CategoriesStyles and Movements
Pittura Metafisica
Italian painting of about 1910 to 1920 in which deserted squares, mannequins and still objects take on an unsettling, enigmatic charge.
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About
Empty squares under a green evening sky, arcades throwing long black shadows, a distant train, a tailor's dummy with a blank oval head: these are the props of the paintings Giorgio de Chirico began in Florence and Paris around 1910. Steeped in Nietzsche, he painted ordinary things in skewed, contradictory perspectives so that they seemed to hold a secret, as in The Song of Love (1914), where a rubber glove hangs beside a classical head.
In 1917, while stationed at Ferrara, de Chirico worked alongside his brother Alberto Savinio and Carlo Carrà, a former Futurist, and the style became a shared programme. Giorgio Morandi painted a short series of stark metaphysical still lifes around 1918–19, and the magazine Valori Plastici spread the ideas. The partnership had broken up by the early 1920s, but René Magritte, Max Ernst and other Surrealists drew directly on de Chirico's early work.
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