Editing Amedeo Modigliani (section)

==Art student years==
Modigliani is known to have drawn and painted from a very early age, and thought himself "already a painter", his mother wrote,<ref name="Mann 1980 12">{{Cite book| last = Mann | first = Carol | year = 1980 | title = Modigliani | location = London | publisher = Thames and Hudson. | isbn = 0-500-20176-5 | page = 12}}</ref> even before beginning formal studies. Despite her misgivings that launching him on a course of studying art would impinge upon his other studies, his mother indulged the young Modigliani's passion for the subject.

At the age of fourteen, while sick with typhoid fever, he raved in his delirium that he wanted, above all else, to see the paintings in the [[Palazzo Pitti]] and the [[Uffizi]] in Florence. As Livorno's local museum housed only a sparse few paintings by the [[Italian Renaissance]] masters, the tales he had heard about the great works held in Florence intrigued him, and it was a source of considerable despair to him, in his sickened state, that he might never get the chance to view them in person. His mother promised that she would take him to Florence herself, the moment he was recovered. Not only did she fulfil this promise, but she also undertook to enroll him with the best painting master in Livorno, [[Guglielmo Micheli]].

===Micheli and the Macchiaioli===
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[[File:Amedeo Modigliani, c.1915, Portrait de Picasso, oil on cardboard, 43.2 x 26.7 cm.jpg|thumb|upright|''Portrait of Pablo Picasso,'' 1915, private collection]]
[[File:Modigliani in Venice - Calle dell'Avogaria (a S.Sebastiano), 1633.jpg|thumb|His home in Venice]]
Modigliani worked in Micheli's Art School from 1898 to 1900. Among his colleagues in that studio would have been [[Llewelyn Lloyd (painter)|Llewelyn Lloyd]], [[Giulio Cesare Vinzio]], [[Manlio Martinelli]], [[Gino Romiti]], [[Renato Natali]], and [[Oscar Ghiglia (painter)|Oscar Ghiglia]]. Here his earliest formal artistic instruction took place in an atmosphere steeped in a study of the styles and themes of 19th-century Italian art. In his earliest Parisian work, traces of this influence, and that of his studies of [[Renaissance art]], can still be seen. His nascent work was influenced by such Parisian artists as [[Giovanni Boldini]] and [[Toulouse-Lautrec]].

Modigliani showed great promise while with Micheli, and ceased his studies only when he was forced to, by the onset of tuberculosis.

In 1901, whilst in Rome, Modigliani admired the work of [[Domenico Morelli]], a painter of dramatic religious and literary scenes. Morelli had served as an inspiration for a group of iconoclasts who were known by the title "the [[Macchiaioli]]" (from ''macchia''&nbsp;—"dash of colour", or, more derogatively, "stain"), and Modigliani had already been exposed to the influences of the Macchiaioli. This localized [[Landscape art|landscape]] movement reacted against the bourgeois stylings of the academic genre painters. While sympathetically connected to (and actually pre-dating) the [[French Impressionists]], the Macchiaioli did not make the same impact upon international art culture as did the contemporaries and followers of [[Monet]], and are today largely forgotten outside Italy.

Modigliani's connection with the movement was through Guglielmo Micheli, his first art teacher. Micheli was not only a Macchiaiolo himself, but had been a pupil of the famous [[Giovanni Fattori]], a founder of the movement. Micheli's work, however, was so fashionable and the genre so commonplace that the young Modigliani reacted against it, preferring to ignore the obsession with landscape that, as with French Impressionism, characterized the movement. Micheli also tried to encourage his pupils to paint ''[[en plein air]]'', but Modigliani never really got a taste for this style of working, sketching in cafés, but preferring to paint indoors, and especially in his own studio. Even when compelled to paint landscapes (three are known to exist),<ref>{{Cite book| last = Werner | first = Alfred | year = 1967 | title = Amedeo Modigliani | location = London | publisher = Thames and Hudson. | page = 16| isbn = 0-8109-0323-7}}</ref> Modigliani chose a proto-[[Cubist]] palette more akin to [[Cézanne]] than to the Macchiaioli.

While with Micheli, Modigliani studied not only landscape, but also portraiture, still life, and the nude. His fellow students recall that the last was where he displayed his greatest talent, and apparently this was not an entirely academic pursuit for the teenager: when not painting nudes, he was occupied with seducing the household maid.<ref name="Mann 1980 12" />

Despite his rejection of the Macchiaioli approach, Modigliani nonetheless found favour with his teacher, who referred to him as "Superman", a pet name reflecting the fact that Modigliani was not only quite adept at his art, but also that he regularly quoted from Nietzsche's ''[[Thus Spoke Zarathustra]]''. Fattori himself would often visit the studio, and approved of the young artist's innovations.<ref name="Mann-1980-16">{{Cite book| last = Mann | first = Carol | year = 1980 | title = Modigliani | location = London | publisher = Thames and Hudson. | isbn = 0-500-20176-5 | page = 16}}</ref>

In 1902, Modigliani continued what was to be a lifelong infatuation with [[life drawing]], enrolling in the Scuola Libera di Nudo, or "Free School of Nude Studies", of the [[Accademia di Belle Arti di Firenze|Accademia di Belle Arti]] in Florence. A year later, while still suffering from tuberculosis, he moved to Venice, where he registered to study at the [[Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia|Regia Accademia ed Istituto di Belle Arti]]. It is in Venice that he first smoked [[hashish]] and, rather than studying, began to spend time frequenting disreputable parts of the city. The impact of these lifestyle choices upon his developing artistic style is open to conjecture, although these choices do seem to be more than simple [[teenage rebellion]], or the clichéd [[hedonism]] and [[bohemianism]] that was almost expected of artists of the time; his pursuit of the seedier side of life appears to have roots in his appreciation of radical philosophies, including those of [[Nietzsche]].
[[File:Amedeo Modigliani - Chaim Soutine (1917).jpg|thumb|upright|''Portrait of [[Chaïm Soutine]]'', 1916]]

===Early literary influences===
Having been exposed to erudite philosophical literature as a young boy under the tutelage of Isaco Garsin, his maternal grandfather, he continued to read and be influenced through his art studies by the writings of Nietzsche, [[Baudelaire]], [[Giosuè Carducci|Carducci]], [[Comte de Lautréamont]], and others, and developed the belief that the only route to true creativity was through defiance and disorder.

Letters that he wrote from his 'sabbatical' in Capri in 1901 clearly indicate that he is being more and more influenced by the thinking of Nietzsche. In these letters, he advised friend Oscar Ghiglia;

<blockquote>(hold sacred all) which can exalt and excite your intelligence... (and) ... seek to provoke ... and to perpetuate ... these fertile stimuli, because they can push the intelligence to its maximum creative power.<ref name="Werner 1967 17">{{Cite book| last = Werner | first = Alfred | year = 1967 | title = Amedeo Modigliani | location = London | publisher = Thames and Hudson. | page = 17| isbn = 0-8109-0323-7}}</ref></blockquote>

The work of [[Lautréamont]] was equally influential at this time. This doomed poet's ''[[Les Chants de Maldoror]]'' became the seminal work for the Parisian [[Surrealists]] of Modigliani's generation, and the book became Modigliani's favourite to the extent that he learnt it by heart.<ref name="Mann-1980-16" /> The poetry of Lautréamont is characterized by the juxtaposition of fantastical elements, and by sadistic imagery; the fact that Modigliani was so taken by this text in his early teens gives a good indication of his developing tastes. Baudelaire and [[D'Annunzio]] similarly appealed to the young artist, with their interest in corrupted beauty, and the expression of that insight through [[Symbolism (arts)|Symbolist]] imagery.

Modigliani wrote to Ghiglia extensively from Capri, where his mother had taken him to assist in his recovery from tuberculosis. These letters are a sounding board for the developing ideas brewing in Modigliani's mind. Ghiglia was seven years Modigliani's senior, and it is likely that it was he who showed the young man the limits of his horizons in Livorno. Like all precocious teenagers, Modigliani preferred the company of older companions, and Ghiglia's role in his adolescence was to be a sympathetic ear as he worked himself out, principally in the convoluted letters that he regularly sent, and which survive today.<ref>{{Cite book| last = Mann | first = Carol | year = 1980 | title = Modigliani | location = London | publisher = Thames and Hudson. | isbn = 0-500-20176-5 | pages = 19–22}}</ref>

<blockquote>Dear friend, I write to pour myself out to you and to affirm myself to myself. I am the prey of great powers that surge forth and then disintegrate ... A [[bourgeois]] told me today–insulted me–that I or at least my brain was lazy. It did me good. I should like such a warning every morning upon awakening: but they cannot understand us nor can they understand life...<ref>{{Cite book| last = Mann | first = Carol | year = 1980 | title = Modigliani | location = London | publisher = Thames and Hudson. | isbn = 0-500-20176-5 | page = 20}}</ref></blockquote>