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Artist or Maker: GIORGIO DE CHIRICO 1888 - 1978
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Dimensions: 27 1/2 by 39 3/8 in. 70 by 100 cm
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Provenance: Private European Collection (and sold: Sotheby's, London, February 8, 2006, lot 389)
Private Collection, Japan (acquired at the above sale)
Acquired from the above by the present owner
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Notes:
Painted in his signature metaphysical style, Plazza D'Italia con Arianna belongs to a series of De Chirico's remarkably enigmatic Italian cityscapes embedded with a timeless, uncanny quality. Driven by a modernist impulse, de Chirico created works that juxtaposed the classical within a modern setting. Referencing his formal academic training in Germany and Greece and drawing inspiration as he frequently did from classical mythology, De Chirico here uses a plaster cast of the mythical figure of Ariadne (see fig. 1). Ariadne was a passive object of desire whom the Greek-born artist was deeply fascinated with, as the melancholic story of Ariadne had great symbolic meaning for de Chirico. De Chirico equated the Hellenistic figure with painting itself- her golden thread, which led Theseus out of the labyrinth, becoming a metaphor for the artist's quest for knowledge and perfection in painting (Giorgio de Chirico, Il Signor Dudron, Florence, 1998, p. 7).
De Chirico juxtaposes this sculpture from antiquity with evidence of the industrial age, referenced specifically by the steam train passing in the background. As with many of his paintings, this underscored de Chirico's idea of time versus stillness, as he invested this composition with a suspended narrative, simultaneously infusing the painting with both a sense of unknown mystery and a familiar, nostalgic quality. Piazza D'Italia con Arianna visibly embodies Surrealist credo, as de Chirico himself said: "What I hear is worth nothing; there is only what I see with my eyes open and, even more, what I see with them closed" (André Breton, Le surréalisme et la peinture, Paris, 1928, p. 38). Also evident here is the influence of Swiss Symbolist artist Arnold Böcklin on de Chirico's artistic trajectory. Like Böcklin, de Chirico's painting reveals the importance of classical myth while possessing an element of symbolic romanticism. As de Chirico himself commented: "[My art is a] frightening astuteness, it returns from beyond unexplored horizons to fix itself in metaphysical eternity, in the terrible solitude of an inexplicable lyricism..."(quoted in P. Baldacci, De Chirico, The Metaphysical Period 1888-1919, Milan, 1997, no. 114, p. 326).
As with many of his mysterious metaphysical paintings, Piazza D'Italia con Arianna is executed in a palette primarily of warm tones, white and green and is rendered in boldly simplified and modern forms. The deep recesses and heavy shadows cast by the rigid angularity of the Renaissance-style arches on the right-hand side of the composition and the dramatic shadows in the foreground of dream-like Ariadne, paired with the passing steam engine in the background combine to create an unsettling feeling that is so particular to both de Chirico and the Surrealist movement.
Fig. 1 Sleeping Ariadne, 2nd century A.D., marble, Museo Archeologico, Florence
