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拍品專文
In Giorgio de Chirico’s Gli archeologi, offered at auction now for the first time, two melancholic figures – part mannequin, part statue, part architectural ruin – sit beside one another. Classical porticoes and structures cascade from their chests, while Greco-Roman style drapery flows over their shoulders and legs. One is seated in a modern, tasselled red armchair, their right forearm raised in a pose that emulates medieval statuary, while the accompanying figure perches on a stool that resembles the base of an ancient fluted column.
De Chirico had first depicted these fusions of human and architectural forms in the 1920s, and returned to this favoured motif throughout his life. In 1938 he explained that he had been inspired by a visit to a Gothic cathedral, where he was struck by a ‘strange and mysterious impression made on me,’ by ‘certain figures, representing seated saints and apostles… the very short legs, covered by the folds of their clothing formed a sort of base, of indispensable foundation but only to sustain the torso-monument, and the arms naturally stretched out of proportion to the torso’ (De Chirico, quoted in F. Poli, ‘Statues, Shadows, Mannequins,’ in Nature According to De Chirico, exh. cat., Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome, 2010, p. 140).
The Surrealists had been enthralled by De Chirico’s oneiric Metaphysical paintings of the 1910s, and it was in this period that the artist introduced the featureless, mannequin figures that became recurrent protagonists in his poetic imagery. Here, the inanimate nature of their ovoid heads is juxtaposed with the fleshiness of their limbs, and, seen in combination with their peculiar architectural torsos, the twin figures appear as beguiling, uncanny substitutes for human presences.
Fascinated by the relationship between antiquity and modernity, De Chirico increasingly incorporated Classical themes into his art after 1919, following his famous declaration, ‘pictor classicus sum’ (I am a Classical painter). His interest in antiquity stemmed from his childhood in Greece, and later evolved with his extensive reading of Nietzche and Schopenhauer’s philosophies. As Christopher Green has noted, the artist ‘responded to a pre-Socratic, Homeric, and Heraclitan vision of antiquity – an antiquity which is not the origin of Western rationalism and modern science, but rather propagates a mythology in which the divine and the human coalesce, in which the world is in constant flux, with the passions dominant, and in which everyday existence, between waking and dreaming, is surrounded by signs and riddles not to be decoded by logic’ (‘Giorgio de Chirico: enigma and lies, 1911-1934,’ in Modern Antiquity: Picasso, De Chirico, Léger, Picabia in the Presence of the Antique, exh. cat., The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, 2011, p. 67).
De Chirico had first depicted these fusions of human and architectural forms in the 1920s, and returned to this favoured motif throughout his life. In 1938 he explained that he had been inspired by a visit to a Gothic cathedral, where he was struck by a ‘strange and mysterious impression made on me,’ by ‘certain figures, representing seated saints and apostles… the very short legs, covered by the folds of their clothing formed a sort of base, of indispensable foundation but only to sustain the torso-monument, and the arms naturally stretched out of proportion to the torso’ (De Chirico, quoted in F. Poli, ‘Statues, Shadows, Mannequins,’ in Nature According to De Chirico, exh. cat., Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome, 2010, p. 140).
The Surrealists had been enthralled by De Chirico’s oneiric Metaphysical paintings of the 1910s, and it was in this period that the artist introduced the featureless, mannequin figures that became recurrent protagonists in his poetic imagery. Here, the inanimate nature of their ovoid heads is juxtaposed with the fleshiness of their limbs, and, seen in combination with their peculiar architectural torsos, the twin figures appear as beguiling, uncanny substitutes for human presences.
Fascinated by the relationship between antiquity and modernity, De Chirico increasingly incorporated Classical themes into his art after 1919, following his famous declaration, ‘pictor classicus sum’ (I am a Classical painter). His interest in antiquity stemmed from his childhood in Greece, and later evolved with his extensive reading of Nietzche and Schopenhauer’s philosophies. As Christopher Green has noted, the artist ‘responded to a pre-Socratic, Homeric, and Heraclitan vision of antiquity – an antiquity which is not the origin of Western rationalism and modern science, but rather propagates a mythology in which the divine and the human coalesce, in which the world is in constant flux, with the passions dominant, and in which everyday existence, between waking and dreaming, is surrounded by signs and riddles not to be decoded by logic’ (‘Giorgio de Chirico: enigma and lies, 1911-1934,’ in Modern Antiquity: Picasso, De Chirico, Léger, Picabia in the Presence of the Antique, exh. cat., The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, 2011, p. 67).