Giorgio de Chirico is in Bologna until March 12, in the rooms of Palazzo Pallavicini.
Palazzo Pallavicini hosts the exhibition “De Chirico and Beyond. From the “Baroque” Season to Neometaphysics (1938-1978)”, entirely dedicated to the father of metaphysical painting, Giorgio de Chirico.
Who was Giorgio de Chirico
Giorgio de Chirico was born in Volos, Greece, on July 10, 1888, to Italian parents of noble descent.
His father Evaristo was the son of the Palermitan baron Giorgio Filigone de Chirico, while his mother was the baroness of Genoese origin Gemma Cervetto.
For the first seventeen years of his life, de Chirico lived in Greece with his parents and his brother Andrea, who was also an artist and writer, later becoming famous under the pseudonym Alberto Savinio.
De Chirico and Beyond
Palazzo Pallavicini hosts the metaphysical painting of Giorgio de Chirico.
“De Chirico and Beyond. From the “Baroque” Season to Neometaphysics (1938-1978)” brings together a prestigious corpus of works by one of the most influential and recognized painters of the Italian 20th century.
“De Chirico and Beyond. From the “Baroque” Season to Neometaphysics (1938-1978)” includes over seventy works from the Giorgio and Isa de Chirico Foundation in Rome and aims to narrate two important moments in the master’s painting: the “Baroque” season and the neometaphysical season.
The first spans from 1938 to 1968, when de Chirico leaves Paris and returns to Italy in 1939.
During this phase of his artistic production, he draws inspiration from Rubens and the great masters such as Dürer, Raphael, and Delacroix.
How Metaphysical Painting Was Born
The metaphysical painting was born in Florence in 1910.
During those years, de Chirico, hospitalized at the military hospital in Ferrara, met the Futurist painter Carlo Carrà, with whom he embarked on the journey that led him to refine the canons of metaphysical painting.
From 1920, these theories were disseminated through the pages of the magazine Metaphysical Painting: an inspiration for real architectures built in the cities founded during the Fascist era, where Italian rationalism also worked on metaphysical forms, spaces, and architectural details.
The figure of the mannequin, also present in the work The Unquiet Muses, of the contemporary man-automaton (The Great Metaphysician, 1917), was inspired by him “by the faceless man,” a character from a drama by his brother Alberto Savinio, who was also a painter and writer.
After a brief period of contact with Surrealism in the early 1920s, the subsequent works of Giorgio de Chirico are characterized by technical virtuosity, a tribute and thanks to the Baroque period.
The Exhibition on de Chirico in Bologna
The works included in the de Chirico exhibition in Bologna aim to create an ideal and unreal world, a fiction more real than reality: de Chirico was convinced that “reality cannot exist in painting because it generally does not exist on earth,” as he himself wrote.
The exhibition features a series of well-known self-portraits, such as the famous Nude Self-Portrait from 1945 and the emblematic Self-Portrait in the Park with 17th Century Costume from 1956.
Here the artist wears ancient garments and measures himself against the masters of the past, declaring his distance from modernity and rejecting the dogmas of the twentieth century, revealing himself as the first post-modern artist.
Also on display are other fundamental works from the “baroque” period, such as Ariostean Still Life, 1940; The Skater, 1940 (the portrait of his wife Isabella as an allegory of winter), the terracotta Bucephalus, 1940 (one of the first examples of de Chirico as a sculptor) and the series of Villa Medici (exhibited in 1945 at the Galleria San Silvestro).
The cultural programming of Bologna is rich! If you want to discover the other exhibitions in the city, these articles are for you:
Roberto Ferri on display in Bologna until March 12
Jago, Banksy, Tv Boy: the great exhibition in Bologna until May 7
Want to discover all the other exhibitions and museums in Bologna? Click here!
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