Carlo Maria Mariani (25 July 1931 – 19 November 2021) was an Italian painter.
Among other things he depicted Andy Warhol as Napoleon and made "improved" and "corrected" versions of works by Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael.
[2] One of his most famous paintings is The Constellation of Leo (1980–1981), a group portrait of people from Italy's art world, which is in the collection of the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna in Rome.
[3] In the United States, Mariani's works were called postmodernism; the American art critic Hal Foster made a distinction between postmodernisms rooted in "reaction" and "resistance", and placed Mariani with his shameless use of "worn-out" styles in the former category.
[4] William Wilson of the Los Angeles Times described a Mariani exhibition in Los Angeles in 1992 as "an extraordinarily complex, beautifully executed attempt to make classical drawing and painting meaningful again.