ABSTRACT
Giorgio de Chirico first painted a piazza populated only by a statue and two shadowy figures in 1910, while he was in Florence. (The Enigma of an Autumn Afternoon, fig. 1). Soon thereafter, in the summer of 1911, he and his mother moved to Paris where they remained, together with his brother, until 1915. In Paris, de Chirico continued to paint piazzas that increasingly reflected Italy through the sculptures, which are clearly identifiable as Italian monuments. Indeed, the Piazza d’Italia series flourished throughout the painter’s Parisian period. This part of his pittura metafisica represents the crucial conjunction of de Chirico’s real experience of things he has seen and places he has inhabited with his imagined and dreamlike transformations of those same places and things. Without doubt, it is this conjunction of the real and the imaginary, the product of the years when de Chirico lived in Paris and dreamed of Italy, that gives the pittura metafisica its haunting power. The aim of this article is to aid our understanding of that power, first of all, by suggesting several hitherto overlooked sources for de Chirico’s Piazza d’Italia series–in particular the actual nineteenth century works that stand behind de Chirico’s sculptural inventions–and, second, by tracing the transformations of those sources in the paintings. Giorgio de Chirico, The Enigma of an Autumn Afternoon, 1910. Oil on canvas. Whereabouts unknown. Reproduced from J. T. Soby (1955). https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9780203778456/85a5da50-c914-41c2-bda6-cd286432f3ce/content/fig4_1_OB.jpg" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/>
