Self-Portraits
He looks at us. Always. Still, motionless, with a gaze that seems to pierce the surface of the painting and reach us beyond time and beyond the frame. Antonio Ligabue portrayed himself dozens of times throughout his life. It is perhaps the genre that represents him most fully, the one in which he pours his unease, his need to exist, to affirm a presence that was too often denied or misunderstood.
In the three self-portraits before you, we see him in the foreground, severe, concentrated, sometimes with his mouth tightly closed, other times with a grimace betraying tension or discomfort. His figure emerges forcefully from the background, made even more vivid by the magnetic intensity of his eyes. Eyes that give us no respite, that question us, that challenge us. This is not a mere exercise in style: it is a necessary act, almost a declaration of identity.
Behind him, always, an animal. Here appear birds with iridescent feathers and nervous postures, and even a fly—an ordinary insect, yet made a protagonist, disturbing the scene like an obsessive thought. The presence of these animals is not accidental. They are symbols, silent companions, projections of the self. As in his famous self-portraits with the tiger or the snake, these smaller creatures are also charged with meaning: the fly may represent the gnawing presence of anxiety, the birds perhaps sentinels, messengers from an inner world perpetually on alert.
Ligabue never merely depicts himself. He exposes himself. He stages himself. And in doing so, he uses his own face as both mask and mirror. Every wrinkle, every unruly lock of hair, every shadow beneath the eyes is amplified by a painting that does not seek beauty, but truth. And that truth, raw and unfiltered, forces us to stop, to look inward, and perhaps to recognize something of ourselves in him.