Amedeo Clemente Modigliani (July 12, 1884 – January 24, 1920) was an Italian artist, practicing both painting and sculpture, who pursued his career for the most part in France. Modigliani was born in Livorno (historically referred to in English as Leghorn), in Northwestern Italy and began his artistic studies in Italy before moving to Paris in 1906. Influenced by the artists in his circle of friends and associates, by a range of genres and art movements, and by primitive art, Modigliani's śuvre was nonetheless unique and idiosyncratic. He died in Paris of tubercular meningitis — exacerbated by poverty, overworking, and an excessive use of alcohol and narcotics— at the age of 35.
Amedeo Modigliani Self-portrait
Amedeo Modigliani was born into a Jewish family at Livorno, in Tuscany. Livorno was still a relatively new city, by Italian standards, in the late 19th century. The Livorno that Modigliani knew was a bustling centre of commerce focused upon seafaring and shipwrighting, but its cultural history lay in being a refuge for those persecuted for their religion. His own maternal great-great-grandfather was one Solomon Garsin, a Jew who had immigrated to Livorno in the eighteenth century as a religious refugee.[1]
Modigliani was the fourth child of Flaminio Modigliani and his wife, Eugenia Garsin. His father was in the money-changing business, but when the business went bankrupt, the family lived in dire poverty. In fact, Amedeo's birth saved the family from certain ruin, as, according to an ancient law, creditors could not seize the bed of a pregnant woman or a mother with a newborn child. When bailiffs entered the family home, just as Eugenia went into labour, the family protected their most valuable assets by piling them on top of the expectant mother.
Modigliani had a particularly close relationship with his mother, who taught her son at home until he was ten. Beset with health problems after an attack of pleurisy when he was about eleven, a few years later he developed a case of typhoid fever. When he was roughly sixteen he was taken ill with pleurisy again, and it was then that he contracted the tuberculosis which was to eventually claim his life. Each time it was his mother Eugenia's intensive care of him which pulled him through. After Modigliani had recovered from the second bout of pleurisy, his mother took him on a tour of southern Italy: Naples, Capri, Rome and Amalfi, then back north to Florence and Venice.[2][][4]
His mother was, in many ways, instrumental in his ability to pursue art as a vocation. When he was eleven years of age, she had noted in her diary:
"The child's character is still so unformed that I cannot say what I think of it. He behaves like a spoiled child, but he does not lack intelligence. We shall have to wait and see what is inside this chrysalis. Perhaps an artist?"[5]
Soby, James Thrall (Sep 1977). Amedeo Modigliani. New York: Arno P, 55.
Werner, Alfred (1967). Amedeo Modigliani. London: Thames and Hudson., 14.
Mann, Carol (1980). Modigliani. London: Thames and Hudson., 12. ISBN 0-500-20176-5.
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