Following a guide through the rooms of a museum listening, in a group, to information and formulas similar to antidotes to ward off the enigma that each work represents, can be a desolating experience.
Against this desolation, being guided by the voice of someone, perhaps a friend, who heads to a room in a museum with the aim of seeing that particular work again without the expectation of getting to the bottom of it once and for all and therefore listening to the suggestions and stories that that work arouses in our companion, can reveal itself, on the contrary, to be a happy, disturbing and even transformative experience.
Every month, the column Art stories, edited by Lucia de Ioannaoffers itself as a meeting point from which to start a walk towards a work of art kept in Parma, a walk for which we need to abandon ourselves to the flânerie of thoughts of those who will act as our guide from time to time.
The journey begins from the suggestive park of the Magnani Rocca Foundation, following Pietro Piragine, an entrepreneur who loved humanistic, Galilean and economic knowledge, towards the Enigma of the Departure by Giorgio de Chirico.
By Pietro Piragine
I arrive at Magnani Rocca, a place that is always beautiful. I walk in the large garden among pines, cedars, lindens, horse chestnuts, maples hoping that a peacock will give me a spectacular display.
I climb the external staircase and enter the villa. From the large entrance hall I access the Flemish-Spanish collection on the left with the addition of Canova’s Terpsichore, I access the Italian High Epoch on the right and from here again on the right the 250 works of the temporary exhibition of the eclectic Bruno Munari. Going back through the entrance hall I go up to the first floor where the modern art collection is. In a short while I find myself approaching the Enigma of the Departure by Giorgio de Chirico.
I remember the first time this happened not too long ago. A few meters away I immediately saw that it was a Piazza d’Italia by de Chirico. However, I was curious to know if it was a real “Enigma” performed in the years immediately following the Enigma of an Autumn Afternoon (a “revisited” Piazza S. Croce) with which Metaphysics was born or one of the many Piazzas of Italy made in the last two decades of his life and with which Pictor Optimus effectively copied the extraordinarily important self of those first works that were so significant in the history of art. Close up I read: 1914. Regardless of the title it was therefore a real Enigma.
It depicts a square with a statue of a male character seen from behind in the centre. On the left a classical monumental building like that of the Universal Exhibition of Rome ’42 illuminated by the sun. The building on the right is not lit and, through one of its openings, you can glimpse a sailing ship whose hull is hidden by a wall also present in other puzzles including the first one already mentioned from 1910. Always ahead is a chimney of the same industry to those of Sironi’s urban landscapes of 1920. In the distance in the square you can just make out two characters facing each other, close together.
Even with a completely different pictorial technique, the romantic spirit is largely present. On the other hand, de Chirico’s Half of Physikà (beyond physical things) is a close relative of the Absolute towards which Romanticism tends both in its irrationalistic component of Sturm und Drang and much else and in its rationalistic component represented by Idealism Hegelian. At the center of the painting the character of the statue looks towards the infinite like the “Wanderer on the sea of fog” (manifesto of all Romanticism) by CDFriedrich looks, always represented from behind, at the infinite from the top of a mountain having below him the sea of fog that separates him physically but even more spiritually from the concrete world of the eighteenth century Enlightenment; in the painting by Magnani Rocca, the lack of concreteness is given by the pictorial technique which creates a place of absence, not real where time has stopped.
Next to the shadow cast by the statue there is another that seems to be generated by a second statue but this is not there because it should be seen through the opening through which instead the upper part of a sailing ship can be seen. This second shadow has the same contours as the figure represented in the Enigma of the Oracle; a painting done in 1910 and which is, in content and spirit, the same thing as the Odysseus and Calypso by Boecklin, a romantic-decadent and symbolist painter who influenced de Chirico who always showed great elective affinities with Friedrich Nietzsche of whom he said he was the artist who more and better than any other transposed philosophy into painting.
Always romantically, the wall has both the function of a towering Leopardian hill which from a large part of the final horizon the view excludes both from the Heghelian antithesis which makes the thesis true and in the synthesis realizes it at a higher level and is therefore an obstacle to be overcome in order to obtain something higher. More than the USSR, in Churchill’s definition of it, everything in the work is a puzzle wrapped in an enigma that lies within a mystery.
This painting, like the other enigmas, has important influences on the birth of surrealism. The works of Magritte and Dalì, with their unreal, timeless, dreamlike atmospheres and settings and the enigmatic characters shown from behind, can be said to be two thirds de Chirico, one third Freud. Max Ernst also signed one of his canvases with the name de Chirico, such was the closeness he felt with him. It is true that this work, like the other enigmas, appears very different from the dynamism present in many contemporary futurist creations.
It is true, however, that Metaphysics, Futurism, Cubism and Abstraction are components of modern art born in 1910-1912. And they all have in common the desire to represent reality through new cultural and pictorial filters that make it more difficult to understand but more fascinating. And this happens for all modern art, not only in painting and sculpture. The enigma, the mystery, the secret to be revealed are also typical of Hermeticism born in the same years. Ungaretti said that poetry must contain a secret, it must be a little difficult to understand; if it is easy, it is not poetry.
Being faced with the Enigma of Departure allows the mind to navigate through a large number of cultural and intellectual contexts. In this immensity thought drowns and shipwreck is sweet in this sea.
