Portrait of a man with a fly

Closed in a large checked jacket, this robust figure of a middle-aged man - the pale eyes looking, inquisitively, towards the observer, the stripe of the mustache on the thin mouth represented, with a remarkable sense of immediacy, slightly open - appears solidly built through large and synthetic backgrounds of color. Behind him stretches a country landscape, in which, as in most of the works of the third period, the effect of distance is obtained by alternating large areas of green and yellow, while a row of houses is neatly placed along the line of the horizon, in front of the low profile of the hills. A fly, a recurring symbol of life in many portraits and self-portraits by Ligabue, flies in the sky at the top left.