角斗士尸场

Juan Luna finished this huge canvas in 1884 and sent it to the national fine-arts exhibition in Madrid, where it won one of the top gold medals. That mattered far beyond the prize. Luna was a Filipino from a colony Spain still ruled, and here was an indio beating Spanish painters at their own grand history painting. The scene is the spoliarium, the back room of a Roman arena where dead gladiators were dragged and stripped of armour, their bodies hauled across the floor while onlookers wait. Filipino reformers in Madrid, José Rizal among them, seized on it at once and read those broken bodies as their own people under colonial rule. It hangs today in Manila, filling most of a wall at the National Museum of Fine Arts.