Giorgio de Chirico Biography Quotes 4 Report mistakes

Early life and education
Giorgio de Chirico was born in 1888 in Volos, Greece, to an Italian family whose movements across the Mediterranean shaped his early imagination. His father, Evaristo de Chirico, was a railway engineer, and his mother, Gemma Cervetto, maintained a household attentive to literature, music, and the classical past. His younger brother, Andrea, later renowned under the name Alberto Savinio, became a close intellectual companion; the two would remain entwined in art and ideas throughout their lives. De Chirico studied drawing and painting in Athens, absorbing the rhetoric of academic training while steeping himself in the ruins, statues, and clear light of the Aegean world. After his father's death, he continued his education in Munich, where the paintings of Arnold Bocklin and Max Klinger, together with the philosophy of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, gave him a sense of tragic lyricism and metaphysical questioning that never left him.

First breakthroughs
By 1910, while in Italy, he experienced the breakthrough that defined his mature voice. In Florence, in the quiet of a piazza, he painted The Enigma of an Autumn Afternoon, staging an image of an empty square, long shadows, and a statue poised like a memory from antiquity. The mood of estrangement and haunted clarity, intensified by exaggerated perspective and unexpected juxtapositions, announced a new pictorial language. He soon produced related works, including The Song of Love and later The Mystery and Melancholy of a Street, where facades, arcades, trains, and mannequins gathered into scenes of arrested drama.

Paris and the formation of Metaphysical painting
De Chirico moved to Paris in 1911. The poet Guillaume Apollinaire recognized his originality and championed him in articles and conversations, opening doors to salons and to circles around Pablo Picasso, Constantin Brancusi, and other leading figures of the avant-garde. Exhibiting at the Salon d'Automne and the Salon des Independants, he refined a repertoire of deserted piazzas and enigmatic stillnesses that seemed at once ancient and startlingly new. The stage-like constructions and philosophical undertones led contemporaries to speak of a "metaphysical" art. That term soon became the designation for his project and for a small current in modern painting whose reach would prove wide.

War, Ferrara, and the Scuola Metafisica
With the First World War, de Chirico returned to Italy and was stationed in Ferrara. Health issues limited his military duties, giving him time to work. There he joined forces with his brother Alberto Savinio and befriended Carlo Carra; Giorgio Morandi entered the orbit of this circle, as did Filippo de Pisis. The Ferrara period introduced mannequins without faces, chalk plumbs, biscuits, charts, and instruments laid out like clues. Masterpieces such as The Disquieting Muses and The Great Metaphysician broadened the metaphysical theater from city squares to claustrophobic interiors, mixing precision with mystery. The group's discussions intertwined painting with philosophy and poetics, and their example left an imprint on numerous younger artists.

Postwar shifts, writings, and debate with Surrealism
After 1918, de Chirico advocated a return to technical mastery and to the lessons of the Renaissance. In 1919 he published essays arguing for careful drawing and craft, and in the following years he moved between Rome, Florence, and Paris, painting classical subjects, horses, gladiators, and self-portraits. The Surrealists, among them Andre Breton, Paul Eluard, and Louis Aragon, first revered his Paris and Ferrara canvases, finding in them a model for dreams made concrete. Their admiration helped carry his reputation across Europe. But as de Chirico embraced a neo-Baroque and explicitly classical idiom, tensions grew. Public polemics in the later 1920s crystallized the split, with Surrealist leaders castigating his new direction while still collecting his earlier works. De Chirico responded forcefully in writings and interviews, defending autonomy, tradition, and the painter's métier.

Literary work, theater, and craftsmanship
De Chirico's intellect ranged beyond the studio. His novel Hebdomeros, published in 1929, extended metaphysical atmospherics into prose, presenting a sequence of scenes and reflections admired by poets and critics for its uncanny logic. He designed sets and costumes for theater and ballet, translating his sense of space into dramaturgy. In his workshops he studied historical materials, prepared grounds, and employed glazing techniques; from the 1930s he sometimes signed works "Pictor Optimus", affirming the primacy of painterly excellence.

Later years, controversies, and personal life
The 1930s and 1940s saw him continuing to revise classical themes while also returning at intervals to his earlier motifs. He traveled for exhibitions and eventually settled in Rome, where his studio near Piazza di Spagna became a magnet for students, critics, and collectors. Questions of authenticity trailed him. He railed against forgeries in the market, occasionally reworking earlier canvases or producing variants of his celebrated subjects, which further complicated attributions and stirred debate among dealers and museums.

His personal circle remained central. The companionship of his brother Alberto Savinio shaped his intellectual life until Savinio's death. De Chirico married a Russian-born dancer named Raissa in the 1920s; later, in the early 1950s, he married Isabella Pakszwer Far, who became a vigilant steward of his studio and legacy, organizing exhibitions and guarding archives. Their home preserved a record of his methods and the atmosphere in which he labored.

Legacy and influence
De Chirico died in 1978 in Rome, leaving behind a body of work that redirected the course of 20th-century art. His metaphysical paintings became a touchstone for artists exploring the uncanny in the everyday: empty streets, hard sunlight, cast shadows, and mute objects staged as if on a proscenium influenced figures as diverse as Giorgio Morandi in his still lifes and the Surrealists in their dream imagery. Writers and poets drew nourishment from his example, while art historians traced how his synthesis of antiquity and modernity opened paths for later returns to figuration. The people who stood around him at crucial junctures, Apollinaire in Paris, Carra and Morandi in Ferrara, the Surrealists who first embraced and then resisted him, and his family, especially Alberto Savinio and Isabella Pakszwer Far, formed an evolving constellation that shaped his achievements and reputation. Through cycles of acclaim, dispute, and rediscovery, de Chirico's art maintained its quiet power: a theater of the mind in which the most familiar settings become enigmas, and the past speaks in the present tense.

Our collection contains 4 quotes who is written by Giorgio, under the main topics: Deep - Art.

Other people realated to Giorgio: Rene Magritte (Artist), Max Ernst (Artist)