MANILA — On display until December 30, 2023 at the Ayala Museum, the exhibition Splendor: Juan Luna, hero painter celebrates the rediscovery of Luna’s virtuoso depiction of a Roman wedding procession, “Hymen, oh Hyménée!” Unveiled at the museum on June 9, the canvas is on public display for the first time since winning a bronze medal at the Paris World’s Fair in 1889. Reverently spoken of as the lost “holy grail” of Philippine paintings, it was previously known through photos, preparatory sketches and a color lithograph. It was rediscovered in a European collection in 2014 – in a “well-appointed room with dark velvet curtains” – by Jaime Ponce de Leon, art collector and owner of the Manila museum. Leon Gallery auction house; it has since spent years in a crate, waiting for the right moment to be revealed.
Born in the Philippines in 1857 and widely regarded as the country’s greatest artist, Luna was a tragic figure whose status as an internationally acclaimed painter who broke colonial borders is forever shadowed by the consequences of his own actions. The painting’s title, “Hymen, oh Hymenea!”, refers to Hymenaeus, the ancient Greek god of marriage whose name is said to have been chanted by a bride and her retinue on their procession to the groom’s bedroom. Set in the atrium of a bright, colonnaded domus (private residence), the cast of the painting depicts a veiled bride, her scarlet-clad mother, three boys, 10 bridesmaids, a legionnaire, interpreters, and servants. The painting also includes symbolic animals: a pair of sacrificial lambs and a pet turtle in a cesspool, representing the submissive bride safe in her protective home. Red, pink and white roses, carried in baskets and strewn on the ground, join fruits, branches, branches and other flowers to symbolize wealth, passion and innocence. A lectus genialus (wedding couch), vases and other status items, hanging oil lamps, and boldly colored frescoes further enhance the inventory of visual splendors in the work.
Vibrant and sensual, “Hymen, oh Hyménée! is a stark contrast to Luna’s best-known masterpiece, “Spoliarium,” a violent crowd-pleaser in the collection of the National Museum of Fine Arts, Manila. Painted three years before “Hymen, oh Hymenea!”, the colossal “Spoliarium” cemented the artist’s early fame after winning one of three gold medals at the Madrid Art Exhibition of 1884. Dark and streaked with blood, it depicts a Roman amphitheater in which the bodies of dead gladiators are stripped of their armor and weapons in preparation for burial. Interpreted by some intellectuals of the time as an allegory of the plunder of the Philippines under the brutal colonial rule of the Spaniards, “Spoliarium” presented Luna as a kind of Filipino Jacques Louis David, an artist whose paintings contained coded revolutionary messages.
Part of the reason “Hymen, oh Hymenea!” » has aroused so much interest is that it reveals the sunny side of a painter who built his international reputation both on “Spoliarium” and on a morbid and erotic “Death of Cleopatra” which was hidden from the public between 1887 and 2017. Painted during the artist’s honeymoon in Venice and Rome, “Hymen, oh Hymenea!” projects some of the excitement Luna felt in her ascendant marriage to the daughter of the Grand Inquisitor of Spain. In ancient Rome, only citizens could marry, and the canvas can also express Luna’s joy at being accepted by his wife’s family. Historian Ambeth Ocampo says that “Hymen, oh Hymenee!” “was rooted in happiness and optimism, hoping for a happy and productive future.” Unfortunately, Luna’s sense of marital bliss was quickly replaced by jealousy and suspicion.
Five years after “Hymen, oh Hyménée! was over, Luna suspected that his Spanish mestizo wife, Paz Pardo de Tavera, was having an affair and questioned her. When her family then urged her to separate, Luna shot and killed Paz and her mother. Luna was acquitted of the double homicide, likely due to Napoleonic laws and 19th century values that favored crimes of passion committed by men against women. Filmmaker Martin Arnaldo, who recently completed a documentary on the artist, says the jury was also swayed by Luna’s eloquent lawyer, Albert Danet, who argued his client was a simple man of a savage race – a primitive, superstitious being incapable of civilisation. When the jury announced its verdict of acquittal, it was accompanied by an outburst of joy from those attending the trial, which necessitated the evacuation of the courtroom before Luna was released.
“If such a thing were to happen today in France”, suggests Arnaldo, “Luna would have spent her last days in prison, and Paz would have become a powerful symbol for the defense of women against domestic violence.”
For this reason, viewing Luna as a painter/hero involves seeing him through another lens. As Arnaldo frames it, Luna can be seen by contemporary Filipinos as an “Indian” who bridged the social and colonial divide of the 19th century by painting more skillfully than its colonizers. “For some,” notes Arnaldo, “his work helped our colonized people to see beyond the constraints of colonialism, thus aiding in the formation of our own sovereign state. Luna’s era eventually paved the way for the Revolution of 1896 and the proclamation of independence from Spain.
In 1890, after reading the works of Karl Marx, Luna switched from painting academic Greco-Roman themes to depicting contemporary Parisian life. He left France in 1893, went to Madrid, then made the Philippines his base of operation. Increasingly politically active, he was briefly imprisoned by the Spanish authorities for his pro-revolutionary activities. After his release in 1897, he was appointed by the executive council of the Philippine revolutionary government as a member of the Paris delegation and traveled to Washington DC to lobby for recognition of the Philippines as a sovereign nation. Luna’s death in Hong Kong at the age of 42, a year and a half after the Philippines gained independence from Spain, was recorded as being caused by cardiac arrest, but rumors that he was poisoned persist.
Although he did not live long enough to see the 20th century, Luna’s dual cultural identity endowed his most ambitious works with a startlingly modern hybridity and cross-cultural tension. The rediscovery and exhibition of “Hymen, oh Hyménée! offer a new opportunity to contemplate the role Luna played in the early formation of Filipino politics and culture. In the alert, nervous eyes of the feverish, dreamy veiled bride in the painting, the passion that permeates every brushstroke is palpable.
