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Lot Essay
The Piazza d'Italia is the most frequent subject and repeated theme in De Chirico's oeuvre. Deriving from a series of metaphysical paintings depicting a statue of Ariadne set amidst the dark shadowy arcades of a Turin piazza that the artist painted between 1912 and 1913, De Chirico's Piazza d'Italia paintings are meditative mandala-like variations on a single theme that lies at the heart of the artist's complex aesthetic and lifelong journey of philosophical discovery.
Painted at all stages throughout his life, De Chirico's Piazza d'Italia works, with their melancholic evening shadows, "ideal" architecture and strange angular perspective, exist in three distinct types: one with a fountain at its center, one with the statue of Ariadne and one with a statue of a man in coat tails seen from the back – a monument to the "political man." According to the De Chirico scholar Paolo Baldacci, their themes correspond to the subjects of the flux of time, feminine intuition and masculine creativity respectively. The symbolism of all these variants was based on a synthesis of Greek mythology, Nietzschean philosophy and De Chirico's own life and experience.
They are founded on an image of Turin, the city which had first revealed to de Chirico the "strange and profound poetry" of "an autumn afternoon" and which had also awoken in him the philosophical belief in another reality underlying that of perceptual understanding. Turin was also the location where Nietzsche had gone mad, breaking down one afternoon after witnessing a donkey being abused by its owner. This end to Nietzsche's metaphysical journey proved, however, to be the starting point of de Chirico's own odyssey and he began to subvert the classicism of the city's architecture and the strict rational logic of one-point perspective, so championed by the Renaissance humanists, and to transform it into a metaphor for the chaos of the uncanny.
Time, too is often suspended or even subverted in the Piazza d'Italia paintings, many of which often bear deliberately incorrect dates inscribed by the artist. Indeed, in these poetic but stage-set paintings, all is artifice; time has effectively come to a stop. Only the pervasive feeling of melancholy, implied by the contemplative statues of Ariadne reclining or the politician standing like a mysterious phallic and patriarchal presence alone at the center of a bizarre and ultimately illusory world imbues these paintings with any emotion or Dionysian sense of life.
Combining themes of chaos and time, of harmony and eternity and also of the essentially hermaphroditic nature of artistic creation—a creation dependent on the tense conjunction of masculine and feminine elements—De Chirico's Piazza d'Italia paintings are, like the images they show, repetitive monuments to the metaphysical odyssey that man takes through life. Depicting, more or less the same scene—for each of these near identical paintings was always deliberately made by de Chirico to be a slight variant of the others—this odyssey represents a spiritual voyage beyond time but rooted in the timeless and eternal myth of Ariadne and her thread.
This work painted circa 1956 and authenticated as such by the artist on the verso, was in the family collection of Barone Pasquale Cutore Recupero in Catania for over fifty years.
Painted at all stages throughout his life, De Chirico's Piazza d'Italia works, with their melancholic evening shadows, "ideal" architecture and strange angular perspective, exist in three distinct types: one with a fountain at its center, one with the statue of Ariadne and one with a statue of a man in coat tails seen from the back – a monument to the "political man." According to the De Chirico scholar Paolo Baldacci, their themes correspond to the subjects of the flux of time, feminine intuition and masculine creativity respectively. The symbolism of all these variants was based on a synthesis of Greek mythology, Nietzschean philosophy and De Chirico's own life and experience.
They are founded on an image of Turin, the city which had first revealed to de Chirico the "strange and profound poetry" of "an autumn afternoon" and which had also awoken in him the philosophical belief in another reality underlying that of perceptual understanding. Turin was also the location where Nietzsche had gone mad, breaking down one afternoon after witnessing a donkey being abused by its owner. This end to Nietzsche's metaphysical journey proved, however, to be the starting point of de Chirico's own odyssey and he began to subvert the classicism of the city's architecture and the strict rational logic of one-point perspective, so championed by the Renaissance humanists, and to transform it into a metaphor for the chaos of the uncanny.
Time, too is often suspended or even subverted in the Piazza d'Italia paintings, many of which often bear deliberately incorrect dates inscribed by the artist. Indeed, in these poetic but stage-set paintings, all is artifice; time has effectively come to a stop. Only the pervasive feeling of melancholy, implied by the contemplative statues of Ariadne reclining or the politician standing like a mysterious phallic and patriarchal presence alone at the center of a bizarre and ultimately illusory world imbues these paintings with any emotion or Dionysian sense of life.
Combining themes of chaos and time, of harmony and eternity and also of the essentially hermaphroditic nature of artistic creation—a creation dependent on the tense conjunction of masculine and feminine elements—De Chirico's Piazza d'Italia paintings are, like the images they show, repetitive monuments to the metaphysical odyssey that man takes through life. Depicting, more or less the same scene—for each of these near identical paintings was always deliberately made by de Chirico to be a slight variant of the others—this odyssey represents a spiritual voyage beyond time but rooted in the timeless and eternal myth of Ariadne and her thread.
This work painted circa 1956 and authenticated as such by the artist on the verso, was in the family collection of Barone Pasquale Cutore Recupero in Catania for over fifty years.