The Artists
To free the fresco, knowledge was needed. To make it Art, a vision was needed.
The works that cover the J.Rose bottles are not decorations. They are signatures.
They bear the mark of artists who gave shape to worlds, characters and illustrations that entered everyone's imagination. J.Rose offers them a new material on which to exist.
A millimeter of marble that passes through time, like lime it has preserved art for centuries. The artist brings his vision. The shop carries his hands.
From the meeting something is born that neither of them could have created alone.
These are not simple collaborations. They are meetings.
And here's who made them possible.
Master of international comics
Biography
Born in Luson in 1945, Milo Manara has built one of the most recognizable visual languages in the world over a sixty-year career.
His figures inhabit a space suspended between myth and desire, between narration and pure form.
His clean and sensual line has gone through collaborations with Federico Fellini, Hugo Pratt, Neil Gaiman, Marvel. It has never been just comics: it has always been art.
It is with Manara that J.Rose found her voice.
The first bottles were born around his muses, full of movement, sensuality and history, transforming each edition into something that goes beyond the distillate it contains.
Entrusting Manara with the surface of a bottle was not a choice of style. It was an identity choice.
Molly, muse of the epic El Gaucho, born from the pen of Hugo Pratt and the hand of Milo Manara. In this nude from the back, an instant of intimate abandonment on the bed: a dreamy pose that preserves, beneath the grace, the strength of a woman suspended between the desire for freedom and an adverse destiny, in early nineteenth-century Argentina.
Underneath every beauty that surrenders, a strength that does not yield.
In this work Milo Manara pays homage to Alphonse Mucha, one of the fathers of Art Nouveau, in the series he dedicates to the painters he loves most. A refined union between the aesthetics of vintage posters and the sign of modern comics: Mucha's floral decorations and sinuous lines blend with the carnal beauty of the women of Manara, in a timeless bridge between classical art, eros and design.
The name is not accidental. Like Mucha's figures crowned with flowers, wrapped in arabesques, eternal like sacred icons, Regina reigns over her own beauty: a sovereignty made of grace and strength together.
Because certain images belong to an era. Others, like her, pass through it intact, and continue to live.
Miele is perhaps the most iconic character born from Manara's pencil, the very archetype of his idea of beauty. In this illustration the magic of The Scent of the Invisible comes to life again, an erotic masterpiece that evokes the myth of the invisible man by H.G. Wells: an ointment makes you invisible, and with invisibility the most forbidden desire emerges.
All the tension lives in the unknown, in what can be sensed but not seen. Miele is the perfect muse for this game of gazes and impalpable presences: luminous, free, never truly graspable.
Because true beauty is not just what it appears. It is what remains invisible, and continues to exist within us.
Here Miele returns in another guise: not the invisible presence of Perfume, but the pop icon par excellence. Manara gives her the appearance of a young Kim Basinger, consecrating her as the absolute symbol of beauty and image of an entire decade.
The precision of the sign captures a mischievous innocence, homage to the Eighties and their cinematic charm. She is the dream woman of generations of readers: desired before even being known.
Two faces of the same muse: the soul that cannot be seen. The icon that cannot be forgotten.
Claudia is the protagonist of Il Gioco, a cult of global eroticism that appeared on Playmen in the early 1980s: the initiatory journey of a woman who, freed from all conventions, discovers herself. A force that goes beyond paper, inspires cinema, redefines the canons of beauty.
Nobody owns it. It is she who decides when to let herself be turned on.
A second interpretation of Claudia. In the masterpiece The Game she professes to be cold, indifferent to pleasure, until a mysterious device, capable of turning on her senses, transforms her into the undisputed queen of desire.
The work captures this paradox: the composed elegance that yields to the explosive force of instinct. It is the border between self-control and abandonment, one of Manara's most loved territories.
Not a different woman, but the same one who is really starting to get to know herself. Because certain muses do not limit themselves to traveling in the world: they travel within themselves, and rediscover themselves.
This work reproduces the special cover of Everything began again with an Indian summer, and celebrates one of the most legendary collaborations in comics: Hugo Pratt and Milo Manara. The sign of Manara is placed at the service of Pratt's poetics, giving life to a colonial atmosphere full of tension and adventure.
Two masters, one work. Female beauty is not decoration, but a living part of a historical fresco: the exact point where two visions meet and become one.
Because certain works are born from a single name. The rarest, of two.
A tribute to Giacomo Puccini's masterpiece, created for the Teatro alla Scala in Milan. Manara reinterprets the fragility and nobility of Cio-Cio-San, intertwining the drama of opera with the sensuality of contemporary design. The comic that enters the temple of great music: like every J.Rose work, a language born popular becomes art to be preserved.
No one is stronger than those who know how to break without bending.
Milo Manara reinterprets one of the absolute symbols of the Renaissance: Sandro Botticelli's Venus. A cultured and passionate homage, where his unmistakable trait meets the ethereal elegance of the Florentine genius.
Venus reveals itself in all its iconic grace, crossed by a modern and sensual vibration that transforms the classical divinity into a living muse. Born from the foam of the sea, eternal for five centuries: the beauty that time does not consume, but preserves.
Sometimes beauty does not fade: like spring, it awakens and blooms.
Illustration celebrating the 80th anniversary of Milo Manara. The iconic Miele is depicted in a deep and serene sleep; above her, the dream comes to life in a swirling reinterpretation of Vincent van Gogh's Starry Night. Manara blends the dreamy abandon of her muse with the feverish colors and expressive power of the Dutch painter.
A dreamlike work, a dialogue between giants of art. Outside, the body resting. Inside, an entire sky that turns: because it is in the dream that beauty becomes infinite.
Because a woman who dreams knows no boundaries.
A work that Milo Manara dedicates to the roots of Mexico, full of mystery and charm. A female figure, Alma Beltran, is portrayed in the intimacy of an ancient rite: in the mirror, her face transforms into a flowery Catrina, in the play of contrasts between sensual nudity and the sacred symbolism of tradition.
An image that suspends time, where the black cat and the large hat evoke the deepest Mexico. And there, in front of the mirror, the very meaning of Día de los Muertos is fulfilled: beauty does not die, it transforms.
For everyone it was The Seven Lives. Because some souls never die.
A tribute to Los Altos de Jalisco and the music that is its soul. Immersed in the golden light of the blue agave fields, the protagonist, Alma Beltran, is portrayed proudly between a decorated sombrero and her vihuela, ready to give voice to an eternal song.
Manara's line merges the beauty of the woman with the boundless horizon of Mexico: a work that embodies the passion of mariachis and the vital force of a legendary land.
Because certain beauty is not just admired. We listen.
Interpreter of contemporary romantic realism
Biography
Khabarovsk, Russian Far East, 1957. A childhood marked by travel, a gaze that learns to focus on people before even understanding why. Volegov becomes a painter because it is the only form of attention he knows and attention, in his case, has always had the face of a woman. Painting therefore arrives early, as the only way he knows to give shape to what he observes, as an expressive necessity
The female subject that runs throughout Volegov's research finds an unexpected but natural placement on a J.Rose bottle. There is something in his painting that escapes cataloguing, a balance between intimacy and distance that belongs only to him. It is exactly this quality that finds its space on the label, not by chance, not to decorate, but because two different researches have arrived at the same place.
A work full of pathos and mystery, signed by Vladimir Volegov.
Classic elegance is intertwined with a suspended narrative: Angiolina appears as the keeper of a secret, something that she carries with her and, at the right time, reveals.
Volegov's masterful line, famous for how he captures natural light and the soul of his subjects, infuses the portrait with a rare tension.
It is the story of a repressed truth. It is the mystery that faces fear.
Bitter Blood is not revenge, it is justice.
Painter, decorator, sign craftsman
Biography
Francesco Palma has been working with the tools of decorative painting, portraiture and scenography for over forty years. His is a path that can be read on the walls of the most exclusive residences in the world, in the hand-painted frescoes that he left around the planet together with Dario Roselli, with whom he founded FRADA in 1998.
For the Follow the Flow collection, Palma brings something to the label that is rarely found in such a small space: movement. Shapes and symbols that still seem to be evolving, as if the brush had stopped an instant before finishing. A visual choreography that needs no explanation but is just to be admired.
Francesco Palma captures the ardent soul of Andalusia in a vibrant work, dominated by a palette of warm and enveloping colours. A flamenco dancer, proud and overwhelming, occupies the heart of the scene, surrounded by an explosion of fiery red and earthy tones that evoke a visceral passion. In the background, the figures of the musicians add depth and rhythm to the composition.
Because flamenco was born like this: from pain that becomes dance, from fatigue that becomes fire. An ancient art in which beauty is never just grace, it is force in movement.
Flamenco opens a collection of eight dances, each guardian of a culture, a tradition and a different way of transforming movement into art.
European cartoon architect
Biography
Milan, 1933. He grows up with his father's cello as a soundtrack and that music teaches him something that architecture, the object of his university studies, could never teach him on its own: rhythm. How a moment expands, how an emotion is compressed, how anticipation is built.
Crepax has spent an entire career thinking about the surface, what is shown, what is retained, what is left to be perceived. On a J.Rose bottle that reasoning continues on a different medium. His sign is as strong as an engraving and suspended as a question. And whoever holds that object in his hand finds himself, even without knowing it, in an open question.
In the cycle of Baba Yaga, the witch who chases Valentina from dream to dream, the table from which this edition comes is born. Annette: the dreamlike summit of Crepax, where waking and dreaming cease to have a boundary.
Valentina brings a finger to her lips. Shhhh.
He doesn't ask for silence: he asks for complicity. He knows something that you don't yet know, and of all people he chose you.
From this moment on, there are two of you who are silent.
He has his back turned. And he turns.
The gaze passes over the back: direct, without shame and without invitation. It lets you enter private time, on the sofa, when no one can see it.
Yet he grants one thing and withholds ten. Even so, she remains in control of what she doesn't say.
Valentina walks towards the horizon, camera at her side. An airport. A jet landing. The world opens up before her.
For once he is not the object of the gaze. It is she who chooses where to place it.
