ANDRES BONIFACIO MONUMENT: MASTERPIECE OF PHILIPPINE ROMANTICISM
How did Romanticism enter the Philippine visual arts tradition?
Education in Academic Realism was introduced into the Philippines through the establishment of the Manila Academy of Painting, Sculpture, and Engraving by the Spanish colonial regime in 1846.
The Academy had been established to succeed the first art school in the Philippines, launched in 1821 by Filipino Chinese painter Damián Domingo (1796-1834). His pioneering school had closed upon the artist’s demise thirteen years later.
The first interim director (1850-58) of the Academy was Lorenzo de la Rocha y de Icaza (1837-1898), who was schooled in traditional Academic art—realistic, and during the latter half of the nineteenth century, inspired by Romanticism. Rocha developed into an accomplished painter, and toward the end of his life he served as the director (1892-98) of the Academy.
Juan Luna de San Pedro y Novicio (1857-1899), together with his contemporary and compatriot, Félix Resurrección Hidalgo y Padilla (1855-1913), may be said to have introduced full-blown Realism to the Philippines, which in the early twentieth century segued into Romanticism, epitomized by Fernando Amorsolo.
Romanticism in the Philippines lasted well into the twentieth century in the works of Fernando Amorsolo and the paintings done according to his influential style. Amorsolo often represented in an alluring, romantic manner the dalaga or young, unmarried woman and various rural idylls. He reimagined in his characteristic idiom important events in Philippine history.
Juan Luna: Education in Academic Realism
“The Lunas transferred to Manila in 1861 enabling Juan to finish his high school at the Ateneo de Manila. In 1869, he enrolled at the Escuela Nautica, where after five years of theoretical courses and practical sailing to Asian ports like Hongkong, Amoy, Singapore, Colombo, and Batavia, he obtained the certificate of piloto de altos mares tercer clase (pilot of the high seass third class). While in Port for six months, he took up landscape painting at the Academia de Dibujo y Pintura. Eventually, he received private lessons from Lorenzo Guerrero, who, perceiving his potential, urged his parents to send him to Spain for further studies. In 1877, Juan executed ‘Barrio al Lado del Rio’ (village by the river) and ‘Vista de un Barrio con Kapok’ (Barrio Scene with Kapok Trees). Towards the end of that year he sailed to Spain.
“Luna enrolled at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid. There he obtained an award for outstanding color, composition and antique studies but did not stay long. Instead he apprenticed himself with Alejo Vera, a professor of the said school, whom he accompanied to Italy in 1879 when the later went to fulfill commissions there. Upon arriving there, Luna visited the ruins of Pompeii and Naples and made some 40 studies of excavated classical sites and objects now mostly in the National Museum of the Philippines. …He stayed in Rome until spring, 1884, finishing there such pieces as ‘La Bella Feliz y la Esclava Ciega’ (The Happy Beauty and the Blind Slave), ‘La Muerte de Cleopatra’ (The Death of Cleopatra), and the ‘Portrait of Pedro Paterno.’ ‘Cleopatra’ won for him a silver medal at the Madrid Art Exposition of 1881. For this achievement the Ayuntamiento de Manila granted him a four-year scholarship upon the instigation by Francisco de Paula Rodoreda. In 1883 he started painting the ‘Spoliarium,’ which won him the first gold medal at the Madrid Art Exposition the following year. A colossal multifigure scene depicting dead gladiators being mourned by their relatives at the basement of the Roman Colosseum, the ‘Spoliarium’ was identified by Jose Rizal as an allusion to the exploitation or the Philippines by Spain.
“…Nurtured in the academic classical canons then prevalent all over the western world, Luna followed the conventional steps in attaining professional success, such as obtaining prizes with colossal Graeco-Roman canvases in the grand Classico-Romantic manner at the prestigious art salons of Europe. By 26 May 1889, however, in his letter to Javier Gomez de la Serna, he vowed his disillusionment with the historical canvas thus: ‘all historical painting is false starting with the very concept, and those who think that correct drawing, good composition, brilliant coloring and a lot of adornment are enough to make it valid are mistaken.’
“This statement, however, does not signify Lunas break with the academic tradition nor his sympathy with Impressionism, as many critics earlier presumed, but rather his leaving towards the more progressive faction of the salon—‘the distant one,’ that he described on 5 May 1891 to Rizal. Luna first signaled this involvement with ‘Le Chifonier’ (The Rag Picker), showing an old man in tattered clothes carrying a basket of rags, which he showed at the Champs-de-Mars in 1889. By 1891, he was reading Le Socialism Contemporain (Contemporary Socialism) by E. de Lavelaye, and through this concern, he attained the highest honors he was ever to achieve, namely his acceptance as member of the Societe Nationale de Beaux Arts.”
—“JUAN NOVICIO LUNA (b. Ilocos Norte, Oct. 24, 1857 d. Dec. 7, 1899),” Geringer Art, Ltd.
“The distant one” in Luna’s letter refers to the progressive Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris, which was reinvigorated in 1890 by a group of artists that included Puvis de Chavannes, Ernest Meissonier, Carolus-Duran, Marie Bracquemond, and Albert-Ernest Carrier-Belleuse. The Société signaled its renewal by holding its annual exhibition at the Champ-de-Mars. Luna’s letter shows the influence of Social Realism beginning in his art.
What is Romanticism in the visual arts?
“Romanticism was a cultural movement that emerged around 1780. Until its onset, Neoclassicism dominated 18th-century European art, typified by a focus on classical subject matter, an interest in aesthetic austerity, and ideas in line with the Enlightenment, an intellectual, philosophical, and literary movement that placed emphasis on the individual.
“While Romantic figures agreed with the Enlightenment’s interest in individualism, they steered away from its rationalism. Their approach diverged greatly from the Neoclassicists, who were known for their didactic history painting. Instead of looking back to classical models, artists like Joseph Mallord William Turner, Eugène Delacroix, Théodore Géricault, Francisco Goya, and Caspar David Friedrich found inspiration in their own imaginations. This introspective approach lent itself to an art form that predominantly explored the spiritual side of humanity, the sublimity of nature, and, above all else, the fruits of personal freedom.
“…In general, Romantic artists worked in one medium: paint. Specifically, in the movement's early years, these figures predominantly focused on landscape painting. The Romantic landscape genre was primarily pioneered by JMW Turner, a British oil painter, watercolorist, and printmaker. Early in his career, Turner was associated with the Neoclassical movement, but a trip to the Swiss countryside sparked an artistic interest in nature, which materialized as an imaginative and untraditional approach to painting.
“‘A master of history, landscape and marine painting, he challenged the style of the old masters, trailblazing in technique and subject matter,’ the Tate Britain explains. ‘Turner often shocked his contemporaries with his loose brushwork and vibrant color palette while portraying the development of the modern world unlike any other artist at the time.’
“Turner’s emotion-driven style paved the way for other artists, including John Constable and Caspar David Friedrich, whose powerful paintings explore the relationship between human beings and their sublime surroundings. However, Turner’s work also inspired Romantics who didn’t specialize in landscapes, like French artists Eugène Delacroix and Theodore Gericault. Like Turner, these figures employed expressive brushwork to heighten the drama of their action-packed paintings, including Liberty Leading the People and The Raft of the Medusa, respectively.
“By focusing on emotion and the free expression of the artist, the Romantic Era allowed these painters to break free from the classical rules of art. The idea that an artist was a genius who could produce art ‘from nothing’ using just their own creative thinking was of paramount importance to Romanticism. This concept was best summed up by poet and critic Charles Baudelaire, who wrote in 1846, ‘Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject nor in exact truth, but in a way of feeling.’
“While most Romantics stuck to painting, some dabbled in sculpture. Among the most well-known of these artists is François Rude, a French sculptor who crafted Le Marseillaise, a group of reliefs on Paris' Arc de Triomphe. However, aside from painting, Romanticism found most of its success beyond the visual arts.
“Some of the 18th and 19th century’s most well-known composers worked in the Romantic style. These include Ludwig van Beethoven, who also worked in the preceding Classical period, as well as Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Franz Liszt, and Richard Wagner. Similarly, Romantic interests flourished in the field of literature, particularly in poetry. English poets like William Blake, William Wordsworth, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge led the way with their sensitive written works.
“The Romantic movement also touched more academic disciplines, including education and both the social and natural sciences. …’There was something pioneering—almost revolutionary—about Romanticism,’ the National Trust says. ‘It involved breaking with the past, and consciously moving away from the ideas and traditions of the Enlightenment. In so doing, Romanticism fundamentally changed the prevailing attitudes toward nature, emotion, reason, and even the individual.’”
https://mymodernmet.com/what-is-romanticism/
—Kelly Richman-Abdou, “Romanticism: An Art Movement That Emphasized Emotion and Turned to the Sublime,” My Modern Met, July 4, 2023
Guillermo Tolentino: Influence of Romanticism
Guillermo Tolentino (1890-1976), the first Philippine National Artist for Sculpture, was educated in the Beaux-Arts tradition of the West. He was born just before the inception of the Philippine Revolution against Spain in 1896 and grew to adulthood under the American colonial regime, enrolling in the University of the Philippines School of Fine Arts and graduating with a Fine Arts degree in 1915. Tolentino traveled to New York in 1919, enrolling at the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design. He continued his studies at the Regge Istituto Superiore di Belle Arti di Roma in Rome, graduating in 1923 and then returning to the Philippines in 1925.
The artist’s oeuvre throughout his life is marked by the Beaux-Arts Style. Although the Beaux-Arts Style principally applies to architecture, it also describes in a secondary sense the visual arts. Basically Neoclassical, the style is influenced by Romanticism, the nineteenth-century movement that followed upon and interacted with Neoclassicism. Depiction in the Beaux-Arts Style is predominantly “realistic” in the broad sense of the term.
Andres Bonifacio monument: Romantic attributes
On July 29, 1930, Guillermo Tolentino won first prize in a design contest organized by the National Museum for the monument, which was planned to coincide with the inauguration of the Philippine Commonwealth three years later. Tolentino’s design reveals his education in the Beaux-Arts Style besides the influence of nineteenth-century Romanticism.
The subject of the sculpture is nationalism, a principal Romantic motif. The memorial portrays the upwelling aspirations, deep emotions, energy, flair, and struggle associated with nationalism.
Bonifacio is a heroic figure. He is flanked by combative Katipuneros, while behind him to his right a defiant Emilio Jacinto, the “Brains of the Katipunan,” exclaims. At the rear of the monument slouch casualties of the Philippine revolution, including at least one hooded figure who has been executed by garrote.
Atop the monument stands the “Angel of Victory”—a winged spirit recapitulating the “Nike of Samothrace,” a star of the permanent collection at the Louvre and a symbol of victory. She raises a symbol of peace, a branch with leaves, to the sky.
Alice Guillermo expounds the memorial as follows.
“…The principal figure is Andres Bonifacio, leader of the 1896 Philippine Revolution. Behind him and beneath the flag stands Emilio Jacinto. On both sides the Katipunero brandish their bolo in a call to arms. Behind the figure of Bonifacio, at the opposite side of the obelisk, are the...three martyred priests Mariano Gomez, Jose Burgos, and Jacinto Zamora, whose execution gave birth to nationalism. These are followed in sequence by the initiation rites into the revolutionary secret society of the Katipunan, a dying woman with an infant reaching for her breast, and the man with clenched fist upraised beside the Katipunero figure, which completes the movement back to Bonifacio.
“Bonifacio himself stands with pistol and bolo in each hand, his figure expressive of nobility and resoluteness of purpose as he surveys the scene. Classical ideals come into play, particularly in the restrained approach to the Bonifacio figure, but so does romanticism in the emotional dynamism of the Katipunero. Not to be overlooked is the realist’s concern for detail, especially since Tolentino was also an excellent portraitist. Through these various strands, what comes to the fore is the sculptor’s genuine feeling for the subject. The figure of Bonifacio, the tragic revolutionary hero, was an inspiration to the artist as nationalist. This monument, which marked the apex of Tolentino’s career, was completed on the eve of the founding of the Commonwealth, once more stirring hopes for independence from colonial rule, symbolized by the winged victory atop the obelisk.”
https://epa.culturalcenter.gov.ph/3/82/2150/
—Alice G. Guillermo, “Bonifacio Monument / Monumento,” CCP Encyclopedia of Philippine Art Digital Edition, November 18, 2020
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