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Lot Essay
The Fondazione de Chirico has confirmed the authenticity of this painting. It is recorded in the archives under the number 028/04/13.
"A strong current of mysticism is indispensible to the formation of classical artists. Greek painters and the great Italian artists derived it from religion. Let us not forget that mysteries flourished at the time of Polignatius and would not have been foreign to his severe and emotional drawing, to that ethos which enveloped his figures, to that idealism so eulogized by Aristotle. Today let us hope to be sufficiently mystical for the rebirth of classicism" (the artist quoted in On Classic Ground, Picasso, Léger, de Chirico and the New Classicism, 1910-1930, exh. cat., The Tate Gallery, London, 1990, p. 78).
Following the end of the First World War and the death of his great friend and champion Guillaume Apollinaire, de Chirico had decided not to return to Paris but to move from his military stationing in Ferrara to Rome. In Rome in 1919, the manner of his painting immediately underwent the most radical change of his career, taking on the classical style which marked much of his later oeuvre, including the present work. It was in front of Titian's painting of Sacred and Profane Love that de Chirico was granted what he later described as "the revelation of great painting" that made him realize that the true mystery and fascination of pictorial art lay not within a painting's subject matter but within the way in which the image was painted. "There is a static, immobile and intense quality" he wrote, of the way in which Raphael paints drapery, for example, "which makes us think about the eternity of matter. The image seems to have existed even before the painter created it" (quoted in ibid., p. 76).
"A strong current of mysticism is indispensible to the formation of classical artists. Greek painters and the great Italian artists derived it from religion. Let us not forget that mysteries flourished at the time of Polignatius and would not have been foreign to his severe and emotional drawing, to that ethos which enveloped his figures, to that idealism so eulogized by Aristotle. Today let us hope to be sufficiently mystical for the rebirth of classicism" (the artist quoted in On Classic Ground, Picasso, Léger, de Chirico and the New Classicism, 1910-1930, exh. cat., The Tate Gallery, London, 1990, p. 78).
Following the end of the First World War and the death of his great friend and champion Guillaume Apollinaire, de Chirico had decided not to return to Paris but to move from his military stationing in Ferrara to Rome. In Rome in 1919, the manner of his painting immediately underwent the most radical change of his career, taking on the classical style which marked much of his later oeuvre, including the present work. It was in front of Titian's painting of Sacred and Profane Love that de Chirico was granted what he later described as "the revelation of great painting" that made him realize that the true mystery and fascination of pictorial art lay not within a painting's subject matter but within the way in which the image was painted. "There is a static, immobile and intense quality" he wrote, of the way in which Raphael paints drapery, for example, "which makes us think about the eternity of matter. The image seems to have existed even before the painter created it" (quoted in ibid., p. 76).