Category: Essay
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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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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,…