Juan Luna's Spolarium

It rained heavily this afternoon, and along with the rains comes this email: "i want to have a complete detailed facts about spolarium- a huge painting done by juan luna for research purpose"

You can find some information about Juan Luna's Spolarium online --

Spoliarium
Looks like a student's art appreciation homework online.

No stopping sale of rare Juan Luna
"THERE'S no one who can stop the sale of a rare, 110-year-old Juan Luna painting which is now on the auction block at Christie's in Hong Kong." (Philippine Daily Inquirer, Oct 20, 2002)

Suffering Colonialism: Modernity as Sacrifice and Salvation in Philippine Colonial Painting (by Patrick Flores)
"The paper readdresses the problematic of coloniality and modernity by exploring a kind of engagement that enables the history of Philippine colonial painting to inscribe conditions of conversion, artness, and social movement in the very political economy and performance of the practice. I regard painting as idiom of both colonial visuality and folk/popular aesthetic culture. In fleshing out this idea, I turn to two works: Esteban Villanueva’s Basi Revolt (1821), consisting of fourteen panels which depict the failed rebellion in Northern Philippines against the Spanish government’s regulation of a sugarcane wine called basi; and Juan Luna’s Spoliarium (1884), the Gold Medalist at the 1884 Madrid Exposition which allegorizes the oppressive Philippine colonial condition through a dramatic scene at the spoliarium, the part of the Roman coliseum where dead or mortally wounded gladiators are despoiled in the presence of wailing relations."
(Found this link at psychicpants.net, where you'll also find an image of Juan Luna's painting)
[ First posted on 09/29/2003 by Manuel Viloria ]