WALA LANG
HYMEN, O HYMÉNÉE The painting and a detail, the bridesmaids (Leon Gallery).
On exhibit at the Ayala Museum is a rediscovered Juan Luna, Hymen, O Hyménée!. Repatriated from Spain by León Gallery’s Jaime Ponce de León, the painting depicts a bridal procession as it might have occurred 2,000 years ago in ancient Rome.
The bridal party has arrived at the groom’s palatial home. Accompanied by her mother, the bride is midway in the home’s atrium, the central courtyard impressive with fluted columns and floor of gleaming Carrara marble. Ten bridesmaids remain by the entrance, joyfully tossing flowers. Still in the vestibule are servants bearing a heavy load—a jar filled perhaps with perfume or a dowry of gold coins. The groom waits beyond the atrium, in a grand reception hall.
I had understood that European upper-class marriages from classical to modern times were often serious dynastic events, less romantic occasions and more like business mergers with vigilantly and lengthily negotiated prenups. Anyway, Luna’s masterpiece shows what looks like a present-day Catholic wedding with the bride in white and complete with ring bearers and bridesmaids.
Luna obviously did extensive preparatory research. Although the columns may be too massive for a house, there are esoteric details like the impluvium, a pool at the atrium’s center to catch rainwater, frescoes, and Pompeiian red walls, the lararium or household shrine, hanging oil lamps with multiple nozzles, silk door curtains, a ceremonial wedding couch.
Remarkably, Luna painted “Hymen, O Hyménée!” not in the then-accepted highly detailed and photographic academic style but more along impressionistic lines with quick brush strokes, capturing facial expressions, textiles, flowers, with flicks of the brush.
Spain included the painting in France’s Exposition Universelle of 1889 where it was awarded a bronze medal.
At that time, official and public recognition were given artists and art works at government-sponsored salon exhibitions. Complex and realistic compositions based on history, mythology, or religion were top category. The ideal salon entry was something like Jacques-Louis David’s The Oath of the Horatii that had a high-minded theme and painted accurately to the last detail. Exhibited in 1785 to great acclaim, it was based on the legend of three brothers willing to give their lives up for Rome.
Luna painted in the salon style with phenomenal success as an indio from Spain’s most distant colony, winning medals for Spoliarium and La Muerte de Cleopatra. Both were on historical topics, the former being a gory scene of dead gladiators being dragged to cremation and the latter, the suicide of Julius Caesar’s lover and Mark Antony’s wife, Cleopatra the queen of Egypt.
Besides his prize winners, Luna major academic paintings are La Batalla de Lepanto, a Spanish marine victory; El Pacto de Sangre, the peace pact between Conquistador Miguel López de Legaspi and Bohol Rajah Sikatuna; the allegorical España y Filipinas; and the lost Peuples et Rois of a mob desecrating the tombs of French kings in the Abbey of St. Denis.
Luna was an exceptional artist and did excellent work not only on noble themes but also in categories lower on the official totem pole, namely portraits, landscapes, scenes of daily life, and still lifes.
He reportedly painted half a dozen family portraits in an afternoon just before leaving for Europe, and numerous others, including the life-size Una Bulaqueña, a bemedaled Governor General Ramon Blanco and Blanco’s daughter as Minerva, the Roman goddess of wisdom and justice.
Luna’s genre works include Tampuhan, a lovers’ quarrel set in the sala of an Intramuros home while the La Navál procession is passing on the street below. Serenade is of a young lady listening to a guitar-playing gallant. Intérieur d’un Café shows a woman sitting alone at a café while a jovial group of men who look like expatriate Filipinos are behind. En el Balcón shows an elite group in a box at the opera.
Salon juries were conservative and entries even of established artists like Gustave Courbet were rejected for being on unacceptable subjects or for what they considered poor execution. This led to the organization of a parallel Salon de Refusés (exhibition of rejects) beginning in 1863 that went into new directions in art.
Luna, trained in the academic style in Manila, Madrid, and Rome, ventured out of his comfort zone into these new directions.
A group led by Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Alfred Sisley was interested in landscape and contemporary life and in the effects of light. In 1872 Monet exhibited Impression, Soleil Levant (Impression, Sunrise) that was derided by a critic as “impressionist.” The name stuck and impressionist works soon became in high demand.
Luna’s Picnic in Normandy is impressionist both in technique and subject matter, although I should add that Luna’s Normandy is not as windy and sunny as in say Monet’s striking Woman with a Parasol.
High among my favorites is Les Ignores (The Unknowns), an evocative 1892 painting of a humble worker’s funeral taking place on a winter’s day. In this Luna was among artists who found inspiration in the plight of the working class and income inequality that also led Karl Marx to write Das Kapital. Luna painted a number of related works including The Forge showing workers in a sweltering steel mill.
In England, Dante Rosetti’s led the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood that sought a return to great detail (the miniaturismo of 19th century Philippine painters), intense color, and complex compositions. Their goal was a return to the sensitivities of 15th century Italian painters such as Botticelli, Fra Angelico, Mantegna, and artists before Raphael and his 16th century contemporaries.
The popularity of Ancient Rome as subject continued but with emphasis on imagined scenes of daily life, motivated to a large extent by excavation findings at Pompeii and Herculaneum, towns buried in Mt. Vesuvius’ 79 A.D. eruption.
Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, a Dutch artist who moved to London, was inspired by the structures and objects uncovered by archaeologists. So too were the elite who had been schooled in Latin and Greek and in the works of Livy, Ovid, and Cicero. With both artistic inspiration and demand from the wealthy, Alma-Tadema became one of the most respected and sought-after Victorian artists, granted British citizenship and knighted by Queen Victoria. His forte was daily life in ancient Rome and Greece, depicting handsome young men and pretty maidens a-courting, making offerings to the gods, relaxing, etc., all in meticulously researched settings.
Sister Wendy, a popular art critic of the 1990s, included in her selection of the 1,000 great masterpieces of Western Art, Sir Lawrence’s A Favourite Custom showing two nude maidens in a Roman bath and Unconscious Rivals also showing two women—dressed this time—conversing on a balcony between statues of Cupid and a sleeping boy-toy. These must have caused repressed Victorian viewers’ imaginations to run wild speculating on what was going on and what was going to happen next. Sir Lawrence BTW, also exhibited at the 1889 Paris exposition and won a Medal of Honor.
Juan Luna’s years in Europe were not all smooth-sailing. He was apparently victim of racism and professional jealousy. His personal life was rocky. Suspecting his wife of cheating, he killed both wife and mother-in-law in a rage. He was charged with murder but was acquitted. Luna’s return to the Philippines was not smooth-sailing either. He was arrested as a Katipunan revolucionario but was released. After Spain departed, Luna was in the Aguinaldo government until his brother Antonio was killed under questionable circumstances.
Hymen, O Hymenee! was last exhibited in the Paris exposition of 1889 and is now on view at the Ayala Museum in celebration of the 125th anniversary of the declaration of Philippine independence. Through this presentation we honor the memory of Juan Luna, a great artist and a great Filipino.
Notes: (a) References: Mina, Marinella Andrea C. et.al., Splendor, Juan Luna: Painter and Hero (Makati City: Ayala Foundation, Inc., 2023), and Pickett, Wendy, Sister Wendy’s 1000 Masterpieces (London: Dorling Kindersity, 1999) and (b) Spoliarium and Una Bulaqueña are in the National Museum, Manila; La Muerte de Cleopatra - Museo del Prado, Madrid; La Batalla de Lepanto - Spain’s Senate Building; El Pacto de Sangre - Malacañang; Portrait of Governor General Ramon Blanco - Lopez Library and Museum; Portrait of Governor General Blanco’s Daughter as Minerva - Intramuros Administration; Serenade - Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas; Parisian Life - Government Service Insurance System; Les Ignores – Biblioteca Museu Victor Balaguer, Vilanova I la Geltru, Spain; Impression: Soleil Levant – Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris; The Forge – Yuchengco Museum; and Tampuhan - private collection.
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