Bibliography
The Spirits Released : De Chirico and Mataphysical Perspective
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Picard’s description of the Synistor painting as a pictorialised ‘tomb facade’ heralded a significant breakthrough in our understanding of Romano-Campanian wall-painting. However, I believe it is more technically correct to use the term fanum, a sacred area dedicated to a deity or an in-house memorialising shrine. The problem with describing them as tomb facades is that it implies an entrance to a burial chamber. Cicero, in 45 BC, quite clearly makes the distinction between tomb and ‘fanum’ in a letter to his friend Atticus, when he asks him to supervise the building of a ‘fanum’ in memory of the death of his only daughter,  “I wish to have a fanum built and that wish cannot be rooted out of my heart. I am anxious to avoid any likeness to a tomb, not so much on account of the penalty of the law, as in order to attain as nearly as possible to an apotheosis. This I could do if I built it in the villa itself . . .” Cicero’s reference to the law probably relates to the edict that burial should not take place within the house as was the ancient custom. What is significant from the point of view of this essay is that Cicero wishes to memorialise his daughter within the house. (For a further description see W W Fowler The Religious Experience of the Roman People Macmillian, London 1933, p146 and p385).

The link between tragic-style painting and the room of dreams provides the first and undoubtedly most complex clue to the mysterious relationship that exists between De Chirico’s early metaphysical paintings and these ancient paintings.  It is the relationship between painting and the oneiric. Both De Chirico and his predecessors engaged in the plastic projection of a world that was significantly influenced by dreams. In the case of our ancient model, its location would also suggest that these paintings were, in turn, used to influence the dream state itself (fig.1).  Perhaps De Chirico’s dream manifestations were also intended to have a similar effect, although on the conscious mind in the form of daydreams (fig.2). Friedrich Nietzsche, his lifelong philosophical mentor, played an important part in pointing him in this direction, particularly with such descriptions of the ideal artist as …“A man who feels within himself a surplus of such powers of embellishment, concealment and transfiguration will finally seek to unburden himself of this surplus in works of art;…. ” (Nietzsche, F., Human all too Human, Part 2, p.92, George Allen and Unwin Edition May 1924) and “ ......through Apollonian dream inspiration, his own state, i.e. his oneness with the primal source of the universe reveals itself to him in a symbolic dream-picture”. (Nietzsche, F., Birth of Tragedy, p28-29, George Allen and Unwin Edition May 1923)

Ardengo Soffici, as early as 1914, described De Chirico’s paintings as being “…. like the writing down of dreams which contained funereal lights and shadows” (“Soffici a Milano”, Lacerba, Vol 11 No 13, Florence). The connection with death is also clearly emphasised in Patrick Waldberg’s article “Surrealism and the Metaphysical” in Metaphysical Art, (Massimo Carra et al, 1971:175), in which he describes De Chirico’s painting as a “. . . stage peopled by materialised phantoms, lost desires, latent

 

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obsessions, places beyond time in which present, past and future merge. 'Death is the only representation which moves freely in all directions on de Chirico’s chessboard' ”.  (Waldberg’s un-cited quote comes from Jean Cocteau’s 1928 publication Le Mistère Laïc, which was dedicated to De Chirico… “La mort est la seule pièce qui circule librement et dans n’importe quel sens sur l’échiquier de Chirico.” (Cocteau 1928: 81 ).
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1. Wall-painting cubiculum 16 (bedroom), Villa of the Mysteries, Pompeii, c. 50 BC. The pictorial door appears to lead to a sanctuary. Just visible above the adjacent wall is tholos, a circular colonnaded shrine dedicated to divinities or departed ancestors.

2. Giorgio de Chirico Metaphysical Interior with Factory 1969. The sleeping figure of Ariadne is shown in the nearest inserted painting and the frock coated statue, possibly a reference to his deceased father, is seen in the rear inserted painting.