Spoliarium

On the right side of Juan Luna's four-metre Spoliarium, an old man holds up a torch and peers forward into the crowd of dead. He is searching for his son among the gladiators being dragged out of the arena. Behind him a woman kneels, weeping. Luna painted this in Rome in 1884. It won gold at the Madrid Exposition that same year. Filipino nationalists reading the painting at home saw the old man's grief as the Philippines under Spanish colonial rule, and the anonymous stripped gladiators as Filipinos. José Rizal, who would be executed by the Spanish twelve years later, gave a famous toast identifying the painting as Filipino allegory. Spain had missed what the painting was about. Now at National Museum of the Philippines, Manila @natmuseumph