Geronimo Cristobal

Month: April 2025

  • Book Review of Enigmatic Objects for Southeast Asian Studies journal

    —

    by

    admin
    in

    In Enigmatic Objects: Notes Towards a History of the Museum in the Philippines (Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2023), National Artist for Literature Resil B. Mojares offers a thoughtful and absorbing meditation on the origins of collecting in the Philippines. Organized like a cabinet of curiosities, the book assembles stories of portraits, phrenological skulls, coconut-shell…

  • Pearls in Jean Fouquet’s Melun Madonna

    —

    by

    admin
    in , ,

    Painted ca. 1452–58 as the right wing of the Melun Diptych, Madonna and Child Surrounded by Seraphim and Cherubim by Jean Fouquet constitutes a singular contribution to the visual culture of the French court. Executed in oil on panel, the painting presents a Marian figure suspended between celestial abstraction and courtly specificity. Seated on a…

  • The Queen’s Cosmopolitical Portrait

    —

    by

    admin
    in ,

    Imagine standing before a grand portrait of Queen Elizabeth I, resplendent in a gown adorned with pearls, her hand resting confidently on a globe. Behind her, two seascapes depict the English navy’s triumph over the Spanish Armada. This is the Armada Portrait, painted around 1588 to commemorate England’s naval victory and to project the queen’s…

  • The Place of Shells: Making and Unmaking Archipelagic Southeast Asia

    —

    by

    admin
    in , ,

    Summary This essay traces how vernacular spatial logics in Southeast Asia—expressed through myths, maritime movement, and ritual orientations—shaped understandings of sovereignty before the imposition of colonial borders. Drawing on the figure of the pearl as a model of layered accretion, it explores how societies in the Philippine archipelago organized space through concentric and relational forms…

  • Goya’s Fight with Cudgels

    —

    by

    admin
    in ,

    Two men, isolated in a barren landscape, beat each other with heavy sticks. There’s no clear reason, no visible audience, and—crucially—no way out. Their legs vanish below the frame, long assumed to be submerged in mud. Later photographs taken before the painting’s transfer to canvas suggest they may have been standing in tall grass. Either…

  • Felix Hidalgo, Un Rio

    —

    by

    admin
    in ,

    The enigmatic painter Felix Resureccion Hidalgo captures a river veiled in the quiet of early evening. The viewer’s gaze glides over the water’s surface, mirroring the way our eyes perceive the fading light by fluidly dissolving into darkness. The glow trembles in the foreground, absorbed by the landscape rather than resisted, as if the deepening…