UC Berkeley
California Italian Studies
Title
‘Il faut méditerraniser la peinture’: Giorgio de Chirico’s Metaphysical Painting, Nietzsche,
and the Obscurity of Light
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https://escholarship.org/uc/item/12d9s5vb
Journal
California Italian Studies, 1(1)
Author
Merjian, Ara H.
Publication Date
2010
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“Il faut méditerraniser la peinture”:
Giorgio de Chirico’s Metaphysical Painting, Nietzsche, and “the Obscurity of Light”
Ara H. Merjian
From their first unveiling in Parisian salons in the early 1910s, Giorgio de Chirico’s
Metaphysical paintings (1909-1919) set off a discursive pursuit of their ostensible geographic
origins. Writing on de Chirico’s solo exhibition of 1913, the critic Maurice Raynal compared his
painting to the (notably Italian) archaeological nostalgia of Gabriele D’Annunzio, yet deemed de
Chirico “a consciously ‘French’ artist.” While Giovanni Papini and Ardengo Soffici argued for a
particularly Italian redolence about the images, other Italian writers dismissed de Chirico’s art as
entirely exogenous: a product of the “cloaca maxima of Paris’s Alexandrian snobberies,”
according to Roberto Longhi, one of Italy’s most eminent art historians.1 The American art
historian James Thrall Soby described de Chirico’s paintings as “unmistakably Italian,” whereas
the French salon critic André Billy called these same works “lugubriously Germanic,” and the
notable Parisian pundit Nino Frank identified in them a “very Nordic” poetry.2 Despite the
increasingly received notion of the Metaphysical paintings as betraying a fundamentally Italian
sensibility, de Chirico was himself disparaged in Italy after World War One as “il greculo.”
More recently, one Italian critic reckoned the images as “oppressively Teutonic.”3
The collective discrepancies of such accounts recapitulate the elusive pith of the
Metaphysical cityscape: a confusion and conflation of geographical allusions. Each image
reveals a fractured pictorial topography, shot through with numerous, simultaneous evocations,
but stripped of any precise locale. Consider, for example, de Chirico’s Gare Montparnasse
(1914) – perhaps his most “French” painting, in both title and style. As his only canvas to name
an actual place, it invokes a specifically Parisian one. [Fig. 1] Yet the preparatory drawing for
the canvas is catalogued at the Musée Picasso under the title “Place d’Italie avec bananes.” [Fig.
2] If the painting’s architectonics conjure up the iron and concrete modernity of the original Gare
Montparnasse’s side porch, they also evince the spare trabeation of an Athenian stoa; if the
canvas’s deep perspective cites the Italian Quattrocento, its radical flatness owes an equal, and
undeniable, debt to Cézanne.
On the occasion of a 1927 exhibition, the prominent Parisian critic, Waldemar George,
suggested a new rubric under which to file de Chirico’s images – a way, perhaps, to reconcile
My thanks to Claudio Fogu and Lucia Re as well as to the two anonymous reviewers for their very helpful
comments and criticisms. Any errors or oversights that remain are my own, as are, unless otherwise noted, all
translations.
1
Maurice Raynal, “Exposition G. de Chirico,” Gil Blas, October 16, 1913. Reviewing the Salon d’Automne of the
same year, Louis Vauxcelles mentions the “mystérieux et racé Georgio [sic] de Chirico”; while Vauxcelles’ “racé”
here may simply mean “distinguished,” it also bears a certain racial connotation. Vauxcelles, Supplement to Gil
Blas, review of Salon d’Automne, Nov. 15-16, 1913. Roberto Longhi, “To the Orthopedic God,” review of the
exhibition of Giorgio De Chirico’s works at the Galleria Bragaglia; published in Il Tempo, February 22, 1919.
2
James Thrall Soby, The Early Chirico, (New York: Dodd, Mead, and Company, 1941) 65; André Billy,
Apollinaire, Critique d’art (Paris: Paris-Musées/Gallimard, 1993) 101; Nino Frank, “Giorgio de Chirico et Alberto
Savinio,” in Cahiers de Belgique n. 4 (April 1929), 131.
3
Carlo Carrà, Il Selvaggio, Dec. 30, 1927 [“Il greculo Chirico”]; Umberto Barbaro, Le Ricche Miniere della Pittura
Contemporanea (Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo, 1948), 54.
1
their incongruities into one fold: “réalisme méditerranéen.”4 Here was a category at once
delocalized and geographically precise, generic and specific, in equal measure. George invoked
this same theme the following year, in a brilliant, lyrical monograph on the artist; insisting upon
de Chirico’s attention to “the limpid light of the Mediterranean coasts,” George titled his essay
“Chirico et les appels du sud.”5 A half-century later, a major exhibition, Giorgio de Chirico and
the Mediterranean, reprised and expanded this same aegis, setting de Chirico’s entire oeuvre –
from his early Metaphysical canvases up through his last, fraught efforts – in dialogue with all
manner of ancient Mediterranean artifacts.6 His work has since anchored various surveys of
Mediterranean culture, from exhibitions of European painting between the World Wars to
analyses of the region’s role in a globalized economy.7 [Figs. 3, 4]
In the wake of widespread confirmation of his “Mediterraneanness,” however, the artist
himself insisted otherwise. Writing in 1941, by which time his early Metaphysical imagery had
long been absorbed to the marrow of Italy’s modernist-Fascist cult of mediterraneità, de Chirico
remarked with characteristic spleen: “[W]ith regard to my art, it is a commonplace, both in Italy
and abroad, to trot out ‘Mediterranean spirit.’ I have never asked myself whether my spirit is
Mediterranean, Adriatic, Atlantic, or Baltic.”8 Of course, such a disavowal flies in the face de
Chirico’s actual images, steeped as much in the myth of Mediterranean antiquity as they are
structured by its environmental commonplaces: crisp light, stuccoed façades, arcuated porticoes
and piazze. His earliest canvases, painted after three years’ residence in Munich, follow in the
vein of Arnold Böcklin’s Symbolist figurations and treat specifically Greco-Roman themes, from
Prometheus and The Sphinx (both Winter 1908-09) to Battle of Centaurs (Spring 1909) and The
Departure of the Argonauts (Summer 1909). While his subsequent, Metaphysical images (c.
1909-1919) empty out the specificity of these mythical narratives in favor of a spectral
architectonics, they still evoke the Mediterranean as their unnamed – but indubitable and
unwavering – setting. What, then, prompted this umbrage at the notion of his art as
quintessentially Mediterranean? Why this refusal of a category to which his work clearly lends
itself – indeed, of which it appears emblematic, even somehow formative, in the history of
twentieth-century modernist painting?9 It was, it seems, a particular kind of Mediterraneanism at
which de Chirico took offense and from which he intermittently sought to distinguish his own
work.
4
Waldemar George, Giorgio de Chirico (Galerie Bucher, Paris, May-June, 1927).
Waldemar George, Chirico: avec des fragments litteraires de l'artiste (Paris : Chroniques du jour, 1928), xxiii. To
be sure, George’s championing of de Chirico’s works served his own (increasingly fraught) politics, which sought to
reconcile aspects of Parisian modernism with the rise of Fascist culture. See Matthew Affron, “Waldemar George: A
Parisian Art Critic on Modernism and Fascism,” in Fascist Visions: Art and Ideology in France and Italy (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1997) 171-204.
6
Jole de Sanna, ed., Giorgio de Chirico and the Mediterranean (New York: Rizzoli, 1998).
7
See, for example, Mediterraneo d'art. Il mare e la pesca da Giorgio De Chirico all'era della globalizzazione
(Rome: Erreciemme Edizioni, 2005); Mediterraneo. Mitologie della figura nell’arte italiana tra le due guerre
(Selerio, 2008).
8
De Chirico, “Perché ho illustrato l’Apocalisse” (1941), reprinted in Il meccanismo del pensiero. Critica, polemic,
autobiografia (Turin: Einaudi, 1985) 379 (hereafter Meccanismo). [“A proposito della mia arte, tanto in Italia che
fuori, è un luogo comune tirare in ballo ‘lo spirito mediterraneo.’ Non mi sono mai chiesto se il mio spirito è
mediterraneo, adriatico, atlantico o baltico.”]
9
See, for example, Werner Helwig, De Chirico: Peinture Métaphysique (Paris: Hazan, 1962) n/p: “A l’encontre du
Greco qui avait transplanté l’esprit crétois dans la Péninsule pour l’y concentrer dans des oeuvres d’une manieère
quasi invisible mais sensible, Chirico s’est approché de l’esprit grec avec une mentalité italienne, unissant les
éléments antiques et moderne de la Méditeranée dans un seul et même réve.”
5
2
During the same years that de Chirico painted his first Metaphysical canvases, the Catalan
modernist, Joaquim Sunyer, sought to reconcile a modernist idiom with timeless Mediterranean
idylls, exemplified in his paintings, Mediterráneo (Mediterrània) (1910-1911) and Pastoral
(1911-12). [Fig. 5]. Sunyer’s languishing female bodies are easily confused as counterparts to de
Chirico’s recurrent Ariadne figures, which appear in numerous canvases from 1912 and 1913.
[Fig. 6]. Eugeni d’Ors, the Catalan critic and theorist who had helped to launch the career of
artists like Sunyer, would later declare de Chirico an exponent of “rational, lawful, tectonic”
principles in the Mediterranean tradition, a producer of images “in honor of Logos.”10 But such
claims to de Chirico’s paintings disavowed (or ignored) the less rational origins of his Ariadnes,
the disquieting underside of their literary roots, and their stubborn semiotic circuity: thrice
removed from reality, as painted likeness of a stone representation of a mythical/literary figure.
Furthermore, while the Mediterranean aspects of Sunyer’s Noucentiste paintings aim to revive
Catalan culture in terms of millennial, classical tradition, de Chirico’s fitful invocations of Greek
and Italian elements eschewed any specific cultural or national(ist) agenda. Their Greco-Roman
sensibilities, which are themselves shot through with aspects of pre-classical culture and preSocratic philosophy, are put in the service of a singular, even solipsistic, vision. If we find the
Mediterranean in the Metaphysical images, it is only as a skeleton, stripped of its descriptive
particulars, impossible to distill to any particular national tradition or ideological application.
Unlike Sunyer’s paintings, de Chirico’s Metaphysical cityscapes are not timeless, but rather
“untimely”; they are not eternal, but eternally recurring. My Nietzschean allusions here are as
tendentious as de Chirico’s own. “To make wholesome art! Worse still: to make Mediterranean
art! (May the soul of Nietzsche absolve them of their innocence!)” [“Fare dell’arte sana! Peggio
ancora: far dell’arte mediterranea! (Che i mani di Nietzsche perdonino loro cotanta
innocenza.”]11 His remarks here, in a 1924 essay on Gustave Courbet, provide an apt touchstone
for examining his particular version of mediterraneità. For, it was Nietzsche’s writings from
which de Chirico drew his notions of the Mediterranean – notions that exceeded geographic
resonances in their metaphorical import, but fell willfully short of any collective or political
application. In the period between the World Wars in Europe, numerous figures, including de
Chirico himself, championed the so-called “Return to Order” – a sober redressment of the Great
War and its devastations, of which the pre-war avant-gardes had come to seem both symptom
and cause. De Chirico’s Metaphysical images, which had already reconciled modernist and
classical elements, appeared as models for a range of interwar efforts at recapturing “plastic
values” while not entirely renouncing modernism.
Even as de Chirico’s own painting ossified after World War One into an increasingly
conservative and rigidly neoclassical idiom, his writings clung to many of the paradoxical
aspects of his early work.12 In particular, he refused the valences of “health” and “innocence”
often ascribed to, or identified in, his particular evocations of Mediterranean culture. It is on the
10
Eugeni D’Ors, “Giorgio de Chirico y la inteligéncia sarcástica,” La Gaceta Literaria, Madrid, n. 79 (January 4,
1930).
11
De Chirico, “Gustave Courbet” (1925); reprinted in Il meccanismo, 250. De Chirico explains earlier in the essay,
“Oggi in Italia la pittura senza fantasi va sotto la demominazione di arte sana. Privato della fantasia un quadro si
presenta sotto l’aspetto della noia e dell’inutilità; inoltre, conseguenza diretta della mancanza di fantasia è la
mediocrità e spesso brutezza assoluta della tecnica e della materia pittorica.”
12
Despite the reactionary shift in de Chirico’s compositions, his writings reveal a striking continuity in terms of his
aesthetic and ideological ethos. His essays and novels from the 1920s, 30s, and 40s continued the defiant spirit of his
early paintings and writings, often elaborating previous themes, increasingly at odds with the conservatism of his
image-making. His novel Hebdomeros (1929), for example, remains a decidedly “Metaphysical” work of art.
3
significance of that refusal, and its roots in de Chirico’s close study of Friedrich Nietzsche’s
writings, that I hope to shed some light. It is, in fact, light itself – as both a formal strategy and a
philosophical metaphor, a mode of ostensible transparency and coded obscurity – that most
poignantly articulates the fraught place of the Mediterranean in de Chirico’s oeuvre.
Nietzsche and the “Stimmung des Sudens”
“I will now whisper something in your ear: I am the only man to have truly understood Nietzsche
– all of my work demonstrates this.”13 After moving from Munich (where he had studied for
three years) to Italy, de Chirico penned these lines to his friend Fritz Gartz in 1910, when his
paintings first assumed the architectonic dimensions that would mark his work over the next
decade. As he moved away from the formative influence of Böcklin’s Symbolist canvases,
Nietzsche’s writings came to exercise the greatest single influence upon the development of de
Chirico’s Metaphysical venture.14 As with his interest in Böcklin, a great part of de Chirico’s
attraction to Nietzsche derived from the latter’s demonstrative rapport with Mediterranean
culture, which helped de Chirico navigate the tensions between his own origins and his extensive
residence in northern European cities. As an Italian born and raised in Greece, between Volos
(ancient Iolchos, mythical launching site of Jason and the Argonauts) and Athens, de Chirico
incarnated – quite literally – a modern Greco-Roman sensibility. Rather than an elective affinity,
his connection to both Italy and Greece fueled his self-appointed identity as Nietzsche’s latterday disciple. Nietzsche had declared himself a “Man of the North in the South,” a southerner “a
southerner, not by descent, but by faith.”15 De Chirico thus considered himself, in a sense,
Nietzsche’s chiasmic counterpart: a man of the Thessalian “south,” displaced in Munich and
Paris. It was Nietzsche, a German notably at odds with his own cultural inheritance, who
mediated de Chirico’s (re)discovery of the “South” as a philosophical and aesthetic trope.
Nietzsche mined ancient Greece for some of his most prominent conceits, from the
Apollonian/Dionysian dialectics of The Birth of Tragedy, to his extensive writings on the PrePlatonic philosophers, to his final, mad letters, signed “Dionysus.” Even in his pronouncements
on contemporary (German) culture’s overweening historical proclivities, Nietzsche declared
13
De Chirico, Letter to Fritz Gartz, dated “Florence 26 Januar 1910”; reprinted in Gerd Roos, De Chirico e Alberto
Savinio. Ricordi e documenti (Monaco, Milano, Firenze, 1906-11) (Rome: Edizioni Bora, 1999) Appendix I, v, p.
422. Thanks to the extensive archival research of Gerd Roos, who discovered many of de Chirico’s extant letters to
his friend Fritz Gartz, we know for certain that by the summer of 1909 Giorgio and his brother Alberto had read at
least Ecce Homo and Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in addition to French translations of The Birth of Tragedy, The Case
of Wagner, and probably The Gay Science. See Paolo Baldacci’s discussion of Roos’s findings and of de Chirico’s
early readings of Nietzsche, in Baldacci, Giorgio De Chirico: The Metaphysical Period, 1888-1919, trans. Jeffrey
Jennings (New York: Bullfinch, 1997), especially 67-74.
14
On de Chirico’s uses of Nietzsche, see Baldacci, Giorgio de Chirico and “The Function of Nietzsche’s Thought in
de Chirico’s Art,” Nietzsche and “An Architecture of Our Minds” (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 1999);
Ara H. Merjian, Urban Untimely: Giorgio de Chirico and the Metaphysical City (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of
California, Berkeley, 2006). Baldacci’s monograph is a model of both historical diligence and theoretical
sophistication, and he is the first scholar to pay sustained attention to de Chirico’s reading of Nietzsche (and to a
lesser extent Schopenhauer and Heraclitus). Baldacci’s book serves as both a comprehensive monograph and a
catalogue raisonnée of the Metaphysical period.
15
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, “Peoples and Fatherlands,” in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. and ed.
Walter Kauffmann (New York: The Modern Library, 1968), 385.
4
himself “a student of more ancient times, particularly the Greeks.”16 The Italian cities where
Nietzsche lived and worked during the late 1870s and 1880s also influenced the philosopher’s
writings in both topic and tenor, a fact that Nietzsche frequently emphasizes in his texts, from his
letters to Peter Gast (Heinrich Köselitz) to the his poems in the Gay Science, up through his last,
frenzied decrees in Ecce Homo. His travels to Genoa, Rome, Sorrento, and other Italian locales
coincided with – and to a great extent fueled – his gradual split with Wagner, his rejection of
German Romanticism, and his development of an increasingly clipped and aphoristic style of
writing.17 Though inland from the Mediterranean shores that had “cured” him of deleteriously
German proclivities, the city of Turin – where his mental illness set in over the winter of 1888 –
stood for Nietzsche as the summation of the “southern” sensibility that revolutionized his
thinking and his body. “T[urin is] the first city where I am possible,” Nietzsche wrote to Gast.
“It’s the air that does it – dry, energizing, jolly.”18
Several of de Chirico’s early Metaphysical images allude to the philosopher’s famous
mental breakdown in Turin and to the enduring association of his madness and his genius with
that city’s particular pathos.19 That Nietzsche’s dawning madness coincided with the artist’s own
birth, that same fateful year, formed an origin myth for de Chirico – one to which he would make
recourse in claiming the privileged mantle of Nietzsche’s philosophical insight. “The beauty of
Turin,” de Chirico writes decades later, “is difficult to apprehend – so difficult that aside from
Nietzsche and myself, I know of no one who has concerned himself with it until now.”20 His
early Metaphysical paintings already form more tacit, pictorial declarations of the same ilk. Still
Life: Turin Spring (1914) [Fig. 7], for example, restages the view from Nietzsche’s hotel room
on Turin’s Piazza Carrignano, conceptually merging that vision with de Chirico’s own. In his
paintings or writings de Chirico often transcribes Nietzschean passages almost literally:
incorporating esoteric symbols mentioned by Nietzsche, painting Turin’s “aristocratic calm” and
“yellow or reddish brown.”21 With their piazze adorned with Turin’s Risorgimento monuments
and their perspectives plunging to surrounding mountains visible from a city center, some of the
images seem directly to invoke Nietzsche’s descriptions of “the Piazza Carlo Alberto and the
hills beyond.”22
16
Nietzsche, preface to “On the Use and Abuse of History for Life,” Untimely Meditations, trans. R.J. Hollingdale
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
17
Writing from Turin in 1888, Nietzsche informs his readers that Daybreak was “first thought, caught among that
jumble of rocks near Genoa”; Human, All Too Human, he relates, “was written in the main in Sorrento,” while he
traces Zarathustra’s conception back to Genoa, Rome, and specifically to the Piazza Barberini. See Nietzsche, Ecce
Homo, in Basic Writings, 744. The Antichrist, he notes, was completed in Turin, as was Twilight of the Idols – in
between strolls “along the Po river” and sessions in his apartment on “Via Carlo Alberto 6, fourth floor, opposite the
imposing Palazzo Carignano.” Ibid, 771. See also The Gay Science, “Songs of Prince Vogelfrei,” “In the South,”
Appendix, 355: “Accept me southern innocence! . . . Is German, not life – a disease . . . Southward I flew, across the
seas.” See also Nietzsche’s letter from Turin to Peter Gast, Aug 9, 1888: “Today an incredibly beautiful day, colors
of the south!”
18
Nietzsche, Letter to Peter Gast, April 20, cited in Lesley Chamberlain, Nietzsche in Turin: An Intimate Biography
(New York: Picador, 1996), 44.
19
See Wieland Schmied, “Turin als Metaphor für Tod und Geburt,” in De Chirico und seine Schatten (Munich:
Prestel-Verlag, 1989); Paolo Baldacci, Giorgio de Chirico.
20
De Chirico, “Paola Levi-Montalcini” (1939), reprinted in Meccanismo, 362. [“La bellezza di Torino è difficile a
scorgere; talmente difficile che fuori Nietzsche e di me stesso non conosco nessuno che se ne sia proccupato
finora.”]
21
Nietzsche, Letter to Heinrich Köselitz, April 7, 1888, in Briefwechsel, Kritische Gesamtausgabe, 5: 285.
22
Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. and ed. Walter Kauffmann (New York: The Modern
Library, 1968), 772.
5
Yet such apparent, pictorial equivalences get us only so far in considering what, precisely,
de Chirico distilled from Nietzsche’s writings. His uses (and abuses) of Nietzsche are not simply
– nor, for that matter, chiefly – iconographic, literal, or topographical. On the whole, de Chirico
does not translate his uses of Nietzsche into a set of places or objects, but rather a way of seeing,
a strategy of representing. By de Chirico’s consistent admission, it was Nietzsche’s work that led
him to paint the particular “Stimmung” of space – “atmosphere in the moral sense,”23 as de
Chirico would later gloss the term. In his memoirs, he describes this Stimmung both temporally
and spatially, as a season and a region: “the Mediterranean autumn . . . [the] terrible beauty of the
autumn discovered by Nietzsche.”24 In what follows, I address how Nietzsche’s insistence upon
the Mediterranean as a philosophical trope – rather than a mere subject or site – influenced the
development of de Chirico’s Metaphysical paintings, as well as marked his writing long after he
abandoned his early mode of painting.
“Il faut méditerraniser la peinture”: Nietzsche, de Chirico, Wagner, Weather
Nietzsche launched his career with a controversial paean to the operas of Richard Wagner. The
Birth of Tragedy (1872) posited art, and music in particular, as the sole means of revivifying
myth in contemporary culture. After his fateful break with Wagner in 1876, Nietzsche insisted
again and again upon climate and geography as the source of their irreconcilable differences,
aesthetic and ideological. Again and again, he insisted upon these differences as indicative – or
propitious – of specific intellectual and cultural tendencies, both good and bad, healthy and sick.
Nietzsche casts the Christian histrionics of his former mentor as the inexorable product of the
Teutonic grove, the fog-ridden forest. Wagner’s art, he claimed, resounded with “muted
thunder.” It was “gray, gruesome, and cold.” It was an art of “bad weather, German weather!”25
As an antidote, he championed “the colors of the south” and a “Music of the South”; “We need
the south, sun ‘at any cost,’” he wrote to Erwin Rohde.26
Even Nietzsche’s praise for the Georges Bizet’s opera Carmen (1875) – made in no
uncertain terms at the expense of Wagner – is rendered in a language in which aesthetics,
identity politics, and dilettante meteorology are difficult to tease apart. With Bizet’s work,
Nietzsche writes in The Case of Wagner,
one takes leave of the damp north, of all the steam of the Wagnerian ideal . . .
[instead we find] the shortest line, the harsh necessity; above all it has what goes
with the torrid zone: the dryness of the air, the limpidezza in the air. In every
23
De Chirico, Memoirs, trans. and ed., Margaret Crosland (New York: Da Capo Press, 1994 [1945]), 55.
De Chirico, “Gustave Courbet,” in Meccanismo, 252 [“l’autunno mediterraneo . . . la] terribile belleza
dell’autunno scoperto da Nietzsche”]. This phenomenon is found almost exclusively, he writes elsewhere, “in Italian
cities and in Mediterranean cities like Genoa or Nice; but the Italian city par excellence where this extraordinary
phenomenon appears is Turin.” (Memoirs, 55). See also “Vale Lutetia,” in Meccanismo: “Torino è ancora una città
italiana e, malgrado certi aspetti ingannevoli nordici e occidentali, una città mediterranea” (267). “Nietzsche’s books
gave me a taste for those Italian cities with their many porticos.” Cited in Pierre Mazars, “Giorgio de Chirico,” Yale
French Studies 31 (May 1964 ): 112-67.
25
Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, “The Case of Wagner,” Section 3.
26
Nietzsche, Sämtliche Briefe, Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin Walter
de Gruyter, 1967–88).
24
6
respect, the climate is changed . . . southern, brown, burnt sensibility . . . Il faut
méditerraniser la musique: I have reasons for this formula.27
According to Nietzsche, Wagner’s music evinced a decomposition of both musical integrity and
bodily health. The only remedy was the dry air of Mediterranean clarity – “limpidezza” as he put
it, not coincidentally, in Italian (just as he would render gaya scienza in Provençal – implying
that it was as much a southern landscape and language that “cured” him of Wagnerian pomp as
any philosophical revelation). Nietzsche goes so far as to deem the environmental qualities of
Bizet’s work “African,” as reminiscent of a “Moorish dance,”28 pushing the envelope of his
music’s austral associations even further south. Nietzsche calls his new philosophy “the great
health,” the “ideal ‘Mediterranean,’” and deems those who choose to join him the “Argonauts of
the ideal.”29
Such a call resounded for de Chirico as a personal address. It confirmed his sense of
Nietzsche’s philosophy as intended only for a select group of like-minded initiates; and it
bolstered his self-styled mythography as a latter-day Argonaut, hailing (quite literally) from the
city of the Argos’ mythical departure. The weather – or lack thereof30 – in de Chirico’s paintings
after 1910 makes clear that Bizet’s breezes reached his work during the same time that he was
reading Nietzsche assiduously. Sharp lines and horizons, burnt tones and architectonic clarity:
these become the building blocks out of which de Chirico constructs his cityscapes. Compare
one of his earliest compositions from 1909, The Sphinx, with The Soothsayer’s Recompense,
painted four years later [Figs. 8, 9]. The hazy skies, frenzied brushwork, and morose subject
matter of his earlier imagery have evaporated in the later canvas, revealing a limpid, fresco-like
aridity of sun-baked porticoes and piazze. Tempestuous, murky skies have given way to crisp
delineations of light and shadow; a foreground littered with the morbid details of bloody bones
and skulls has been replaced by a clear swath of sun-baked ground. A few paintings and
drawings after 1913, including The Soothsayer’s Recompense, go so far as to include palm trees
and demonstrably “southern” (even “African”) bananas.31 But it was the more comprehensive
evocation of dryness, clarity, and linear definition by which de Chirico applied Nietzsche’s
“formula,” almost to the letter. He used Nietzsche’s philosophy to “Mediterraneanize [sic]” his
own aesthetics.
Writing on Nietzsche’s notion of a “Southern music,” Walter Frisch argues that it refers
not to music that is necessarily composed in Italy, Spain, or Provence, but to the
ideal qualities of music. Music of the South is ‘effectively a private tag for music
that has agreed’ with Nietzsche physically and emotionally. When Nietzsche is
more specific about what such music is, he uses terms similar to those he uses to
describe his own literary style: in Love’s account, ‘deceptive naiveté combined
with great subtlety (heiter und tief); refined awareness of its own modernity and a
27
Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, Section 2.
Ibid.
29
Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Section 382, “The great health”; 346: “the coasts of this ideal ‘Mediterranean.’” Ecce
Homo, 754: “ideal ‘mediterranean’”; “argonauts of the ideal.”
30
I would note here the significant overlap, in French and Italian, of the denotations “time” and “weather” in the
word temps/tempo.
31
De Chirico, “Paulhan MSS” (c. 1911-13) in Hebdomeros and Other Writings, ed. John Ashbery (Cambridge:
Exact Change, 1992), 210-11. [“African sentiment. The arcade is here forever . . . The happiness of the banana tree .
. . Palm trees.”]
28
7
conscious delight in the deliberate exploitation of tradition.32
For Nietzsche, a renewed gravitas and mystery could only take root in an art which appeared –
on the surface of things – light, linear, and logical. Even if that aesthetic concealed a
fundamental illogic and terror, it must not wear that affect – like Wagner’s music in particular,
and Romantic culture in general – on its proverbial sleeve. It must appear, instead, light,
cheerful, rational, and clear.33 In de Chirico’s own subtle “exploitations of tradition” after 1912 –
when he begins inserting modern smoke stacks and trains into the background of seemingly
ancient cityscapes – he avails himself of similar strategies. In the same spaces, he increasingly
conflates affects of joy and anxiety, lightness and solemnity, apparent simplicity and recondite
sophistication. Moreover, the images short-circuit the ascription of such sentiments to any
specific geography or tradition, appealing as much to German Symbolist and Romantic
morbidity as to the apparent insouciance of Mediterranean tranquility.
More specifically, we find in these images the frequent juxtaposition of elements both
innocent and anxious, whether a young girl rolling a hoop near an empty hearse (in Mystery and
Melancholy of a Street, 1914) or else the brooding furrow of ubiquitous arcades that often loom
alongside bright, toy-like objects (The General’s Illness, The Sailors’ Barracks, Metaphysical
Composition with Toys, 1914 [Fig. 10]). This last painting invokes not simply the harmless play
of children’s toys, but also alludes to the organs assembled on the sacrificial altars of augurs in
ancient Rome and Etruria.34 De Chirico’s ostensible naïveté, then, is as willfully “deceptive” as
Nietzsche’s. And perhaps here we sense why – and to what end – de Chirico’s own conception of
the Mediterranean refused the “wholesome” and “innocent” (to recall his own disparaging
words) labels applied to his paintings after World War One. Though the Metaphysical canvases
after 1912 appeared increasingly dry, clear, even “jolly,” other valences lurk in the same crisply
delineated spaces and surfaces. Even de Chirico’s earliest extant writings – penned in Paris from
around 1911 to 1913 – evoke, in their strange combination of sentiments, the sense that his
serene piazze belie other, more anxious resonances: “in spite of its afternoon warmth, it is icy.”35
Looking south, writing south
Indeed, no less striking than his painted “Mediterraneanizations,” and inextricable from them,
are de Chirico’s adoption of Nietzschean rhetoric in his writings, during and after the
Metaphysical years. In a series of essays culminating in the late 1910s, he recapitulates the
principle tenets of his Metaphysical theories, even as his painting adopts an increasingly rigid
and conservative tack. In his crusades against the (modernist) use of painterly imprecision to
generate a sense of wonder or marvel, de Chirico employs the same terms that Nietzsche had
used in his polemics against Wagner. He condemns the modernist penchant for formal
deformation, for example, in psycho-pathological and corporeal terms such as hysteria,
32
Walter Frisch, German Modernism: Music and the Arts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 25.
The Genealogy of Morals, 457: “[C]heerfulness – or in my own language gay science – is a reward: the reward of
a long, brave, industrious, and subterranean seriousness, of which, to be sure, not everyone is capable.” See also the
preface to The Genealogy of Morals, on Zarathustra: “the halcyon element out of which that book was born . . . in its
sunlight clarity, remoteness, breadth, and certainty” (458).
34
See Ara H. Merjian, “Untimely Objects: Giorgio de Chirico’s The Evil Genius of a King (1914) between the
Antediluvian and the Post-human,” to Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics, forthcoming Spring 2010; and Maurizio
Calvesi, “L’incontro di de Chirico con Apollinaire,” Storia dell’arte 102 (May/August 2002).
35
De Chirico, “Eluard MSS” (c. 1911-13) in Hebdomeros and Other Writings, 184.
33
8
effeminacy, and hypersensualism. In plain imitation of Nietzsche’s anti-Wagnerian rhetoric, he
also couches certain aesthetic invectives in meteorological and environmental metaphors, such as
murkiness, mistiness, cloudiness and haze. Conversely, he uses decidedly Nietzschean turns of
phrase to exalt favorable qualities and tendencies: dryness, clarity, “spectrality,” linear precision.
And, like Nietzsche, in praising these qualities in other artists, he essentially describes his own
style.36
In his 1919 essay, “We Metaphysicians,” a kind of retrospective manifesto (whose title
recalls Nietzsche’s “We Philologists,” [1874]), de Chirico credits “the Pole Nietzsche [sic]” as a
vital forerunner of his ventures in painting, before proceeding to clarify that painting’s seemingly
rarefied designation:
In the word ‘metaphysical’ I see nothing tenebrous; it is the tranquil and senseless
beauty of matter that appears to me ‘metaphysical,’ and even more metaphysical
to me are all those objects which, in the precision of their color and the exactness
of their dimensions, represent the antipodes of all confusion and nebulousness.
His essays on Courbet, Max Klinger, Böcklin, and “The Architectonic Sense in Ancient
Painting” all form thinly veiled eulogies to his own painting in this regard.37 He writes of
Klinger’s imagery, for example, that it evokes “a sun that does not burn,” a “sweet and
Mediterranean tranquility.”38 Böcklin and Wagner, he writes, “were antipodes in spirit. In
Wagner everything remains undefined; it murmurs and runs together . . . In Böcklin, by contrast,
the metaphysical power always derives from a specific phenomenon that is exact and clear.”39
Expounding on the paintings of Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain, de Chirico lauds their
“arcane joys of mysticism and of the metaphysical, in stripped and geometric surroundings.”40
Not coincidentally, Claude is one of the few painters that Nietzsche praises in his entire body of
writings, remarking upon his images on several occasions as examples of Italy’s “halcyon”
perfection and invoking Claude’s imagery to describe the environs of Turin.41
It is significant that all of the artists whom de Chirico praises for their Mediterranean
sensibilities hail from the North. The distance between their culture and the “Middle Sea,”
36
“In Munich I was very much a Wagnerian,” de Chirico writes years later in his memoirs, describing his days
before his conversion to Nietzsche’s philosophy, and its profound consequences on his aesthetics. (Memoirs, 64); I
have here availed myself of the translation offered in Baldacci, Giorgio de Chirico, 71. Baldacci was the first to
address this aspect of de Chirico’s thought – and its roots in his study of Nietzsche.
37
When speaking of Hans Thoma’s scenes “deprived of any human presence,” or of Klinger’s “extraordinary
comprehension of the metaphysicality of cities” de Chirico is describing his own imagery as much, if not more, than
that of the artists at hand. Giorgio de Chirico, “Osservazioni su una mostra d’arte tedesca,” undated manuscript in
the collection of the Fondazione de Chirico; reprinted in Giorgio de Chirico/Isabella far, Commedia dell’arte
Moderna (Milan: Abscondita, 2002), 128. [“Bellissime anche le incisioni di Hans Thoma . . . si vede una scena priva
d’ogni umana presenza”; “Straordinaria era pure la sua comprensione della metafisica delle città”].
38
De Chirico, “Max Klinger” (1921), reprinted and translated in Massimo Carrà, ed., Metaphysical Art (New York:
Praeger, 1971), 98.
39
De Chirico, “Arnold Böcklin,” (1920), in M. Carrà, ed., Metaphysical Art, 138. I am here indebted to Paolo
Baldacci’s incisive discussion of de Chirico’s opinions on Wagner and Wagnerism, particularly following his study
of Nietzsche. See Paolo Baldacci, Giorgio De Chirico: The Metaphysical Period, 1888-1919, trans. Jeffrey Jennings
(New York: Bullfinch, 1997), 71-74.
40
De Chirico, “The Architectonic Sense in Painting,” in Carrà, ed., Metaphysical Art, 95.
41
See Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, “Why I Write Such Good Books,”; Twilight of the Idols; Nietzsche Contra Wagner;
and various letters to Peter Gast, Franz Overbeck, and Meta von Salis (KSA, 6.356).
9
according to de Chirico, occasioned a specific – and more admirable, because hard-won –
apprehension of the Mediterranean spirit on their behalf. He writes, “Germany is situated in the
middle of Europe. Such a fate places a barrier between her and the Mediterranean and Eastern
countries . . . [this] means that when her men of genius want to look deeply into these worlds,
they have to lean out like prisoners between the bars of high windows.”42 Once again, de Chirico
implicated himself in the fold of said artistic genius. We should recall here, too, Nietzsche’s
insistence, in the “Peoples and Fatherlands” section of Beyond Good and Evil, on his own
identity as a “southerner, not by descent, but by faith.”43 Before de Chirico settled definitively in
Italy after 1915, he had spent far more time in Munich and Paris than the country of his ethnic
origins. His vision of the Mediterranean, and of Italy in particular, was thus conditioned by the
same “barrier” to which he refers here and which, like Nietzsche, he duly overcame.
But while the luminous clarity of de Chirico’s Metaphysical paintings came expressly to
defy “northern” histrionics, cured of Wagnerian intemperance, their light must not be mistaken
as a transparent illumination of idealized truths. For, even (or, especially) in its pretensions to
Nietzsche’s “great health,” de Chirico’s deployment of light refracts less wholesome valences;
while it conveys the integrity of spaces and objects, it seeks to put their presence and visibility to
less transparent ends, both semantically and philosophically.
Metaphysical painting and “the obscurity of light”
Like many German authors before him, Nietzsche used the Mediterranean as a mirror in which to
discern more clearly the specifically German character of himself and his nation. When he asks
“what is German” in various texts (such as The Gay Science), he consistently measures his
answers vis-à-vis Greek and “Latin” sensibilities (in defiant riposte, notably, to Wagner’s
tendentiously nationalist rhetoric in the 1878 essay, “Was is deutsch?”).44 Yet, importantly, it
was a particular aspect of Greek and Roman antiquity to which Nietzsche made recourse – one
notably ignored and repressed by Winckelmann, Hegel, and Goethe in their own (German)
versions of “the classical ideal.”45 Appealing particularly to the enigmatic and often
unfathomable aphorisms of Heraclitus, Nietzsche aimed to recuperate pre-Socratic Hellenism as
the basis of his “Philosophy of the Future.” The obscured legacy of Heraclitus exemplified for
Nietzsche a Greek world prior to the ratiocinations of Socrates and sophrosyne, of what
Nietzsche disparagingly refers to as “Greek cheerfulness.” The short, terse aphorisms of
Heraclitus’s writings appeared to him more mysterious and inscrutable than the most
overwrought Romantic elucubrations. In Heraclitus’s writing, Nietzsche found a strangeness
tantamount, despite its ostensible familiarity, to the most extrinsic of exotic orientalisms.46 Or,
rather, it was precisely the ostensible familiarity of this aspect of classical world that afforded a
covert, privileged use by the philosopher-genius. It is this Greece, Ernst Bertram writes, that
42
De Chirico, “Max Klinger,” in Carrà, ed., Metaphysical Art, 98-99.
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, #255, 385.
44
Nietzsche, “On Germans as artists,” The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kauffmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), 13032.
45
Nieztsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1967),
849. [“Future things. – Against the romanticism of great ‘passion.’ – . . . It is an amusing comedy at which we have
only now learned to laugh, which we only now see: that the contemporaries of Herder, Winckelmann, Goethe, and
Hegel claimed to have rediscovered the classical ideal - and at the same time Shakespeare!”]
46
See Sara Kofman, “Nietzsche and the Obscurity of Heraclitus,” Diacritics 17:3 (Fall 1987), 39-55; and Baldacci,
Giorgio de Chirico, 92-97.
43
10
represented for Nietzsche “a secret, interior Orient.”47 I want to address here how de Chirico
came to use even the seemingly familiar and reassuring quality of Mediterranean light as a
vehicle for representing more disturbing apprehensions and arcane meanings.
Despite the superficially classical trappings of de Chirico’s Metaphysical canvases, they in
fact incorporate a range of ignored and abjured strains of the pre-Socratic world – a world not of
Periclean or Platonic order, but rather of oracles and soothsayers, augurs and seers. Following
Nietzsche’s lead, de Chirico engaged most consistently and assiduously with what he called
Greek “prehistory,” leavening his imagery with subtle allusions to the various cultures and protoclassical traditions from the Mediterranean basin. In an autobiographical text, published in
Belgium in 1929 under the pseudonym “Angelo Bardi,” de Chirico makes plain what kind of
Greco-Latin world he sought to evoke in his painting from the early and mid-1910s. Bardi/de
Chirico declares that during his Metaphysical period, “he had discovered an enigmatic Greece
quite different from the Greece illustrated in schoolbooks, just as, after reading Nietzsche’s Ecce
Homo, [he] set about discovering the ‘mystery of Italy’ [‘le mystère italien’].”48 The enigmas of
Metaphysical Composition with Toys and The Evil Genius of a King (1914), for example, lie in
their conflation of modern and ancient temporalities in the same space and iconography,
confusing the commodities in a modern shop window with the sacrificial objects of a Roman or
Etruscan altar. But another aspect of that same “mystery” lay in the treatment of “Southern” light
as both a condition of vision and a metaphor of knowledge (and non-knowledge).
In particular, Nietzsche’s celebration of “cloaks of light” (Beyond Good and Evil), his
anthem to “We somnambulists of the day!” (The Gay Science), and his insistence upon “wideawake day-wisdom” (Zarathustra) influenced de Chirico’s exploration of light, clarity, and
linear precision as paradoxical sources of obscurantism throughout the 1910s.49 As a selfdeclared “photomaniac,” de Chirico declares at the conclusion of his Metaphysical period: “As
far as I am concerned, there is more mystery in a fossilized piazza in the clarity of midday than
in a dark room in the heart of the night, during a spiritual séance.”50 In his novel Hermaphrodito
(1916-18), Giorgio’s brother and closest collaborator, Alberto Savinio, describes their pre-war
activities in Paris, “We even had a philosophy; – that is, the principles of antiphilosophy. Latin
philosophical spirit, nourished by the profound obscurity of light: – an unprecedented fact. –
Nietzsche would have cried with joy.”51 Glossing this same notion years later, Savinio writes,
47
Ernst Bertram, Nietzsche: Essai de mythologie, trans. Robert Pitrou (Paris: Éditions du Félin, 1990 [1932]), 330,
334. Importantly, Bertram discusses how Turin served for Nietzsche as a kind of “transition” back to this “internal
Orient.”
48
Angelo Bardi [pseudonym of Giorgio de Chirico], “La vie de Giorgio de Chirico,” in Séléction: Chronique de la
vie artistique, cahier n.8, Éditions Séléction (Antwerp, 1929), 23.
49
In Beyond Good and Evil, for example, Nietzsche invokes a world “concealed under cloaks of light . . .
occasionally night owls work even in broad daylight.” Nietzsche, BGE, 245.
50
De Chirico, “Arte Metafisica e Scienze Occulte,” in Meccanismo, 62. [“Per conto mio credo che ci sia molto più
mistero in una piazza fossilizzata nel chiarore del meriggio che non in una camera buja, nel cupre della notte,
durante una seduta di spiritismo.”]
In a typically self-referential description, de Chirico writes of the Ferrarese painter Gaetano Previati that he
“succeeded in rendering the nocturnal sense of light, the sense of midnight at midday” – a quality that clearly
resonates with his own painting. “Gaetano Previati,” in Meccanismo. [“. . . riuscì a rendere il senso notturno della
luce, il senso della mezzanotte a meriggio…”]
51
Alberto Savinio, Hermafrodito (1914-1918) reprinted in Hermaphrodito e altri romanzi (Milan: Adelphi, 1995),
16.
11
“[I]n order to rehabilitate light, to save it from the compromise of too-closeness, Nietzsche
invented the ‘obscurity’ of light, of a midday light more profound than midnight.”52
But how did Metaphysical painting rescue its objects – say, Gare Montparnasse’s [Fig. 1]
bananas offered up for the taking – from the compromising “too-closeness” of legibility, of clear
light (and of positivist “enlightenment”)? For, this was precisely the purpose to which the
Impressionists had put light, whether that of Paris, Normandy, or the Mediterranean: a
registering of the contingent and the everyday; a vehicle of immediacy, purged of verbal
encumbrances and allegiances; a cipher of the present and of pure presence. And, as much as
Nietzsche (and de Chirico) disparaged Romanticism for its mawkish storminess, the qualities of
immediacy, presence, and the coarse texture of the present were equally inimical to both
Nietzsche’s philosophy and de Chirico’s painting. How, then, could the crisp light of the
Mediterranean be used both to expose objects – in the common place of the piazze – and at the
same time conceal them from “common” knowledge? In other words, how could de Chirico’s
sunlight squares be at once eminently public, yet at the same time – following Nietzschean
imperatives – jealously esoteric and exclusive?
The Nietzschean essence of de Chirico’s Metaphysical painting, and indeed the essence of
Nietzsche’s own esotericism, hinges precisely upon a concurrence of ostensible intelligibility and
coded obfuscation.53 It is that seeming contradiction to which Savinio gives voice in his trope of
“the obscurity of light.” Even Heraclitus’s appeals to light and dryness – what T.M. Robinson
calls Heraclitus’s “dryness-criterion” – informed Nietzsche’s transvaluation of his own
philosophy to this end.54 Dryness, clarity, and terseness in fact concealed an even more elitist
withholding of meaning from the commonplace. In this vein, if the significance of Gare
Montparnasse’s looming bananas is indecipherable, the fruit’s surface, its pictorial presence,
appears eminently legible. If the fruit’s untimely inappropriateness contributes to the painting’s
psychological suspension and estrangement from common sense, it does so in undisguised form.
Eschewing the facile portent of haze and darkness, but also rejecting the wholesome
transparency and immediacy of Impressionism, de Chirico pursued the more unlikely profundity
of Nietzsche’s “Great Noon,” with its mysteries displayed in the plain sight. The crisp outlines
and ostensible wholeness of objects in Metaphysical painting belies the more insidious nature of
presence in these images – a presence that is always also an absence (of sense, of teleology, of
52
Alberto Savinio, “Apollo,” Nuova Enciclopedia (Milan: Adelphi, 1977) 50. Sara Kofman notes in Nietzsche et la
scène philosophique that while Apollo is generally considered “précis, limpide, lumineux,” that in fact “la surface
apollinienne solaire dissimule une force potentielle cachée, l’horrible tréfonds de la nature, la nuit térrifiante [i.e.
Dionysianisme].” See Kofman, “Apollo/Dionys, Frères Enemis,” in Nietzsche et la scène philosophique (Paris:
Union Générale, 1979) 72. Kofman’s discussion of Nietzsche’s “autre ‘version du soleil’” is precisely what Savinio
and de Chirico articulate in their discussions of the role of light in Nietzschean philosophy.
53
In evident reflection of Giorgio’s application of this philosophy to his own mises-en-scene, Savinio’s
contemporary experimental drama, Les Chants de la Mi-Mort (1914) specifies the setting for Act II as: “A red
piazza. A wall [. . .] the dead of night, but the sky is blue.” [“Une place rouge. Un mur . . . Nuit complète, mais le
ciel est bleu.”] First published in Les Soirées de Paris n. 24, 1914, 420.
54
“A flash (or: ray) of light <is> a dry soul, wisest and best (or: most noble).” Heraclitus, Fragment #118, (John
Stobaeus 3.5.8), in Heraclitus, Fragments, ed. and trans., T.M. Robinson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1987). Robinson glosses this aphorism: “for Heraclitus the most rational and most nible (human) soul is one
composed, sequentially, of (a) the driest form of air, and (b) (after death) of aether, the clear, hot and dry upper
atmosphere that he took to be divine, and home of the gods of fire, the stars . . . At the extreme ends of the spectrum
are (a) those other souls (the majority) who inhabit the dank atmosphere that surrounds us and who (because also
constituted of it) are forever running the risk of death by condensation.” Robinson calls this hierarchy his “drynesscriterion” (p. 159).
12
meaning). Gare Montparnasse and The Soothsayer’s Recompense intend a mystery no less
obscure, arcane, and morbid than that evinced in The Sphinx and his earlier Böcklinian and
“Wagnerian” paintings. But the portentous mystery of a “spiritual séance” now takes place in the
light of day and appears as flippant as a wayward clump of fruit.
Pictor mediterraneus sum?
“I decorate myself with three words that I wish to be the seal of all my work: Pictor classicus
sum.”55 In a painting from 1923, it is not de Chirico who decorates himself with such an honor,
but the god Mercury himself [Fig. 11]. With his (in)famous “Return to the Craft” after 1920, de
Chirico began copying old master paintings at the Galleria Borghese in Rome, declared himself
“Pictor Optimus,” and returned to the literary specificity of Greco-Roman myth and history –
from Orestes and Electra, to Tibullus and Mesalla, to Telemachus and Penelope. The formerly
elliptical, disembodied iterations of myth in Metaphysical painting returned – like Mercury
bearing his laurel wreath – in the guise of more explicitly narrative forms. De Chirico
increasingly depicted the artefactual details that his images had long held at bay: ruined columns
and capitals, images of Ajax and ancient horses, indolent archaeologists and minotaurs, Oedipus
and Aesclapius, sibyls and trophies. “From the geographical point of view,” de Chirico
proclaimed in 1919, “it was inevitable that the initial conscious manifestations of the
metaphysical movement should have been born in Italy.”56 Declaring Metaphysical painting a
“Geographic destiny,” he thus conveniently disavowed the geographic, philosophical, and
cultural cocktail (of Greek myth, German Romanticism, and Parisian modernism) from which his
imagery had derived.
If Ardengo Soffici felt obliged to offer an “Apologia del futurismo” on the pages of his
journal, Rete Mediterranea, renouncing the violence of Futurism and the pursuit of aesthetic
novelty for novelty’s sake, de Chirico’s pre-War pictures owed no such justification. They
seemed, in fact, to have anticipated and invited the revival of classical principles on modernist
terms. The widespread pursuit of “valori plastici” during this period brought de Chirico’s
painting to the fore of contemporary Italian aesthetics. Prominent figures like Vicenzo Cardarelli
vaunted “our Olympian, Latin clarity”57 in his new journal La Ronda (1919-1922), to which de
Chirico and Savinio were prominent contributors. But as I hope to have shown, the ostensible
clarity of the Metaphysical canvases belies a more complex and insidious etiology – one that
defies the too-neat categories of “Olympian” or “Latin,” or even “Mediterranean” as it was
commonly deployed in the post-War period. On the surface of things, these terms seemed to
resonate with de Chirico and Savinio’s early appeals to a “latinismo moderno.”58 Yet it was
precisely the ostensible transparency of surface – and the attendant valences of intelligibility,
public presentation, and straightforwardness – that de Chirico’s Metaphysical images sought to
complicate. De Chirico’s Metaphysical paintings undertook a transvaluation of both national
specificity and of classicism, rather than simply an unqualified revivification of their “values” –
whether plastic or moral. Discussing the role of the Mediterranean in art between the World
Wars, Elizabeth Cowling writes, “Perhaps the most potent myth of all is that of the
Mediterranean world as Arcadia – an earthly paradise protected from the sordid materialism of
55
Giorgio de Chirico, “The Return to the Craft,” (1920), translated and reprinted in Carrà, ed., Metaphysical Art.
Giorgio de Chirico, “On Metaphysical Art,” translated and reprinted in Carrà, ed., Metaphysical Art.
57
Vicenzo Cardarelli, Viaggi nel tempo (Florence: Vallecchi, 1920).
58
Savinio, Hermafrodito, “Epoca Risorgimento,” 14.
56
13
the industrialized world, free from strife and tension, pagan not Christian, innocent not fallen, a
place where dreamed of harmony is still attainable.”59 With their interruption of antiquity by
factories and trains, their mannequins recalling the prosthetic limbs and masks of the Great War,
and the conflicting perspectives and raking light of their anxious spaces, the Metaphysical
paintings hardly evoke the Mediterranean as a site of unqualified Arcadia.
Nevertheless, the painter’s own equivocations and voltes faces after the war abetted various
(mis)interpretations of his work, particularly the resonances of its Mediterranean qualities. In
“We Metaphysicians” (1919), de Chirico dissociated his own painting from the nostalgic
palliatives of a facile neoclassicism: “Still less shall I play the fakir swooning at the Olympian
evocation of golden ages buried for all time,” he writes in “We Metaphysicians.”60 Yet, just two
years later, in a text from 1921, he remarked that his “most recent canvases, such as Oedipus,
[the] Salute of the Departing Argonauts, and the two versions of Statue of Mercury who Reveals
the Metaphysicians the Mysteries of the gods, one finds a tendency toward clear painting and
transparent color, a dry sense of pictorial material, which I call Olympian.”61 Only one of de
Chirico’s titles nominally invokes the Mediterranean: his 1927-28 La mia camera mediterranea;
he later painted a different version of the image, which he titled Ma chambre dans l’Olimpe –
revealing that he, too, casually slipped between Mediterranean and “Olympian” registers. De
Chirico thus wanted it both ways. On the one hand, he let his increasingly conservative forms
resonate conveniently with utopian (and increasingly Fascist) ideals of national unanimity; at the
same time, through a shifting and frequently disingenuous rhetoric, he sought to liberate his work
from any idealist purpose or collective cultural agenda.
For the young de Chirico, the Nietzschean “ideal ‘Mediterranean’” signified a space of
solitary exploration. The yoking of its commonplaces to anything smacking of grand, communal
ideals would have travestied the claim to the Mediterranean as a Stimmung of irreducible
mystery and prophecy, placed – like the inorganic and inert spaces of his piazze – into the
temporal, spatial, and semantic abeyance of quotation marks. When his imagery began to serve
as a touchstone for certain fusions of modernity and romanità in Fascist urbanism,62 de Chirico
refused (at first) to oblige the meliorist and collective aspects of such uses:
What of all those sublime and stupid resolutions of going back to the land, of folk
art, of sincerity, of abnegation, of honesty, of probity, of simplicity, of bowing
down before nature, of the cult of the beautiful, of health in art . . . of the
Mediterranean spirit, of victory over oneself? Twaddle and utopias? Utopian
fancies . . . ? Pure utopias! And of all that, nothing now remains; nothing but a
handful of ashes.63
The ends to which de Chirico had originally “mediterraneanized” his aesthetics before the war
were not the same to which painting was being submitted during the 1920s and ‘30s. He thus
recoiled from the notion of the Mediterranean as a metaphor for collectivity, whether cultural or
59
Elizabeth Cowling, On Classic Ground: De Chirico, Léger, Picasso and the New Classicism (London: Tate
Gallery, 1991), 12.
60
De Chirico, “Noi Metafisici” (1919) in Meccanismo, 70.
61
De Chirico, “Prefazione” (1921), in Meccanismo, 223.
62
See, for example, Metafisica Costruita: Le città di fondazione degli anni Trenta dall’Italia all’Oltremare,
(Milano: Touring Editore, 2002).
63
De Chirico, “The Survivor of Navarino” (1928), in Hebdomeros and Other Writings, ed. John Ashbery
(Cambridge: Exact Change, 1992), 131-32.
14
ideological; he feared that it confused his esoteric genius with the exoteric populism that proudly
bore the stamp of Mediterraneanism.64 A decade later, however, he changed his tune. In a 1938
interview in Italy, de Chirico’s pronouncements on Mussolini’s Third Rome cast a tendentious
light back on his Metaphysical paintings: “The Via del Impero has surprised me with its beauty.
The rebirth of Italy is by now a great conquest.”65 The painter clearly recognized aspects of his
own aesthetics in the new Imperial Way, with its ruthless eviscerations of history and
archaeology. More specifically, he appeared at ease with the increasing slippage between his
own “ideal ‘Mediterranean’” and the explicit imperatives of Italianità.
Indeed, just as they had served the tectonic logos of Eugeni D’Ors and the réalisme
méditeranée of Waldemar George, de Chirico’s scenes came to inspire, in turn, aspects of Fascist
urbanism, most notably the subtractive practices of sventramento (disemboweling) and
isolamento (isolation). During the very same years, however, his images also inspired the active
subversion of rationalism and nationalism by Surrealist activity in France and other countries.66
In a similar vein, while his pre-war pictures served painters between the world wars as models of
Italianità, Metaphysical painting was accused by some critics in Italy of evoking a “sick and evil
air of the north.”67 The architectonics of the Metaphysical canvases – at once generic and
specific – are always undermined by subtle, but seismic, destabilizations of geographic and
semantic propriety. This is why they afforded (and still afford) the projection of shifting claims
onto their reticent spaces. The Metaphysical cityscapes may be read as either consummate
expressions of health or as a portentous evocation of sick morbidity; as either public addresses or
solipsistic withholdings; as models of romanità or as thinly veiled “nordic” vision. Of course, the
images combine and conflate these aspects in equal measure. It is not simply their titles (to wit,
The Joy of Return/The Anxious Journey; The General’s Illness/The Gentle Afternoon) or their
paradoxical iconography that perform such conflations and equivocations. As I hope to have
shown, the more ineffable alchemy of light and “obscurity” in the pictures strikes the same
unresolved tension. And it is to that extent that they served various, contradictory agendas: both
aesthetic and ideological, by both de Chirico and others.
In an essay from 1916, after the de Chirico brothers had moved from Paris to Ferrara,
Giorgio’s brother, Alberto Savinio, exclaimed in a characteristically weird lyricism: “From this
ferment will spring the prototype of Mediterranean genius – the man in the wings, the religious
man, the pellican-man who rips open his chest from which lightening and shade will spray, as
well as a flaming heart . . . But where is this man? Who is he?”68 In Nietzsche’s writings, de
Chirico had found the “formula” for distilling such genius, one inflected by “lightening and
shade” in equal measure. For a while, he believed that Metaphysical painting could serve as its
64
Ricciotto Canudo’s use of the Mediterranean as the model for a new “Latin cinema” – in the service of a
universalist, utopian aesthetics – exemplifies such phenomena, even before World War One. Canudo’s prominence
in the Parisian avant-garde, particularly the circle of Guillaume Apollinaire, would have made his theories quite
available to de Chirico. See Giovanni Dotoli, Lo Scrittore Totale. Saggi su Ricciotto Canudo (Fasano: Schena,
1986).
65
De Chirico, interview with Leonida Repaci, L’Illustrazione Italiana, 13 february, 1938; reprinted in part in
Meccanismo, 477. [“Il risveglio dell’Italia ormai è una grande conquista”].
66
On the simultaneity and ironic commensurability of these uses, see Ara H. Merjian, “The Architectonic Afterlives
of Giorgio de Chirico,” in Architecture & Arts 1900 – 2004: A Century of Creative Projects in Building, Design,
Cinema, Painting, Sculpture (Milan: Skira, 2005).
67
Carlo Carrà, La mia vita, in Tutti gli scritti (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1978). [“aria malata e cattiva del Nord”]
68
Alberto Savinio, “La Realtà dorata,” La Voce, VIII, n. 11-12, (December 1916), 90. [“Da quel lievito scaturira’ il
prototipo della genialita’ mediterranea – l’uomo a’ coulisse, l’uomo religioso, l’uomo-pellicano che si dilania il
petto d’onde schizza la folgore e l’ombra, ed il cuore fiammeggiante! . . . Ma quell’uomo ov’e’? . . . Chi e’?”]
15
prototype. Yet after settling in Italy definitively, he shrugged off the epithet of “Mediterranean
genius” just as often as he claimed it outright. A portrait of de Chirico by the photographer Irving
Penn from 1944 perhaps unwittingly evinces something of de Chirico’s eccentric place in the
echelons of Mediterranean aesthetics, or else the unstable place of the Mediterranean in his
oeuvre [Fig. 12]. The wreath of laurel, with which Mercury once crowned the Pictor classicus,
sits outsized and askew. The artist’s eyes shift off scene, askance. At the height of his plodding
and pedantic philippics against the decadence of Modernism and its betrayal of classical ideals,
the garlanded de Chirico appears ill at ease here, even – or especially – as the self-styled laureate
of Mediterranean glory.
16
Figure 1. Giorgio de Chirico, La gare Montparnasse, 1914, oil on canvas, 140 x 184.5 cm,
Museum of Modern Art, New York; Figure 2. De Chirico, Place d’Italie avec bananes,
preparatory drawing for Gare Montparnasse, pencil on paper, 21.3 x 16.4 cm., Musée Picasso,
Paris.
17
Figure 3. De Chirico: La Metafisica del Mediterraneo; Figure 4. Mediterraneo d'arte: Il mare e
la pesca da Giorgio De Chirico all'era della globalizzazione, Rome, Erreciemme Edizioni, 2005.
18
Figure 5. Joaquim Sunyer, Pastoral, 1911-12, oil on canvas, 106 x 152 cm, Generalitat de
Catalunya, Department de Cultura, Barcelona.
Figure 6. Giorgio de Chirico, Ariadne, 1913, oil and graphite on canvas, 53 3/8 x 71 in. (135.6 x
180.3 cm) Bequest of Florene M. Schoenborn, 1995 (1996.403.10).
19
Figure 7. Giorgio de Chirico, Still Life: Turin Spring, March-May, 1914,
oil on canvas, 125 x 102 cm, private collection.
20
Figure 8. Giorgio de Chirico, The Sphinx, 1908-09, oil on canvas, 76 x 120 cm, private
collection, Milan.
Figure 9. Giorgio de Chirico, The Soothsayer’s Recompense, 1913, oil on canvas, 135.5 x 180.5
cm, The Philadelphia Museum of Art.
21
Figure 10. Giorgio de Chiricio, Metaphysical Composition with Toys, summer-autumn 1914, oil
on canvas, 55 x 46.5 cm., The Menil Collection, Houston.
22
Figure 11. Giorgio de Chirico, Self-Portrait with Bust of Mercury, 1923, private collection.
23
Figure 12. Irving Penn, Giorgio de Chirico, Rome, 1944; Figure 13. Sandro Botticelli, Portrait
of Dante, c. 1495, Tempera on canvas, 54,7 x 47,5 cm, Private collection.
24
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