Giorgio de Chirico and the Metaphysical painting
To become truly immortal a work of art must escape all human limits: logic and common sense will only interfere. But once these barriers are broken it will enter the regions of childhood vision and dream.
Logic must not speak: visions must. The visionary art of de Chirico, known for his mannequins and dreamlike atmospheres, is not a sterile attention to form, but a constant research for a revelation through it.
Born in Volos, Greece, in 1888 from Italian parents (his father being a Sicilian railroad engineer and his mother a wealthy Genoan woman), de Chirico always aimed at an international artistic and cultural confrontation. As the inventor of the Metaphysical painting, de Chirico deeply inspired the Surrealist movement and — later — fascinated artists like Warhol, Lichtenstein, and Pascali.
De Chirico was a regular visitor of museums in Rome and Florence, executing a number of pastiches of works of the Italian masters. He and other artists co-founders of the Metafisica looked back at the Renaissance masters, such as Giotto, Piero della Francesca, Paolo Uccello, as a sort of antidote to war’s disintegration, making the Metafisica result in a counter-modernist trend. In de Chirico’s works the silence of forms prevails over the noise of the Futurism.
What’s stunning about the Italian artist is his masterly combination of the classical taste with modern anxiety, resulting in a powerful sense of misplacement. The trait d’union of the Metaphysical painting — which anticipated somehow the Surrealist movement — was the appearantly random juxtaposition of objects and memories onto the canvas. In de Chirico’s case, such are the references to his father’s work (the triangle, the work tools, the locomotives) and the views on the piazzas he remembered from Florence — Piazza Santa Croce inspired his The Enigma of an Autumn Afternoon, whose perpective seems to come from an observation from the first floor of a palace.
As the art critic Daverio writes,
For De Chirico, the artist was like a vaticinator, who leads people to understand matters that they would otherwise not understand.
De Chirico’s visions aimed at stimulating a reasoning in the viewer, as in a symbolist paintings: anxiety and harmony have never been so close in art history.
Form seems to be the only certainty within the years of anguish. Even if a sense of disquiet is present as omen, classical images dive into a symbolism of forms: the condition of man is eternalized. The viewer is ready for a revelation.
Originally published at uberaura.wix.com.
