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Setting the record straight: Joaquín Pardo de Tavera y Gómez (9 November 1829, San Roque, Cavite – 19 March 1885, Paris)
Online sources are unreliable for the visual identification and basic biography of Joaquín Pardo de Tavera y Gómez. Google results and highly visited websites often confuse him with other members of the Pardo de Tavera family. I asked fellow historians but none could offer a definite visual identification of the important historical figure. So I…
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Protected: Botong Francisco’s Emilio Aguinaldo and the Philippine Revolution woodcarving panel executed by Paete woodcarvers (1964)
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
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Shells and Catholic Ritual
A set of giant clam shell holy water fonts from the Philippines is installed inside the Sagrada Família. According to a spot.ph article by Micah Avry Guiao, published on 4 November 2025, These objects were presented as a national gift to Spain in 2010. The installation consists of six shells of Tridacna gigas (taclobo), positioned…
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Death of Cleopatra, an art historical dialogue
Juan Luna’s The Death of Cleopatra (1881) strikes me first for its contrast with motion and stillness. Cleopatra is already dead. Her body lies stretched across a richly adorned bed at the centre of the composition, draped in diaphanous fabric and jewellery, her torso partially exposed, her head tilted back in a pose that suggests…
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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: EL 82
Originally published in Excelsior, Ano XXIX (Numero 928), Febrero 29, 1932 Five decades ago, on the first day of March of that year so sorrowfully remembered in the history of the capital—because during its course it was first visited by the terrible traveler from the Ganges, which spread death and the most dreadful devastation among…
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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: Philippine University’s 1936 Painting Exhibition
Originally published in The American Chamber of Commerce Journal, Vol. XVI, No.4 (April 1936) We review the yearly art exhibit at the University of the Philippines because wealth patronizes art and because, further, it is far ahead of past exhibits. We should say it contains at least a dozen pieces that would grace the average…
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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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Lozano’s Letras y Figuras in the FDR Museum for Mapping Philippine Material Culture (SOAS)
While researching visual representations of port cities, I encountered an unexpected object at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum: a nineteenth-century letras y figuras painting by the Manila artist José Honorato Lozano (1815/1821–1885). The Roosevelt Library—best known for presidential papers, wartime correspondence, and family memorabilia—is not the first place art historians would think…
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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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Talismanic Case with Qurʾanic Prayer Scroll (Iran, 19th Century)
This nineteenth-century Iranian amulet consists of a metal case and a tightly rolled Qurʾānic prayer scroll preserved inside it (National Museum of Asian Art, Accession S2018.6a–c). The container, made of silver plated over a copper alloy, measures approximately 1.9 × 7.6 × 1.5 cm and has a six-sided body with rounded ends. One end opens…
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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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Metro Romance (dir. Taylor Wong, 1984)
Carlotta Films is slated to re-release Behind the Yellow Line (1984) on Blu-ray under the title Metro Romance in April 2026. Directed by Taylor Wong, the film (originally titled 緣份, Yuan Fen, “Fate”) is a light romantic comedy set on Hong Kong’s newly modernized MTR. The new edition restores a modest but revealing mid-1980s hit.…
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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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Vicente Rafael, Historian, 70
Vicente L. Rafael (February 16, 1956 – February 21, 2026) was a pioneering historian of the Philippines whose work transformed the study of colonialism and political power. A longtime professor of History and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Washington, Rafael reshaped Philippine historiography by demonstrating how empire operates through language and the fraught…
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Bonifacio’s Talisman
Andrés Bonifacio (1863–1897) was a Filipino revolutionary leader and founder of the Katipunan, the secret society that launched the 1896 uprising against Spanish colonial rule. Often called the “Father of the Philippine Revolution,” Bonifacio emerged from modest urban circumstances in Tondo, Manila, and rose to prominence through his ability to mobilise working-class supporters. Unlike later…
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Manila Beans in a Medici Recipe Book
When I visited Florence over the summer, I was surprised by how many Filipinos I met. Some were priests. Others ran restaurants or worked as artists. Hearing Tagalog in Tuscan streets made me think about older connections between Manila and Europe. I began wondering how Manila was imagined by the rest of the world during…
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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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The Chapel in the Six Circuits of Hell
In his Kapilya installation for Art Fair Philippines, Max Balatbat assembles a makeshift chapel of salvaged wood and rusted rebar. This is supposed to represent the look of faith forged from marginal lives that the art writer Carla Gamalinda has compared to the one studied by Rey Ileto’s Pasyon at Revolution. A pendulum whip swings…
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Modernist Morophilia
Thank you to my colleagues at the Ateneo, especially Charlie Samuya Veric, for making this possible. This lecture on January 19 2026 will be inside Ateneo Katipunan Campus at the NGF Conference Room, located on the ground floor of Horacio De La Costa Hall. During my dissertation research, I came to see how many of…
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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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Geronimo Cristobal 