More than 120 works, including some unpublished ones, cover 60 years of his artistic production
In conjunction with the Jubilee (September 17th, 2024 / January 10th, 2025) and a year after death, at Palazzo Bonaparte in Rome is taking place a large Fernando Botero retrospective (curated by his daughter Lina and Cristina Carrillo de Albornoz - until January 19th, 2025). On view, more than 120 artworks made in about sixty years of activity, including a Homage to Mantegna (1958) only recently discovered and never exhibited.
We meet his personal revisitations of the Fornarina by Raffaello, the diptych of the dukes of Urbino Federico da Montefeltro and Battista Sforza by Piero della Francesca, and the bourgeois portraits by Rubens and Van Eyck. Also, a new version of the infant from Velázquez’s Las Meninas.
He always remains faithful to his style: round and chubby faces, fat and curved arms, ironically overflowing volumes
Obviously, in this reinterpretation of masterpieces from far away, Botero remains totally faithful to himself and his style: round and chubby faces, fat and curved arms, ironically overflowing volumes (he used to say that he believed in volume as an expression of sensuality that generates pleasure). A lively and bursting sensuality, typically South American, which finds its apex in the female nudes, as in the watercolor odalisque dated 2023, present in the exhibition: a completely naked woman offers her opulent forms to the viewer’s view while maintaining a mysterious and indecipherable look, so that it is at the same time welcoming and distant.
The belly is prominent, similar to that of a pre-Columbian anthropomorphic sculpture of the mother goddess of fertility, as if the author wanted to weave a common thread, represented by the sensuality of the forms, able to symbolically bring together more than ten centuries of art history, as if to suggest that the key to understanding our world is precisely the representation of the human being and his physicality.
Enigmatic and almost Fellinian the Vatican BATHROOM with a high prelate immersed in a large tub filled with water to the edge
The exhibition also includes works with recurring subjects in his production, such as bullfighting and circus, so rooted in the Goya and Picasso Hispanic expression, revised in a more exuberant, cheerful, and colorful way. There is no lack of artworks with topics that he cares about such as religion, mythology, and still life. Among them, the enigmatic and almost “Fellinian” The Vatican Bathroom (oil on canvas, 2006).
It depicts a high prelate, perhaps a bishop, sumptuously dressed in ceremonial dress, with a mitre on his head, lying and floating in a large bath full of water to the edge; while another religious, modestly dressed, of dimensions exaggeratedly smaller and deliberately out of scale (to mean its lower prestige in the ecclesiastical hierarchy?) holds a towel, waiting for the end of the singular bathroom.
Then follows a section dedicated to watercolors on canvas, a more delicate and intimate production, inaugurated from 2019 in the season of senility, when he approaches the familiar themes of his poetry in a more introspective way.
