Giorgio de Chirico (Volos, Greece, 1888 – Rome, 1978) is the most famous Italian artist of the twentieth century in the world. Initiator and main exponent of Metaphysical Painting, he stated that everything has two aspects: “a current one, what we almost always see and what men in general see, the other, the spectral or metaphysical, which only rare individuals can see, in moments of clairvoyance and metaphysical abstraction”. “Metaphysics” is therefore not an art that looks at what is transcendent with respect to reality and nature, but at what goes beyond their most obvious and “grossly patent” appearances, trying to penetrate their mystery.
De Chirico’s famous Italian Squares are metaphysical places in which time is suspended and space dilated, marked by long shadows that stand out on the floors, in an intense and still light. These metaphysical landscapes are recognizable in the new urban episodes of the 20th century, and took shape between the 1920s and the early 1940s in the reality of the new “foundation cities”. Cities which, characterized by an absolute classicism, out of time, unlike those of the futurist utopia, are cloaked in an aura that evokes D’Annunzio’s “cities of silence”.
It is in these architectures that new planning and design languages are experimented, according to an approach based on the one hand on the urban culture of Renaissance cities, on the other on the same codes (figure/background, pictorial plane/object) used in metaphysical painting. The enigma contained in Giorgio de Chirico’s canvases thus penetrates the real urban dimension: dizzying spaces, flights of round arches, square or truncated cone towers, Roman walls, classical statues, seem like explicit quotations from metaphysical painting in the language of architects who understood the importance of the painter’s plastic intuitions.
The suggestions of De Chirico’s painted architecture therefore take shape in the three-dimensionality of rationalist buildings, they seem to materialize and become stone in the architectural scenography of the cities of the Agro Pontino (Littoria, Sabaudia, Aprilia, Pomezia…) and Sardinia (Carbonia, Arborea…), in the buildings of the EUR, in Rome, in the rural villages built in the African colonies, or in a small “metaphysical” jewel like the town of Tresigallo, built on the banks of the Po di Volano, halfway between Ferrara and the Comacchio Valleys, unique among the cities of foundation to have been declared “City of Art”. Silvia Pegoraro, art critic, has always focused on the relationships between art and literature. Since January 2024 you have been part of the Scientific Committee of Tessere del 900
During the evening it will be possible to sign up for the visit to the Metaphysical City of Tresigallo (Fe) organized by Tessere del 900 on Sunday 19 May at 11am. Followed by dinner at Passatelli for €30 upon reservation.
