Spoliarium is the most famous painting of Antonio Juan Luna, Summaries of Art

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Spoliarium is the most famous painting of Antonio Luna that he made in 1884. He made the painting to symbolize our moral and political life and it was made in Barcelona Spain. Now the painting is in Museo de Arte de Moderno in Barcelona and it has gained a lot of awards all around europe. In 1886, the painting was sold to the provincial government of Barcelona for 20,000 pesetas. It currently hangs in the main gallery at the first floor of the National Museum of Fine Arts in Manila, and is the first work of art that greets visitors upon entry into the museum. The National Museum considers it the largest painting in the Philippines with dimensions of 4. meters x 7.675 meters. Spoliarium is a Latin word referring to the basement of the Roman Colosseum where the fallen and dying gladiators are dumped and devoid of their worldly possessions. On the left side of the painting, there is an audience of people seeming to only speculate the carnage of gladiators. While on the right side, there appears to be mourning family members, in search for their loved ones on the piles of dead bodies in the background. In other perspective spoliarium is a great painting with a deep meaning about our moral and political life. And the painter has a great vision on how to interpret cruelty, injustices, sufferings and helplessness experienced by the gladiators. And these spaces in the painting evoke different forms of death, which, in the past and in the present, are constant.