“Beauty is the opposite of violence,” said Milo Manara in 2023, “beauty is always there, only it is increasingly obscured.” In the same interview, the Italian artist—who turns 80 this September—rejected his classification as merely an erotic illustrator. “Art should have no labels, but in the end labels are sewn on us even against our will.” Manara’s keen sense of eros is, however, inescapable. Over his 55-year career he’s managed to coax eroticism out of everything from a comic-book riff on Jonathan Swift, Gullivera, to his renderings of COVID-19 female essential workers in Lockdown Heroes. (In 2021 Drake tapped Manara to paint an alternate cover for his album Certified Lover Boy.) Despite being most known in America for his work appearing in Heavy Metal and Penthouse magazines in the 90s, Manara’s fans worldwide include auteurs Alejandro Jodorowsky and Pedro Almodóvar, both of whom he collaborated with on the books I Borgia and La feu aux entrailles, respectively. The Museo della Città “Luigi Tonini,” in Rome, is now hosting an exhibition dedicated to Manara’s collaborative friendship with Federico Fellini. Original plates of their books Viaggio a Tulum and Il viaggio di G. Mastorna detto Fernet are on display, along with posters illustrated by Manara for some of Fellini’s films, unpublished material, archival documents, sketches, photographs, and more. —Spike Carter