Amedeo Modigliani is one of the most well-known artist of the 20th century. His fascinating and unique image, art wise, at the beginning of the century fixed a nonfading romantic and cursed image of the artist endowed with genius. Especially after his death, his life took on legendary notes, between myth and reality. After the first pictorial studies in Livorno, under the guidance of the post-macchiaiolo Guglielmo Micheli, once scholar of Giovanni Fattori, probably Modigliani's most important characteristic as an artist has paradoxically been his firm will on not taking part on any new expressive tendency. Those were the years of Post-Impressionism, of Fauves, of Cubism, but the livornese painter stood in his own way, away from them, taking an alternative, unique and personal path characterized by the sinuous line, oval faces and their enigmatic and apparently incomplete strokes.

Even when Modigliani switched to sculpture in 1909, he managed to pass a personal touch to his works. From stone blocks (or sometimes wood blocks) through the technique of sculpting with hammer and chisel, Modì realized caryatids and cuneiform faces shaped in hight, with slight necks, pronounced features (especially the nose), and elongated eyes without iris – characteristic he would later prosecute in many paintings.

Nonetheless Modì has never been properly understood. He had no success in life, and had very few real friends. Many were acute collectors (among those Paul Alexander, Paul Guillame and Leopold Zborowski), others were unappreciated artists as he was (in primis Utrillo and Soutine).

Amedeo Modigliani was likable, contentious, elegant, handsome, capable, touchy, sweet, generous, stubborn, easy to depression, proud, unlucky, self-destructive, incredibly brilliant. But his “fortune” started the exact day of his death, when everyone immediately went for buying those works of art that they won’t so much as look at it since a couple of hours before.