Erotomachia, usually translated as ‘Battle of Love’, is the title given to a group of 29 explicit erotic drawings made by Federico Fellini during the final years of his life, between 1991 and 1992. Featuring exaggerated female forms, uninhibited sexual encounters and playful transformations of the human body, they offer an unusually direct glimpse of the director’s private erotic imagination. Some of the drawings feature Gianna, the woman with whom Fellini had a relationship during the last years of his life. The group has been exhibited under the title Erotomachia, notably at the Karikaturmuseum in Krems, Austria, in 2005.
The title also provides an appropriate introduction to a much larger collection of Fellini’s erotic drawings, sketches and caricatures, made over several decades. Drawing was an integral part of his everyday life. He drew the dreams he remembered on waking, made sketches while talking on the telephone, illustrated ideas for his collaborators and drew actors he imagined for his films. As his friend the journalist and comic writer Vincenzo Mollica recalled, he sometimes drew to seduce a woman or make her laugh, when his lines could become ‘comical or erotic, shameless as only the shy can be’. His drawings were not confined to the notebooks or to any particular artistic project, but emerged in all sorts of circumstances.
The subjects range from voluptuous women and exaggerated sexual anatomy to fantastical encounters in which human bodies become distorted, enlarged or transformed. There is a strong element of caricature, but the images are not simply jokes about physical appearance. Illustrator Milo Manara, who knew Fellini well and regularly gave him boxes of coloured pencils, considered their underlying impulse expressionistic – Fellini was concerned less with outward likeness than with bringing the personality of his subjects to the surface. The comic exaggerations often have something more personal and revealing behind them.
Eroticism was a persistent presence in Fellini’s imagination and his films, from the exuberant sexuality of La dolce vita to the fantasies of 8½, Juliet of the Spirits and City of Women. These drawings make that preoccupation more explicit, exposing a world of appetite, anxiety, humour and fantasy in which women are frequently idealised, exaggerated and transformed into larger-than-life figures.
In this selection, the Erotomachia drawings are followed by some of Fellini’s very many pencil and crayon sketches, some of his most explicit. Taken together, the Erotomachia drawings and the related works offer a fascinating view of a unique erotic imagination
