Metaphysical Painting

Metaphysical painting, style of painting that flourished mainly between 1911 and 1920 in the works of the Italian artists Giorgio de Chirico and Carlo Carrà. These painters used representational but incongruous imagery to produce disquieting effects on the viewer. Their work strongly influenced the Surrealists in the 1920s.

Metaphysical painting originated with de Chirico. In Munich, Germany, where he spent his formative years, de Chirico was attracted to 19th-century German Romantic painting and to the works of the philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche. The latter’s search for hidden meanings beyond surface appearances and his descriptions of empty squares surrounded by arcaded buildings in the Italian city of Turin made a particularly deep impression on de Chirico. In his painting Turin Melancholy (1915), for example, he illustrated just such a square, using unnaturally sharp contrasts of light and shadow that lend an aura of poignant but vaguely threatening mystery to the scene. The arcades in this painting, as well as the deep perspectival space and dark-toned sky, are pictorial devices typical of de Chirico’s strange, evocative works. He gave his paintings enigmatic titles—such as The Nostalgia of the Infinite (1913–14), The Philosopher’s Conquest (1914), and The Soothsayer’s Recompense (1913)—that contribute to their cryptic effect.

Many of de Chirico’s paintings depict mannequins, as do works done about 1917–21 by the former Futurist Carlo Carrà, who came under de Chirico’s influence. In 1917 the two artists met in Ferrara, Italy, where, together with de Chirico’s younger brother—a poet, musician, and painter known as Alberto Savinio—they formulated the rather obscure principles of the scuola metafisica (“Metaphysical school”). (De Chirico, however, had already arrived at his Metaphysical style several years before the movement came into existence, and by 1911 he had shown paintings of this nature in Paris.) Other Metaphysical painters included Giorgio Morandi, Filippo de Pisis, and Mario Sironi.

The Metaphysical school proved short-lived; it came to an end about 1920 because of dissension between de Chirico and Carrà over who had founded the group. After 1919 de Chirico produced weaker images, lacking the mysterious power of his earlier work, and his painting style eventually sank into an eccentric Classicism.