His earliest writings, in the 1950s, are some of the first significant attempts to understand Philippine national culture. Zobel not only wrote criticism on art exhibits, he also produced articles on Philippine colonial sculpture, the silver ex-votos of Ilocos in Luzon, Philippine porcelain, and reviewed books on numismatics and religious imagery. The book Philippine Religious Imagery, published in Manila in 1963, is the culmination of these excursions and research. In this book, Zobel confronts the question of Philippine style and demonstrated how colonial statuary shows the existence of such a style.