The instructor at the Ateneo that Rizal chiefly liked was Father Guerrico, a kindly, gentle, devout old man, full of learning and given to good works. Long after swift and stirring events in the great world had dimmed the memory of other faces at the Ateneo, the visage of Father Guerrico, furrowed with thought, yet beaming with good will to all mankind, was clear before Rizal, and with that marvelous gift of his for sculpture he made, out of his lingering recollections, a bust of the father, achieving a likeness of extraordinary quality, so subtly charged it is with the feeling of truth that confers life upon portraiture. But there is, indeed, no room to doubt his high artistic calling; if to painting or to sculpture he had cared to devote himself, he would have been one of the world figures of his day. When one so gifted and having also the artist’s craving for expression and achievement makes of these a sacrifice for the general welfare, it may be doubted if rack or prison mean much more. Sculpture came as easily to him as laughter to a child. From his babyhood, or thereabouts, he had been modeling these figures in clay, a spontaneous and irrepressible outgiving of the spirit in him; figures strangely vital, and wittily touched, so that to-day the observer coming upon them for the first time beholds them with a sense of something weird, as if in some way he had come also upon the sculptor behind his work. Often with no tool but a pocket-knife he worked in wood to the same results. There are extant faces and busts he carved thus in wood that have an almost inexplicable potency to suggest character, thought, or life. He had as great a command over his brush and pencil; his sketch-book has a certain charm, distinctive and rare; he had the French artist’s uncanny power to suggest with a single line an inevitable trait or an overmastering feature of a landscape. He could paint before he had taken a lesson. When he was a mere boy, still at Calamba, before he had entered the Ateneo, a banner was spoiled that was to have been used in one of the local festivals that were then so important; José painted in its place a banner that all men declared to be better than the original. [43] At the Ateneo he carved an image of the Virgin Mother that won the unstinted praise of men not novices in art, and a statue of Christ that for twenty years was one of the admired exhibits of the school hall.