Muse Metafisiche, which Giorgio de Chirico painted in Ferrara in the spring of 1918, features a key theme from his iconography: the mannequin, which found great resonance in the development of Metaphysical painting in Italy during World War I and in avant-garde art between the two wars.

Muse Metafisiche (Metaphysical Muses), which Giorgio de Chirico painted in Ferrara in the spring of 1918, features a key theme from his iconography: the mannequin, which found great resonance in the development of Metaphysical painting in Italy during World War I and in avant-garde art between the two wars. In fact, de Chirico’s mannequins anticipate the experience of Italy and the war; they already featured in the paintings that the artist produced in Paris in spring-summer 1914.¹ A metaphysical distillation of two central motifs from his imagination – on the one hand, the artist as a poet, philosopher and traveller, or a visionary guided by an inner vision, and, on the other hand, the man-statue-mannequin analogy representative of the metaphysical quest for an essence beyond appearances – their iconography derives from a productive exchange of images between de Chirico, his brother Alberto Savinio and the poet Guillaume Apollinaire. In 1914, the three worked together on Les Chants de la mi-mort, a musical play written and set to music by Savinio, who also painted the scenery and designed the costumes.² Nevertheless, the iconography of the main character – a “bald man […] without a voice, without eyes and without a face” – derived both from Apollinaire’s poem Le Musicien de Saint-Merry (1913) and from the headless statues of de Chirico’s early paintings.

Also in Paris de Chirico introduced the theme of the mannequin and its double in a series of paintings that explore the ambiguity of the figure by countering (throughthe alternation of colours and iconographical references) male and female identifications, classical and popular culture, and ideas of completeness and fragmentation.³ According to Paolo Baldacci, the mannequin and its double should be understood “as a tribute to Savinio’s contribution to the creation of Metaphysical art”.⁴ The idea of fraternal complementarity certainly plays an important part in the development of the mannequin pairs. Muse Metafisiche revives the iconography of Le due sorelle (The Two Sisters), a painting dating to winter-spring 1915, which was one of the last works produced by the artist in Paris before he moved to Italy in May. Le due sorelle remained at the gallery of de Chirico’s Parisian dealer Paul Guillaume, who exhibited it at André Salmon’s Salon d’Antin in summer 1916. It seems likely that the female title was due to Guillaume, or to the exhibition curator. It should be noted that the Cerruti muses were painted at the same time as de Chirico’s famous painting Le muse inquietanti (The Disquieting Muses, after the mythical sister muses Melpomene and Thalia), with which they were exhibited for the first time under the title Castore e Polluce (Castor and Pollux), the two legendary heroes and brothers with whom de Chirico and Savinio identified themselves ever since their childhoods in Greece.⁵

Like the Parisian “two sisters”, Muse Metafisiche juxtaposes an antithetical couple: behind a dark figure with two helmet-like openings in the foreground – which seems to resemble the assembly of wood or soldered metal constructions and ready-made objects such as a wig or a set square – a white figure peeps out. Probably modelled plaster or a polished marble, this figure bears the metaphysical sign of its inner vision on its face. This contrast between opposites is reflected in the Cerruti muses by the motif of the window in the room, typical of the works that de Chirico painted in Ferrara. There, the interior of a narrow workshop, with the tools of the trade illustrating the artist’s professional legitimacy, is echoed by a monumental exterior experienced as an objective legacy.

The work was included in de Chirico’s first solo show organised by Anton Giulio Bragaglia in Rome in February. News of the exhibition spread across Europe and marked the start of relations between de Chirico and André Breton. The piece featured in an international exhibition in Geneva as early as 1920. A torn exhibition label on the back of the painting, only part of which remains, enables us to associate the title Le maschere (The Masks), as the work began to be known from the 1930s, with the VI mostra interprovinciale del Sindaco fascista Belle Arti del Lazio held in Rome, at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni, in 1936.⁶ Nevertheless, no works by de Chirico are mentioned in the exhibition catalogue.⁷ In any case, the painting was included in the inaugural show of the Galleria di Roma in 1937 and in the first major exhibitions of post-war Italian modern art in Paris, Brussels and London in 1950.⁸

[Silvia Loreti]

¹ See G. de Chirico, I’ll Be There… The Glass Dog, April-May 1914, oil on canvas, 69 x 57.5 cm, private collection, and G. de Chirico, The Nostalgia of the Poet, April-June 1914, oil on canvas, 89.7 x 40.7 cm, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice.

² Savinio 1914, pp. 413-426.

³ See G. de Chirico, The Duo (The Models of the Red Tower), winter 1914-15, 81.5 x 59 cm, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

⁴ Baldacci 1997, p. 272.

⁵ Giorgio de Chirico, exhibition without catalogue (Rome, Casa d’Arte Bragaglia, 2-22 February 1919). See G. Roos, “Giorgio de Chirico, la mostra alla Casa d’Arte Bragaglia nel febbraio del 1919 e la fine della pittura metafisica. Recensioni e reazioni”, in Ferrara 2016, p. 122. I would like to thank Fabio Cafagna for having provided me with this essay.

⁶ I would like to thank Luisa Mensi for her help reading the label.

⁷ I would like to thank Clementina Conte, Fondi storici, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Rome, and Giulia Beatrice, PhD student, Universität Zürich and pre-doctoral fellow, Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max-Planck-Institut für Kunstgeschichte, for their help with research into the exhibition.

⁸ Paris 1950; Brussels 1950; London 1950. I would like to thank Rosalind McKever for providing me with a copy of the Arts Council of Great Britain catalogue.