A painter making a private weather

In the early summer of 1914, in Paris, a young painter named Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978) was making small, quiet, deeply strange pictures that almost no one yet understood. He was Italian by family but born in Volos, in Greece, where his father worked as a railway engineer, and he had grown up among the ruins and the hard Mediterranean light that would haunt everything he painted. By 1914 he was twenty-six, living in Paris, and the avant-garde poet Guillaume Apollinaire had begun championing him as one of the most original minds in the city.

What de Chirico was making had a name. He called it pittura metafisica, Metaphysical painting, a style he had been developing since about 1910 (later partly alongside the painter Carlo Carrà). The word “metaphysical” here does not mean spiritual or occult; it means the feeling of something beyond the physical, a charge of meaning hidden inside ordinary things. His pictures are nearly all the same kind of place: a silent Italian-style piazza (a town square) ringed by arcades (rows of arches on columns), deserted, lit by a flat, hard, sourceless noon that throws long shadows and lets no air move. Into these dead-still squares he would set down, with the calm logic of a dream, objects that have no business being together.

He was after one effect above all: the enigma, the sense that an ordinary square, at a strange hour, is concealing something it will not tell you. (He liked the idea so much that he once inscribed a 1911 self-portrait with a Latin motto, “Et quid amabo nisi quod aenigma est?”, “And what shall I love if not the enigma?”, a line he borrowed from the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, whose vision of empty, ominous afternoons saturates his early work. The motto belongs to that self-portrait, not to The Song of Love, but it is the credo behind all of it.) De Chirico had absorbed that mood as a student in Munich, partly from the Swiss painter Arnold Böcklin, whose dreamlike scenes of silent classical architecture stand directly behind these squares.

The most-repeated error about this picture is worth correcting up front: de Chirico was not a Surrealist. The Surrealist movement, the one André Breton would launch with a manifesto, did not exist in 1914; it was founded a full decade later, in 1924. De Chirico is its great forerunner, the painter the Surrealists would later worship as a prophet of their own program, but he came before them and was never one of them (in fact, by the time the movement formed he had largely turned against the modern avant-garde and they fell out). The picture in front of us is a 1914 Metaphysical painting that fed a movement which did not yet exist.