Piazza d’Italia belongs to one of Giorgio de Chirico’s most iconic series of Metaphysical paintings, in which an elegantly sculpted model of Ariadne dominates the centre of a curiously other-worldly Italian town square. The displacement of familiar elements and their arranged combination disorientates all sense of t.mes and place whilst revealing a new myth or a new narrative. Born in Greece, de Chirico was particularly intrigued by the legend of the Grecian princess, who, abandoned by her lover on the island of Naxos after she had enabled him to slay the Minotaur, is dramatically rescued by Bacchus. Most importantly, De Chirico was fascinated by Nietzsche’s highly personal interpretation of the figure of Ariadne and its myth interpreted as a labyrinth or riddle to resolve. In Piazza d’Italia, de Chirico chooses to depict Ariadne suspended between the moment of abandonment and salvation, contemplating her fate with seeming tranquillity.

The principal themes of de Chirico’s oeuvre, classicism and modernity, t.mes , melancholy, nostalgia and existence, are explored through recurring objects and motifs. The juxtaposition of the Ariadne, the loggias, the men in suits, and the train in the background, enhances the artist’s careful contrast between modernity and antiquity, reminiscent of Atget’s relentless photography documenting the rise of modernity in fin-de-siècle Paris which influenced a number of Surrealist artists through his somet.mes s eerie documentation of life in the streets. De Chirico further continued to return to the fundamental theme of the Piazza throughout his career, finding constant inspiration, as Michael Taylor suggests, in “the infinite possibilities of a finite set of objects” (Michael R. Taylor inquoted in Giorgio de Chirico and the myth of Ariadne (exhibition catalogue), Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, 2003, p. 133).

Painted circa 1955, the present work incorporates the primary motifs which were of major significance within the Piazza d’Italia paintings: the red tower dominating the square, the train glimpsed in the background about to sweep through the scene, echoing the futurist signs of modernity, the two anonymous figures greeting each other, in darkness and almost as shadows, and, omnipresent, the classical statue of Ariadne which serves as the focal point of the composition. Ultimately Piazza d’Italia elegantly conveys the elegiac mood which Ardengo Soffici first attributed to these works: “Giorgio de Chirico expresses as no one else has done the poignant.mes lancholy of the close of a beautiful day in an old Italian city where, at the back of a lonely piazza, beyond the setting of loggias, porticos, and monuments to the past, a train chugs […] or a soaring factory chimney sends smoke into the cloudless sky” (Ardengo Soffici, “De Chirico e Savinio”, in Lacerba, July 1914, Florence, translated from the Italian).