“Metaphor, juxtaposition, unsettling connections, meaning evoked in the missing connective tissue between somehow familiar objects—these are the poet’s tools.”¹

In her introduction to a new publication of de Chirico’s poems, Stefania Heim has written of the many qualities and concerns which are shared between painters and poets. In this particular instance, the poems were written and the paintings were produced by the very same person, Giorgio de Chirico.

It all seems like a stage set: houses lined up around the edges of piazzas; foreground still lives shifting the scale of the entire vista; statues, some riding horses in the background and some asleep in the center; trains speeding past in the far distance, all seemingly without reason or purpose within the total scene. All of them, however, contributing to the interconnectedness and the overall strangeness, with smokestacks and towers looming over the horizon.

Enigmatic imagery and hermetic signs, these elements often function in both painting and poetry. Classical marble statues: heads and figures that often appear livelier than their human counterparts, resulting in a kind of painting that strives to be magical. These are the very ideas that form the foundation for all of Giorgio de Chirico’s imagery in both painting and poetry. A portion of his poem, “Mysterious Night” contains the following image, taken directly from one of his still lives.

“Two iron artichokes on the ocher table.
The geometry of shadows lacerated the heart
all melancholy morning.
But evening came and the volumes and forms fused.
Men and animals were passing like silent shadows
in the crepuscular light.
Long dream’s light. The strange sounds arrive muffled
only the mind’s wheels, vertiginous, rotate.”²

In the poem “Vision” de Chirico speaks of the houses that line the piazzas, and then there is this excerpt from “Zeus the Explorer” a prose poem incorporating anther favorite image from de Chirico’s work:

“The big colored zinc glove, with the terrible golden nails, swinging on the shop door in the sad breaths of the civic afternoons, showed me with its index finger pointing toward the slabs of the sidewalk the hermetic signs of a new melancholy.”³

VISION

“Houses along the piazzas,
houses at the top of the world
at the near horizon
of our faraway desires,
friends you came one evening
in which at every moment
hope escaped before
our hands that uselessly
attempted to stop it
and we were thinking
about the white acropolises
where the poet exalts himself
and kneels.”⁴

(fragment)

“Life, life, great mysterious dream! All the enigmas
that you muster; joys and flashes…
Porticoes in the sun. Sleeping statues.
Red chimney tops; nostalgias for unknown horizons…
And the enigma of the school, and the prison, and the
barracks;
and the locomotive that whistles night below the frigid
vault and the stars.
Always the unknown; the waking at morning and the dream
it has become, dark omen, mysterious oracle…”⁵

Later during the 1930’s, as the whole idea of ‘surrealism’ was becoming institutionalized, painting mostly formulas and facing failure, certain artists saw new doors opening. This was especially important for Alberto Giacometti and Giorgio Morandi. Giorgio de Chirico to some extent realized this as well, he even wrote about it at the time: “Around me the international gang of modern painters was stupidly striving amid exhausted formulas and sterile systems.”⁶

De Chirico looked back to the classical period admiringly, tried to return to it, but with very mixed results. Turning his head on the ‘modern’ movement, he did indeed go backwards, whereas Giacometti and Morandi looked forward, seeing ways out of this dilemma in order to discover new methods of seeing, rediscovering their own eyes.

ZEUXIS THE EXPLORER
for Mario Broglio

“The most ancient Cretans would print an enormous eye in the middle of the skinny profiles that chased each other around their vases, their domestic utensils, the walls of their houses.
Even the fetus of a man, of a fish, of a chicken, of a serpent, in its first stage, is entirely an eye.
You must find the eye in every thing.”⁷

---

1 de Chirico, Giorgio, (Stefania Heim, translator); Geometry of Shadows; A Public Space Books; Brooklyn, New York; 2019; p. xi.

2 de Chiric, Giorgio; (Stefania Heim, translator); Geometry of Shadows; A Public Space Books; Brooklyn, New York; 2019; p. 3.

3 de Chiric, Giorgio; (Stefania Heim, translator); Geometry of Shadows; A Public Space Books; Brooklyn, New York; 2019; p. 37.

4 de Chiric, Giorgio; (Stefania Heim, translator); Geometry of Shadows; A Public Space Books; Brooklyn, New York; 2019; p. 69.

5 de Chiric, Giorgio; (Stefania Heim, translator); Geometry of Shadows; A Public Space Books; Brooklyn, New York; 2019; p. 83.

6 de Chiric, Giorgio; (Stefania Heim, translator); Geometry of Shadows; A Public Space Books; Brooklyn, New York; 2019; p. 35.

7 de Chirico, Giorgio; (Stefania Heim, translator); Geometry of Shadows; A Public Space Books; Brooklyn, New York; 2019; p. 35.