.

In 1853 Paz joined the Comisión Corográfica, the government survey that described the regions of the country, as a draftsman, working alongside Henry Price. Price later left the project for reasons of health. The commission was led by Agustín Codazzi. From 1853 to 1858 Paz painted 127 watercolours, which were printed as lithographs. They illustrated the commission’s reports, and some were published separately under Codazzi’s patronage. In those same years Paz helped him draw maps of different parts of Colombia. A notebook survives with drawings and sketches from the commission’s seventh and eighth expeditions; a facsimile was published in 2011 by the Universidad de Caldas and the Universidad EAFIT.

After Codazzi’s death Tomás Cipriano de Mosquera did not want the accumulated work to be lost. He signed a contract with Paz and Manuel Ponce de León: they were to finish and publish what had been begun under the general’s direction. So in 1865 the “Atlas de los Estados Unidos de Colombia” appeared. The second atlas, the “Atlas Geográfico e Histórico de la República de Colombia”, he published in 1889 together with Felipe Pérez. For this work he was admitted on 6 December 1889 as a member of the Société de Géographie in Paris.

Between the two atlases Paz kept exhibiting: in 1871 at an exhibition for the national holidays, and in 1883 as part of the celebrations of the anniversary of the birth of Simón Bolívar. His other publications include the “Mapa General de Colombia y los particulares de los Estados” (1873), a table of distances from the capital to the towns of the country (1870) and the “Carta del territorio de los chibchas” (1894).

He died on 16 September 1902 in the parish of San Victorino in Bogotá.