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The Crystal Arcade, designed by Luna’s son Andres, a top architect in Manila during his time. The structure burned down, and there are people who say it was because Luling kept the urn of his father’s ashes there.
“Yung mga sinasabing malas, I don’t believe in malas objects,” Ramon Villegas tells me. “Yung case ni Jun Gonzales, it was [because of ] a land deal gone wrong.” According to Villegas, Gonzales was killed some 12 years after performing the restorative work on Portrait and the way he died had nothing to do with art at all. Apart from being an art historian and a culture writer, Villegas owns the famous antique store, Katutubo, at the La’O Center in Makati. I ask him about the value of the Portrait in pesos, and says that it might have fetched around P2 million when the Nazarenos bought it in the ‘80s, but now he thinks it can easily be at least in the P50 million range. It is said that legends and spells and curses are sometimes woven into the fabric of art and other such treasures to add to them a layer of history and importance, consequently upping their value in the world market.
Indeed, like in the many mishaps the legendary Hope Diamond is said to have wrought, none of the misfortunes illustrated above may actually be caused by having the portrait in one’s care. The National Museum, its home since 1986, seems in good shape—at least by Philippine government office standards—the renovations that began in 2011 are now in their final stages. But what of the Philippine government, the painting’s rightful owner since the 1986 EDSA revolt kicked out its most recent owners from power?
“If one believed in the curse, then one would believe that every item from that house during that murder is cursed,” Mara Pardo de Tavera tells me in her home filled with artworks and antiques. “Me, when I get Luna paintings, or I borrow them, or people ask me to check if it’s good (read: authentic), I tell them I have to keep it for a while because I need to dwell on it.” She shows me a photograph of a painting of the Luna home’s fireplace in Paris. “I was dwelling on this because I thought something about this felt so familiar. And one day I see my jar and I remember that picture.” It turns out the pair of jars that has been with her family for a long time, and are now towering on Mara’s living room coffee table, are the same jars that sat on top of the fireplace at 26 Villa Dupont, the Luna residence in Paris. Are they, these beauties made of a sort of deep green stone, like the painting, cursed, too?
“I believe there’s energy in everything that you own. The energy of what happened in that house, and in that jar, I don’t believe that energy can harm or do good. It all depends on the beholder, what they want it to do for them,” Mara tells me in her rented home in a well-appointed Makati village. “And for me I’ve been creative with that, and it’s been useful for me in connecting to pieces or to the paintings. I feel some kind of vibration from them that connects me to the history of that time. So yes there is that story of that painting that belonged to Imelda daw and then namalas si Imelda. I just have to say people create their paths in life, and if they don’t do good to many people, don’t expect good to come back to them. So that I think is a curse that one makes for oneself, depending on their behavior and how they act. So it’s unfair to blame [what happens to you] on anyone’s paintings. But it’s convenient to do so.”
This article was originally published in our February 2015 issue. The following corrections are made online: Luna's favored model is Angela Duche not Angela Douche. Luna married Paz Pardo de Tavera in September 1886 not December. According to historian Ambeth Ocampo, Luna did not fire through a keyhole, but rather at the heads of his wife and mother-in-law.
