Category: Essay
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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, in Nicanor G. Tiongson’s phrase, the “Brains of the Katipunan”: a Tondo-born essayist and poet (15 December 1875–6 April 1899) who joined the Katipunan in 1893, served as Bonifacio’s counsellor,…
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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…
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The afterlives of Rizal’s A orillas del Pasig
A orillas del Pasig circulated in late nineteenth-century Manila as music sung in drawing rooms and printed as sheet music. Its most familiar version, A orillas del Pasig: Danza Filipina para Canto y Piano, features lyrics credited to José Rizal and music composed by his Ateneo Municipal classmate Blas Echegoyen. Hardly anyone remembers that the…
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Coulisse ala Philippine
I was reminded of a term I’ve seen before but never fully grasped during an art history lecture by Andrew Moisey on staffage in photography: the coulisse (pronounced koo-LEES). Developed by Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin in 17th-century Rome, it refers to the dark “wing” of trees or architecture placed on one side of a…
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Juan Luna in Japan
Juan Luna’s brief but productive stay in Japan in 1896 is not always discussed is scholarship even if the works he produced during those visits forms some of the most visually compelling episodes of his late career. After returning to Manila in 1894, and following a turbulent period amid the growing revolutionary climate, Luna traveled…
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Mga Bilanggong Birhen (1977), an Amorsolo-Pastoral in Film
Mga Bilanggong Birhen (1977) is set on a Visayan hacienda during the early years of American colonial administration. The film follows the Sagrada family—Felipa, Juan, Doña Sagrada, and the daughters Celina and Milagros—within a household that retains social structures established during the late Spanish period. Throughout the film, the architecture of the ancestral home, its…
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Rosa Rosal, 97
Rosa Rosal, who died today at 97, was a leading actress of the postwar studio era and one of the Philippines’ most prominent humanitarian workers. Born Florence Lansang Danon on October 16, 1928, in Manila, she was discovered by chance after the war and made her screen debut in Fort Santiago (1946) for the Nolasco…
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Indios Bravos, 1888–1889
Between April 28 and May 16, 1888, during his continental journey across the United States, and again during the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1889, Rizal confronted two dramatically different representations of Indigenous Americans: one as commercial stereotype, the other as dignified performers. These encounters shaped what would become Indios Bravos, the fraternity founded by Rizal…
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José Rizal’s visit to the Javanese Village at the 1889 Paris Exposition
rizal, gamelan, debussy, java, expo, 1889, dunia melayu
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Vertebra in Vial
Questions persist about Rizal’s vertebra. Among them, why was it preserved? The oft-repeated claim that it was precisely where the bullet struck is unproven and, in the end, immaterial, since part of his brain was also preserved. The more curious matter is why these fragments, the vertebra and the brain, were placed in viales de…
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La Bulaqueña: What We Know About The Louvre Abu Dhabi’s Latest Attraction
The following notes draw from the wealth of information shared by scholars, collectors, archival researchers, and art history networks following the loan of La Bulaqueña (1895) to the Louvre Abu Dhabi (June 2025). It brings together insights from literature, oral histories, institutional records, and recent findings that have come to light in the wake of…
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Irineo Miranda’s Ethnographic Portrait of Nina Rasul and the Philippine Bangsamoro
My article, “Irineo Miranda’s Ethnographic Portrait of Nina Rasul and the Philippine Bangsamoro,” is now out in the latest issue of Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints (Vol. 73, No. 1, pp. 3–43). This piece revisits Miranda’s 20th-century illustrations through the lens of colonial ethnography, visual anthropology, and Bangsamoro history, tracing how his portrait of…
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Suzi Ferrer
Herbert Johnson MuseumJan 25, 2025–June 8, 2025Ithaca, NY In her artist statement for Portrait in Six Dimensions (1973), Suzi Ferrer (1940–2006) described the installation as emerging from her “continuing concern with the relation of the individual to society,” specifically addressing “female stereotypes and role-playing, or perhaps, what this society expects of women, and how they…
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Pearls in Jean Fouquet’s Melun Madonna
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…
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The Queen’s Cosmopolitical Portrait
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…
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The Place of Shells: Making and Unmaking Archipelagic Southeast Asia
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…
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Muhammadan Mysticism in Sumatra
R.L. Archer’s 1937 article, “Muhammadan Mysticism in Sumatra,” provides an early and detailed inquiry into the forms of Islamic mysticism as they emerged and took root in the Malay world. Drawing principally on Malay-language manuscripts held in Leiden and elsewhere, Archer situates these texts within a broader genealogy of Sufi metaphysics, while also attending to…
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Manila’s Monument to Queen Isabel II
The statue of Queen Isabel II is one of few public artworks that survive from the time of Spanish colonial rule in the Philippines. Located in front of Puerta Isabel II in Intramuros, Manila, this bronze monument has weathered the vicissitudes of Philippine history and the shifting tides of politics and empire. Commissioned in the…
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Marca Demonio de las Comparaciones: Die anachronistische Substitution des Kris Joloano in Rizal und Amorsolo
Diese Studie untersucht die anachronistische Präsenz des Kris Joloano in José Rizals Noli Me Tangere (1887) und Fernando Amorsolos Marca Demonio, dem Etikett für den Ginebra San Miguel-Likör, das 1917 geschaffen wurde. Aufbauend auf Nagels und Woods Untersuchung von Anachronismen während der Renaissance positioniert die Analyse die neugierige Einfügung eines Kris Joloano als zeitliche Brücke,…
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Pearls in Islamic Art from the Umayyads to the Ottomans
In Islamic art and culture, pearls symbolize divine light, purity, and paradise, and serve as markers of spiritual authority and sovereign power. Nacreous objects were central to trade networks across the Indian Ocean and Mediterranean, integrating them into Islamic artistic and economic systems. Historical studies tell of their layered significance: as royal emblems in Late…
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Galo Ocampo’s Brown Madonna
Fig. 29 Galo Ocampo, Brown Madonna, 1938 Photo: UST Museum Collection A few years after Rising Philippines, Galo B. Ocampo advanced his fusion of local iconography and modernist style by reimagining the Madonna and Child as unmistakably Filipino. Depicted with Filipino features, traditional dress, and surrounded by native vegetation, Ocampo roots this iconic Catholic image…
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Filipino Muslim Perceptions of Their History and Culture as Seen Through Indigenous Written Sources
Samuel K. Tan’s Filipino Muslim Perceptions of Their History and Culture as Seen Through Indigenous Written Sources examines the historiographical landscape of Filipino Muslim history, emphasizing indigenous written sources over colonial records. Tan highlights the limitations of oral traditions, which vary across ethnic groups, and critiques colonial sources for their biased perspectives that framed Muslims…
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Edades and the fabricated history of his Armory Show conversion to Modern Art
Nicola Kanmany John’s dissertation has critically examined the narrative surrounding the Filipino artist Victorio Edades’s Armory Show conversion to Modern Art. Edades is often regarded as the “father of Philippine modernism” and Kanmany John’s findings challenges the claim that a Seattle exhibition inspired by the 1913 Armory Show of New York fundamentally shifted Edades’ artistic…
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The Ottoman Influence in Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring
This brilliant short visual essay on Things that Talk has resurrected a forgotten facet of one of Western art’s most iconic pieces, Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl earring. Most standard scholarship does not mention this except in a brief mention in Encyclopedia Brittanica and an indirect reference to Dutch trade in the far east in…
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Poseidon’s poisoned gifts
On John Steinbeck’s The Pearl and the bizarre Pearl of Lao Tzu By the time John Steinbeck published The Pearl in 1947, his reputation as a chronicler of the dispossessed was well established. The Grapes of Wrath had cemented his place as a writer who could capture the harsh realities of those on the fringes…
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The Pearl-Diving Mermaid’s Transcorporeality: An Introduction
Louis Renard, mermaid, from Poissons écrevisses et crabs… (Amsterdam, Reiner & Josué Ottens, 1754), State Library Victoria, RARESEF 597 R29 Mermaids have long been intertwined with the imagery of pearls, frequently portrayed like Boticelli’s Venus as dwelling within bivalve shells or scouring the ocean depths for treasures. This connection casts mermaids, whose dual corporeality symbolizes…
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The Wisdom of Uz
William Blake (1757 – 1827), There Was a Man in the Land of Uz (The Book of Job), 1821 This essay sets directions towards the writing of a material history of the Land of Uz, the setting of the Book of Job, by revisiting textbook historical and archaeological records of the Levant and relevant ancient…
Geronimo Cristobal 