The Blood-Red Banner
Nous nous sommes rencontrés dans un caveau maudit
Au temps de notre jeunesse
Fumant tous deux et mal vêtus attendant l’aube
Épris épris des mêmes paroles dont il faudra changer le sens
Trompés trompés pauvres petits…
—GUILLAUME APOLLINAIRE,
“Poême lu au mariage d’André Salmon”
ONE DAY in December 1898 the fourteen-year-old Dedo appeared as a new student in the studio of Guglielmo Micheli. The teacher, son of a printer, an orphan since the age of twelve, had worked his way out of poverty by unremitting effort and was given a grant to attend the Accademia delle Belle Arti in Florence. There he developed as a skilled but unexciting painter, but one with a natural gift for teaching and an ability to discover developing talent. Of the nine boys in Dedo’s class almost all became established artists. (There were no girls.)
Micheli’s school consisted of a large room well lit by three north-facing windows on the ground floor of a villa in the via delle Siepi, Livorno, across from a shoemaker’s workshop. In keeping with its modest location Micheli’s school taught the basics in everything from painting, drawing, and sculpture to nude studies and landscapes. It was elementary training but, for its day, far more advanced than what a beginner would have received in an academy. Micheli’s master, Giovanni Fattori, was a prominent member of a group of artists working in Florence in the mid-nineteenth century, at a moment when Italy was struggling toward unification. Desperate times called for new horizons, in art as everywhere else. A group of artists had rejected the stale formulae of the academies and were dedicated to an art that would mirror the reality they saw around them. Like Robert Henri, founder of the Philadelphia Eight some decades later, another inspired teacher, Micheli and Fattori encouraged students to seek their inspiration in the contemporary scene. Fattori, who fought in the War of Independence of 1848–49, painted endless scenes of soldiers, whether camping or furiously engaged in battle, with a meticulous attention to detail and great delicacy of feeling, not just for his human subjects but their animals as well. Later, he turned to equally uncompromising studies of country life and was, when he died in 1908 at the age of eighty-three, one of the country’s most admired artists.
Giovanni Fattori, no date (image credit 4.1)
The Macchiaioli took their name from their manner of painting. They applied their colors in short brushstrokes and dots of paint; “macchia” means stain or blot, and these were the “makers of patches.” Like the French Impressionists who would follow them, they abandoned sterile studio studies for the outdoors, deliberately heightening the contrasts between light and shade. Adriano Cecioni, another prominent member of the group, recalled the almost religious fervor of their conversion to actual studies of real life. “ ‘Look, Banti, at the beauty of that white in the distance!’—‘Look, Signorini, the tone of the wheels against the white of the road!’—‘Look at the power of the vibrations of light!’ All it took was the sight of laundry hanging out to dry … to drive them into a frenzy.” But unlike the Impressionists the Macchiaioli took their cue from the muted, earth-toned palettes of Millet, Corot, and others of the Barbizon school. One of Fattori’s maxims was “Faites ce que vous sentez et n’aimez pas ce que font les autres” (“Do what you feel and don’t admire what others do”), which was not far removed from a subsequent injunction by Cocteau, “Ne t’attardes pas avec l’avant garde,” or “Don’t lag behind the avant garde.” This emphasis on originality was to have a lifelong significance for Modigliani.
Fattori, by then in his seventies, was often in Micheli’s studio, taking a benevolent interest in student progress. On one of his visits “Dedo was doing a charcoal drawing on carta intelaiata, a still-life with drapery behind it; the technique of these drawings consisted in partly burning the paper and using the smoked parts as half-tints. Fattori saw the drawing and was very pleased with it,” Silvano Filippelli wrote. Modigliani’s classmates all had comments to make about him later. One described him as small and sickly looking, with a pale face and prominent, full red lips. Another called him “introverted and very shy. He would blush for no reason.” If, however, something made him angry—and his anger was unpredictable—he would start throwing whatever was handy, and he was hard to calm down.
To others, he seemed owlishly old and knowledgeable—like them, had left the lycée to concentrate on art—spouting the poetry of Gabriele d’Annunzio and Charles Baudelaire, quoting from Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Henri Bergson, and Prince Peter Kropotkin’s memoirs. That his elegant manners pointed to a good family was clear to them all. His classmate Renato Natali recalled that Dedo “belonged to a family that, to us, without a sou in our pockets, seemed rich but was probably only a little better off than we were.” The fluent comments in French, Italian, and English, the paintings and drawings by Dedo around the walls, the references to obscure writings—they were in awe. So when Dedo discussed Nietzsche’s theories about the death of God and the emergence of the Übermensch, and could quote from d’Annunzio’s latest novel, Le virgini delle Rocce (1896), he was “the Professor,” and “Superman.”
Dedo seems to have spent little time in the studio, taking paint and canvas into the fields surrounding Livorno with one of his classmates, Manlio Martinelli. According to Renato Natali, he disliked painting the natural world intensely. The impression is rather borne out by an early painting of a wide road stretching into the horizon bordered by fields, popularly given to Modigliani, and with the speculative date of 1898. The execution is careful and listless, as if the artist wanted to make his feelings about the exercise completely clear. According to Natali, what Dedo wanted to do was “stroll through museums adoring his favorite Old Masters, the Sienese, for example,” referring to the artists of the Italian Renaissance. He added, “Amedeo hated the recent past.” This was not quite true, because Modigliani had already expressed his admiration for Segantini (1858–1899), a painter of Alpine meadows, not to mention Fattori and the Pre-Raphaelites. But he was very selective.
The work of the Post-Macchiaioli movement disintegrated into genre scenes, landscapes, portraits, and pseudo-Romantic costume histories; to John Russell it seemed “a peculiarly dead-end art” (1965). Despite the Italian trend to see Modigliani as the logical heir to a great movement, it seems impossible nowadays to find the remotest resemblance between the mature work of Modigliani and his tutelage under the guidance of Micheli and Fattori. As for student work, too little of that remains to make any conclusion possible.
An exhibition in Venice in 2005, “Modigliani in Venice Between Leghorn and Paris,” is a case in point. It showed several works said to be from his earliest period. These were discovered by the art historian Christian Parisot, the result of his research into the history of the Modigliani family in Sardinia. Parisot also studied Tito Taci, a Tuscan businessman who opened a hotel and settled in Sardinia with his wife and children. He wrote that the Modigliani and Taci families were friends, which is the basis for his belief that, since Flaminio Modigliani continued to have business ties in Sardinia, he would have stayed at the Taci hotel and might have brought Dedo with him. Parisot ascribes a profile portrait of one of the Taci daughters, Norma Medea, to Modigliani.
Parisot cites the canvas and supports as consistent with the period, along with the manner in which the paints are applied, some dates at lower left, a red hieroglyph, and a monogram with the letters AM on the front. Apparently the owners took the unusual step of cleaning the reverse and discovered a signature, “a. modigliani.” Questions remain, since signatures can be forged and no evidence is cited in the catalog by way of letters or photographs to prove Dedo ever visited Sardinia or, if he did, ever painted there.
Other paintings, grouped together as “Study Subjects,” are also published without provenances. One, Man with a Moustache, which has the same date of 1900 as the Norma Medea portrait, is so clumsily executed that it is hard to believe the same artist was responsible for both paintings, whoever he or she might be. Other works, Cowherd at Table (1898) and Young Man Seated (1901), present identical problems of authenticity. In addition, the amateurishness of, for instance, Man with a Moustache is hard to reconcile to an earlier work that has been authenticated by Ceroni and appears in I dipinti di Modigliani, the single trusted source for the authentication of Modigliani’s works. A pencil self-portrait is evidence of a rapidly maturing talent at a moment when Modigliani was aged about twelve or thirteen.
A new piece of evidence bears out this attribution to Modigliani, and it was discovered by accident. In the spring of 2008 I was working in the G. E. Modigliani archives in Rome, with the help of Professor Donatella Cherubini, his biographer. When materials known to be on deposit at the Italian Central Archives could not be identified from the office files, Cherubini sent me there.
After several days of work I had gone through eighteen boxes, not all of them relevant to my needs, and had arrived at the last box, Busta 19, the photo collection. I have always paid close attention to pictures on the reasonable assumption that the homegrown variety in particular are artlessly revealing about relationships and telegraph closeness or conflict, often before the participants know it themselves. Then the problem started with the words that strike terror into the heart of anyone who has ever worked at, for instance, the Library of Congress: “Not on shelf.”
Never mind. It must be somewhere and two librarians went on the hunt. As they eliminated one possibility after another I was reminded of the incident Kenneth Clark relates in his autobiography when he was curating the Italian Exhibition in London in 1930 and a shipment of Old Masters had just arrived from Italy. They were in the care of another Modigliani, this one Ettore (no relation), and he had the only key. A party repaired to the ship’s strong room to view the wonders it contained. As Modigliani approached the door, “a look of agony came over his face and his hands beat the air: ‘La chiave, dov’è?’ (Where is the key?)” Clark concluded, “Only those who have had long experience of Italian sacristans will enjoy this story.”
The key was found in Modigliani’s hotel bedroom. Similarly, the photographs were finally found on the shelf, but not in Box 19. There was no Box 19. They were all in Box 20. Of course, nothing was indicated in the records. Among the numerous pictures I found documenting Modigliani’s career, the posed political committees, the studio portraits, the snapshots of G.E. and Vera in Venice, climbing the Alps and so many others, there were no pictures of Modigliani’s grandparents. But there was a small photograph of a boy, perhaps aged eight or ten, with cropped hair and in a fashionable sailor jacket, perhaps a slightly younger version of the boy in the self-portrait. Written in a laborious hand on the reverse was, “Al mio caro, A …” Mené kept it all his life.
The photograph thought to be of Dedo found in G. E. Modigliani’s archive. On the reverse, the partially obliterated signature begins with the letter “A.” (image credit 4.2)
Portrait of himself wearing a sailor suit by Amedeo Modigliani (image credit 4.3)
When in 1924 Eugénie Modigliani dictated an account of Modigliani’s years studying with Micheli, the tone was disapproving. He went on long walks in the countryside. He spent time in idle conversation with friends. He neglected his studies. He started smoking. He was receiving lessons in the fine points of seduction from willing chambermaids. “This divided him from his brothers, who could not understand his behavior, which they saw as shiftless and idle.” Jeanne Modigliani wrote that Margherita Modigliani always described her father in the same way. “The tone of voice, the gesticulations, the clipped phrases, all seemed to say: ’This is what geniuses are like—childish, rather silly, self-centred and impossible to put up with.” This portrait of an idle son frittering away his opportunities has the usual bias of the person to whom it was dictated, i.e., Margherita. The term “pauvre Dedo” enters the family lexicon at this time, and whatever he did—being led astray by an older classmate who, for instance, introduced him to spiritualism—bears her stamp of disapproval.
Margherita’s version is contradicted by another classmate, Gastone Razzaguta, who habitually met Dedo over a good bottle of wine at the Caffè Bardi, the haunt of the artistic crowd. Razzaguta said that when Dedo was a student studying at Micheli’s atelier, “he was distinguished, disciplined and studious, drawing with enormous care and without the slightest distortion. His manner of presenting the subject of a portrait, almost always with hands resting on knees, reproduced a certain natural attitude of repose, but with something typically Tuscan about it, and can be found also in the portraits by Fattori.” The comment suggests that, even at this early stage, Modigliani was attracted to portraiture.
Modigliani at work in a studio in Livorno with a group of classmates, 1899 (image credit 4.4)
Margherita’s version is also contradicted by an entry in her mother’s diary in the spring of 1899: “Dedo has completely given up his studies and does nothing but paint, but he does it all day and every day with an unflagging ardor that amazes and enchants me. If he does not succeed in this way, there is nothing more to be done. His teacher is very pleased with him, and although I know nothing about it, it seems that for someone who has studied for only three or four months, he does not paint too badly and draws very well indeed.”
Modigliani was learning in his own idiosyncratic way, following his omnivorous curiosity wherever it led. He went to readings. He attended concerts. He memorized poetry. He spent hours at art exhibitions. His intellectual development was at least partly influenced by his aunt Laure, who had introduced him to Kropotkin and the works of Nietzsche and Bergson. Eugénie was translating d’Annunzio’s poetry and had already had one novel published. Dante, Petrarch, Ludovico Ariosto, Giacomo Leopardi, and Giosuè Carducci—Dedo read them all and memorized what he read. Presumably as a reward for this eager determination to learn, Eugénie took him to Florence, where he visited the Uffizi and the Pitti Palace; then he talked about wanting to go to Venice and Rome. He was already in search of a certain autonomy, moving, at the age of fifteen, into a studio in the working-class district of Livorno that had been left to Micheli’s students. The former young owner had died of tuberculosis. It was a bitter omen. In September 1900, within a year, three of the students working in that studio contracted tuberculosis. One of them was Modigliani.
Years later Margherita put it all down to Dedo’s stubbornness. He should have remained with his master, like a conscientious student; as a punishment he contracted tuberculosis, which must have come up through the floorboards, to judge from her tone. The comment showed the extent of the fear that gripped ordinary men and women, faced with one of the most devastating diseases of modern times. Tuberculosis has been afflicting mankind for thousands of years, as demonstrated by evidence found in neolithic burial grounds. However, it appeared with new virulence at the start of the nineteenth century and was the cause of death for a quarter of the inhabitants of Europe. In the 1850s, half the population of Britain had the disease, and the situation was equally desperate in the United States. Tuberculosis was known by various names: phthisis, scrofula, hectic fever, inflammation of the lungs, consumption; these all referred to a disease that struck without warning, sometimes pursuing a violent path, at others, waxing and waning with long and unpredictable intervals. The most commonly used term was consumption, from the Latin consumere, meaning to eat up or devour, because that is what it did; immediately, or by slow degrees, it would consume the lungs and infiltrate the body until the flesh had been burned away and the victim could count his ribs. Keats wrote, “Youth grows pale, and spectre thin …” (1819).
Some indication of the terror consumption could cause is illustrated by an incident in Chopin’s life. Along with George Sand, he had gone to Majorca in search of a mild climate in about 1840. Almost as soon as he arrived he became ill, doctors were called in, and the word spread all over the island. Chopin was doomed. George Sand wrote, “The owner of our small house threw us out immediately and started a suit to compel us to replaster his house on the pretext that we had contaminated it.”
Arriving in Palma, Chopin had a massive hemorrhage. Again they were on the move, condemned to leave the island on a steamship containing a boatload of pigs. Once in Barcelona, “the innkeeper wanted us to pay for Chopin’s bed under the pretext that it was infected.”
Keats and Chopin were hardly alone. The Rev. Patrick Brontë, who nevertheless survived to a healthy old age, was thought to be the source of contamination for his children: Maria, Charlotte, Emily, Elizabeth, and Anne, who all died. Edvard Munch had a severe attack in adolescence. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote about “[a] mouse gnawing at my chest”; Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Goethe both had lung hemorrhages in their youth and Schiller, Novalis, Carl Maria von Weber, and Katherine Mansfield died of the disease. The list of well-known poets, writers, composers, and philosophers goes on and on.
In the early nineteenth century the idea took hold that young men and women with rarefied spirits were particularly at risk. Describing John Harvard, founder of the university, who died of tuberculosis at the age of thirty, Daniel Chester French observed that the illness “gave a clue to the sort of physique that he had. It is fair to assume that his face would be delicate in modeling and sensitive in expression.” The frequency of deaths due to consumption led, perversely, to a kind of vogue. Women were admired, not for their robust good health, but for their interesting pallor, their languid airs, their vaporous silhouettes, and something morbidly angelic about their looks. Those Pre-Raphaelites Modigliani admired had elevated to goddess status Elizabeth Siddal, who married Dante Gabriel Rossetti shortly before her death at the age of thirty. With her spinal curvature, her elongated silhouette, her pallor, and the glitter in her eyes, she was the ideal model for the famous painting by Millais of Ophelia, drowned, floating downstream. Siddal, wearing an exquisite gown spangled in silver, posed in a bathtub for hours without complaint. After her death she was replaced as the feminine ideal by Jane Burden, wife of William Morris, who did not die of consumption but was often ill. Henry James found her “strange, pale, livid, gaunt, silent, and yet in a manner graceful and picturesque,” and raved about her “wonderful aesthetic hair.”
Perhaps the most famous example of the irresistible, doomed heroine was Alphonsine Plessis, who changed her name to Marie Duplessis and married a rich young Englishman. After he died young—of consumption—she took up the life of the heedless and brilliant young woman-about-town in Paris. There she met Alexandre Dumas fils, the playwright, and began an affair that would be immortalized in La Dame aux camélias and then Verdi’s even more famous opera, La Traviata. By the time Dumas wrote his play she, too, was dead of consumption, at the age of twenty-three (in 1847). Mimi, the equally celebrated heroine of Puccini’s La Bohème, had her real-life counterpart as well. She appeared in a semiautobiographical novel, Scènes de la vie de Bohème, by Henri Murger, before becoming the humble seamstress of the opera who meets a young poet and is warmed to life, however temporarily.
Some awful fate clearly awaited gifted people with their acute sensibilities. The poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, herself a consumptive, overheard a visitor asking, “Is it possible that genius is only scrofula?” Such refined spirits, burning with an ever brighter flame as their bodies were consumed, were the chosen ones; they always died poetically. “Detach the delicate blossom from the tree. / Close thy sweet eyes, calmly and without pain,” William Cullen Bryant wrote. (In “Consumption.”) The reality was otherwise.
Despite Margherita’s belief that Dedo was ill because of the studio, the likelihood is that he was already infected. The tuberculosis bacillus could be acquired from a carrier, often a nurse with no apparent symptoms, and remain dormant until adolescence. Modigliani contracted an inflammation of the pleura, the membrane lining the lung, or pleurisy, at least twice. Pleurisy can often be a precursor of tuberculosis, especially if accompanied by the development of fluid in the pleural cavity. “Since early tuberculosis is such a common cause of serious effusion … it must be assumed that all effusions of unknown cause are tuberculous unless proved otherwise.” In September 1900, Modigliani became ill with the pleurisy that developed into a life-threatening tuberculosis.
Modigliani’s illness was not diagnosed until he was sixteen, but before the days of X-rays such diagnoses could be hard to make because tuberculosis in its early stages has diffuse symptoms. A dry, persistent cough, an ache in the shoulders, a sore throat, and a slightly accelerated pulse—even difficulty breathing after exercise—might spell nothing serious. Even in its second stage, a more severe cough, thick mucous phlegm, a painful throat, and fever might mean bronchitis; muscle pains might be caused by rheumatism or neuralgia. However, in the third stage, blood on the handkerchief, a “graveyard cough,” night sweats, constant joint pain, and emaciation could mean only one thing.
“Different phenomena and degrees of suffering mark the termination of consumption,” wrote Dr. William Sweetser, a noted nineteenth-century American physician and diagnostician. In some cases “life, wasted to the most feeble spark, goes out almost insensibly.” In others, symptoms were prolonged and exhausting, including “excessive sweats and diarrhoea … with colic pains.” The patient might feel as if he or she were almost suffocating from the matter accumulating in the lungs. At other times, “a profound hemorrhage comes on at once, pouring from the mouth and nostrils, and causing an almost instant suffocation.” For most people, Dr. Sweetser noted, “the mind maintains its integrity to the last.” So much for a poetic death.
No description of the course of Modigliani’s disease has come down to us, but there are many parallel accounts of severe attacks in adolescence. In 1837 Howard Olmsted, son of Denison Olmsted, a professor of astronomy at Yale University, and apparently in excellent health, was stricken with a stubborn cough and persistent fever, and then had the first of several hemorrhages. One evening as he got ready for bed, Howard wrote,
the hemorrhage returned in all its violence … I was seized with the difficulty of breathing, with coughing and spitting blood … Frank [his older brother] ran downstairs and called Papa, while Fisher [his younger brother] ran for Dr. Tully. The doctor came and gave me a powerful astringent that stopped the bleeding, but my lungs were so that I could not lie down, but had to remain all night seated in my chair. The bleeding returned at intervals for several days, but gradually grew less and less until it ended. However for several weeks I could not lie down at night.
The Norwegian artist Edvard Munch also had a severe attack in 1876, when he was thirteen, and wrote about it later. The account vividly describes not only the author’s terror but the fatalism of his deeply religious father, who believed Edvard was about to die. (He recovered.) Munch wrote, “Father said again, ‘Don’t be frightened my boy.’ But I was very frightened. I could feel the blood rolling inside my chest with each breath that I took. It felt as if the whole inside of my chest had come loose and was floating around, as if all the blood had broken free and wanted to rush out of my mouth.” This illness, he wrote, followed him throughout childhood; “consumption placed its blood-red banner victoriously on the white handkerchief.”
As for the novelist Katherine Mansfield, three years before her death in 1923, at the age of thirty-four, she wrote: “I cough and cough, and at each breath a dragging, boiling, bubbling sound is heard. I feel that my whole chest is boiling. I sip water, spit, sip, spit. I feel I must break my heart. And I can’t expand my chest; it’s as though the chest had collapsed … Life is—getting a new breath. Nothing else counts.”
Katherine Mansfield’s medical care had been assumed by George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, a forgotten figure whose Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man outside Fontainebleau enjoyed a brief and disastrous popularity among the European intelligentsia. As well as directing his disciples’ emotional and personal lives, Gurdjieff pronounced upon their medical conditions. Mansfield was installed in the loft of a cow barn on the theory that breathing in a mixture of manure and urine would effect a cure. Shortly afterward, she died. Gurdjieff’s remedy was no worse than any other being practiced at that time, and at least Mansfield was not bled, the way Modigliani’s grandmother was. Perhaps Modigliani was not, either. He would certainly have been given antispasmodics such as morphine and heroin which were, in any case, freely available. Other remedies guaranteed to soothe the cough and stop the diarrhea included whiskey, brandy, and laudanum (opium dissolved in alcohol). Roentgen, or X-rays, had been discovered in 1895 but were not in wide use until the 1920s. A cure for tuberculosis did not come until World War II.
Suffering from tuberculosis: Katherine Mansfield, 1918 (image credit 4.5)
A description of Modigliani’s bitter struggle is confined to a single sentence from Eugénie, via her daughter: “In September he suffered a violent hemorrhage followed by a fever, and the doctor’s diagnosis held out no hope.” This laconic reference may partly account for the lack of emphasis given to Modigliani’s second brush with death, in 1900, by his biographers. There are no diary entries by Eugénie which might have given a better insight into those dreadful days; “L’Histoire de notre famille” trails off after 1899. There could, however, be an explanation for that. Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, a novel based on his observations of life inside a Swiss sanatorium in 1913, makes references to the “induction of a pneumothorax.” This was an operation that had been perfected by Carlo Forlanini in Italy in 1895, five years before Modigliani’s attack. In it, air was deliberately introduced into the pleural space so as to collapse the upper part of the lung, usually the most diseased area. This was designed to increase the blood flow in that area so that white blood cells would fight the infection. Sometimes it was successful. The damaged area would then scar over and heal; this happened often enough for the operation to become widely accepted in Europe and North America. The problem was that, because only local anaesthesia could be used, it was painful, did not always work, and could cause serious side effects. As a last resort an even more radical operation might be attempted. In it the surgeon would cut out the infected matter in the lung. There were no blood transfusions in those days, the patient could not be fully sedated, and if he or she went into shock there was no treatment.
Modigliani could have had the first, the collapse of one of his lungs. His brother Emanuele made the offhand comment that Dedo only had “one and a half lungs,” and patients in The Magic Mountain who underwent the ordeal were known as the “Half-Lung Club.” If such a cure had been attempted and Dedo’s condition worsened this might explain why the account of his crisis is so unrevealing. No one in the family would want a bad decision recorded. All we know is that, as an adult, he was terrified of doctors. We know that his fellow students died and that he survived.
Since everything hinged on the strength of the patient’s immune system we can assume that Modigliani’s was unusually resilient despite his frequent illnesses and the typhoid that had also almost killed him just two years before. Once on the road to recovery Dedo needed months of convalescence. To Europeans that had come to mean the mountain air of the Alps or the breezes blowing in from the Mediterranean. In the U.S., there was the same difference of opinion. One went north in search of pristine air that would not only clear the lungs but toughen up the invalid. Alternatively, one went south in search of gentle winds that would not irritate an already weakened constitution; you chose, depending on your views about how much further stress a consumptive patient needed. For Eugénie, there was no contest. It was the Mediterranean coast, but then there was the cost of an extended stay. Again, Amédée came to the rescue. As it happened he had been busy building his latest venture in Marseille, the Compagnie pour l’Exploitation de Madagascar, and for the moment there was money rolling in. He wrote back, “Consider your son as mine. I shall cover whatever costs you consider necessary.”
As soon as Dedo could travel they set off for Naples and from there to Torre del Greco, spending the autumn and winter months beside the sea in a vast, almost empty hotel, the Santa Teresa. One can assume that, as Dedo slowly began to mend, he slept sitting up for weeks, if not months. One can also assume that his temperature was taken several times a day to keep track of the fevers that would abate in the morning and reappear every evening, with their unpleasant night sweats and disorientations, if not delirium. Wherever the patient was, the emphasis would be on absolute rest accompanied by nourishing food and plenty of it. In The Magic Mountain, Mann has given us a vivid portrait of life as an invalid in a Swiss sanatorium, as the day took its unvarying course. “When he had finished [eating] he would sit there propped up against his pillows, his empty dishes … before him, and gaze out into the quickly falling dusk—today’s dusk, which was hardly distinguishable from yesterday’s, or the dusk of the day before yesterday, or of a week ago. There was evening—and there had just been morning. The day, chopped into little pieces by all these synthetic diversions, had in fact crumbled in his hands, and turned to dust—and he would notice it now … It seemed to him that he was simply gazing ‘on and on.’ ”
After such a serious attack some people were never able to return to normal life. By contrast, Modigliani’s infection—with luck, tuberculosis went into a lengthy remission—declined relatively rapidly. One of the great factors was his mother’s selfless care. The other was the right diet. The third may well have been psychological; Uncle Amédée had thoughtfully provided a studio as well. He began sketching again remarkably soon. Then he was well enough to paint and models were provided; an old beggar was a particular favorite. He started visiting museums, always accompanied by his mother, who slept in the same room. He was gaining weight and, as he entered his seventeenth year, began to grow a light, curly beard.
Modigliani’s actual instruction in technique ended relatively soon but museums were his constant inspiration. Margherita describes how he would sit transfixed for hours before an unfinished canvas by Leonardo da Vinci analyzing every stroke, from background to lightly sketched foreground figures. He was fascinated by the antique bronzes he saw at the National Archaeological Museum in Naples, with its collections of Greek and Roman sculpture, and visited the churches of Santa Chiara, San Domenico, and San Lorenzo. Margherita’s account refers to her brother’s “haughty air” and “rather cold manners,” but this comment has to be taken with caution, given her attitude toward her brother. Others describe him differently, as having a certain aristocratic bearing that seemed instinctive, rather than an effort to assert social status. As for his manners, these could belong to a boy who was still shy and ill at ease with strangers. Perhaps he no longer blushed when spoken to, but he had not yet developed the easy friendliness that was to become marked. Once drawn into conversation he lived up to his sobriquet of “the Professor.” Margherita is probably right in thinking most people assumed him to be much older than he really was. He was certainly looked on as an artist with a future. “You must paint with intuition, imagination and concentration,” an English tourist told him. This, Modigliani replied, was exactly what he intended to do.
The process by which Modigliani evolved from a gravely ill adolescent to someone committed to his talent and future as an artist is closed to us. We may guess at the pain and terror he endured as he was struck down by these terrible illnesses. We may guess at his agonizing recovery and what feelings he must have had for the mother who had used all her powers to keep him alive. There is considerable evidence that the experience of almost dying can have a life-altering, if not transfiguring effect. The American writer Katherine Anne Porter, who contracted tuberculosis during World War I and almost died in the Spanish influenza of 1918, is a case in point. She used the experience twenty years later in a story which forms the title piece for her collection of three short novels: Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939). The reference is to a horse she rode when she was growing up on a farm in the American South. In her story, the horse comes to symbolize death.
Porter said later that the illness changed her forever. “It just simply divided my life, cut across it like that. So that everything before that was just getting ready, and after that I was in some strange way altered, ready … I had what the Christians call the ‘beatific vision,’ and the Greeks called the ‘happy day,’ the happy vision just before death. Now if you have had that, and survived it … you are no longer like other people, and there’s no use deceiving yourself that you are.”
One cannot know what Modigliani experienced or to what extent he shared Porter’s “beatific vision.” He certainly seemed infused with a new sense of purpose and almost giddy at the inner transformation. The evidence is contained in the letters he wrote to Oscar Ghiglia, the classmate eight years his senior who was already making a name for himself as an artist. Ghiglia was the one Margherita believed had started Dedo on the path of drink, drugs, and loose women. Whether or not this is true, it is clear that Oscar was Modigliani’s confidant, they were dedicated to art, believed in a life after death, and studied arcane symbolism that would find its way into Modigliani’s later work. Ghiglia had taken courses in the self-portrait with Fattori in Florence and was beginning to have early success in the genre that would become so important to his friend. Ghiglia’s method was to shut himself up in a room in Florence, painting himself in front of a mirror. He had a particular composition in mind, of himself seated, with brushes and palette in hand. The result, Allo specchio (At the Mirror), was shown to another of their classmates, Llewelyn Lloyd, who was so impressed that he entered the painting in the Venice Biennale. Allo specchio had been accepted in the spring of 1901 and the news had just reached Modigliani, who was convalescing on Capri.
He was there for the cure, Modigliani wrote without explanation—perhaps they both knew what that meant. He had painted nothing for four months but he was accumulating material just the same. He wanted to move to Florence and start work, “that is, to dedicate myself faithfully (body and soul) to the organization and development of every impression, of every germ of an idea that I have collected in this place as if in a mystic garden.”
In his next letter, Modigliani expanded on his pleasure in Capri. He wrote, “Would you believe that I have changed in traveling here? Capri, whose name alone is enough to arouse a tumult of beautiful images and ancient voluptuousness in my spirit, appears to me now as essentially a springlike place.” Once they were in Rome, he was even more enchanted. “Rome … is not only outside of me, but inside of me as I talk. Rome which lies like a setting of terrifying jewels on its seven hills, like seven imperious ideas. Rome is the orchestration with which I surround myself, the limited area in which I isolate myself and concentrate all my thoughts. Its feverish delights, its tragic landscape, its beautiful and harmonious forms—all these things are mine through my thought and my work.” Exactly what were the truths of art and life? These were the ideas he was trying to come to grips with and had found them “scattered among the beauties of Rome.” By that Modigliani evidently meant not only the monuments, buildings, and scenery, but the thrilling discoveries he was making in the museums and churches, the Borghese, the Palazzo Doria, the Terme, the Sistine Chapel, and so many more. “I will try to reveal and rearrange their composition—I might almost say their metaphysical architecture—to create my own truth on life, on beauty, and on art.”
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!
—William Wordsworth
His sense of giddy optimism pervades the letters, almost an exultation. He added, “I would like my life to be a fertile stream flowing joyfully over the ground.” It was tempered by the very real possibility that he did not have long to live, and a numb acceptance of what seemed inevitable: “I am myself the plaything of strong forces that are born and die in me.” This was not too far removed from the sentiment expressed in Shakespeare’s King Lear: “As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; / They kill us for their sport.” Perhaps he felt, as Edvard Munch did after a similar attack, lying flat on his back in bed, his hands outside the sheets, “Now I could never be as before. I looked at my brothers & sisters, and I envied them.” Munch asked himself, “Why me?”
Little by little the idea seems to have taken hold that he was marked for some special fate. Like Frank Lloyd Wright a few years later, Modigliani was clearly influenced by Nietzsche’s theories about the emergence of the Übermensch. The artist, as Superman, was divinely endowed, therefore divinely inspired, for as Nietzsche also wrote, the artist had his own truth, or a special kind of truth. “He fights for the higher dignity and significance of man; in truth, he does not want to give up the most effective presuppositions of his art: the fantastic, mythical, uncertain, extreme, the sense for the symbolic … the faith in some miraculous element in the genius.”
As for Wright, after experiencing public censure for abandoning his wife and six children to live with a married woman, he wrote, “The ordinary man cannot live without rules to guide his conduct. It is infinitely more difficult to live without rules, but that is what the really honest, sincere, thinking man is compelled to do. And I think when a man … has given concrete evidence of his ability to see and to feel the higher and better things of life, we ought to go slow in deciding he has acted badly.”
Modigliani could have written that himself. In fact, he wrote something very much like it to Oscar Ghiglia almost a decade before Wright’s letter. “People like us … have different rights, different values than do normal, ordinary people because we have different needs which put us—it has to be said and you must believe it—above their moral standards.” As for Wright’s defiant conclusion: “I am a wild bird—and must stay free,” that would have struck Modigliani as completely logical and reasonable. “Do what you feel …” The artist who is really serious about his work must “push his intelligence to its maximum creative power.” There was a battle ahead, one he must be prepared to undertake, “facing the risks, carrying on the war with … great strength and vision.” He must be prepared to suffer every hardship and “bring forth the most supreme efforts of the soul” in the cause of satisfying beauty’s “painful demands.” In his mind, fatalism and idealism, creativity and death, seemed intertwined.
The mold was set when Modigliani was seventeen.
