Giorgio de Chirico

F.F. Collection, Rome

Galleria Bonaparte, Milan

Galleria Spagnoli, Florence

Acquired from the above by the present owner

Claudio Bruni Sakraischik, Catalogo Generale Giorgio De Chirico, Rome, 1976, vol. VI, no. 517, illustrated 

Imbuing quotidian objects and surroundings with a sense of the mysterious, Interno metafisico con biscotti is a superb example of Giorgio de Chirico’s mature metaphysical paintings. Within the present work, the artist depicts a fantastical interior, crowded with familiar objects – biscuits and a life preserver – amid curious geometrical forms. De Chirico’s masterful juxtaposition of these elements in unexpected combinations challenges the viewer’s preconceived notions of the fundamental nature of the objects themselves. Removed from their usual context, the biscuits seem to become endowed with an uncanny sense of ‘otherness’, becoming almost abstract in form and meaning.

Interno metafisico con biscotti features an astonishingly distorted sense of perspective: objects are enclosed by a wall which could equally plausibly serve as floor or ceiling. Many critics have remarked upon de Chirico’s resurrection of fifteenth-century perspective as a feature of his supposed classicism, overlooking the irrational and peculiarly twentieth-century character of his particular version, in which multiple and distorted vanishing points undermine any hoped-for stability. As William Rubin has argued, ‘Renaissance perspective projects a space that is secure and eminently traversable. De Chirico’s tilted ground planes, on the contrary, produce a space that, when not positively obstructed, is shallow and vertiginous’ (William Rubin, ‘De Chirico and Modernism’, in De Chirico (exhibition catalogue), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1982, p. 58). 

The term 'metaphysical' had first been given to De Chirico's paintings in 1914 by the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire and referred to the enigmatic quality of his urban landscapes and interiors. Interno metafisico con biscotti was painted in 1950, during a time when De Chirico was revisiting the themes and contents of his early metaphysical works; biscuits had originally appeared in his paintings around 1916. De Chirico referred to the world as ‘an immense museum of strange things’ (quoted in ibid. p, 57). With its curious clustering of diverse objects and forms, Interno metafisico con biscotti conveys the sense of wonder suggested by this phrase, standing as a magnificent exposition of De Chirico’s utterly inimitable creative imagination.