The Magazine  God in a Dustbin  The brief, tumultuous life of
Amedeo Modigliani.  Jul 17, 2006, Vol. 11, No. 41 • By DIANE
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Text Alerts   A Life  by Jeffery Meyers  Harcourt, 288 pp., $27
After a night of drunken revelry, Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920)
was awakened by someone pulling his sleeve. When he opened his
eyes, he could see street cleaners laughing at him. Then he
realized that he couldn't move. He had spent the night forcibly
thrust in a large trash can with his knees bent under his chin.
He stank, was covered in filth, and had lost his pale blue
sketchbook as well as his identity papers. Modigliani stood up
and tried to laugh it off, calling himself "a god in a dustbin."
Only five feet five inches tall, this dustbin god was
extraordinarily handsome with thick, dark hair, hot, lustrous
eyes, and a strange mixture of brooding melancholy and Latin
lust. As Pablo Picasso's mistress put it, Modigliani's beautiful
Roman head and nearly perfect