Pegaso e Lampo

De Chirico is considered the father of metaphysical painting, which was bom as a reaction to the Cubist and Futurist avant-gardes and posed as one of the most innovative experiences of the first part of the century. De Chirico today is best known for the works he created in the early part of his career: he was a very long-lived artist (he lived to be ninety), but it is mainly the works of the 1910s, 1920s and 1930s that have entered the collective imagination. Works that appear as if suspended, traversed by visions on which mysterious symbols and elusive characters move, dreamlike images and complex allegories that can be read only if one keeps in mind the composite and heterogeneous culture that nourished the imagination of Giorgio de Chirico, who was moreover always close to the literary circles of his time (two great literary figures such as Guillaume Apollinaire and Jean Cocteau held De Chirico in high esteem). Nicknamed Pictor Optimus because of his crystalline technique (the Latin, on the other hand, is a tribute to his profound classical culture, which the artist had also acquired by his training in Greece), Giorgio de Chirico was an artist who spanned the entire twentieth century, experiencing different phases: a debut under the banner of German culture with Böcklinesque works, the first metaphysical season of the 1910s, the 1920s with the works of the “classical” period, then again the second metaphysical season between the 1920s and the 1930s coinciding with his second stay in Paris, to arrive at the themes of tradition tackled until the 1950s and end his career with a return to metaphysics (so much to speak of “neo-metaphysics”). “De Chirico,” reads the introduction to the exhibition that Palazzo Blu in Pisa has dedicated to him from Nov. 7, 2020, to May 9, 2021, “imagines views of ancient cities that are superimposed on visions of modern cities taken from places of lived life, first Volos and Athens, then Munich, Milan, Florence, Turin, Paris, Ferrara, New York, Venice, Rome. These are places where the public space uninhabited by man is populated by objects (fragments, ruins, arches, arcades, street corners, walls, buildings, towers, chimneys, trains, statues, and mannequins) that estranged from their usual context emerge with all their iconic force becoming unreal, mysterious, enigmatic.