Fire, gold, excavated words

Fernando Amorsolo is often described as the artist who captured “Philippine sunlight” in his canvases. His works are bright in contrast to the somber masterpieces of 19th-century Filipino masters like Juan Luna and Félix Resurrección Hidalgo. Amorsolo’s palette also differs from the dark tones of his uncle, Fabián de la Rosa. When I was a boy, my father pointed out Amorsolo’s expert draftsmanship, perspective, drapery, and trademark backlighting. As I grew older, I became fascinated with another way Amorsolo handled light: how he painted fire.

From the warm glow of embers under a palayok, encouraged by a pretty woman blowing through a wooden tube, to the small flame from firewood in a kalan, Amorsolo froze culinary history before electric, gas, convection, and microwave cooking. Fire figures heavily in Amorsolo’s wartime paintings, such as “The Burning of the Dominican Church” in Intramuros or “The Burning of the Intendencia,” of which he made numerous copies. Light and color mix to capture the intensity of fire, shifting from red and orange to yellow. Backlighting appears again in scenes of people escaping a burning city or amid the smoldering ruins of Intramuros and Rizal Avenue. Time may have softened the memory of those terrible days, but not in the titles assigned to Amorsolo’s wartime works by the pioneering art historian Alfonso T. Ongpin, who did not mince words and laid blame squarely on the “salvajes japoneses” (savage Japanese soldiers).

Fire reappears in his commissioned historical paintings from the 1950s. Ferdinand Magellan and Lapulapu fight to the death on the shores of Mactan, with native houses ablaze in the background. Recreating the Philippines at Spanish contact in “The Burning of the Idols,” Amorsolo depicted Filipinos casting out their old religion in exchange for Christianity—throwing their licha, anito, and bulul into a pyre, with the smoke and orange glow reflected on their faces, while in the shadowed background stand a cross and the blurred suggestion of Spanish missionaries. Like many Filipinos of his generation, Amorsolo was raised and educated to believe that Magellan “discovered” the islands in 1521, that Spain brought “civilization” to our shores, and that Spanish contact swept away all existing native culture.

Yet, the light of pre-Spanish culture was not entirely extinguished in those fires. Much of it survived the colonial period—gleaming in a bewildering array of gold jewelry held by the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas and the Ayala Museum. These artifacts dating from the 10th to the 13th centuries are a source of pride for a country and a people thrice colonized and often in need of validation. These golden objects prove that, once upon a time, the Philippines had a golden age—literally.

It is unfortunate that many of these gold objects were acquired from pot hunters, removed from their archaeological and historical context. Yet current scholarship tells us far more than we knew half a century ago, complemented by nondestructive analysis using modern X-ray fluorescence equipment. Illustrations from the 16th-century Spanish manuscript, known as the Boxer Codex, have helped us understand how this jewelry was worn: on ears, necks, arms, hands, fingers, legs, and toes. Early missionary vocabularios from the 17th century provide even greater detail. For instance, the “Vocabulario Bisaya,” compiled by the Jesuit Mateo Sánchez and published in 1711, lists four words for the Spanish oro (gold): bulauan (reddish gold), uagas (pure or fine gold), uray (refined gold), and lascog (whitish, discolored, or low-karat gold). “The Vocabulario de Pampango,” compiled by Diego de Bergaño and published in 1731, lists five words: guinto (gold), lapang (raw mined gold in clumps resembling saffron or turmeric), panica and belatan (false gold), and cullyauan (literally “hanging gold,” likely a pendant).

The earliest Tagalog dictionary, compiled by Pedro de San Buenaventura and published in Pila, Laguna, in 1613, offers the most extensive and nuanced gold vocabulary, including specific terms for various grades: dalisay (24 karat), ginogulan (22K), hilapo (20K), panagbo (less than 20K), panica (18K), lingginin (14K), bislig (12K), and hotoc and malubay (below 12K). Precolonial Filipinos possessed a sophisticated understanding of gold, describing fineness in terms of human age, where matanda (old/fine) indicated higher quality than bata (young/lower fineness). Between dalisay (24K) and ginogulan (22K), they distinguished dalisay na bata (slightly below 24K) and ginogulan matanda (slightly above 22K).

There were also precise terms for different forms of gold: biclatan referred to gilded or gold-plated surfaces; uagas meant raw gold dust or filings kept in a pouch called a bolobolo; balangamas was gold thread wound over silk imported by the Sangleyes (Chinese); barac was gold wire; aliyamas was gold beaten into sheets for gilding; and lantay meant paper-thin gold leaf.

See Also

Talk of the Town: Some are smarter than the law

Imagine history and an ancient gold culture rediscovered within dictionaries. There is clearly much more to excavate here than gold.

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