Journey inside De Chirico. 4 part
So, Ferrara. De Chirico is living here while on military service in the 27th Infantry Regiment (he moved here from Florence in 1915) and here his metaphysical art blooms. We have already seen, in the first episode, the picture The disquieting muses, which transformed a corner of the square in front of the Estense Castle into a surreal view. But the metaphysical masterpieces of the Ferrara period are many: here we will admire some. First, why has De Chirico, just during the military service, while the Italian front is about to collapse under the Austrian attack, so much time to paint? In our city the artist is at first active as as a secretary of the army, then he is admitted to the Military Psychiatric Hospital Villa del Seminario (today the structure houses the Boy City and is located on the way to Cona hospital), where the director practices a very innovative therapy: he lets his patients free to devote themselves to their favorite occupations. Together with De Chirico, in 1917, other painters were admitted: between them, another leader of the metaphysical painting as Carlo Carra, who was before a Futurist. The First World War saw the explosion of PTSD, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: soldiers returned from trenches with a nervous breakdown, they were often reduced to amoebas (there are some unsettling videos about that), so that the existence of a hospital dedicated exclusively to nervous diseases in Ferrara, one of the cities behind the front of the Piave, is not surprising at all.
But back to painting. In Ferrara, De Chirico gets acquainted with another great artist of this environment, Filippo De Pisis; moreover, during the last years of the war, he cultivates contacts with Paris (we'll see that), with the Dadaism of Tristan Tzara and other intellectuals of that metropolis, then a crossroad of the most diverse and innovative artistic trends. Finally, in Ferrara, in 1917, De Chirico meets his fiancée, Antonia Bolognesi, "Alceste", with whom he weaves together an intense relationship, witnessed by an extensive correspondence: his letters, found by her grandson, Eugenio Bolognesi, were published one year ago. They lead us into a love story of the past, a little ancient, flourished in that very special and almost dreamy city which is Ferrara, where the painter searches strenuously for a stable job in order to get married and make his dream real (but he was never able to get married with Antonia). Alceste was the title of the painting depicting a portrait of Antonia: a portrait sold during an exhibition in 1919, and that, not surprisingly, the artist was afraid of losing, as evidenced in a letter to his fiancee; it is the painting printed on the book cover. Alceste: like the wife of King Admetus of Thessaly (we have a homonymous tragedy by Euripides), who sacrificed herself to save the life of her husband and that Hercules, in a surge of friendship, saved from Thanatos, the god of death, which was dragging her into Hades: the sweetest bride of the whole Greek mythology. And who knows whether Antonia, in the bleak period of the Great War, amid the fog of our plains, actually saved our painter from some kind of intimate death?
Of course, mythology marriage and love struck the artist, as it is also shown by another Ferrara masterpiece, Hector and Andromache. The painting (which was replicated in other works, including a bronze) presents in metaphysical key the poignant farewell between the hero and his wife at the end of the sixth book of the Iliad, one of the most touching passages of the poem: the Trojan princess knows that her husband will not return from war, he indulges in a sorrowful tenderness thinking that, one day, after his death, she will be the slave of winners, and the sense of duty must, with agony, prevail on love. We are in 1917: how many times will our painter have witnessed equally poignant farewells at the station or in the military environment he was frequenting back then? So many soldiers never returned. And so his masterpiece portrays, in a surreal atmosphere (the oblique light seems to announce a storm, with a leaden sky and shadows appearing sideways), between walls of ramparts like ours, made out of bricks, two mannequins who are tight in a hug that does not let to clearly delineate their silhouettes. This is perhaps, and I'm not kidding, one of the most beautiful and intense embraces of the history of art: Hector looks strong, with a typically masculine shape (narrow hips, broad shoulders) and "squeezes" the body, full of curves, of Andromache, almost leaning with fatigue his forehead onto her cheeks, which, however, turn upward, as if she took a last breath of strength. However ... We have before us two dummies: why?
The world where the painter's dummies move is an inanimate world, of inert matter: it is a world, in fact, of objects, objects behind which a deep and unexpected meaning lies, a meaning which usually, in everyday life, we do not see. Metaphysical painting reveals the mystery of the things that we do not understand because we look superficially. An introductory text published in 1916 on Vraie Italie says: De Chirico (...) brings us to unknown places scattered in the same places where our senseless life flows. Houses, rooms, halls, corridors, open or closed doors, the windows, appear to him in a new light. He constantly discovers new aspects, new loneliness, a sense of recollection even in those objects that daily habit has made so familiar to us, enough to conceal in them the famous demon Heraclitus of Ephesus saw in all things. And so biscuits, aluminum boxes, maps, pieces of metal or painted wood, framed in a certain way and viewed from a certain point, rise to the sublime of a new religion.
No wonder then that Projects of a girl, against the background of the Castello Estense, shows a whole host of everyday objects that seem to materialize the closed world of a girld at the time (maybe Alceste? But he did not know her in 1915): the bobbins (cylindrical perfect figures, so attractive for a painter fascinated by geometry: he seems to go back to the pure volumes by Piero della Francesca), the matchbox sideways, the tape rolled around a cardboard, geometric designs, the gloves, so bulky (and so feminine, ubiquitous among the heroines fin de siècle: for example they appear as a recurring symbol in contemporary Russian poet Anna Akhmatova). This seems the view, intimate and at the same time narrow, of a girl of a good family: her outlook is closed by the sight of the castle, the few objects of everyday life and a sense of self-absorption from which, at the same time, she would want to escape.
Other works of the Ferrara period are The troubadour, of 1917 (inspired by the poets of the twelfth century), and the Great Metaphysical, always of 1917. The troubadour was a poet much admired by Nietzsche, who connected him to the joy and exuberance of life. Not much remains here of that joy, given that we are facing the usual dummy, maybe a little more robust than usual, without arms, without legs, his head bowed, and a face without eyes; the mannequin seems to move, but is tied to his scaffold like a puppet (but the scaffold seems almost the gallow of a hanged man, with a stage for performances). In the background there is a tower surrounded by the light of a thunderstorm, on the left still a "Ferrara" building, made of red bricks, casting an ominous shadow. The troubadour looks like a knight armor made with a mass of colorful cans. And who is the shadow standing out on the left? It's scary. Perhaps is he the hanger of the poor troubadour, who lost every spark of Nietzschean joy?
Finally, in the "Great metaphysical," we find a real scaffold, where we can no longer recognize the dummy, except for a white and amorphous head, a scaffold consisting of a jumble of square materials (have you noticed that the more bizarre the jumble is, the more the materials composing it, as well as for the mannequins, have a strictly geometric shape?). The background is a public square, with clear buildings on the background and a dark one looming on the left. In front of works of art we must ask the simplest questions, those of children: have you noticed how the floor is tilted? But how can the mannequins stand up and not slide down? De Chirico stops on a canvas that era which, with the war, really seemed to "slide down", by "geometric pieces", apparently unexceptionable, but which provide together a sense of absurd. In those same years, and shortly after the war, the cultural and artistic revolution reached its climax in the capital of Europe, Paris, with the avant-garde: De Chirico returned there after the end of the conflict. But he had already stayed there before 1915, alone, almost unnoticed, and yet, even then, his art had touched many people. So Paris is our next stop.
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