The gold of the gods arrives in Bilbao

Albrecht Dürer was one of the few who knew how to look. While the Spanish were exhibiting gold pieces to exaggerate the legend of the new world they were exploring in the 16th century - this was some years before they started to melt them down to fund other conquests and wars - the German painter visited a collection of precious metals from the kingdom of Moctezuma, taken to the Netherlands in honor of Carlos V.

"Among them I saw strange works of art, which had been exquisitely crafted, and I looked in awe at the subtle genius of these men from far-off lands. There aren't enough words to describe the things I saw before my eyes," he wrote, giving a lesson on modernity that the art world only assimilated several centuries later. Dürer, who was the son of a goldsmith, saw art where others saw riches, power or primitive rites. Gold never travels alone.

While 500 years and a number of artistic revolutions may have passed since, it is easy to understand what the painter must have felt as he examined masks, necklaces, bracelets, breastplates, earflaps and nose rings, designed in gold or tumbaga (an alloy of gold, silver and copper) by anonymous pre-Hispanic artists who inhabited land that now belongs to Colombia.

These pieces are now on show at the Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao. Oro sagrado (or, Sacred Gold) brings together 253 pieces from diverse pre-Columbian cultures, belonging to the Gold Museum of Bogotá, which boasts one of the most important collections of pre-Hispanic works in the world, made up of more than 50,000 pieces of metal, fabric, ceramic and stone.

As always, this collection is far from complete. According to Clara Isabel Botero, former director of the Gold Museum, Colombia is an as-yet unexplored goldmine of archeological art. One of the most impressive pieces in the exhibition - a brooch shaped like a palm, dating from between 100 and 400 BC - came from the archeological zone of Calima-Malagana, which was only unearthed in 1992.

Botero moves on to another display cabinet, to another gold object, which could almost find a home in the Tate Modern. "It's a poporo, a receptacle that was used to store lime which was later mixed with coca leaves for shamanic rituals. It's so stylized, we call it the 'Brâncusi'," in honor of the Romanian-born sculptor.

In the 19th century, these objects were treated as archeological material, and served to beef up the Natural Science collections of the big museums. With the arrival of the 20th century, a certain recognition began - if its designation as primitive art can be described as such. It did, however, fascinate a number of artists, such as Gauguin and Picasso, to name a few, who helped contribute to substituting the "archeology" label for one of "art."

While the exhibition is billed as a complete collection, the pieces do not have any kind of uniformity. They come from 12 different archeological areas, and from a period that ranges from 500 BC, to the arrival of the Spanish in 1500.

The societies in which they were created shared a love of precious metals, which suggests a certain level of development. They did not use the wheel, they did not make use of any kind of written language and they did not have horses. They also had in common certain rituals, which fed the perverse dream sought in vain by a number of Spaniards with equal amounts of ambition and credulity: El Dorado. A legend woven from a ritual observed by the first Europeans to walk the high ground of Colombia: a man smothered in honey and gold dust, who threw objects made of gold and emeralds into a lake as an offering to the gods. "The attempts to dry out lakes and find these treasures lasted practically until our lifetimes," explains Germán Ramírez, head of museology at the Colombian Gold Museum.

The exhibition is divided into six thematic blocks, one of the highlights being the anthropomorphic section, given the contrast with European creations. Here there are pieces that reproduce men with features of jaguars, monkeys, birds and fish, which, according to ethnographers, aimed to bestow humans with certain properties of animals.

Sacred Gold. Pre-Hispanic Art in Colombia. Until September 4 at the Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao, Plaza del Museo 2, Bilbao. See www.museobilbao.com for more information.