Three things that do not belong together
MoMA dates the painting precisely: Paris, June–July 1914, on the eve of the First World War that would scatter the whole Paris avant-garde within weeks. The Song of Love (in French, Le Chant d’amour) is the most famous single image de Chirico ever made, and it is built from a method that sounds almost like a joke until you stand in front of the result: he took objects that have nothing to do with one another and nailed them together on a wall.
The objects are three. A plaster head of a classical statue, white and serene, the face of an idealized ancient god, hangs beside an oversized rubber surgeon’s glove, limp and drooping, the kind a doctor pulls on, tacked flat to the wall. On the ground below sits a single green ball. There is no story that connects a god’s head, a surgical glove, and a child’s ball. They are bound together only the way a dream binds things, by sitting in the same frame and refusing to explain themselves.
The glove is not an invention de Chirico dreamed up at the easel; it was a real object he went out and bought. Apollinaire, who was close to him that summer, recorded in July 1914 that de Chirico had picked up a pink rubber gloveprecisely for the uncanny charge it would lend his pictures. (Different sources call the glove pink or red; Apollinaire’s word was pink. Either way it reads as a warm, soft, slightly repellent flesh-tone against the cool wall.) That is the engine of the whole method: an ordinary modern thing, bought in a shop, set down beside an antique god so that both turn strange.
And then, far back, the modern world arrives in miniature. Over the wall, on the horizon, de Chirico put a small locomotive trailing smoke, the railway motif that runs through nearly all his early work. It is usually read as a quiet nod to his railway-engineer father, though that reading is interpretation, not documented fact. What matters is the collision: a steam train, a god’s head, a doctor’s glove, and a green ball, gathered into one small silent square as if it were the most natural thing in the world.