The Song of Love

A Greek marble head, a pink rubber surgical glove, and a green ball, nailed together on a wall in an empty sunlit square, painted a decade before Surrealism existed by a man who was never a Surrealist.

1. 1
   The pink rubber glove

   Left of center, tacked flat to the wall: a large, limp surgeon’s glove hanging like a pinned specimen

   A big rubber surgeon’s glove is nailed to the wall, fingers drooping, the single most unsettling thing in the picture. It is a hollow mould of a hand, so it reads as the absence of the person who should be inside it. Sources call it red or pink (Apollinaire, who knew de Chirico that summer, called it pink), so it reads pink or red rather than one colour fixed as documented fact.
2. 2
   The marble head

   Upper left, fixed to the same wall beside the glove: a serene classical sculpted head in profile

   Beside the glove hangs the white head of a classical statue, calm and idealized, a relic of antiquity set against the modern glove. Secondary scholarship overwhelmingly identifies it as the Apollo Belvedere, the famous Roman marble; MoMA’s own short description keeps it generic, a classical Greek head. The hedged reading is the honest one: a classical head, commonly called the Apollo Belvedere, not labelled so by the museum.
3. 3
   The green ball

   Lower center, on the ground below the wall: a single plain green sphere

   A green ball sits on the paving below the wall, almost toy-like, with nothing to explain why it is there. Its very plainness deepens the strangeness of its company, an ordinary round object keeping silent company with a god’s head and a surgical glove.
4. 4
   The wall and the arcade

   Filling the picture: the low wall the objects hang on, and the arcaded building framing the space around it

   The objects are mounted on a low wall, and an arcaded building (a row of arches on columns) frames the open space, a recurring de Chirico stage-set. The light is hard and sourceless, a flat noon that flattens every surface and throws long shadows, so the square feels deserted and over-lit at once.
5. 5
   The little train on the horizon

   Upper right, far back over the wall: a small locomotive trailing a plume of smoke under a hard blue sky

   Over the wall, on the horizon, a small locomotive pulls a line of smoke across a bright sky. The railway recurs all through de Chirico’s early work and is usually read as a nod to his father, Evaristo, a railway engineer who built lines in Greece, where the artist was born. The autobiography is a common reading rather than a certain fact; what is plainly there is a modern, moving train pulled into a still dream.
6. 6
   The deadpan stillness

   The picture as a whole: small in scale, calm in finish, rendered with diagrammatic clarity

   Everything is painted with a flat, almost diagrammatic calm at small scale, under two and a half feet tall. The unease does not come from any visual distortion (nothing is smeared or fractured) but from how reasonably impossible things are shown. The calm legibility is the trap, and it is exactly what reproductions lose, since they tend to make the small panel feel monumental.