"GOLDEN HOUR for reckoning"

Gold told people what to do with it

- MARIAN PASTOR ROCES

COLLECTIVELY, A TOUR DE FORCE. 

One word suffices for the gold, personal funerary articles found in archaeological sites in the Philippines.

Exquisite.

Astonishingly, all—every single piece—of this grave jewelry is finely wrought. Each still exhibits delicacy and virtuosity, deftness of breath-driven gold melting and figuration, and confident form, 500 to 1,000 years after their making. The collection of Leandro and Cecille Locsin on permanent public display at the Ayala Museum, and that of the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, frees an exhalation: exquisite.

Collectors and archaeologists expect pure gold, or just microns short. The fineness of make, executed at the tiniest scale repoussé, granulation, filigree, metal sheet cut-out, gold weaving, and chain-making, could not have been realized with alloys that harden the metal beyond what can be sculpted into elements measurable by millimeters. Beauty at this scale is self-evidently distant from monumentality.

Exquisite is also the word that brings art historian and casual museum visitor together in enchantment. One look fixes the certainty: this stuff belongs to the world’s sublime artworks. Completely outside nationalistic hubris, comparison with, say, Latin American Pre-Columbian gold jewelry convinces many: archaeological gold from Philippine sites are collectively a tour de force defining an aesthetic of delicacy. The former essays the large-scale. Pre-Columbian pieces speak of vast, hierarchical, centralized societies. Not the Philippine pieces, which suggest the opposite.

QUESTIONS