Giorgio de Chirico *

(Volos, Greece 1888–1978 Rome)
Gli Archeologi (Manichini Seduti), 1962, signed; signed and titled with notary inscription on the reverse, oil on canvas, 60 x 50 cm, framed
This work is accompanied by a photo certificate of authenticity issued by Carlo Bruni Sakraischik

Provenance:
Galleria Il Prisma, Cuneo (stamp on the certificate)
Galleria d‘Arte Cafiso, Milan (stamp on the certificate)
Galleria d‘Arte Orler, Favaro Veneto (label on the reverse and certificate available)
European Private Collection

Literature:
P. Picozza, E. Pontiggia, Giorgio de Chirico. Catalogo generale. Opere dal 1914 al 1976, vol. V, Edizioni San Marino 2023, p. 298, no. 2196 with ill.

“A work of art, in order to be truly immortal, must go entirely beyond the limits of the human: logic and common sense must be completely absent. In this way, it will come closer to the state of dreaming and to a child’s state of mind (…) To live in the world as though it were an immense museum of oddities, of curious, brightly coloured toys that change their appearance, which we sometimes smash, like children, to see what they are made of inside, only to be disappointed to find that they are empty.”
Giorgio de Chirico

In 1962 Giorgio de Chirico returned to one of the most celebrated and recognisable subjects of his poetic universe, born of the Metaphysical period that left an indelible mark on twentieth-century art and paved the way for Surrealism and Magic Realism. That season, begun in Paris and Ferrara in the 1910s, with its deserted squares, long shadows, mannequins and dizzying perspectives, exerted a decisive influence on artists such as Max Ernst, René Magritte, Salvador Dalí and, in Italy, Carlo Carrà and Alberto Savinio, the artist’s brother and companion in his research.

Conceived in the early 1920s and revisited many times over the decades, the theme of the Archaeologists is a true emblem of the artist, among the most sought-after by collectors. The earliest versions emerged from the Parisian climate of 1922–1928, in dialogue with Surrealism, while the later reprises, in particular those of the 1960s and 1970s, belong to the neo-Metaphysical phase, in which de Chirico reworked his own repertoire of images with complete freedom, often introducing variations in format, colour and composition.

Two faceless mannequins sit side by side in a silent interior, wrapped in a suspended atmosphere. Within the chest of each there is no heart, but a world: temples, arches and stairways descending towards the sea, as though the entire Mediterranean civilisation were housed in the very bodies of its custodians. The gesture of one arm resting on the companion’s shoulder adds a note of intimate fraternity, almost a pact of memory between two guardians of the same secret. Here lies the master’s unmistakable signature: the ruin enters the bourgeois drawing room, the remote becomes near, the familiar turns enigmatic. The perspectival floor and the red curtain closing the scene on the right lend the setting a theatrical, stage-like quality, while the upholstered armchairs with their fringes anchor the figures in a domestic intimacy that makes the appearance of architecture within their bodies all the more disorienting.
The figures themselves, hybrids of man and statue, with draped garments recalling ancient sculpture, fuse the human and the monumental. The absence of a gaze does not empty the figures but makes them the repositories of every possible face, in a meditation on time and eternal return rooted in his youthful reading of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. The title itself alludes to the profession of those who dig into the past; yet here the past is not buried in the earth but dwells within the human being, and the archaeologist becomes at once excavator and excavation, custodian and relic.
Specialist: Alessandro Rizzi