Category: Essay
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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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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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‘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…
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Is Art History?
Just found out there’s a new book gathering the writings of Svetlana Alpers: Svetlana Alpers: Is Art History? A fitting title for someone who fundamentally changed how many of us think about pictures, surfaces, description, Dutch art, and the discipline itself. Includes selected writings, a foreword by Barney Kulok, an introduction by Richard Meyer, and…
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Mikhail Tikhonovich Tikhanov: a Russian artist in Manila (1819)
During the Manila stop of Captain V.M. Golovnin’s 1817–1819 circumnavigation aboard the sloop Kamchatka, the expedition artist Mikhail T. Tikhanov produced a series of drawings from direct observation, of which only three Manila scenes are known to survive. An Indian in Manila Took Tikhanov’s Hat and Ran Away, Malays Arey and Thomas from the Island…
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Protected: Sagrada Familia Philippine Shells and Catholic Ritual
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
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Doubting Thomas, an Easter Egg
The Feast of the Resurrection has just passed and now its time to return to work and to Manila traffic. I find myself going back to old emails. In them, I notice Vince Rafael’s last email and the profile picture he once used: a detail from The Incredulity of Saint Thomas by Caravaggio. It feels,…
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From the Archive: A New Direction in Filipino Art
Orginally published in Philippine Review, Volume II (Issue No. 6) August 1944 This article by Galo B. Ocampo may be read as a rare document of Philippine modernism in the visual arts under Japanese occupation. It records, from within, a moment that has largely escaped art historiography: that the cause of modernism did not stall during…
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From the Archive: What About Filipino Painters?
Originally published in Panorama, Volume X (Issue No.120 December 1958 They are a product of both East and West,but have a distinct art of their ownBy E. Aguilar Cruz Painting and architecture were integrated until comparatively recent times. It was only with the rise of the European merchant class, which had no palaces but town…
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Monthly art history article for Philippines Graphic
I’ve started writing a semi-regular art history feature for Philippines Graphic. Founded in 1927 by Ramon Roces, the magazine remains one of the country’s oldest periodicals still in print. My article this month traces the lesser-known history of Spoliarium by Juan Luna in Rome and Barcelona, where it was first exhibited alongside Catalan artists. Get…
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Review of Unmaking Botany by Kathleen Cruz Gutierrez for Kyoto Southeast Asian Studies Journal
Kathleen Cruz Gutierrez. Unmaking Botany: Science and Vernacular Knowledge in the Colonial Philippines. Durham: Duke University Press, 2025. Kathleen Cruz Gutierrez’s Unmaking Botany offers a compelling and interdisciplinary rethinking of the history of science in the Philippines. Rather than treating botany as a one-way imposition of imperial knowledge, the book foregrounds the coproduction and friction between…
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Dying Gaul in Philippine Cinema and Plaster Casts Conference at Aby Warburg
The image above is a film still from Babaing Hampas-Lupa (1952), an LVN Pictures melodrama written and directed by Nemesio E. Caravana and photographed by Raymond Lacap. The image shows Nida Blanca and Rogelio de la Rosa standing beside a plaster cast of the Dying Gaul inside the galleries of the University of the Philippines…
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Félix Pardo de Tavera y Gorricho (Manila, 1859 – Paris, 1932)
Erratum: This post previously included a photograph I identified as Trinidad Hermenegildo Pardo de Tavera (T.H.) and Felix Pardo de Tavera in their youth, sourced from Alfred W. McCoy’s Anarchy of Families (Manila: ADMU Press, 1994). The image in fact depicts a younger generation of Pardo de Taveras from the early 20th century. I am…
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Women Pioneers of Philippine Art
In celebration of International Women’s Day, allow me to introduce three pioneering and remarkable women in Philippine Art. By the late 19th century, women began carving their place in formal art education led by the trailblazing Pelagia Mendoza y Gotianquin (1867-1939). Born in Pateros, Mendoza grew up demonstrating exceptional talent in artistic pursuits such as…
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A Filipino painter you should know: Eduardo Arandia Salgado
The following article expands the original posted here: https://libguides.nybg.org/c.php?g=1465030 Eduardo Arandia Salgado (1910–1987) was a Filipino painter and botanical illustrator born in Manila. He studied painting at the University of the Philippines, completing advanced courses between 1931 and 1932 under the direction of Fabian de la Rosa and Fernando Amorsolo. Trained in a classical style,…
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Antonio Garcia Llamas (1912–1999)
Antonio Garcia y Llamas (1912–1999) was a Filipino painter, muralist, and teacher who worked between Manila, Jakarta, and Madrid. Little is written about Garcia but his work aligns with the Philippine academic tradition in twentieth-century Philippine painting. He was born in Manila on 16 May 1912 and received his early education at the Colegio de…
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Intellectual and Social Currents in the Establishment of the Academia de Dibujo y Pintura (1821–1834) published in Sojourn
I’m pleased to announce the publication of my article in Sojourn: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia: Geronimo Cristobal, “Intellectual and Social Currents in the Establishment of the Academia de Dibujo y Pintura (1821–1834),” Sojourn: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia 41, no. 1 (2026): 1–45.https://doi.org/10.1355/sj41-1a The article revisits the origins of the…
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Jacques Derrida’s La vérité en peinture (Flammarion 1978)
Jacques Derrida’s La vérité en peinture (The Truth in Painting), published by Flammarion in 1978, gathers a set of essays that rethink the relation between philosophy and the visual arts. The title, borrowed from a remark by Paul Cézanne, signals the provocation at the heart of the book: if painting is said to bear or…
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Isabelo de los Reyes’s Las Islas Visayas
Isabelo de los Reyes was born on July 7, 1864 in Vigan, Ilocos Sur, the son of the Ilocana poet Leona Florentino. He was raised for a time under the care of his uncle, a lawyer and member of Ilocos’ literary circle. At sixteen, without his uncle’s consent, he left for Manila. He studied at…
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Museum installation focuses on small figures in large landscapes
I wrote about staffage in vues d’optique—a genre of etching popular in the second half of the eighteenth century—for a new exhibition at the Johnson Museum. I first encountered these prints during my research fellowship in Leiden and was struck to learn that, around the same time, the Johnson received a donation of a set…
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Desde el cielo: Real Photo Postcards and the Counter-Archive of Alfonso Ongpin
Art History, ulaf050, https://doi.org/10.1093/arthis/ulaf050 I’m pleased to share that my article Desde el cielo: Real Photo Postcards and the Counter-Archive of Alfonso Ongpin has been published in Art History (Oxford University Press). The article examines the work of Alfonso Ongpin (1885–1975), a Filipino photographer, art conservator, and collector active in early twentieth-century Manila. It focuses on…
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On Walter Benjamin’s weak messianic power
In Walter Benjamin’s writing, “weak messianic power” (schwache messianische Kraft) names a fragile, non-sovereign capacity that belongs to the present to redeem the past—not by fulfilling history’s promises in a grand, theological sense, but by interrupting the dominant narrative of progress and rescuing suppressed or defeated moments from oblivion. The phrase appears most explicitly in…
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Jacinto’s ‘Mutya’ in Liwanag at Dilim
Emilio Jacinto (Emilio Dizon Jacinto)—also known in the Katipunan as Pinkian and Dimas-Ilaw—wrote Liwanag at Dilim out of the same revolutionary world that made him, the “Brains of the Katipunan”. This is how Nicanor G. Tiongson’s sketches his life as a poet in the CCP Encyclopedia: Tondo-born essayist and poet (15 December 1875–6 April 1899)…
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Baroque Churches in the Philippines
The development of the Baroque in the Philippines is most clearly observed in masonry churches, where European architectural forms were adapted to local materials, labor, and environmental conditions. The term “Baroque,” associated etymologically with the Portuguese barroco (irregular pearl), was later used by art historians to describe artistic production marked by dynamic composition and intensified…
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Sikatuna as viewer’s surrogate in Luna’s Pacto de Sangre
I reread Filomeno Aguilar’s essay on the pacto de sangre, and it reminded me how often Luna’s painting is still described as a straightforward image of uneven relations between Spaniards and indigenous leaders. Even the encyclopedia article by Santiago Pilar echoes this. That reading treats the canvas as if it were meant to function like…
Geronimo Cristobal 