Giorgio De Chirico

Giorgio de Chirico’s Piazza d’Italia is a painting of a deserted, melancholic Italian town square, and it is one of the many repetitions of this subject during de Chirico’s career. In order to situate Piazza d’Italia, I will differentiate between the early career of de Chirico and his later career, as well as explain what the metaphysical painting style that de Chirico developed was, because I believe these are the two most significant aspects of my research on this artist and his work.

De Chirico’s early work, from 1911 until 1919, was characterized by mystery, silence, and belonged to the metaphysical painting style, meaning painting “beyond the senses” (Henning 140). The most common subjects of the early career of de Chirico were empty Italian town squares with everyday objects out of context that had the purpose of creating a feeling of surprise, and interior still lives with cakes, toolboxes and disjointed mannequins (Henning 143). However, after 1919 and until his death, de Chirico rejected his early style and

It was accomplished late during de Chirico’s career, in 1939, and it is a rework of a painting he made earlier in his career, but without the enthusiasm and creativity he had in the 1910s (“Chirico”). Though works of his late career are often ignored or criticised, this painting still had a profound effect on me.

In the meta-statement of the previous assignment, I supposed that the artwork that I chose belonged to the Surrealism movement because of its dreamlike infinite space and the unexplained cube in its foreground. I was wrong, since the painting actually belongs to the metaphysical painting style, however, de Chirico and metaphysical painting were considered to be precursors of Surrealism by the likes of André Breton (“Chirico”). This is significant because, though this artwork is not surrealist, the Surrealists admired