INTRODUCTION

Approaching the biography of Amedeo Modigliani a hundred years after his death, one might think there is very little left to add to the vast literature on the subject. Looking at the most widely read texts, one finds a substantial uniformity of views, based on the same body of information and traced back to sources considered beyond question: the writings of the artist’s mother and of his daughter, together with the rare letters written by Modigliani himself. Eugénie Garsin’s diaries have never been examined in sufficient depth, not even by their official custodians, who perhaps feared that raising doubts about their reliability would diminish their authority.
It is a fact that, more than a century after the events Eugénie Garsin recorded in her own hand, no source criticism has ever been carried out, no historical analysis of the manuscripts and, above all, no prosopographical study of the people who appear in these family stories. Instead, the Livre de Raison and the Histoire de notre famille have been quoted slavishly, legitimising even the author’s unintentional mistakes about her own past: from her family ancestry to the addresses of the houses in Marseille, confused in Eugénie’s memory, and even her own brother’s date of birth.
Hence the need to apply historical and genealogical method to finally reconstruct some of the key coordinates in the lives of these people. (…)

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