The Death of Cleopatra

Juan Luna painted this in a studio on Rome's Via Margutta in 1881, a young Filipino working far from a home still ruled from Madrid. He sent the canvas, Cleopatra collapsed in death and based partly on a French painting he admired, to the National Exposition of Fine Arts in Madrid, his first, and it won a silver medal. For a colonial subject to be honoured in the capital of the empire was startling, and it opened doors: a city scholarship followed, then the gold medal three years later that made him a hero back in Manila. It hangs today in the Prado, one of only three works by Filipino painters in that collection.