Manara - Lot 211

Manara MILO MANARA Borgia - Complete, Drugstore 2011 Original illustration. Signed. Watercolor and India ink on paper 25 × 36 cm (9.84 × 14.17 in.) Manara's drawing for Jodorowsky's Borgia series revisits the historical figure of the sultry Lucretia Borgia in a vision that is at once baroque, psychoanalytical and mystical. Manara reuses the classic theme of the woman in the bath, in a synthesis between Botticelli's Venus and Manet's Olympia. Nude Lucretia receives the whitish trickle poured over her body by a black servant. Is this the ass's milk that made Cleopatra so splendid? Here, beauty is true to legend. The woman is no longer divine, as in the case of Venus, but desirous. Nor is she as shocking as in Olympia; on the contrary, she participates in a communion of pleasure, in a moment of sweet, delicate ecstasy.