Pwhy Antonio Ligabue (1899-1965) triumphed over the avant-gardes who believed they could establish the canon of artistic value? Because it was saved by writers, without forgetting the tireless work of Augusto Tota, and that of a masterly editor like Franco Maria Ricci.
What critics did not do, betraying their mission, in the second half of the twentieth century, dazzled by the mythology of the avant-garde, was done by writers such as Giancarlo Vigorelli, Giorgio Soavi, Mario De Micheli, Cesare Zavattini, enlightened and pure minds who recognized Ligabue even if he was not referable to a current, a line, a group. Ligabue was proudly alone and what he painted he did against every history, every program and programmatic nature.
The same luck did not come to another artist immersed in the same creative condition, equally totally and irremediably alone: Pietro Ghizzardiborn in Viadana in 1906 and died in Boretto in 1986. Ligabue moved to Gualtieri in 1919. One can imagine that in his stray, nomadic, wild life he came close to Pietro. But it’s not known. Too devoted to loneliness to recognize each other, to make Rilke’s verse about love come true “May we laboriously prepare / the love that consists in this, / may two solitudes guard, delimit and / greet each other”.
Vittorio Sgarbi Art critic and historian
However, the two artists met, but not with each other, in the mind of Cesare Zavattinithe writer who guarded the extreme solitudes of Ligabue and Ghizzardi. A lush visionary nature dominates in Ligabue which determines the creation of an original world, populated almost only by animals, domestic and wild, oscillating between the rural idyll and a treacherous, threatening forest. No twentieth century painter, except perhaps Gino Rossi, has the same exuberance. The animals of the forest are projections of an anger, of a conflict with the world, resolved only in painting.
Ghizzardi, conversely, reflects the fragile human conditionand paints predominantly solitary men and women. An apparently endless sequence, with variations determined by different psychologies, but with a pietas so profound as to authorize the idea of a new Humanism, painful, heartfelt, peasant.
Antonio Ligabue: “Leopard in the forest” (sd, 1956-1957). The work is exhibited in the exhibition “Antonio Ligabue. The great exhibition” at the Palazzo di Città in Cagliari until 7 June (Private collection).
Ligabue’s exaltation becomes in Ghizzardi a lucid interpretation of souls and faces; in an unprecedented gallery of characters he puts us before a disarmed humanity. I believe I was the first, many years ago, to compare Pietro Ghizzardi’s portraits to the figures of Lucien Freud, the German-born British painter, grandson of the inventor of psychoanalysis and great interpreter of contemporary discomfort.
The wild animals in the Ligabue forest have become Ghizzardi’s women. Pietro loved women, but he couldn’t live with them. He talks about it at length, about his difficult relationship with the opposite sex, in his autobiography, published by Einaudi in 1976, I still rememberwho demonstrated to the world the literary power of an illiterate, the linguistic impetuosity of a “primitive”, as a critic like Angelo Guglielmi, certainly accustomed to the avant-garde, said.
Antonio Ligabue, “Il Serpentario”, 1962. (Private collection)
Ghizzardi’s mind fermented at the thought of Anna Magnani, Ava Gardner, of Sophia Loren that he saw on TV or in magazines. And he appropriated it in the painted image, sometimes not even painted but obtained from collages and newspaper clippings. Sometimes he reinvented female figures who resembled the desired and never loved womenwhich however in turn became a source of inspiration: there is no doubt that Federico Fellini was inspired by his portraits of women for the figure of “Volpina” in Amarcord (1973).
Ghizzardi made women masks, exalted their power and rockiness, the primordial power over him, rejected, and destined for this distant reappropriation in another form. Like Ligabue’s ferocious animals, Ghizzardi’s women have something fearsome, disturbing: they are powerful divinities not to be disturbed, but to be disturbed by them.
Ligabue and Ghizzardi, at a short spatial distance, appear perfectly complementary to each otherand foreign to any figurative tradition, of which they are fertile anomalies. And sometimes the anomaly has its home in literature, rather than in art criticism.
INFO: Cagliari, Palazzo di Città, until 7 June 2026 (sistemamuseale.museicivicicagliari.it)
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