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In a painting by the late Colombian artist Fernando Botero (1932-2023), a woman dressed in green looks directly at the viewer. In the background, there is a natural landscape, while a transparent veil covers her dark, curly hair.
Together with her barely noticeable eyebrows, these elements make the portrait clearly reminiscent of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa. However, the work brings together all the characteristics that make it unmistakably by Botero: the figure has a rounded body, a large head and small features.
Mona Lisa (1978) is one of many works in which the painter and sculptor reinterpreted some of the world's most famous paintings and images through his signature style known as "Boterism."
Botero's figures and voluminous objects made him one of Latin America's most recognized artists. "Some artists have a very personal language, and Botero is one of them: you will always recognize a work by him", says Belén Herrera Ottino, director of Opera Gallery Madrid, an art gallery in Spain.
The London branch of the gallery is currently presenting the exhibition Fernando Botero: In Praise of an Amplified World, which can be visited until the end of November.
Botero's unique style has earned him international recognition.
His painting Mona Lisa at Age 12 (1959) was acquired by New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in 1961; his bronze sculptures were exhibited in prominent public spaces, such as Park Avenue, in New York, and the Champs-Élysées, in Paris; and his work The Musicians (1979) reached a price of US$5.1 million at a Christie's New York auction in November 2023, two months after his death.
But what is behind Botero's characteristic style and what can it reveal about the history of art in Europe and Latin America?
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For Botero, exaggerating objects and figures was "a way of celebrating the presence of things", says Herrera Ottino. She adds that it was also a "celebration of life and the sensuality of nature."
Throughout his life, he used to explain that the main objective of his works was to raise the spirits of those who contemplated them, something that, in his opinion, shape and color, in particular, were capable of doing.
"For him, it was clear that, throughout history, the purpose of art was to provide pleasure," adds the artist's son and former Colombian Defense Minister, Fernando Botero Zea.
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The power of boterism
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The origins of boterismo date back to 1956, when Botero lived in Mexico City. When painting Still Life with Mandolin (1957), he accidentally drew an acoustic opening that was too small in the instrument and "felt that the mandolin acquired a disproportionate volume and shape", Botero Zea tells the BBC.
"It was on that day that Botero's style was born." From then on, the artist created all his works as part of the same singular universe, in which everything occupies space. "There are very few artists who have created an entire universe defined by a single style."
At the Botero Museum, in Bogotá, Colombia, it is also possible to see numerous paintings, drawings and sculptures by the artist, as well as pieces from his personal collection, which includes works by Picasso, Monet and Dalí.
When he donated these works to the Central Bank of Colombia, responsible for the museum, in 2000, "he was relating his own work to European tradition", Nicolás Gómez Echeverri, the bank's arts director, explains to the BBC. "He's telling visitors, 'My name is on the same level as these other artists.'"
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What the Botero Museum collection also reveals is that the artist was fascinated by the great European masters. “My father admired great artists,” says Botero Zea.
"He firmly believed that the peak of art history was the Italian Renaissance and that after that period there was a decline, with brilliant exceptions such as Picasso and the Impressionist painters."
The artist had a special aversion to abstract art and said that the popularity of his own works was due to the fact that they moved far away from an approach "in which everything is obscure" and in which the viewer "feels like he needs a teacher to tell him whether it is good or not", Botero told the Los Angeles Times in 2012.
"I believe that a painting needs to communicate directly with the viewer."
Botero Zea says that his father especially admired Italian art after moving to Madrid in 1952 at the age of 20. At the time, Botero was studying at the prestigious Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando and working as a copyist at the Prado Museum.
It was then that Botero saw a book in a store window about the 15th-century Italian painter Piero della Francesca and immediately "made the decision to move to Florence," Italy, explains Botero Zea.
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The works that inspired him
According to Botero Zea, two works of art especially marked Botero's professional career. The first is The Meeting between the Queen of Sheba and King Solomon (1452-1466), by Piero della Francesca, a large fresco depicting a biblical scene in which King Solomon meets the Queen of Sheba.
This work takes us back to Botero's childhood in Medellín, Colombia, where he had little access to art museums and became acquainted with art through religious paintings and sculptures present inside Catholic churches.
Della Francesca's work The Duke and Duchess of Urbino (circa 1473-1475), a double portrait inspired by coins and medals from Ancient Rome, served as inspiration for Botero Federico da Montefeltro's diptych (double work), Battista Sforza (1998).
In the original version, the duke looks to the left, hiding the side of his face that was disfigured during a jousting tournament, a medieval sport.
Although Botero did not reproduce the scars on the Duke's face, he reversed the sides in which the two figures face. Furthermore, both appear visibly plumper, taking up a larger part of the screen.
Botero's approach to shape causes many people to interpret his work simply as a representation of "fat" people.
In Girl, according to Velázquez, the artist focuses on the central figure of Diego Velázquez's masterpiece, The Girls (1656): the five-year-old Infanta Margarida Teresa of Austria.
In Botero's version, his face is plumper and his figure is more voluminous. In Fornarina, according to Rafael (2009), he does something similar by transforming Rafael's La Fornarina (Portrait of a Young Woman) (1518-1519) — which depicts an almost naked woman, covered only by a thin veil on the lower part of her abdomen — into a corpulent, smiling figure.
However, Botero himself explicitly rejected the term "fat".
In 2014, he told the Spanish newspaper El Mundo: "I don't paint fat women... Nobody believes me, but it's true." He said that when painting a woman, a man, a dog or a horse, he always thought about volume.
Another influence was The Battle of San Romano, a series of three paintings by Florentine artist Paolo Uccello that depict a clash between the forces of Florence and Siena in 1432.
Botero Zea highlights a plump white horse, with an intense blue harness, in the center of one of the works. The animal stands out among a crowd of men in dark armor, which, according to Botero Zea, looks like "a Botero".
It is possible to find similar horses throughout Botero's work, including in The Drag (1984), a scene in which three horses remove the body of a dead bull from a traditional bullfighting ring.
But the fact that a Colombian artist is so fascinated by European artists raises questions about visibility and which art forms are considered important.
Botero Zea remembers that, when he was a child, his father took him to some of the most important museums in the world, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Louvre in Paris, the National Gallery in London and the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. According to him, Botero used to feel attracted to the masterpieces of the most famous artists in history.
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However, Gómez Echeverri states that Botero's work is not limited to extolling Western art; in fact, its production explores Colombia's relationship with it. He explains that, for example, it is possible to find images of the Mona Lisa printed throughout the country.
"There's a restaurant nearby called Mona Lisa, and it's a pizzeria", he comments. A bar in a popular area of the city also has depictions of Dalí on the walls. "I believe that this type of work by Botero, like his Mona Lisa, reaffirms how these images come from another context, from across the ocean, and become part of our Latin American visual culture."
Knowing that Botero was also influenced by pre-Columbian art, which often featured large, rounded shapes, helps put his work in another perspective.
“He always felt very Colombian and was always committed to representing his country well on the international stage,” says Botero Zea.
For Gómez Echeverri, Botero was breaking the barrier between "erudite" and "popular" art.
"What he says is that this barrier does not exist: both can be part of the same references", he states. He adds that while some people may understand "high" art as European, classicist and white, Botero turns this idea on its head.
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