Dating from the pivotal year of 1913, Il Pomeriggio di Arianna (Ariadne’s Afternoon) is one of only eight canvases that make up Giorgio De Chirico’s earliest painted series as well as the genesis of his metaphysical style, a revolution in the history of art which would fundamentally change the modernist identity.

De Chirico arrived in Paris on Bastille Day, July 14, 1911, having traveled from Florence to join his brother Andrea (later known as Alberto Savinio) who had arrived the previous year. He was to become a profoundly independent painter in a city of great artistic innovators, working in a style directly opposed to the dominant school of Cubism. The young artist, who had studied at the Munich Art Academy, had drawn his inspirations primarily from Germanic sources: the philosophy and essays of Kant, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer and the romantic, symbolist paintings of Max Klinger and Arnold Böcklin. His aim was to depict the psychic phenomena which lay hidden within the visible world.

The central image within Il Pomeriggio di Arianna (Ariadne’s Afternoon) is the statue of the draped reclining 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; see fig. 1). 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 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” (J. T. Soby, Giorgio de Chirico, New York, 1955, p. 52).

Soby referred to a group of paintings executed between 1913 and 1914 as the Ariadne series. Most of these works center around mysteriously quiet piazzas which are illuminated with an almost surreal light and traversed by long, sharp-edged shadows. The scenes include both the sculpture of Ariadne and elements of contemporary life in the form of modern buildings, smokestacks, trains, clocks and passerby. Soby adds that “If antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the late Victoria era are the main focal points of his visionary longing, he had reacted also and in a comparable spirit, to his own age…” (ibid., p. 55). It is not, however, only the iconography which lends the paintings their metaphysical quality, but the artist’s own unique style. De Chirico painted in a carefully delineated and representational manner which was very much at odds with the prevailing cubo-futurist style of his contemporary avant garde artists.

De Chirico drew heavily not just from the philosophical underpinnings of Nietzsche but also from a long lineage of visual art history. While the sculpted figure in the present work is inspired by the aforementioned sculpture of sleeping Ariadne at the Vatican, the foreshortening of the carved figure harkens back to Renaissance master Andrea Mantegna’s Lamentation of Christ. The piazza and towers flying proud flags bear more than a passing affinity with concepts of the Renaissance “ideal city” which was depicted both surreally empty as in Francesco di Giorgio’s Ideal City or crowded with figures of religious significance as seen in many of Raphael’s biblical scenes such as The Marriage of the Virgin (see fig. 1). The Romantic and Symbolist movements also had a hold over de Chirico’s early artistic vision. Arnold Böcklin’s mysterious Island of the Dead, where a draped figure stands in a rowboat piloted by a seated figure, conjures Greek mythological associations of Charon ferrying the dead across the River Styx, while the island plumed with Cypress trees is likely modelled on the Greek island of Pontikonisi (see fig. 2).

Born in Greece from Italian parents, De Chirico was surrounded by images of the antique world since early childhood. Classical mythology, history, art and architecture provided an endless source of inspiration for the painter. The myth of Ariadne is multi-layered in the artist’s usage. Born to the King and Queen of Crete, Ariadne’s half brother was the monstrous Minotaur who was confined in the Labyrinth constructed by Daedalus. Young Athenians were sent as tribute to Crete every seven years to be fed to the Minotaur. In one of these groups of youths was the Athenian prince Theseus who, having won Ariadne’s heart, managed with her assistance to slay the Minotaur. Fleeing Crete they landed on the island of Naxos where Theseus, despite all promises, abandoned Ariadne while she lay sleeping. When she awoke, though abandoned and distraught, she was soon discovered by Dionysus, the God of Wine, who married her and set her crown into the heavens where it remains as the constellation Corona Borealis.

De Chirico takes the moment of Ariadne’s sleep (Ariadne’s abandonment) to set his scene. According to Matthew Gale, “Ariadne’s passivity is made manifest in de Chirico’s paintings by his concentration on her sleep between her contact with her two lovers. As well as drawing on a convenient iconography of Hellenistic sculpture, the painter’s use of the statue of Ariadne emphasizes this stasis, but the moment he depicts is nevertheless one of transformation. Ariadne’s sleep is the moment in which abandonment and discovery touch, in which mortal and immortal, Apollonian and Dionysian worlds meet. She is the conduit…. In painting Ariadne asleep, de Chirico paints a moment in which revelation is about to occur. His use of the sculpture within the paintings ensures that clairvoyance is seated within the privileged arena of art, specifically his art” (M. Gale in Giorgio de Chirico and the Myth of Ariadne, op. cit., p. 56). Ariadne’s treatment here varies markedly from, for example, Titian’s active oil Bacchus and Ariadne (see fig. 6). Instead of telling the story in great narrative arcs, complete with a God’s lively entourage, de Chirico uses quiet and solitude to convey the dream-like quality of myth.

In each of the eight canvases which make up the Ariadne series, the sculpted sleeping figure is placed in different versions of an ambiguous piazza; the figure is seen from the side, from above, at a diagonal. Towers and trains rise behind her, arcades flank her, small figures appear in a vast distance and flags stream in a seemingly-brisk breeze. Only two of these works, the present painting and Ariadne also contain an emblematic ship—Theseus sailing away from the island while on a steam train Dionysus arrives (see fig. 3). “In his Ariadne paintings,” writes Michael R. Taylor, “de Chirico retained the outward appearance of illusionistic painterly devices, while all the while undermining the rules that governed the use of one-point perspective, using multiple viewpoints and skewed and converging orthogonal lines stitched together into a seamless image, in a process akin to the college technique of a modern filmmaker. As David Sylvester puts it ‘Chirico’s eye invariably gravitates, like an Expressionist movie director’s, towards the spectacular, picturesque, vertiginous viewpoint. A Chirico composition is a kind of collage in which every element has been seen from a different position and each position provides an ‘interesting’ angle: a steep, high or low angle, or an acutely oblique angle, or an extreme close-up or extreme long-shot.’ This interest in parodying perspective can be compared to the work of Marcel Duchamp whose iconic Chocolate Grinder (No. 1), 1913, uses pictorial effects of deep space and mysterious shadows similar to those found in de Chirico’s work of the same year” (ibid., p. 32; see fig. 4).

The shadows in Il Pomeriggio di Arianna (Ariadne’s Afternoon) exemplify this notion, not corresponding to a single light source or angled view point, nor in a way that seems to correspond to architectural shapes such as the red tower: “The incongruous nature of de Chirico’s artistic vision continues in the vertiginous Ariadne’s Afternoon, probably completed in the autumn of 1913, which represents the penultimate work in the Ariadne series. The exaggerated verticality of the painting again tips the statue forward onto the picture plane, and the figure is for the first t.mes cropped, just above the knees. It is almost as if Ariadne is slowly starting to slip from view…. In Ariadne’s Afternoon the focus has shifted to the massive red and white towers, behind which lurk the white sails of Theseus’s ship and, again, a chuffing steam locomotive. The towers are located behind a low, buttressed wall that forms a paddock or enclosure around the somewhat androgynous figure of Ariadne, whose deep slumber brings to mind Cocteau’s poetic claim that de Chirico drugged his statues with chloroform” (ibid., pp. 36-37).

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” (L. Rosenstock, “De Chirico's Influence on the Surrealists,” in De Chirico, New York, 1980, p. 113).

William Rubin has pointed out that de Chirico’s great.mes taphysical paintings emerged at a t.mes when the analytical Cubism of Picasso and Braque had almost obliterated recognizable subject matter, thus opening the way to non-figurative art. De Chirico’s rehabilitation of the object, his discovery of the poetic possibilities to join even the most mundane things, pointed the way for the young Surrealist painters. Max Ernst, René Magritte and Salvador Dalí in particular were deeply moved by the mystery of the world invented by de Chirico and the way in which it found a language through which to express the bizarre logic of dreams. But they also appreciated the formal inventions of these paintings. This can been seen in the Surrealists’ works throughout the 1920s, ‘30s and ‘40s where color palette, subject matter and composition all seem to drawn concretely from de Chirico’s metaphysical vision (see figs. 9 & 10). So much was de Chirico ingrained on the Surrealists consciousness that Il Pomeriggio di Arianna (Ariadne’s Afternoon) was reproduced in the 1926 La Révolution Surréaliste alongside a text by Paul Éluard.

“Every object has two appearances, the current one, which we nearly always see and which is seen by people in general: the other a spectral or metaphysical appearance beheld only by some rare individuals in moments of clairvoyance and metaphysical abstraction, as in the case of certain bodies concealed by substances impenetrable by sunlight yet discernible for instance, by X-ray or other powerful artificial means” (quoted in J. T. Soby, Giorgio de Chirico, New York, 1955, p. 67). It was these powerful means that De Chirico used to capture the dream and sleep of Ariadne alone on the island of Naxos, suspended between abandonment and discovery.