Portraying Lapu-Lapu

PAREDES

Unveiled at Palm Grass Hotel in Saturday, September 22, was my sculpture “Ang Sangka sa Mactan” (“The Battle of Mactan”), a four feet by three feet wood relief or carving.

It is the second of a series of sculptures on Cebuano history that the heritage hotel is commissioning me to do.

Compared to my previous work, which shows Leon Kilat in the battle of Tres de Abril in 1898, portraying Lapu-Lapu was a more difficult challenge for me.

First of all, there is very little that we know about him.

The only primary source was the account of the Italian chronicler Antonio Pigafetta who claimed to have witnessed the death of his beloved captain, Magellan, during the Battle of Mactan.

But Pigafetta only had a few words for Lapu-Lapu (he calls him CiLapu-Lapu), whom he describes as the “other chief” of Mactan “who refused to obey the king of Spagnia.”

His description of the battle focused on Magellan, who led their group of about 60 men against more than 1,500 native warriors and how they killed him.

He described in detail how Magellan bravely faced death in his heavy armor, sword and lance as a group of natives attacked him with arrows, spears, and large cutlasses.

Pigafetta did not specifically mention that it was Lapu-Lapu that hacked Magellan to death, as the native chief has been portrayed in many artistic depictions of that battle.

One understands this tendency to embellish history in our desire to push for our own narrative as a nation.

Unfortunately, this often leads to mythologizing.

In the absence of subsequent historical accounts about Lapu-Lapu during the early period of Spanish occupation, his legend survived in oral history where the native chieftain is depicted as living in a magical world and possessing some supernatural powers.

The rise of Filipino nationalism at the close of the Spanish period and the entry of America as the new colonizer, led to more revisioning of the Lapu-Lapu narrative, this time in the form of popular history, which combines factual and imagined stories in order to make them more appealing to the general public or to suit an ideological point-of-view.

It is exactly this tendency to embellish history in our desire to portray Lapu-Lapu as a local hero that I tried to avoid in my attempt to depict him in an artwork.

As it is hard to ascertain how Lapu-Lapu may have looked like given conflicting descriptions of him by historians including those who interviewed other survivors of the expedition who described him as much older than we imagined him to be.

I opted instead to preserve the mystery of Lapu-Lapu by representing him only as a pair of eyes juxtaposed in the sky above the scene where Magellan is attacked by a group of native warriors.

The use of superimposed image is itself suggestive of the supernatural, a slice of magic added to what is predominantly drawn from historical facts, in this case Pigafetta’s description of the death of Magellan.

My own work thus makes no claim at verisimilitude or historical accuracy.

In the first place, artistic depictions of historical events can never be totally accurate.

The artist also has to structure his image in an aesthetically-pleasing composition or form.

Then there is the difficulty of portraying three dimensional objects on a flat surface that requires some visual tricks, as the rules of perspective don’t always apply.

This illusionistic device is common in relief, a genre traditionally used in historical art.

But such is the paradox of historical art.

The artist tries so hard to adhere to facts, but retelling them in the mute medium requires the use of visual metaphors and even visual tricks for the image to make sense.

Yet, as history is itself always a tension between the real and the imagined, art can only mirror that contradiction.