The story
The largest painting in the Philippines hangs in a room where laws were once debated. Juan Luna's Spoliarium, more than four metres high and seven and a half wide, fills a hall on the second level of the National Museum of Fine Arts. The room was the session hall of the House of Representatives, and in 1934 it hosted the convention that drafted the country's 1935 constitution.
Luna, a young painter from Ilocos in northern Luzon, painted it in Rome and showed it in Madrid in 1884, where it won a gold medal at the National Exhibition of Fine Arts. It shows the bodies of fallen gladiators being dragged from a Roman arena. In 1886 the provincial government of Barcelona bought it, and the canvas was badly damaged during the Spanish Civil War. In 1958 Spain handed the partly restored painting to the Philippines as a gift.
The building carries its own history. It was completed in 1926 as the Legislative Building, largely destroyed in the Battle of Manila in 1945, rebuilt by 1950, and used by the Senate until 1997. It opened as the national art museum in 1998. The same hall holds the largest canvas by Félix Resurrección Hidalgo, Luna's contemporary, who won a silver medal at that same Madrid exhibition. It shows the assassination of Governor Bustamante and his son, a killing in Manila in 1719.
