Modigliani is known to have drawn and painted from a very early age, and thought himself "already a painter", his mother wrote, 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 Modigliani worked in Micheli's Art School from 1898 to 1900. Among his colleagues in that studio would have been
Llewelyn Lloyd,
Giulio Cesare Vinzio,
Manlio Martinelli,
Gino Romiti,
Renato Natali, and
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 —"dash of colour", or, more derogatively, "stain"), and Modigliani had already been exposed to the influences of the Macchiaioli. This localised
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, characterised 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), 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. 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 in Florence. A year later, while still suffering from tuberculosis, he moved to Venice, where he registered to study at the
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. '', 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,
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 his friend Oscar Ghiglia; (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. 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. 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... ==Paris==