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Isabel, Leyte from the archives
The settlement was first called Dupong, after a venomous snake said to have inhabited a local river. Isabel, municipality on the western coast of Leyte, Philippines, developed from the older settlement of Quiot near Dupón Bay. Quiot was a Spanish-period visita, or dependent mission, of Palompon; became an independent Roman Catholic parish in 1877; and…
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1792, The Mermaid of Manila Bay
Earlier this morning, I saw Fernando Brambila’s graphite drawing of a dugong at a special exhibition at the Galería de las Colecciones Reales, beside the Palacio Real in Madrid. I thought it was a bizarre coincidence that exactly 234 years earlier, on 24 August 1792, the animal depicted in the drawing was captured in Manila…
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Félix Martínez’s Village Scene and the History of the Jota Manileña
Félix Martínez y Lorenzo painted this village dance in Manila in 1886. The work is signed “Felix Martinez” in red at the lower left. Auction catalogues also record an inscription dating it to Manila in 1886. The composition is horizontal. Two barefoot dancers occupy the center and left side of the foreground. A group of…
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Anonymous was a Filipino: Who Drew Mallat’s Philippine Plates? Juan Serapio Transfiguración Nepomuceno and His Son
I began this inquiry by asking who made the original illustrations for Jean-Baptiste Mallat’s Les Philippines (1846). I initially suspected José Honorato Lozano, but the documentary evidence points more directly to another Manila artist: Juan Serapio Transfiguración Nepomuceno. The atlas’s celebrated hand-colored plates are repeatedly described simply as “French illustrations” or credited exclusively to Adolphe…
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Adolphe d’Hastrel Vista de la ciudad de Manila, hacia 1855-1874
I had been searching everywhere for this painting after seeing it reproduced in a magazine, and at one point I even wondered whether it had been generated by AI. While browsing a catalogue at the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, I discovered that it does indeed exist. It offers a remarkable view of Manila and…
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Finding Damián Domingo’s Niña con perrito
Finding Damián Domingo’s Niña con perrito is definitely one of the most memorable episodes of my PhD journey, made possible by Cornell’s Southeast Asia Program, which swiftly provided the travel funds that allowed me to fly to Madrid. It was only when I held the painting in my hands that the research, which until then…
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The Gilded Coconut
Looking at this extraordinary Netherlandish coconut cup, made around 1540 and now at the National Gallery of Art, it is easy to assume that the gilded silver made it precious. In the sixteenth century, however, the coconut itself was a luxury material. Still exotic in Europe, its shell was carved with coats of arms, foliage,…
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Searching for José Rizal the Theater Actor
José Rizal wrote plays and texts for school presentations. He also attended theatrical productions and recorded his opinions of them. No known source identifies him as a performer in a named dramatic role. Documenting an acting role requires a production, date, character, and source naming Rizal as the performer. His biographies contain extensive evidence of…
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From the Archive: Zeus A. Salazar’s “Pantayong Pananaw como discurso civilizacional”
This essay is an English translation of Zeus A. Salazar’s “Pantayong Pananaw como discurso civilizacional,” published in Revista Filipina, Segunda Etapa, Spring 2015, vol. 2, no. 2. I have retained Salazar’s Filipino terminology because the distinctions among tayo, kami, kayo, and sila are fundamental to the argument. Apparent chronological anomalies are corrected. My own annotations…
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Batanes in Moby Dick (1851)
One of the lesser-known Philippine references in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) appears in Chapter CXI, “The Pacific.” As the Pequod leaves the waters of East Asia, Melville writes: “When gliding by the Bashee isles we emerged at last upon the great South Sea.” The “Bashee Isles” are the present-day Batanes Islands of the northern Philippines,…
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1687: Basi, the sugarcane wine that gave Batanes its European name
William Dampier gives an eye-opening account of how Batanes got its European name. “Bashee Islands” derives from basi, the traditional fermented sugarcane drink associated especially with Northern Luzon. Here is my translation of the Dutch edition (where the now famous engraving appears) of Dampier’s account: “Their common drink is water, like that of all the…
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Rembrandt’s only still life print is of a Philippine shell (1650)
Notice: This post is accompanied by a Facebook Reel in the hyperlink below. Full English translation below for international followers To celebrate West Philippine Sea Victory Day, I want to share an artwork that will give us even more motivation to protect our territorial waters. The title of this work is The Shell, and it…
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A Dutch Print of Batanes, Philippines (1698)
A recent report says Chinese scholars at a 30 June 2026 symposium at Jinan University claimed that China has sovereignty over Batanes, describing the islands as a “natural geographical extension” of Taiwan. Philippine Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro rejected the claim as baseless and ludicrous, while the Department of Foreign Affairs stated that Philippine sovereignty over…
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Juan Luna at Casa-Museu José Benlliure
Valencia, Spain— Five little-known works by Juan Luna remain in the Casa-Museu José Benlliure, far from the Philippine collections that usually define his career. Four are catalogued under his name, while a fifth watercolor carries a tentative attribution: Sacerdotisa (1883), Retrato de María Benlliure Ortiz niña con abrigo azul (1884), Poblado filipino (c. 1880), Paisaje…
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Goya’s Drawing of an Elephant from Manila
Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (1746–1828) was a Spanish Romantic painter and printmaker. He is regarded as one of the most important Spanish artists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. His paintings, drawings, and engravings reflected the political and social upheavals of his time and had a major influence on later European…
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Josef Selleny’s View of Manila, 1858
When Josef Selleny visited Manila in 1858 as part of the Austrian Novara expedition, the city was a busy Spanish colonial port defined by walls, churches, cigar factories, river traffic, and the movement of hemp, tobacco, and other commodities. Shipping on the Pasig River at Manila belongs to this moment of maritime activity. Signed with…
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Anonymous Filipino, Girl with Bird and Flowers, c. 1801-1850
The painting Niña con pájaro y flores (Girl with Bird and Flowers) has been identified as Filipino based on the species of the bird shown in the background. The museum record identifies the bird as a pied fantail, Rhipidura javanica, a species associated with the Philippines and Southeast Asia. It appears on a branch at…
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The Ship of Religion in Ivory, by a 17th Century Anonymous Filipino artist
This seventeenth-century ivory plaque in the National Museum of Decorative Arts in Madrid is one of the stranger religious images attributed to the Philippines. The work shows the Nave Typus Religionis, or Ship of Religion, a Counter-Reformation allegory in which the Catholic Church is imagined as a vessel crossing the sea of life while demons,…
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A 1698 Dutch etching of Mindanao by Caspar Luyken
Caspar Luyken’s Grote optocht ter gelegenheid van de aankomst van kapitein Charles Swan op Mindanao (Grand Procession on the Occasion of the Arrival of Captain Charles Swan on Mindanao) is a Dutch etching dated 1698. Made as a book illustration for volume I of William Dampier’s Nieuwe reystogt rondom de werreld, published in The Hague…
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Damian Domingo, Girl with a puppy, 1833
I would not describe Damián Domingo’s Niña con perrito [Girl with a puppy, a miniature poodle] as a discovery in the strict sense. The ivory miniature was already known by at least 2012, when it appeared in Madrid’s Museo del Romanticismo records on children’s portrait miniatures. To my knowledge, however, it has received little or…
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Rafael, A Story in Portraits
I returned to Vicente Rafael’s essay on photography after learning of his passing on February 21, 2026. Professor Rafael, as I continued to call him even after knowing him for years, was seventy. Our conversations became more regular after I began graduate studies at Cornell, where he had also studied in the early 1980s. I…
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What do we mean when we say “Happy Father’s Day”?
Maybe we are not only greeting a father, but acknowledging a presence that shaped us before we could fully recognize it. For Jacques Lacan, the father is not only the biological parent but also a place in language. The father is one of the first figures through whom we learn that love is also structure.…
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With Rizal, a Little Learning Is a Dangerous Thing
The Newberry Library essay “Rizal before ‘Rizal’: Lessons from His Notebook” written by Luis Castellvi Laukamp is a useful example of how access to a primary source does not, by itself, guarantee historical understanding. The article discusses an important manuscript: Rizal’s Clínica médica, a notebook of medical notes, sketches, language exercises, book lists, and draft…
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From Manila to Bologna
From Manila to Bologna The recent death of Carlo Ginzburg, one of my favorite historians, made me think again about Bologna. Ginzburg, the great scholar of microhistory, taught us to look closely at small things, traces, clues, and fragments. That way of thinking brought me back to an unexpected connection between Manila and Bologna. The…
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Princess Philippine
For a famously chaotic republic, Filipinos seem to have a particular fondness for naming their daughters after queens and princesses. I once saw a post, whether real or satire, I can’t recall, about a class roster in which more than half the girls were named “Princess.” So if you’re looking for a royal name for…
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Jan van der Straet’s (Stradanus) Ferdinand Magellan on His Ship (1589)
Jan van der Straet’s (Stradanus) Ferdinand Magellan on His Ship (1589) belongs to the Americae Retectio series, a group of engravings commemorating the navigators associated with overseas expansion. Magellan occupies the center of the composition seated aboard a ship equipped with cannon, navigational instruments, and the Spanish coat of arms. He holds a pair of…
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Jan van der Straet’s (Stradanus) Conquest of the Philippine Islands (ca. 1590s)
Jan van der Straet’s (Stradanus) Conquest of the Philippine Islands (ca. 1590s) is among the earliest European images of the archipelago. The surviving work is a preparatory drawing (modello) for a monochrome (grisaille) painting executed by his son Scipione Stradano for the funeral ceremonies of Philip II of Spain at the Basilica of San Lorenzo…
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‘Paskil’ and the Speaking Monument
José Rizal titles the 26th chapter of his second novel El Filibusterismo “Pasquinades.” The term refers to anonymous satirical writings, insults, accusations, or political commentaries publicly posted in urban spaces. In the novel, rumours and inflammatory texts circulate through Manila following fears of student unrest and revolution. The people became anxious as the city is…
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From the Archives: Art Collection, Imelda Marcos Style
By Fox Butterfield, Special To the New York Times/ The New York Times Archives March 12, 1986 Imelda Marcos routinely took large numbers of paintings from a major museum here to display in her houses around the Philippines, a team of Government inspectors found today. ”She’d come and pick things up whenever she wanted, even…
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Erased Fernando Zobel mural at Parish of the Holy Sacrifice (1953-1955)
I visited the Parish of the Holy Sacrifice at the University of the Philippines yesterday and tried to find out the exact location of Fernando Zóbel’s now erased mural. Completed in 1955, the circular church brought together some of the most important figures in Philippine modernism: architecture by Leandro Locsin, sculpture by Napoleon Abueva, floor…