Giorgio de Chirico

La Medusa Studio d'Arte Contemporanea, Rome

Centro Arte Internazionale, Milan

Galleria La Colonna, Florence

Collezione N. Mobilio, Florence

International Galleries, Chicago

Claudio Bruni Sakraischik, Catalogo Generale Giorgio de Chirico, Opere dal 1951 al 1971, Milan, 1984, vol. II, no. 174, illustrated n.p.

The canvas is not lined. There is a layer of varnish preventing the UV light from fully penetrating, however UV examination reveals a few minor spots of fluorescence towards the left building, a few spots to the brown background and towards the lower right quadrant. Very minor circular dent to the canvas on the upper left corner. This work is in overall good condition.
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'Indeed, precisely the "pause in time" is suggested by metaphysical images that gradually build up an iconographic armoury, unique and incomparable, a mixture of personal memories and ancestral symbols, of humour and tragedy, of tranquillity and unease'.

Claudio Strinati in Metaphysical Art, The De Chirico Journals, Fondazione Giorgio E Isa De Chirico, Florence, 2012, p. 26

Piazza d’Italia belongs to one of Giorgio de Chirico’s most iconic series of Metaphysical paintings, in which an elegantly sculpted model of Ariadne dominates the centre of a curiously other-worldly Italian town square. The displacement of familiar elements and their arranged combination disorientates all sense of time and place whilst revealing a new myth or a new narrative.  Imbued with a timeless resonance, the myth of Ariadne, Theseus and the Minotaur has served as inspiration for artists as diverse as Titian to Lovis Corinth across the centuries.

Greek born de Chirico was particularly intrigued by the legend of the Grecian princess, in which Ariadne, abandoned by her lover on the island of Naxos after she had enabled him to slay the Minotaur is dramatically rescued by Bacchus. Most importantly, De Chirico was fascinated by Nietzsche’s highly personal interpretation of the figure of Ariadne and its myth interpreted as a labyrinth or riddle to resolve. As James Thrall Soby outlines ‘the sculpture of Ariadne took on a profound symbolic meaning for the painter, perhaps in part because it typified the classical past to which he had so often been exposed during his childhood in Greece, in part because Nietzsche had repeatedly invoked Ariadne’s name’ (quoted in Giorgio de Chirico and the myth of Ariadne (exhibition catalogue), Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, 2003, p. 83-84). In Piazza d’Italia and corresponding paintings, de Chirico chooses to depict Ariadne suspended between the moment of abandonment and salvation, contemplating her fate with seeming tranquillity. Matthew Gale notes that ‘Ariadne’s sleep is the moment in which abandonment and discovery touch, in which mortal and immortal, Apollonian and Dionysian worlds meet’ (Matthew Gale in: Giorgio de Chirico and the myth of Ariadne (exhibition catalogue), Philadelphia, Museum of Art, 2002, p. 56).

The principal themes of de Chirico’s œuvres, classicism and modernity, time, melancholy, nostalgia and existence are explored through recurring objects and motifs. De Chirico first explored the motif of Ariadne towards the end of 1912 and at the beginning of 1913 in works such as La Ricompensa dell’Indovino now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art (fig. 1). Through this figure, the contrast between modernity and antiquity is enhanced, reminiscent of Atget’s relentless photography documenting the rise of modernity in fin-de-siècle Paris which influenced a number of Surrealist artists through his sometimes eery documentation of life in the streets (fig. 3). De Chirico further continued to return to the fundamental theme of the Piazza throughout his career, finding constant inspiration, as Michael Taylor suggests, in ‘the infinite possibilities of a finite set of objects’ (Michael R. Taylor in: ibid., p. 133).

Dating from 1955, the present work incorporates the primary motifs which were of major significance within the Piazza d’Italia paintings: the red tower dominating the square, the train glimpsed in the background about to sweep through the scene, echoing the futurist signs of modernity, the two anonymous figures greeting each other, in darkness and almost as shadows, and, omnipresent, the classical statue of Ariadne which serves as the focal point of the composition. Ultimately Piazza d’Italia elegantly conveys the elegiac mood which Ardengo Soffici first attributed to these works: ‘Giorgio de Chirico expresses as no one else has done the poignant melancholy of the close of a beautiful day in an old Italian city where, at the back of a lonely piazza, beyond the setting of loggias, porticos, and monuments to the past, a train chugs […] or a soaring factory chimney sends smoke into the cloudless sky’ (Ardengo Soffici, ‘De Chirico e Savinio’, in Lacerba, 1st July 1914, translated from the Italian).