To discuss sensuality in the art of Botero as a specific category of his visual production might seem, at first glance, to be a redundancy. Voluptuousness and intimations of carnal pleasure are at the heart of most of his compositions. Nonetheless, concentration upon specific images in which these elements are more overtly depicted might serve to underline the artist's methods of approach.

Standing or reclining female nudes have been depicted by Botero virtually since he began to paint. Reveling in his ability to paint flesh, he has employed the female model as his preferred subject throughout his career. At times these women are preparing for or have just left the bath, as in several compositions inspired by the bathing women of Edgar Degas. Another master of the bathing figure in modern French art is also invoked in several compositions by Botero: in Homage to Bonnard of 1975, the woman reclines in a tub within a simple bathroom, in the manner of Pierre Bonnard's numerous compositions of the 1920s and 1930s.

While the female nude has attracted a good deal of the artist's attention, the male model is not without a presence in Botero's repertory. The 1972 Study of a Male Model is an interesting (unfinished) composition depicting the type of scene in an artist's studio that was the stock-in-trade of nineteenth-century academic painters in France and elsewhere. The man sits before an old-fashioned wood burning stove, a fancy plumed helmet by his side. We can imagine that he is resting after an exhausting session at a local art academy, where he had assumed the guise of Mars, Vulcan or some other mythological figure.

The subject of transvestitism also makes an appearance on several occasions in the art of Botero.The 1989 Melancholy is a compelling variation on the theme of the studio model. Here, a middleaged, mustachioed man, dressed in a frilly gown, holds a mirror as he gazes into space. While at first glance this man might provoke selfconscious laughter from viewers, we are soon struck by the aura of bleakness and dejection that the artist suggests. This is a perfect instance of the artist's underlining, with irony and contradiction, a set of human emotions far removed from those facile sentiments with which his art is often (erroneously) linked.

Brothel scenes, such as The House of Raquel Vega (1975), The House of Amanda Ramírez (1988), and others, are among the most overt references to carnality in the ceuvre of Botero. However in none of these paintings does Botero portray overt sexuality. In each, there is a celebratory rather than a predatory feeling. The atmosphere in these works by Botero is quite distinct from that evoked by those artists who, since the nineteenth century, have engaged in depictions of bordellos. From Toulouse Lautrec to the German Expressionists to José Clemente Orozco (whose early ''corpus'' of drawings of brothels was seized and partly destroyed by United States customs officials at El Paso, Texas in 1917 as obscene), scenes of prostitution have provided artists with the opportunity to address issues of sexual and social disregard for women. In the most famous of all such images in modern art, Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), the ferociousness of sexual impulses and the implied predatory nature of women has led critics to interpret this work as an exaltation of misogyny. Botero, however, employs these themes more than anything else as a pretext to continue his investigations of nonthreatening sexuality. Many of the minor elements in the paintings enhance this atmosphere - from the animals (cats, dogs, parrots etc.) who inhabit the scenes along with the people, to the detritus of uneaten food and cigarettes that litter the floor (a device often employed by the artist who has stated his own ''horror vacui''). There is also the inevitable ''alcahueta'' or Celestina (madam) figure, an older woman who instead of being the leering, menacing mistress of the bordello, appears more as a kindly old lady, a caretaker of the establishment.