Self-portrait

This is the only self-portrait of Ligabue known in sculpture. Made for and at the request of Ugo Sassi di Guastalla, which the painter and sculptor Sergio Terzi - known as Nerone - enlarged to make it a monument that he gave to the municipality of Gualtieri and placed behind Palazzo Bentivoglio, in the middle of the greenery. There is also a photograph of Ligabue which shows him next to this sculpture, placed on a table. The face, obviously reconstructed from memory, has eyes looking towards the left, as happens in oil self-portraits. The uneven and vibrant modelling, in which even the traces of the fingertips that have manipulated the clay can be distinguished, perfectly renders the roughness of the artist's face, from the marked wrinkles on the forehead, to the face rendered with expressive immediacy and punctual realism even in the scar at the temple where it was injured to let out the bad moods and the few hairs on the forehead. The closed mouth, the slightly tense and concentrated air instill a slight melancholy in this face which, cut below the neck, would like to have a certain pretension to solemnity.