Self-portrait

Closed in the usual brown jacket, wrapped in a red scarf, with a sunken face, a prickly beard and graying hair, the artist appears with a sad and bewildered gaze, evoking a condition of dramatic existential isolation which finds correspondence in the crow which, alone, crosses the evening sky. In the background, under a row of houses, the flat fields of green of different shades and, in the distance, the strip of yellow dotted with splashes of color represent formal expedients which Ligabue often uses to render, without resorting to the traditional perspective, the depth space development.