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Lot Essay
The Piazza d'Italia is the most significant and repeated theme of Giorgio de Chirico's œuvre. These enigmatic works formed an almost constant presence throughout his career, with their melancholic evening shadows and eerily empty squares evoking a sense of the mysterious reality that lies concealed behind the everyday. The symbolism, which first appeared in a series completed between 1912 and 1913, is based on a synthesis of Greek mythology, Nietzschean philosophy and de Chirico's own life and experience. For the Greek born, Italian painter the story of the abandoned princess Ariadne, who had saved Theseus from the Minotaur and was later rescued herself by Dionysus, took on a rich metaphorical meaning. She not only represented the classical past of his homeland, but also signified his reading of Nietzsche's radical reinterpretation of the myth, which cast Ariadne as a symbol for the ascension of intuitive consciousness.
According to de Chirico's scholar Paolo Baldacci, the artist upheld Nietzsche's vision of Ariadne as a metaphor for the soul, 'which, abandoned by Theseus--the hero of reason and logic--welcomes the superhero Dionysus, god of mysteries of earth and body' (P. Baldacci, Giorgio de Chirico The Metaphysical Paintings, London 1997, p. 138). The sad figure of Ariadne seen 'endlessly contemplating her shadow', as de Chirico wrote in a 1912 poem entitled 'The Statue's Desire', therefore signifies a state of limbo, where she awaits the physical and spiritual awakening that would return her to a labyrinth of the unconscious.
In this version of the Piazza d'Italia, de Chirico transports this classical subject into the industrial age, with a speeding train and an eternal meeting between two suited men in the distance. Like the slumbering Ariadne, these motifs are linked to de Chirico's metaphysics of anticipatory arrival, whilst the shadowy arcades of the surrounding buildings invoke the city of Turin. Turin was 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, at the end of his metaphysical journey. This location of the end to Nietzsche 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.
The artist expressly revisited his old themes in the Post-War years. In a sense, this was a ritualistic tribute that displayed de Chirico's loyalty to his art and his beliefs, which lead to the story of Ariadne becoming subsumed within his own myth, where she is an emblem for the artist's quest for knowledge and the pursuit of art itself.
According to de Chirico's scholar Paolo Baldacci, the artist upheld Nietzsche's vision of Ariadne as a metaphor for the soul, 'which, abandoned by Theseus--the hero of reason and logic--welcomes the superhero Dionysus, god of mysteries of earth and body' (P. Baldacci, Giorgio de Chirico The Metaphysical Paintings, London 1997, p. 138). The sad figure of Ariadne seen 'endlessly contemplating her shadow', as de Chirico wrote in a 1912 poem entitled 'The Statue's Desire', therefore signifies a state of limbo, where she awaits the physical and spiritual awakening that would return her to a labyrinth of the unconscious.
In this version of the Piazza d'Italia, de Chirico transports this classical subject into the industrial age, with a speeding train and an eternal meeting between two suited men in the distance. Like the slumbering Ariadne, these motifs are linked to de Chirico's metaphysics of anticipatory arrival, whilst the shadowy arcades of the surrounding buildings invoke the city of Turin. Turin was 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, at the end of his metaphysical journey. This location of the end to Nietzsche 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.
The artist expressly revisited his old themes in the Post-War years. In a sense, this was a ritualistic tribute that displayed de Chirico's loyalty to his art and his beliefs, which lead to the story of Ariadne becoming subsumed within his own myth, where she is an emblem for the artist's quest for knowledge and the pursuit of art itself.