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They represent the false-door between De Chirico and his own patriarchal lineage. For more on this see my essay: The Spirits Released. The very fact that the Piazza de I’Italia paintings were produced in large numbers, with slight variations, enabled De Chirico to engage in a repetitive act of apotheosis, which was at the same time, a pictorial reaffirmation of his sense of geographic fatality. This was the phrase that he used to denote his belief in the inevitability of geo-genetic spiritual interconnectedness, which in his case he felt existed between him and his Greco-Roman ancestry. For more on this theme see “Giorgio de Chirico e il Tempio dell’Immortalità” in Metafisica no.22-2023.
                                                                                                        
Picasso’s artistic output was equally legendary and in some instances repetitive. His paintings, sculptures, prints and ceramics filled studio after studio, château after château and even a few castles. In Life with Picasso Françoise Gilot described her first visit to his studio on the Rue La Boétie, as still being full of his art and his possessions despite the fact that it had been unused for five years. Her vivid description reads like Howard Carter’s account of his entry into Tutankhamen’s burial chamber packed with treasures in preparation for the boy Pharaoh’s after-life. When she latter went to his much larger country property at Boisgeloup she also experienced similar feelings caused by the sight of objects appearing to be in a state of limbo. Picasso’s will to posses and at the same time assuage loss seems to have existed in equal measure. This is exemplified by his prolific creativity combined with his legendary incapacity to throw away even the humblest of objects such as fingernail cuttings, old cloths and even cigarette ends. Had he not had the wealth to accommodate his pathological urge to create, posses and hoard, he may well have been clinically diagnosed as having Diogenes syndrome.

Prolific creativity can of course be attributed to any number of benign and not so benign primal motivations such as the will to posses, male machismo, sexual drives, insecurity complexes and an attempt to cheat the inevitable via pictorial abreaction or hypercathexis. In the case of both Picasso and De Chirico, however, the evidence lies before us in the taxonomy of their oeuvre and in an analysis of the themes that they repeatedly used. In the case of both artists a chronological ordering of their work is of comparatively little conceptual value, in contrast to the revelations that emerge from a close analysis of their thematic groupings and the repetitive visual patterns that occur within them. Even a brief study of their respective taxonomies indicates that both artists revolved around opposing gender loci. De Chirico, whilst still in his early twenties, established many of his key recurring themes such as the relationship between metaphysical perspective, the poetics of spatiotemporal discontinuity, visual meta-languages that focused on images such as votive fruit, the voyage and voyager, the Knight Errant or Ariadne in the context of sleep and spiritual reawakening. These themes found visual expression in numerous compositions that focused on images of piazzas, interiors, manikins, gladiators in domestic interiors, still-life paintings (or silent-life as he preferred to call it) and portraits and self-portraits (Figs 1-6).

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