Galleria Gissi, Turin
Galleria Marescalchi, Milan
Acquired from the above by the present owner

Turin, Galleria Gissi, Maestri del novecento italiano, 1962, no. 2259

The canvas is unlined. There are some small spots of retouching, mainly at the right and lower framing edges, visible under ultra-violet light. Apart from a very slight stretcher mark at the upper edge, this work is in good condition. Colours: Overall fairly accurate in the printed catalogue illustration, although slightly fresher in the original.
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Le Muse inquietanti is one of De Chirico's most famous images, based on an earlier oil that marked the peak of his Metaphysical art. The first version of this composition, painted in 1917, was proclaimed by James Thrall Soby to be possibly 'the greatest painting of De Chirico's entire career'. The present work marks the artist's return to his most iconic imagery later in life, in what is now known as his New Metaphysical Period, and was inspired by the scenery of Ferrara, where De Chirico moved in 1915. In his autobiography, the artist wrote: 'The appearance of Ferrara, one of the loveliest cities in Italy, hade made a deep impression on me, but what struck me above all and inspired me from the metaphysical point of view in which I was working, was the appearance of certain interiors in Ferrara, certain window displays, certain shops, certain houses, certain quarters' (G. de Chirico, Memorie della mia vita, Rome, 1945, pp. 122-123).

 

The background of the present work is dominated by the Castello Estense in Ferrara, its striking, red 14^th century façade cont🐼rasted with the simple modern architecture of the factory on the left, and a dark portico on the right. The deep, elongated piazza is constructed of wooden planking resembling an interior space or a theatre stage, occupied by two haunting sculpted mannequins surrounded by several loosely defined objects. By juxtaposing familiar images of everyday life with imaginary human-like figures, De Chirico creates an alternative, mysterious reality which relates to the viewer's unconscious mind rather than a commonplace comprehension of the surrounding world.    

 

The two enigmatic figures in the foreground reflect the influence of classical sculpture and architecture of De Chirico's native Greece. As James Thrall Soby described them: 'They perch like angry phantoms amid the bric-à-brac of Chirico's dream world; they are menacing and ferocious, rather than lyrical, in conception. Their knob-like heads were probably inspired by those used on clothing store dummies... They evoke the terror unconsciously associated with automata, or with any effigy which may come inexplicably to life and lumber relentlessly in pursuit of its creators. The seated figure, with its unholy torso and amorphous legs, has a sinister implacable energy; one feels that it will presently rise to a towering height and proclaim a horrendous doom. The figure on the column is also an oracle of disaster, announcing a time of torpor and long waiting in a land of nightmare from which there is no escape' (J. Thrall Soby, The Early Chirico, New York, 1969, pp. 71-72).

 

It was in a convalescent hospital near Ferrara that in 1917 De Chirico met Carlo Carrà, one of the founding members of the Futurist movement. The two men soon became friends, and from their association evolved the Scuola metafisica. Both artists were interested in depicting psychic phenomena which lay hidden within the visible world. By establishing new, mysterious relationships between ordinary objects, they built a world freed from conventional logic and common-sense causality. As De Chirico and Carrà worked very closely, they influenced each other's ideas, and during a short period developed a common iconography. Through their illogical constructions they created enigmatic images filled with void spaces and shadows, as well as with figures that verge between humans, mannequꦕins and sculpture.

 

Ardengo Soffici, de Chirico's first Italian critic, observed: 'The painting of de Chirico is not painting, in the sense that we use that word today. It could be defined as a writing down of dreams. By means of almost infinite rows of arches and facades, he truly succeeds in expressing that sensation of vastness, of solitude, of immobility, of stasis which certain sights reflected by the state of memory sometimes produce in our mind, just at the point of sleep. Giorgio de Chirico expresses as no one else has ever 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, porticoes, and monuments to the past, a train chugs, the delivery van of a large department store is parked, or a soaring factory chimney sends smoke into the cloudless sky' (A. Soffici in De Chirico (exhibition catalogue), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1982, p. 37).