Amedeo Modigliani was born to a bourgeois family in Italy, and as a teenager educated as a classical painter.  He later shunned his academic upbringing and willingly devolved into a penniless vagabond.  His favorite subject was by far the human form, painting the likenesses of other artists, such as Pablo Picasso, Diego Rivera, Max Jacob, and Juan Gris, who all sat for the artist.