Elisir d'Amore

Elisir d’Amore (Elixir of Love) is an original drawing on paper, realized around the Seventies by the great Italian artist and journalist, Mino Maccari (Siena, 1898 - 1989). 

Black felt-tip pen drawing on ivory-colored and watermarked paper “Chinese paper”. 

Hand-Signed "Maccari" in pencil on the lower-left margin. Excellent condition: as good as new.

With the incredible satiric and caustic touch of the illustrator of Il Selvaggio, this contemporray artwork depicts a couple of lovers holding each other tight and showing outpourings of love. In the background shelves filled with galenic vases of a pharmacy or of a scientific laboratory, an ideal location to recall the image of experiments on assisted fertilization or of the legendary search for the elixir of love.

This original Maccari’s drawing, standing out for the funny meaning and for the fluidity of the sign, surely could enrich your private collection with a Italian satiric touch and elegance!

Mino Maccari (Siena, 1898 – Rome, 1989)

Mino Maccari was a popular Italian painter and engraver with a caustic personality, called in 1924 by Angiolo Bencini to collaborate as illustrator for the magazine Il Selvaggio, an admittedly intransigent fascist, revolutionary and anti-bourgeois magazine. Here Maccari published his first engravings. and after he took over the direction of the Savage which he held until 1942.

In 1959, he became the director of the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome; in 1963, he won Antonio Feltrinelli's prize for painting and became president of the San Luca Academy in 1962. In the same year of one of the biggest Italian accademic honour, Maccari managed to obtain a personal exhibition at Gallery 63 in New York.

His production of drawings, watercolors, tempera, lithographs is exhausted, sometimes in collaboration with prestigious publishing houses (Strapaese, Il selvaggio), of satirical, political or erotic subject matters.