Ploughing, 1961
Ligabue breathes new vitality into a traditional subject such as ploughing, imbuing the scene with a narrative tension that goes beyond simple rural representation. Through a dense and animated composition, the artist enriches every corner of the canvas with details of vivid narrative character, transforming an ordinary day of fieldwork into a lively, almost fairy-tale-like story.
On the right, a dog in full run, depicted with an almost caricatural dynamism, vigorously drives the oxen bent under the weight of the plough. Its momentum seems to impart an inner movement to the canvas, suggesting a restless energy that spreads throughout the surrounding environment. The two draught animals, caught in the physical strain of agricultural labor, appear to mirror the human condition that Ligabue repeatedly explored with emotional involvement and expressive distortion.
In the foreground, a man with rolled-up shirt sleeves turns with a friendly gesture to greet the farmer engaged in ploughing. This apparently simple action takes on an almost theatrical function: it introduces a silent dialogue between the figures, suggesting a sense of community and shared experience that extends even to the animals.
On the left, a group of hens pecks at the ground in a scene of minute, domestic life rendered with great attention to detail. Their presence is far from secondary: as often in Ligabue’s works, animals are not mere decorative elements but true actors on the stage, bearers of instinctive and chaotic vitality that invades the environment.
In the middle ground, a man on a horse-drawn carriage appears, introducing a sense of spatial depth and evoking the popular and fairy-tale imagery that characterizes many of Ligabue’s works, poised between lived reality and inner vision.
In the background, a village with Nordic features, almost stylized, emerges with the artist’s customary obsessive precision. This motif, present in many works from the 1960s, represents a nostalgic memory of Ligabue’s childhood spent in Switzerland. The simple architecture, sloping roofs, and geometric order of the houses create a striking contrast with the narrative chaos of the foreground, highlighting the artist’s dual nature: on one hand, the expressive and deforming tension of his mark; on the other, the need to recover a lost order, an imagined refuge in the past.