Boterismo Still Life Born in 1932, Colombian artist Fernando Botero started creating his Boterismo art pieces – paintings, sketches, sculptures – during the 1950s while living in Mexico. Besides Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, Botero shared his interpretations of other Old Masters, like Jan van Eyck’s “ Girl with a Pearl Earring”), all of which we descanted in Art History 101. No other living artist has a more eminent oeuvre than Botero. My two-day visit to Bogotá, Colombia’s capital city, could not be more adventitious and indelible. (It took place a day after I attended that year’s Rio de Janeiro Carnival – an essential destination in every peregrinator’s bucket list!) The tour guide asked me what I yearned to see in this verdant metropolis on high plateau. For one unfamiliar with the transcontinental nation, only Botero, Gabriel García Márquez, and cartel came to mind, none of which enthralled. In 2000, Botero donated both his own work and his art collection to Museo Botero, housed in an elegant La Candelaria district colonial mansion. Upon entering the museum I sped up my stroll – there was much to absorb and appreciate. Overwhelmed by the previous day’s chimerical Rio-style festivity, and intrigued, moments earlier, by El Museo del Oro’s whimsical display of scintillating pre-Columbian gold artifacts, by a pigeon resting on a Bolivar statue’s head; and sighting of rooftop snipers, I found Museo Botero the impeccable coda for this journey to South America where modernity and antiquity, equability and revolution, and aboriginal and Western civilizations amalgamated.