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Lot Essay
Il Trovatore presents its viewers with the masterfully strange and aesthetically transformative poetry characteristic of Giorgio de Chirico’s renowned Metaphysical paintings. The work depicts a perplexing figure: a blank-faced mannequin stands alone, cobbled together in a red, green and yellow wooden assemblage, ennobled by deep navy fabric hanging from its left shoulder. Stark light spills over the figure from the left side of the composition, casting rich, elongated shadows across a dreamlike piazza. Il Trovatore seems to suspend its viewers in the presence of an inscrutable other, out of time, at once harkening to forms of the past and typifying de Chirico’s celebrated, radical intervention in Modern Art.
De Chirico first explored the motif of Il Trovatore forty-two years prior in 1917. Drawing from his successes earlier in the decade of semi-mechanical figures with oblong heads, like Le Duo, The Seer and La Musa inquietanti, de Chirico iterates in an important way in Il Trovatore. He positions the armless mannequin in a slight contrapposto, reminiscent of Andrea Mantegna’s Saint Sebastian, and with its title and stylings, implies a more concrete referent in the figure of the courtly French medieval lyric poet—the troubadour.
To scholar Christina Santarelli, de Chirico’s interest in the subject of the troubadour can be traced to the artist’s intellectual hero, Friedrich Nietzche; she writes that Il Trovatore “was probably influenced by Nietzsche, who in the final song of Diefröhliche Wissenschaft [The Gay Science] makes the medieval musician-poets the symbols of a new freer, dancing and joyous art, more transgressive because it is aware of having demolished all idols” (C. Santarelli, “Disquieting Muses and Tired Troubadours: Giorgio de Chirico and Mediterranean Metaphysics” in Music in Art, 2012, vol. 37, nos. 1-2, p. 269).
Indeed, this image of the troubadour befits de Chirico’s project of aesthetic transvaluation and inventiveness, one that would remain a potent symbol to the artist in his habitual revisiting of the motif, intensifying its coloration and striking starkness in the intervening years. The present work was once held in the collection of the University of California, Los Angeles before being acquired by the late owners. It has remained in the Saltzman family’s collection for over forty years.
De Chirico first explored the motif of Il Trovatore forty-two years prior in 1917. Drawing from his successes earlier in the decade of semi-mechanical figures with oblong heads, like Le Duo, The Seer and La Musa inquietanti, de Chirico iterates in an important way in Il Trovatore. He positions the armless mannequin in a slight contrapposto, reminiscent of Andrea Mantegna’s Saint Sebastian, and with its title and stylings, implies a more concrete referent in the figure of the courtly French medieval lyric poet—the troubadour.
To scholar Christina Santarelli, de Chirico’s interest in the subject of the troubadour can be traced to the artist’s intellectual hero, Friedrich Nietzche; she writes that Il Trovatore “was probably influenced by Nietzsche, who in the final song of Diefröhliche Wissenschaft [The Gay Science] makes the medieval musician-poets the symbols of a new freer, dancing and joyous art, more transgressive because it is aware of having demolished all idols” (C. Santarelli, “Disquieting Muses and Tired Troubadours: Giorgio de Chirico and Mediterranean Metaphysics” in Music in Art, 2012, vol. 37, nos. 1-2, p. 269).
Indeed, this image of the troubadour befits de Chirico’s project of aesthetic transvaluation and inventiveness, one that would remain a potent symbol to the artist in his habitual revisiting of the motif, intensifying its coloration and striking starkness in the intervening years. The present work was once held in the collection of the University of California, Los Angeles before being acquired by the late owners. It has remained in the Saltzman family’s collection for over forty years.