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 Geo
rge 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 Fontai
nebleau 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.
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