From the headless statue evoking antiquity to the modern faceless mannequin, inspired by the primitivist avant-garde and Parisian mass culture, the step is both long and short.

Giorgio De Chirico painted this version of a theme he had already worked on in Ferrara in 1917 (private collection, fig. 1) in Rome in late 1922. The painting was commissioned by the tailor Flaminio Martellotti, who partnered Mario Broglio from that year onwards in forming the Valori Plastici collection, of which the 1917 Il Trovatore (The Troubadour) already formed part.¹ The Ferrara picture was one of the first that de Chirico sent to Broglio rather than to his French dealer Paul Guillaume, for inclusion in the Roman Valori Plastici group exhibition of 1918. The image of the Troubadour is closely tied to the mediaeval image of Ferrara described in the eponymous work by Giuseppe Verdi (1853). In 1920, de Chirico wrote: “…three minstrels who play and sing beneath the walls of a castle [the Castello Estense in Ferrara], while above, in the middle of a long balcony lit up by the moon, a small female figure appears like a tiny ghost; just the aria of the Verdian Troubadour…”.² Representative of a romanticism between the Middle Ages and the Risorgimento, the bond of this figure with the town of Ferrara was reinforced by the important emotional relationship that de Chirico had established with a young Ferrarese woman, Antonia Bolognesi, who he wished to marry.³ In its iconography, de Chirico’s Troubadour descends from the mannequins that the artist started painting in Paris in 1914, born out of his collaboration with the poet Guillaume Apollinaire and de Chirico’s brother, the musician and artist Alberto Savinio. The mediaeval setting of the Troubadour echoes Apollinaire’s poem Le Musicien de Saint-Merry (1914), which was in turn inspired by the de Chirico brothers’ original process of synthesising urban modernity and mythical figures.⁴ The iconography of the headless statue in de Chirico’s painting refers to two of the greatest travellers in Western literature through the Ulysses in the painting Die Toteninsel (The Isle of the Dead), by the Swiss painter Arnold Böcklin, whose work de Chirico had admired in Munich, and the cloaked figure of Dante in Piazza Santa Croce in Florence, which captured de Chirico’s imagination during his visit to the city in autumn 1909. 

From the headless statue evoking antiquity to the modern faceless mannequin, inspired by the primitivist avant-garde and Parisian mass culture, the step is both long and short. In the 1917 Troubadour, the continuity between the two figures is marked by the metaphysical shadow of the Böcklinstyle Ulysses to the right of the figure. In the Cerruti Troubadour (1922), the presence of an ancient statue takes the place of the symbolist outline of the Homeric traveller. The painting is a declaration of intent by de Chirico on plastic values, which on the one hand asserts his legitimacy as an Italian artist, linking him to the classical tradition, while on the other it reiterates the continuity with his earlier metaphysical work. 

Like other revisitations of Metaphysical paintings during this period, the 1922 Troubadour is painted in tempera, a technique that de Chirico considered to be “purer painting than oil painting”.⁵ The procedure, as noted by Paolo Baldacci, is the same one that de Chirico used in his cycle of “Roman villas”, to which the rock in the background of this painting refers, replacing the metaphysical tower in the Troubadour of 1917.⁶ 

The Martellotti Troubadour was purchased on 19 March 1939 by the collector and then director of the Accademia di Brera and chairman of the Società Dantesca Italiana, Rino Valdameri, former owner of the 1917 Troubadour, through the Galleria del Milione in Milan.⁷ It is possible that Francesco Federico Cerruti purchased the painting from Mario Tazzoli’s Galleria Galatea, probably after having seen it at the Galleria Gissi in 1964. 

Silvia Loreti

¹M. Fagiolo dell’Arco, De Chirico al tempo dei Valori Plastici. Note iconografiche e documenti inediti, in Natale 1982, vol. II, pp. 921-923.

²Cited in Fagiolo dell’Arco 1984, p. 101, n. 124.

³Bolognesi 2015.

⁴Bohn 1991.

⁵De Chirico 1928, p. 70. In around 1920 de Chirico wrote the treatise Pro tempera oratio, which, after being reworked, was included in Pro technica oratio, 1923 (see Vacanti 2006, pp. 475-480).

⁶Baldacci 1997, p. 418.

⁷Appella 2003, p. 362, n. 178.