“The appearance of Ferrara, one of Italy’s most beautiful cities, had struck me; but that which struck me most and inspired me in the metaphysical aspect I was working on at the time, were certain elements of Ferrara interiors, certain windows, certain shops, certain homes, certain neighbourhoods, like the historic ghetto, where you could get cakes and biscuits in high metaphysical and strange shapes.”

Born in Greece, to Italian parents, Giorgio de Chirico received a classical education from childhood, which he spent in Athens alongside his brother Andrea, a musician, writer and painter who worked under the name Alberto Savinio from 1914 onwards. Following the death of their father (1905), the brothers and their mother moved to Munich (1906-09) and then to Italy (1909), firstly to Milan and then to Florence (1910-11). De Chirico’s highly original imagery took shape during these formative years, which included visits to Rome and Turin. In his work, personal memories transfigured through a reinterpretation of classical mythology subjected to modern literary stimuli, particularly the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (Röcken, 1844 - Weimar, 1900), overlap the palimpsestic iconography of the long classical tradition and the stylistic variety of Italian heritage. 

In Paris, between 1911 and 1915, de Chirico came into contact with the international avant-garde thanks to the poet Guillaume Apollinaire (Rome, 1880 - Paris, 1918), who was the first to describe the artist’s painting as “metaphysical”. He began to theorise his aesthetics, working together with his brother and Apollinaire to create the figure of the mannequin that proved such a success in avant-garde art between the two wars. After enlisting in the Italian army in June 1915, de Chirico and Savinio were stationed in Ferrara. While maintaining their Parisian links through Apollinaire and de Chirico’s first art dealer Paul Guillaume (Paris, 1891-1934), they wove new and ever closer ties with leading figures on the Italian art scene, turning Ferrara into the centre of Metaphysical art, which expanded to become a movement. De Chirico, who was deemed unfit for war due to reasons of health, devoted himself to painting, inspired by what he referred to as the “fatal” city: 

“The appearance of Ferrara, one of Italy’s most beautiful cities, had struck me; but that which struck me most and inspired me in the metaphysical aspect I was working on at the time, were certain elements of Ferrara interiors, certain windows, certain shops, certain homes, certain neighbourhoods, like the historic ghetto, where you could get cakes and biscuits in high metaphysical and strange shapes.”¹ 

The influence of the city’s architecture and atmosphere, but also the warm and dense painting of the school of Ferrara, are already visible in the first canvases painted by de Chirico in the Emilian capital. 

Composiozione metafisica (Metaphysical Composition) (1916) is one of the first of twenty-four Ferrara interiors by de Chirico. The painting features some typical motifs: broken frames or set squares - tools of the painter’s trade, but also pertaining to engineers, like the father of the de Chirico brothers - are piled up with nautical and astronomical charts that, like Metaphysical painting, rewrite the world in their specific symbolic language, to grasp its hidden and most significant aspects.² The small format, common to many of his other paintings of the period, was destined for the Parisian market.³ A piece of poetry by de Chirico dated January 1916 is dedicated to the astronomer from Ferrara Giuseppe Bongiovanni (1877-1918), who had opened an astronomical observatory in one of the towers of the Castello Estense.⁴ The military ribbon in the painting is a metaphysical symbol of the human passage to adulthood, but also, conversely, a nostalgic memory of childhood. The latter is a central theme in the art of the de Chirico brothers, for whom childhood had both a psychological and cultural value, reflecting the Greek origin not just of their family, but also of European culture. De Chirico wrote the following words in Paris in around 1912: 

“One must picture everything in the world as an enigma, not only the great questions one has always asked oneself […] But rather to understand the enigma of things generally considered insignificant. To perceive the mystery of certain phenomena of feeling, of the character of a people, even to arrive at the point where one can picture the creative geniuses of the past as things […] To live in the world as if in an immense museum of strangeness, full of curious multicoloured toys.”⁵

The biscuits featured in one of the many canvases from his Ferrara period participate in this mixture of personal sentiments and anthropological symbology. Their precise iconography - a Proustian tool for the return to childhood - derives from seeing them in the windows of shops in Ferrara, home to one of Italy’s most prosperous Jewish communities at the time. 

The provenance of the three Cerruti interiors reflects the evolution of de Chirico’s relations with the market following the Great War and his decision to settle in Italy. In his correspondence from Ferrara with Apollinaire in summer 1916, the painter says he is working hard and that he will send Guillaume eleven new paintings from Ferrara.⁶ Guillaume subsequently presented eleven paintings in the impromptu exhibition he devoted to de Chirico in November 1918.⁷ The speech written by the art dealer for that occasion reveals that all the paintings belonged to the artist’s Ferrara period.⁸ 

Composizione metafisica of 1916 bears a label on the back with the number “17”, which was identified by Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco and Ester Coen as belonging to the Galleria Paul Guillaume.⁹ It was purchased by Albert C. Barnes (Philadelphia, 1872 - Phoenixville, PA, 1951), an American biologist and founder of the eponymous foundation in Pennsylvania, before 1926, when it appeared in a Barnes Foundation inventory as Still Life.¹⁰

Silvia Loreti

¹De Chirico 1962, p. 87.

²Jewell 2004, pp. 42-43.

³“I had written to you about the frames because it would be easy for me to do some paintings in those dimensions…”: Giorgio de Chirico to Paul Guillaume, 16 September 1915, in Venice 1979, p. 118.

⁴G. de Chirico, “La notte misteriosa” (1919), in de Chirico 1985, p. 43.

⁵De Chirico 1994, pp. 78, 79.

⁶De Chirico 2008, p. 616.

⁷Robinson K. 2008, pp. 371-382.

⁸Ibid., p. 377.

⁹Fagiolo dell’Arco 1981, p. 64, no. 97; Ferrara 1981, no 127, pp. 303-304. Identified in both cases on the basis of Guillaume’s label with Les Jeux terribles, an identification proved wrong in Baldacci 1997, no. 107, p. 323, see Fagiolo dell’Arco, Baldacci 1982: p. 501, no. 75.

¹⁰Still Life (#BF459D). I would like to thank Robin Craren, Curatorial Research Assistant, The Barnes Foundation, for having provided the provenance of the work from the Barnes Foundation Archives.