MONUMENTO

It was this precision in symbolism, the keenness to imbue every element with weighty meaning and allusion, was in keeping with Tolentino’s training as a classical sculptor. Guillermo Tolentino—who would become a National Artist for Sculpture—was at the time an established figure in the arts, having been appointed a professor at the University of the Philippines School of Fine Arts upon his return from the the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Rome. His style, honed in Europe, was of classical realism, and he would remain a staunch and vocal champion of the movement. (In the late 1930s, as the classical style and modernism came to a head, Tolentino memorably dismissed modernist work as “ugly”—insisting that “distortion in painting is a cardinal sin.” It is a curious counterpoint, as the second prize for the design of the Bonifacio Monument, submitted by Nakpil and Garcia, was predominantly in the modernist style.)

Tolentino’s aesthetic would influence numerous Filipino sculptors, many of them having studied under him at the UP School of Fine Arts. One of these students was Anastacio Caedo, his star pupil, assistant, and protegé. Caedo would be Tolentino’s right-hand man in the creation of the Bonifacio Monument, the two leading a team of sculptors that toiled in a studio garden in Malate. The Bonifacio Monument was thus, expectedly, a collaborative effort that sought to realize Tolentino’s singular vision: The construction of the central column, including the base, was done by the architect Andres Luna de San Pedro (son of the ilustrado hero Juan Luna, and the chairman of the jurors that chose Tolentino’s design); the pedestal and shaft were carved in granite imported from Germany. The sculptor Francesco Riccardo Monti, Italian by birth, would likewise lend his expertise in the forging of the 23 bronze figures (cast in Italy) that served as the memorial’s central element. (Monti, too, would provide a postwar link, in terms of monuments: Monti designed the mourning angels that surmount the Quezon Monument—itself designed by Federico Ilustre, who started his career as a draftsman for Juan Nakpil.)

If the tableaux in the Rizal monument are static and sparse, those in the Bonifacio Monument are imbued with energy and emotion. Each figure is modeled with classical perfection in composition, but charged with the fierce sentiments of a romanticist—and all of them fashioned with a realist’s careful and conscientious attention to detail. Emilio Jacinto’s face is frozen in a battle-cry right behind Bonifacio; on the other side of the obelisk are the priests Mariano Gómez, José Apolonio Burgos, and Jacinto Zamora. Caedo would serve as a model of one of the Katipuneros—the one that cradled a dead infant, with a sheet thrown over its still face. (Caedo, too, is among those considered to be the model for the UP Oblation, as he was Tolentino’s assistant during its creation.) Tolentino also modelled after Mrs. Angela Sison (wife of Senator, and later Defense Secretary, Teofilo Sison) the young woman that lay prostrate before an angry old man; Guillermo Masangkay’s role in the revolution and the realization of this monument to its nominal father would be forever immortalized as a Katipunero tearing up a cedula.

Nearly unseen unless from a considerable distance from the monument, the winged figure of Victory rises 45 feet in the air, the granite tower her pedestal. Patterned after the Winged Victory of Samothrace, the triumph it evokes only underscores the value of the tumult and the struggle and the fury that holds her up. That in the centuries of subjugation, for every mother who had held her dead child, every laborer who defiantly tore proof of Spain’s ownership, for every boy from Tondo who dared form a nation—the goddess of Victory looked on. We had won.

Nothing demonstrates this—the claiming of the Monument and the Hero for a nation once more on the threshold of independence—better than the marker at the foot of Bonifacio’s statue: cast in the same enduring bronze, but in the various codes of the Katipunan, with exhortations not in English or Spanish, but the Tagalog wielded by Bonifacio as every bit as powerful a weapon as the bolos, rifles, and handguns of the Katipuneros. Literally a codex—it is a proclamation, enduring, inscrutable except to those to whom the words were originally addressed: the Filipinos. Decoded, it is Bonifacio’s proclamation of August 28th, two days before he led the attack at San Juan del Monte—the first real battle of the Philippine revolution:

Whether in word or deed, all this was thus anchored on Andres Bonifacio—in the midst the tumult of these tableaux portraying the agonizing struggle for Philippine independence was a Bonifacio standing tall and serene, his gaze cast toward Old Manila. The Bonifacio of Tolentino was imbued with classical meaning, expressing almost no emotion—a cool, calculating, stoical leader in the thick of battle. Not deaf to the horrors and rage that surrounded him, but drawing strength from it all, held in a calm center. Napoleon Abueva, a student of Tolentino, offers an alternative interpretation: that Bonifacio’s quiet dignity and confidence evokes the resilient spirit of Filipinos.

And so here, at what was once the entrance to Manila before the era of the expressway, stands a calm Bonifacio, dressed in an embroidered Barong Tagalog and knotted kerchief, with a bolo in one hand, a revolver in the other, surrounded by Jacinto and two other Katipuneros, symbolizing the Cry of Pugad Lawin. Tolentino’s work on Bonifacio was the culmination of extensive research and consultations not just with Bonifacio’s living contemporaries, but also with the occult through seances and espiritistas; Tolentino modelled the figure’s bone structure after Bonifacio’s surviving younger sister Espiridiona. Tolentino’s sacred classical realist aesthetic has, perhaps, given us a Bonifacio so unlike the volatile man of action that has bled into our collective psyche—but was nonetheless the best approximation of the man so few could ever define so accurately.

Tolentino's exertions to portray Bonifacio in a manner that would satisfy his dwindling number of contemporaries yet immortalize the appearance of the Supremo for posterity, speaks volumes of the KKK as Secret Society—in comparison to the First Republic that would succeed it, which managed to immortalize for all time, the features of its protagonists in photographs every bit as poised—and posed—as those of the Propagandists. This telling detail—or to be precise, the lack of them, much as Tolentino was prepared to point to documents and testimony assiduously collected by himself—says everything that needed to be said, then or now, about how daring, and essentially, successful the Supremo was as organizer. And how sweeping, because so sudden, the tumult of revolution was, that both its leader and its followers would rise, and fall, with the scantiest of documentation, written or visual.

The biographies of the man who would found the Katipunan trace his 33 years in a short, terse, faithful rote: A man of humble beginnings who wanted more from life—this, unfortunately, in a rigid society that frowned upon such audacious ambition (how we forget the rejection he faced from the family of his second wife, or the protestations against revolution of his own scandalized brother-in-law). The story follows in telegraphic detail: Bonifacio the hard worker who wished to rise up the ranks; self-taught, with a desire to be a great thinker, to be ilustrado in spirit—he read the great French novels, we learned; admired Rizal; and would himself pen stirring manifestos and rousing nationalist poetry. More importantly, we are told, his ambition did not end with himself. Disgruntled by the status quo—of the seeming futility of simply desiring more under Spanish rule, with its insistence on class divides and the superiority of the foreign race—Bonifacio formed and led the Katipunan, a secret society whose sole aim was to overthrow three centuries of subjugation to Spain.

The Katipunan, for Bonifacio, was something that the country direly needed; for the Katipunan was action. It was to be more than the stirrings of dissatisfaction, more than mere grumbling; it was more than mere response, more than the willingness to risk life and limb because of the cause. The Katipunan was committing one’s self fully to the cause. For Bonifacio, the Katipunan was going to do something that would liberate the people, proudly reclaim what was truly ours, and—consciously for its founder or otherwise—in the process build a nation independent in thought, word, and deed.

Our history books catalog the doings of this Bonifacio spurred into action—as do countless historical markers, and monuments cradled in town centers, as do the postcards every grade school student is required to include in a scrapbook of Philippine history. The President of the Supreme Council at the head of a defiant crowd in the then-wilderness of Caloocan (of whose composition we can forever catch a glimpse through the testimony of Guillermo Masangkay), leading the tearing of the sacred cedula—the diminutive piece of paper that proved that one was a subject of Spain. And then here we have Bonifacio with his bolo thrust forward—what could be nobler than a revolution equipped with nothing more than crude blades and the frenzied thirst for freedom?—leading the charge. Here, too, is the Bonifacio painted vividly, even luridly, in the national memory: The red pantaloons of the Katipunan gleaming in the night skirmishes, the indio face scorned by the conquerors forever frozen in the battle-cry for liberty. Our collective memory has successfully immortalized this boy from Tondo: Bonifacio the noble, Bonifacio the indignant, Bonifacio the defiant: Bonifacio, ever the proud “Pangulo Nang Haring-Bayang Katagalugan,” even in his final days, toppled from power, scorned by his own compatriots.

The Bonifacio Monument sought to capture all that—and it was built, it must be said, as much as an act of posthumous vindication, even rehabilitation, as it was intended to be a symbolic place of interment for a Supremo whose mortal remains were lost to history: for it, too, fulfills the role of a particular memorial, the symbolic last resting place for one whose bones are lost to posterity.

Monuments are meant to capture a greatness precisely because they are forged to stand in defiance of the passage of time, of the reputations assigned by trends in historiography, and of the caprices of popular fashion. From the late 1990s onward, the government of Caloocan City would paint the eight-rayed sun a deep yellow, and the octagonal base that surrounded it a red-brown meant to simulate brick. The punch of color would only underscore the stateliness of the granite-and-bronze that lay at its heart. Numerous attempts have been made to alter the dimensions of or entirely move the monument—to Fort Bonifacio, to Luneta close to Rizal’s own memorial (where, in the twilight of his life, Emilio Aguinaldo dreamed his own monument would stand), to the northern district of Caloocan. These numerous proposals have been rejected—in preservation of historical importance, of national art, of the wholeness of Tolentino’s aesthetic and nationalist vision; of what the historian Simon Schama terms “landscape and memory.”

It is Guillermo Tolentino’s memorial—rich in symbolism, imbued, not with false gravitas, but rather, the vital energy, emotions, and losses that are the landmarks in the long road to Philippine independence; enduringly, and thus, relentlessly, so representative of the Filipino people and its hopes and its dreams and its sufferings and what makes it whole—that has perhaps served Bonifacio’s legacy best. It stands at the heart of Caloocan today, eighty years from its unveiling—crowded from all sides by artless establishments that proclaim their transient commercialism, pedestrians who view the bronze-and-granite ode and testament to the Filipino spirit as nothing more than scenery. But it will endure, the winged figure of Victory will forever gaze from her pedestal assuring us of our hard-won liberty as she surmounts the eight provinces first proudly proclaimed in the Katipunan flag and commemorated in our national flag born of the resumed revolution in 1898—and Bonifacio will stand tall and proud and defiant in a world that has refused to stay still, as a reminder that passion must be born of reason; and that action must have, at its heart, a moral purpose: the ultimate source of an individual’s—and a people’s—ability to achieve a happy, cohesive, and independent existence.