"Indeed, precisely the ‘pause in t.mes ’ is suggested by metaphysical images that gradually build up an iconographic armoury, unique and incomparable, a mixture of personal memories and ancestral symbols, of humour and tragedy, of tranquillity and unease."
Claudio Strinati in Metaphysical Art, The De Chirico Journals, Fondazione Giorgio E Isa De Chirico, Florence, 2012, p. 26.

The central image within Piazza d’Italia con Arianna is the statue of the draped reclining figure, which the artist painted after an antique sculpture of Ariadne (most likely after a Roman copy of the lost Hellenistic statue in the Vatican Museum). The sculpture depicts Ariadne asleep on the island of Naxos where she had been abandoned by Theseus. This “Ariadne” series was first identified by noted curator and art historian James Thrall Soby, whose personal collects ion, including a number of related works by de Chirico, became a part of the Museum of Modern Art’s collects ion after his death in the late 1970s. According to Soby: “The sculpture of Ariadne took on a profound symbolic meaning for the painter, perhaps in part because it typified the classical past to which he had so often been exposed during his childhood in Greece, in part because Nietzsche had repeatedly invoked Ariadne’s name… [the] image penetrated de Chirico’s consciousness to such an extent that he himself made a small plaster variant on the recumbent Greek-Roman figure” (James Thrall Soby, Giorgio de Chirico, New York, 1955, p. 52).

Sleeping Ariadne, Roman copy of original Greek, early 2nd century B.C.E., Sculpture Gallery, Vatican Museums, Rome, Italy

The term “metaphysical” had first been given to de Chirico's paintings in 1914 by the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire and referred to the enigmatic quality of his urban landscapes. The development of this imagery, comprising architectural and sculptural motifs, city squares and classical figures, presents not only a turning point in his own art, but also laid the foundation for Surrealist iconography, which was to flourish in the following decade. Creating a world of enigma and uncertainty, verging between dream and reality, and depicting a condition which André Breton described as the “irremediable human anxiety,” de Chirico's metaphysical works had a tremendous influence on the development of Surrealist theories and aesthetics. It was these “powerful conceptions, so dramatically expressed in his paintings, [that] served as a spiritual point of departure for the Surrealists and provided a direct, significant and substantial contribution to Surrealist art” (Laura Rosenstock, “De Chirico's Influence on the Surrealists,” in De Chirico, New York, 1980, p. 113).