Antonio Ligabue on show in Monza, of fantastic animals and where to find them

Gualtieri was and still is on the right bank of the Po, near Guastalla and Luzzara: the low Emilian it is made up of small villages like this, with a bell tower, a square, the bar in the center, the fog in winter and the heat in summer. And the Great River – when the Po was big, so far from today’s shoals – to give work to most people, to dictate the rhythms.

A disoriented twenty-year-old arrived in Gualtieri in 1919, unable to the world: is called Antonio Liguabuehe arrives from Zurich and has already lived unspeakable suffering: the abandonment of his mother when he was not yet a year old, a conflictual relationship with the foster family, difficulties with school, violent nervous crises, the aggression towards the adoptive mother, the denunciation and consequent expulsion from Switzerland.

It is not by chance that he arrives in Gualtieri. He came from that Emilian village Bonfiglio Laccabuethe man who had married his biological mother (whose surname Antonio had refused, crippling it in Ligabue) and whom he hated because he considered responsible for the death of the woman – in fact a victim of food poisoning – the same woman who hadn’t taken long to give that restless little boy into foster care …

Antonio Ligabue’s life is this thing here: a continuous emotional short circuit.

The man arrives in Gualtieri looking for not sure what and he is immediately attracted to the banks of the river: he often lives on the street, like a vagabondit keeps doing hard work, as a drain. With the little money he collects, and thanks to the generosity of some friends of the village, he buys brushes and canvases and he begins to shape his demons. He has a fortune: Renato Marino Mazzacurati, also from those parts and already a famous painter and sculptor, he loves him and appreciates his creative flair. He teaches him oil painting, cultivating his own “Naive art”.

The story of Antonio Ligabue does not have the connotations of a fabledespite some works – like the eagle or the tiger you see here – they seem come out of a children’s illustration book. Ligabue enters and exits thepsychiatric hospital of San Lazzaro: he is violent against others and against himself. In between, the war also arrives: Ligabue earns something as an interpreter for the German troops, but also takes a loud blow. He is often ill and the solidarity of the small local artistic community that never manages to make up for the lack of a real family is of little use. In the 1950s, everyone in the area knew Ligabue: his works from local newspapers ended up on national ones, his life and his painting become “a coincidence”, the first exhibition in Rome is a success, but Antonio Ligabue does not enjoy anything. A hemiparesis locks him in the hospital, where the psyche degenerates, until his death in 1965.