Sotheby's London . A bid just above the top pre-sale estimate for this painter who was much influenced by works of the Antiquity. De Chirico studied in Greece and settled in Munich where he was influenced by Franz Stuck, Max Klinger and Arnold Böcklin. He came back in Italy in 1908 and started to paint architectural scenes with statues and Greek - like skies. The absence of human life in his works was the main element in them until he placed human figures in the forms of faceless robots and dummies in his paintings in 1915. De Chirico met success in 1918 and became the leader of the «Valori Plastici» group a year later. He then copied the works of old masters as well as portraits, nudes and landscapes quite realistic and sad in style. He was then hailed as a pioneer of Surrealism but in 1930 he broke abruptly with his past and turned to academic painting. The present work was one of de Chirico's major paintings of 1915, the year in which the artist left Paris to return to Italy, summoned back by the Italian military authorities. The layers of arches and colonnades piled up in the architectural constructions squeezed into either side of the composition recall the incredible Mole Antonelliana, one of the main sights of Turin, the city that had left such a lasting impression on de Chirico in the summer of 1911. The massing of architectural forms creates a tight, almost claustrophobic sense of airlessness. Towers and chimneys were among de Chirico's most potent images, depicting tall concealed places as blank and uninhabited as his deserted piazzas and dark arcades. A source for these elaborate architectural constructions may be the imaginary towns and cities found in early Italian paintings. De Chirico drew on Renaissance traditions very freely in these metaphysical works, particularly in the adoption of sharply-defined linear perspective and in the use of cast shadows as the catalogue pointed out. FOR CHIRICO PICS GO TO :
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