Geronimo Cristobal

Category: Paintings

  • Sikatuna as viewer’s surrogate in Luna’s Pacto de Sangre

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    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…

  • Juan Luna’s French Orientalist Connection

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    For a long time, art historians have speculated about Juan Luna’s larger network of artists in Paris, including the extent to which he moved within the academic orbit of Jean-Léon Gérôme, the towering figure of French Orientalism. Gérôme’s pedagogical influence has often been inferred through stylistic parallels and early biographical testimony, yet documentary anchors have…

  • The afterlives of Rizal’s A orillas del Pasig

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    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…

  • Coulisse ala Philippine

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    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…

  • Juan Luna in Japan

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    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…

  • Mga Bilanggong Birhen (1977), an Amorsolo-Pastoral in Film

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    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…

  • Ang Mutya ng Epiro: Isang Maagímat na Pagbása sa Florante at Laura ni Balagtas at Marca Demonio ni Amorsolo

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    Disyembre 13, 2025, Sabado 3-4 PM Unibersidad ng Pilipinas-Diliman Tatalakayin ng presentasyong ito ang dalawang anyo ng alegorikong substitusyon. Una, ang pagpapalit ng Pilipinas bilang Epiro sa Florante at Laura ni Balagtas. Dito inilalarawan ang isang kalis bilang sandata ng kabutihan at sagisag ng banal na katarungan. Ikalawa, ang Kris Joloano na muling lumitaw sa imahen ni San Miguel Arkanghel sa Noli…

  • Portrait of the Azcárraga Family (c.1827–1830)

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    Retrato de la familia Azcárraga (c.1827–1830) by Juan Arzeo consists of two oil-on-canvas portraits depicting members of the Azcárraga family of Manila. The sitters are José Azcárraga y Ugarte, an Escolta bookseller; his wife María Isidra Palmera y Bersoza, described in period sources as a mestiza de Albay; and their children José Jr. and Pilar.…

  • La Bulaqueña: What We Know About The Louvre Abu Dhabi’s Latest Attraction

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    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…

  • Pearls in Jean Fouquet’s Melun Madonna

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    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

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    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…

  • Goya’s Fight with Cudgels

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    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

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    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…

  • Lillie P. Bliss and the Birth of the Modern

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    Through March 29MoMA, Floor 2, The Paul J. Sachs Galleries The Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition Lillie P. Bliss and the Birth of the Modern offers a long-overdue reconsideration of a figure whose impact on the institution—and on modern art in America—cannot be overstated. Much like the uprooted pine tree that symbolized the Armory Show, Bliss stood…

  • Pasig River (1948) by Miguel Galvez

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    The Pasig River (1948), an oil on canvas by Miguel Galvez, captures two fishing vessels moored along the riverbank—a quiet tableau of industry and resilience. Galvez depicts Filipinos easing back into the rhythms of labor and life, just three years after the devastation of war. The composition feels deliberate and balanced. The two boats, painted…

  • Marca Demonio de las Comparaciones: Die anachronistische Substitution des Kris Joloano in Rizal und Amorsolo

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    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,…

  • Edades and the fabricated history of his Armory Show conversion to Modern Art

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    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…

  • Pearl of the Orient: The Philippines in Shell (2007)

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    Cariño, José Maria A., and Sonia P. Ner. Pearl of the Orient: The Philippines in a Shell. Manila: Arts Mundi Philippinae, 2007. In Pearl of the Orient: The Philippines in Shell (2007), co-authors Sonia P. Ner and Jose Maria “Jomari” Cariño bring to light an overlooked medium of 19th-century Philippine art—paintings and carvings on Pinctada…

  • Talking trees

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    The image of Alexander (Iskandar) encountering the wondrous talking tree in the Shahnama is a fascinating blend of myth, prophecy, and fantastical imagery. In this particular folio from the Great Mongol Shahnama, the tree takes on an even more vivid character under the hand of the Ilkhanid artist, who expands on Firdawsi’s original vision with…

  • La Perla de Lucban

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    This portrait, titled La Perla de Lucban (The Pearl of Lucban), is characteristic of the foto-óleo technique, where paint is applied directly onto a black-and-white photograph to bring depth and color to the subject. Created in 1891 by the Filipino artist Fabian de la Rosa, this piece captures Maria Isabel Nepomuceno de Ordoveza, who had…

  • The Ottoman Influence in Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring

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    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…

  • Damian Domingo’s portrait: A note on materiality

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    Fig. 1 Damian Domingo, self-portrait, gouache on oval-shaped ivory sheet, 6.1 cm x 4.8 cm, 1826. Source: Ayala Museum.  What is known of Domingo’s physical appearance comes from a miniature painted on an ivory sheet in 1826, which is also the oldest known self-portrait made in the Philippines. All catalogs and previous scholarship on the…

  • Less is More

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    Unknown Flemish artist, Triumph of Fortitude, ca. 1535 Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco In explaining how his practice of writing history operates, historian Carlo Ginzburg turns to architect Mies van der Rohe’s adage: “Less is more.”[1] He explains his method using the metaphor of the dilation of a camera lens: “By knowing less, by…

  • Rodel Tapaya/ Three Paintings for Macao Biennale

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    Dogs have figured in Rodel Tapaya’s works since his first foray into visually translating the myths and legends of the Philippines. From Donsadat and the Magic Dog (2009) to Cane of Kabunian, numbered but cannot be counted (2011), man’s best friend is depicted as the vicar of divine representation and an intermediary between man and…

  • A Habit of Shores: Seni and Seafaring in Dunia Melayu

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    I am presenting seemingly unrelated variables to tell the story of the SEA and the various shores on which they meet the land. It has been a convention now to present an outline of the presentation and I do so not only to give a semblance of cohesiveness but to trigger your imagination. Warning: We…

  • Rama Hari

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    In November 2017, the Times of India published a story about Prime Minister Narendra Modi applauding a ballet performance based on the Ramayana during the opening of the ASEAN Summit in Manila. According to Modi, the event which was attended by Donald Trump, Shinzo Abe, Joko Widodo, and Rodrigo Duterte among many others, shows India…

  • The Ignorant Schulmeister and his Armchair Revolution

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    This essay is a preliminary examination of the artistic pedagogy of Josef Albers mainly using his encounter with Constancio Bernardo, his student at Yale School of Art in the 1950s, as a case study. After being mentored by Albers, Bernardo made the earliest examples of modern abstract painting in Southeast Asia. Drawing from Jacques Ranciere’s…

  • Bauhaus in the Boondocks: Ideas for an Epilogue

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    Or stuff that won’t make the cut in my MFA Research Project at the School of Visual Arts in NYC I intend to follow some leads from Jacques Rancière’s Politics and Aesthetics (Verso, 2003) and his more specifically art critical Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art (Verso, 2013) in writing about the pedagogical…

  • Three Painters from Bandung

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    Tondi Hasibuan Overly rigid attempts at comparisons to Picasso do not do justice to Tondi Hasibuan’s incredibly multifaceted work. The stylistic caesuras are too abrupt. Forms reminiscent of Picasso’s late period pieces are given a new lease on life with reinventions from the fund of the artists imagination. A Fine Arts Professor, Tondi Hasibuan’s ambivalent…

  • The Myth of a Degree Zero Moment

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    Degree Zero at MoMA provides counterpoints to the understanding of drawing’s role in post-war art. Gathering 75 works, made between 1948 and 1966, from Louise Bourgeois, Yayoi Kusama, Henri Matisse, Jackson Pollock, Alfredo Volpi, and many others, as well as recent acquisitions by artists such as Uche Okeke, the exhibition freshly examines the commonly perceived…