| Summary: | While Captain Arturo Prat was an early victim of the Pacific War (1879-1883), turning his defeat into a symbol of heroism, General Manuel Baquedano led the Chilean army to victory in that same war, turning his triumph into a political platform. Large commemorative monuments were built about both characters in Valparaíso and Santiago de Chile, which in the recent iconoclastic cycle have had opposite destinies, allowing us to comparatively observe the construction of meaning that derives from an image in public space, considering its historical moment of establishment, the origin of the social energy that demands it and the legitimacy of its validity. In this context, Rodin's proposal for the Prat monument appears, which was rejected, probably because the iconography of La Défense turned out to be an unbearable image for the programmatic taste of the elites. A situation of forced oblivion in Rodin's work that, in its comparative analysis with the Baquedano monument, shows us that for heritage culture the rise of a hero does not always mean the fall of a villain.
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