In most of Botero's paintings and sculptures there is an incontestable response to a classical mode of artistic vision. On a superficial level, we may interpret his figures as possessing the monumental and timeless qualities related to the Greco-Roman tradition. In a more profound sense, there is a deep response on the part of the artist to the heritage of Western classicism, which he absorbed as a young man studying abroad. This respect, this acknowledgment, has always been one of the strongest underpinnings of his creative process. Botero left Colombia in 1952 for Europe.While his avowed goal was to study in Paris, it was his sojourn in Italy that marked his artistic personality most profoundly, Botero took classes in the history of art at the University of Florence with one of the greatest authorities on Italian Renaissance and Baroque painting, Roberto Longhi. Longhi introduced the young Colombian student to a set of historical concepts and philosophical ideas that have remained central to his creative imagination. Later in this essay we will consider Botero's reinventions of famous works and art and appropriations from the Old Master repertory These scenes, based on Mantegna, Leonardo da Vinci, ]an Van Eyck, Velázquez, Ingres, and many others are only the outward manifestations of an intense process of engagement with the Renaissance and post-Renaissance phases of European art history.

Botero's travels throughout Italy in 1953 and 1954 allowed him to study a wide variety of work that he had previously seen only in books. The frescoes of Giotto, Piero della Francesca and the High Renaissance masters, Raphael and Michelangelo, were crucial to the formation of Botero's art. Even though the artist would reach his characteristic mode of rounded, sensuous forms somewhat later in his career, the aesthetic shock of seeing such monuments as the Sistine Chapel, the Vatican ''stanze'' or the Camera degli Sposi in the Palazzo Ducale, Mantua, with its splendidly illusionistic frescos by Andrea Mantegna, made an indelible mark on Botero. These impressions filtered into his creative consciousiness and carne to form a permanent point of departure for further artistic production. Even modern Italian art became significant for him in his early paintings and drawings, and we note a certain impact from the enigmas of the surrealist compositions of Giorgio De Chirico. In these paintings, the emptiness of urban spaces and the mysteries of unusual architectural forms assume important roles in the compositions.

Perhaps less commented upon than other aspects of Fernando Botero's artistic development is the impact made on him by the artistic atmosphere of Mexico. He lived in Mexico City for approximately one year in 1956. By the mid 1950s, Mexican muralism, which had developed so brilliantly as a cohesive movement from the 1920s to the 1940s, was waning.

Humanist / Universalist
Botero: Artist and Art Historian   Botero and the Sacred   Botero as Social Critic
Botero the Sensualist   Botero and Things   Botero : Colombian Artist   Botero and La Corrida