(Volos, Greece 1888–1978 Rome)
Oreste e Pilade, 1966, signed; titled and signed again
on the reverse with notarial certification on the reverse,
oil on canvas, 40 x 30 cm, framed

Provenance:
Galleria Molino, Rome
Farsetti Prato, 29 May 1999, lot 436
European Private Collection

Literature:
C. Bruni Sakraischik, Catalogo Generale Giorgio de Chirico, Opere dal 1951 al 1974, Electa, Milan, 1974, vol. 5, no. 720 with ill.
Catalogo Arte Moderna, Giorgio Mondadori, Gruppo Cairo Editore, 2018, p. 102, no. 6 with ill.

“The seated mannequin is destined to inhabit rooms, especially the corners of rooms;
open air does not suit him. This is where they are at home; where they flourish and generously
display the gifts of their ineffable and mysterious poetry. [...]

This mysterious aspect of rooms and the corners of rooms which I have expressed in
numerous paintings is also a phenomenon of great metaphysical interest; but to talk about this
now would take too long and, as someone once said, there are cases and moments when we
can only be true philosophers (and poets and painters, I may add) by remaining silent.”
Giorgio de Chirico, Birth of the Mannequin, 1938

De Chirico´s metaphysical watershed occurred, as we know, in the shadow of his reading of the works of Boecklin, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, which moved the focus of his research to the “melancholy of beautiful autumn afternoons in Italian cities”. He wrote: “Schopenhauer and Nietzsche were the first to teach [me] the profound meaning of the nonsensical nature of life, and how this non-sense could be transformed into art […]. The great new creators are the philosophers who have exceeded philosophy.”

The years spent in Paris, where he would catch the eye of a thirty year-old Picasso and where he would capture the brilliance of an enthusiastic Apollinaire, were for de Chirico an important period of collaboration and acquisition of knowledge: these years would see the beginning of the iconographic mannequin cycle.

Following a busy period of several commissions, during the 1960s he regained some peace and quiet for his own work, and began a new phase of research known as Neometaphysics. In this period, he painted works that contemplate and reelaborate subjects from his own painting in the 1910s, 20s, and 30s. Subjects such as the Mannequin, the Troubadour, the Archaeologists, the Gladiators, the Mysterious Baths, and the Sun are reinterpreted in a new light, with bright colours and a more serene atmosphere compared with the dark, severe qualities of his first Metaphysical phase, which was pervaded by a sense of unease. De Chirico poetically sets new compositions of his subjects within his most famous innovations, such as his Metaphysical Interiors, populated with mythological characters such as Orestes and Pylades.

The aim of the metaphysical research into the mannequin is, for de Chirico, “to completely suppress man in the guise of guide or means to express symbols, sensations, thoughts, to free painting once and for all from the anthropomorphism that suffocates sculpture; to see everything, including man, in its quality as an object.” It is the total objectivity of the mannequin that makes man reject it, even hate it: the absence of life and soul renders it eternal and surpassing the death of every man. Orestes and Pylades, symbols of fraternal friendship, are here imbued with a sense of unreality, notwithstanding that they are caught in a moment of intimacy, and appear more humanised than their counterparts of ten years earlier. However, the range of colours and strong contrasts restores a surreal and uneasy dimension into which the observer is transported. This sense is further heightened by the depiction of pale architecture emerging from the window.