Giorgio de Chirico

Born in 1888 in Vòlo, in Greece; dies in 1978 in Rome, Italy.
His father was Evaristo de Chirico, a railway engineer from Palermo, and his mother the wealthy Genoese woman, Gemma Cervetto. He studies painting first at the Athens Polytechnic, then at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence and finally in 1906 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Monaco of Bavaria, where he sees the painting of Arnold Böcklin and Max Klinger and reads with great interest Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and Weininger. In the summer of 1909, he moves to Italy and begins to paint subjects trying to express the mysterious emotions of melancholy that is felt in the autumn in the Italian cities, a feeling that leads him to conceive the first metaphysical painting, L’Enigma di un pomeriggio d’autunno. In 1911, he joins his brother Alberto in Paris, where he meets the leading artists of the period and, in the following years, he paints works critical to the twentieth century, including, in 1914, the first Manichini. At the outbreak of World War I, Giorgio de Chirico and his brothers enlist volunteers and are sent to Ferrara. De Chirico begins to include his still life motif with geometric symbols in his work. In the years from 1925 to 1929, he begins his research on Metaphysics of light and the Mediterranean Myth, which leads to The Archaeologists, The Horses on the Seashore, The Trophies, The Landscapes in the Room, The Furniture in the Valley and Gladiators. In the 1950s, he paints self-portraits in costume Baroque style and views of Venice. In the mid-1960s, he devotes himself to lithography and the circulation of bronze sculptures, and retraces his subjects that reinterprets with a focus on colour, initiating a period known as neo-metaphysical.