“What is especially needed is

great sensitivity: to look upon
everything in the world as enigma…”

Giorgio de Chirico

“What is especially needed is great sensitivity: to look upon everything in the world as enigma….To live in the world as in an immense museum of strange things.” 1 So wrote the Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico, who made paintings of classical piazzas populated with spectral figures and shadows, knitting together purposefully distorted perspectives and tilted grounds. 

In 1917, recently returned to Italy, de Chirico founded the Scuola Metafisica (or Metaphysical School), formulating its principles with his brother Alberto Savinio and the Futurist artist Carlo Carrà. De Chirico compared the metaphysical work of art to “the flat surface of a perfectly calm ocean,” which “disturbs us…by all the unknown that is hidden in the depth.” 3  The term would come to encompass all his work produced between roughly 1911 and 1917; it is this “metaphysical” period that would prove highly influential to the Surrealists in the following decade.