![]() ![]() Dark and blood-streaked, it depicts a Roman amphitheater in which the bodies of dead gladiators are being stripped of their armor and weapons in preparation for burial. ![]() Painted three years before “Hymen, oh Hyménée!,” the colossal “Spoliarium” heightened the artist’s early fame after it won one of three gold medals at the 1884 Madrid Art Exposition. ![]() Vibrant and sensuous, “Hymen, oh Hyménée!” is a marked contrast to Luna’s best-known masterpiece, “Spoliarium,” a violent crowdpleaser in the collection of Manila’s National Museum of Fine Arts. A lectus genialus (wedding couch), vases and other status objects, hanging oil lamps, and boldly colored frescoes further heighten the work’s inventory of visual splendors. Red, pink, and white roses, carried in baskets and strewn on the floor, join fruits, boughs, branches, and other flowers in symbolizing affluence, passion, and innocence. The painting also includes symbolic animals: a pair of sacrificial lambs and a pet turtle in a catch basin, representing the submissive bride secure in her protective home. Set in the atrium of a luminous colonnaded domus (private residence), the painting’s cast features a veiled bride, her scarlet-clad mother, three boys, 10 bridesmaids, a legionnaire, performers, and servants. It was rediscovered in a European collection in 2014 - in a “well-appointed room with dark velvet curtains” - by Jaime Ponce de Leon, an art collector and proprietor of Manila’s León Gallery auction house it has since spent years in a crate, waiting for the right moment to be revealed.īorn in the Philippines in 1857, and widely considered to be the country’s greatest artist, Luna was a tragic figure whose status as an internationally acclaimed painter who shattered colonial boundaries is forever shaded by the consequences of his own actions. The painting’s title, “Hymen, oh Hyménée!,” refers to Hymenaeus, the ancient Greek god of marriage whose name would have been chanted by a bride and her retinue during their procession to the bridegroom’s chamber. Spoken of reverently as the lost “holy grail” of Philippine paintings, it was previously known through photos, preparatory sketches, and a colored lithograph. MANILA - On view through December 30, 2023, at the Ayala Museum, the exhibition Splendor: Juan Luna, Painter as Hero 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 it won a bronze medal in the 1889 Paris Universal Exposition. ![]()
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