Italian square (Piazza d’Italia)

BIOGRAPHY

Greek-born, Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico commenced his artistic career studying at the Athens Polytechnic in 1900 and when the artist’s father passed away in 1905 the family moved to Munich where de Chirico began studying at the Academy of Fine Art. De Chirico returned to Milan, Italy in 1909 and began developing a new visual language in his practice utilising a flatter more abstracted pictorial plane. Arriving in Paris in 1911, de Chirico became part of the Parisian avant garde, making connections with the Cubists and later Surrealist artists.

During this period of dynamic output and experimentation, de Chirico established the notion of Metaphysical Art (Pittura Metafisica) – whereby the artist depicted bold Italian architecture, often void of people but with disquieting and unexpected juxtapositions of objects and forms. These compositions create an imagined world of known objects presented in disjunctive associations beyond the realms of reality.

ESSAY: Italian Square

Painted in 1951, Italian Square is a later work by de Chirico that demonstrates the artist returning to his earlier metaphysical art and revisiting a favoured subject (the artist painted at least three other versions of this work). Depicting the Piazza d’Italia in Turin, which de Chirico first visited in 1910, the work is imbued with an uncanny, otherworldly presence. The raking light casts long shadows from the two figures, the steam locomotive (often considered a reference to de Chirico’s father who was a railway engineer) travels slowly through the middle-ground, dwarfed by the monumental architecture and brooding evening sky. A classical sculpture of Ariadne rests heavily in the foreground, revelling in the viewer’s gaze with her monumentality reinforced by her mountainous shadow filling the foreground.