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The Life and Art of Modigliani
Behind His Unique Vision
- Abstract
IN ITALY there exists an odd legal provision concerning the seizure of a debtor’s property; whatever else the officers of the law may impound, they cannot touch a bed in which a woman has just given birth to a child, or is about to do so. It was thanks to this that Eugenia Modigliani, wife of a bankrupt businessman, Flaminio Modigliani, enjoyed a modicum of comfort when, on July 12, 1884, she gave birth to their fourth child, Amedeo (“beloved of God”), in Leghorn (Livorno), Italy. The Modigliani family had moved into their shabby apartment only a few days before, having been forced by poverty to leave a more elegant section of the city where they had lived in the same house for over a decade. Mother and child lay underneath a mound of family possessions, piled on the bed in order to be saved from confiscation. Roaming about in the desolate rooms were three other children, Emmanuele, born 1872, Margherita, born in 1874, and Umberto, born in 1878, all of them already old enough to grasp tragedy and understand their parents’ grief.
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