A small panel, calmly impossible
It is small, that is the first thing reproductions get wrong. They make The Song of Love feel monumental, but the real panel is about two feet five inches tall by under two feet wide (73 by 59 centimetres), upright, smaller than a kitchen tray stood on end. Everything in it is rendered with a flat, deadpan, almost diagrammatic clarity, and that clarity is the trap. The strangeness does not come from any distortion (nothing is smeared, fractured, or melted) but from how calmly impossible things are laid out as plain fact.
Two objects hang on a low wall that fills much of the picture. To the upper left is the marble head: the white profile of a classical statue, calm and idealized, the kind of face carved on an ancient god. Scholars have long called it the Apollo Belvedere(a celebrated antique marble of the god Apollo), though that specific name is the scholars’ identification, not MoMA’s wall text, which keeps it to a generic classical Greek head. Either way, it is antiquity itself, the calm of a vanished classical order, fixed to the wall.
Beside it, tacked flat to the same wall, is the pink rubber glove, fingers hanging slack. It is a hollow mould of a hand, which is why it reads as eerie: it is the shape of a person with the person taken out, the absence of a body where a body should be. The serene marble god and the limp modern glove, side by side on the same nails, are the picture’s central shock, the antique and the surgical pinned together.
On the ground below the wall sits the green ball, a single plain sphere with nothing to account for it. Around and behind everything runs the arcade, the row of arches that frames the open square, lit by that hard, sourceless daylight that flattens the surfaces and stretches the shadows long. And far off, over the wall in the upper right, the tiny locomotive pulls its plume of smoke under a bright sky, dragging the moving modern world into the frozen tableau.
Nothing in the square connects by ordinary logic. The head does not belong with the glove; the glove does not belong with the ball; none of them belong with the distant train. They cohere only as a dream coheres, and the picture is serene on its surface and uneasy all the way down. It is the enigma de Chirico was always after: a song of love sung in a language no one in the square can hear.