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. Spoken of reverently as the lost “holy grail” of Philippine paintings, it was previously known through photos, preparatory sketches, and a colored lithograph. 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.
Born 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.
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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. 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. 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. Interpreted by some intellectuals of the time as an allegory for the plundering of the Philippines under the brutal colonial rule of the Spanish, “Spoliarium” framed Luna as a kind of Filipino Jacques Louis David, an artist whose paintings contained coded revolutionary messages.
Part of the reason that “Hymen, oh Hyménée!” has generated so much interest is that it reveals the sunlit side of a painter who built his international reputation on both “Spoliarium” and a morbidly erotic “Death of Cleopatra” that was hidden from public view between 1887 and 2017. Painted during the artist’s honeymoon in Venice and Rome, “Hymen, oh Hyménée!” projects some of the excitement Luna felt in his upwardly mobile marriage to the daughter of Spain’s Grand Inquisitor. In ancient Rome only citizens could marry and the canvas may also express Luna’s joy over being accepted by his wife’s family. Historian Ambeth Ocampo says that “Hymen, oh Hyménée!” “was rooted in bliss and optimism, of hope for a happy and productive future.” Sadly, Luna’s sense of marital bliss was soon replaced by jealousy and suspicion.
Five years after “Hymen, oh Hyménée!” was completed, Luna suspected that his Spanish Mestiza wife, Paz Pardo de Tavera, was having an affair and interrogated her. When her family then urged her to separate, Luna shot and killed both Paz and her mother. Luna was acquitted of double homicide, likely due to Napoleonic laws and 19th-century values that were sympathetic toward crimes of passion committed by men against women. Filmmaker Martin Arnaldo, who recently completed a documentary about the artist, says that the jury was also swayed by Luna’s eloquent lawyer, Albert Danet, who argued that his client was a simple man from a savage race — a primitive and superstitious being incapable of civilization. When the jury announced their verdict of acquittal, it was accompanied by an explosion of joy from those observing the trial that required the courtroom to be evacuated before Luna was ordered released.
“If such a thing were to have happened today in France,” Arnaldo offers, “Luna would have spent his remaining days incarcerated, and Paz would have become a powerful symbol for the defense of women against domestic violence.”
For that reason, envisioning Luna as a painter/hero involves seeing him through another lens. As Arnaldo frames it, Luna can be seen by contemporary Filipinos as an “Indio” who bridged the 19th-century social and colonial divide by painting more skillfully than his colonizers. “For some,” Arnaldo notes, “his work helped our colonized people see beyond the constraints of colonialism, thereby aiding in the formation of our own sovereign state. The era of Luna ultimately paved the way for the revolution of 1896 and the proclamation of independence from Spain.”
By 1890, after reading the works of Karl Marx, Luna shifted from painting academic Greco-Roman themes to depicting contemporary Parisian life. He left France in 1893, traveled to Madrid, and then made the Philippines his base of operation. Increasingly politically active, he was briefly imprisoned by Spanish authorities for his pro-revolutionary activities. After his release in 1897, he was appointed by the executive board of the Philippine revolutionary government as a member of the Paris delegation and traveled to Washington DC to press 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 its 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 hybridity and cross-cultural tension that feel surprisingly modern. The rediscovery and exhibition of “Hymen, oh Hyménée!” offer a fresh opportunity to contemplate the role Luna played in the early formation of Philippine politics and culture. In the alert, nervous eyes of the painting’s veiled fever-dream bride, the passion that charged every brushstroke is palpable.
Source: Hyperallergic.com