Manara - Lot 210

Manara MILO MANARA GIUSEPPE BERGMAN Revoir les étoiles (T.4), Casterman 1998 Original plate no. 28, pre-published in (À Suivre) no. 237, October 1997. Watercolor, colored inks and India ink on paper 50 × 71 cm (19.69 × 27.95 in.) A beautiful, particularly erotic plate, in which Manara continues his ironic meditation on the hero's destiny and the very meaning of adventure. Bergman, the author's disillusioned alter ego, wanders through a world of illusions and melancholy beauty, seeking redemption through love and art. Part satire of heroic myth, part eminently modern metaphysical quest, the album revisits Dante's Divine Comedy. Bergman, guided by a mysterious woman named Ipsy (a pun on the Latin "ipsa" meaning "herself"), is confronted with a strange situation: faced with every work of art she encounters, Ipsy immediately identifies with the representations on display, leading to perilous situations that Giuseppe sometimes finds hard to handle. In this plate in particular, we admire the eminently sensual velvetiness of the young woman's skin applied in wash. The color scheme looks unreal, whether for the young woman's complexion or the clothes, or even for Bergman's hair, while white dominates. This gives the sequence a cottony, dreamlike air. This is hardly surprising, given that, as in Dante's Inferno, the narrator is on his way to purgatory, which means he's already in the afterlife.