Metaphysical Art

Definition

Pittura metafisica — the school of Giorgio de Chirico and his brother Alberto Savinio (Andrea Francesco Alberto di Chirico) that preceded and fed surrealism, and (per Weir) the theoretical source of Dalí's representational premise. Savinio's 1919 essay "Anadymenon" (Valori Plastici) made irony "the most important theoretical principle in painting": irony is "the ethical consequence of nature's nudity," leading artists "to develop modes of morality that conceal the 'terribly clear appearances' they perceive" — the morality taking "the form of distortions in their representations of nature's appearance." His second interpretation of Heraclitus's aphorism: nature hides from herself through "self-directed modesty," so that "in reality, not only in representation, natural objects do not reveal themselves through their appearance." The painter's task follows: "Artists, therefore (and especially painters, because they deal exclusively with the visual), must reveal through appearance alone that things are not as they appear. Thus, the deeper aim of metaphysical art was to use representative painting to reveal what is hidden by appearance." The school's painting also supplied surrealism's first objects: de Chirico's metaphysical interiors populate themselves with eatables — "crescents, macaroons, and biscuits finding a place beside T-squares and other utensils," artichokes and bananas as "actual surrealist articles" (Metaphysical Interior with Biscuits, 1916).

Key Thinkers

• Giorgio de Chirico (not yet paged — see log) — the painter of the metaphysical interiors; Metaphysical Interior with Biscuits (1916) as the origin scene of the surrealist object.
• Alberto Savinio (not yet paged — see log) — the school's theorist: irony as painting's "most important theoretical principle"; the two interpretations of Heraclitus's concealment that Dalí inherited; author under an assumed name, "younger brother of painter Giorgio di Chirico."
• Salvador Dalí (not yet paged — see log) — the inheritor: "Savinio's musings appear to have had deep resonance for Dalí. Although he mentioned Savinio only once, he continued to write about Heraclitus's aphorism in precisely these terms" — five essays between 1927 and 1935.

Related Concepts

• Surrealism — the movement de Chirico and Savinio "had considerable influence on"; the surrealist object's painted prehistory.
• Concealment — the school's Heraclitean premise: appearance as nature's hiding, and the ethics of distorting it.
• The Uncanny — the metaphysical interior's affective register in the wider literature: the still, estranged space of the familiar-made-strange; Dalí's objects inherit the estrangement of the ordinary (a telephone, a biscuit) without the haunt.
• Anamorphosis — the older technology for the same appearance/truth disjunction: the image that withholds its referent from frontal view.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Salvador Dalí's Interiors with Heraclitus' Concealment (Weir 2018) — Savinio's "Anadymenon" (1919) and its two interpretations of Heraclitus; de Chirico's eatables as "actual surrealist articles" (Metaphysical Interior with Biscuits, 1916, reproduced as Figure 24.1); the lineage into Dalí's objects and interiors.

Open Questions

• Weir reads Dalí as departing from Savinio's program: where metaphysical art must "reveal what is hidden by appearance," Dalí's objects "reproduce nature's concealment." Is the designed object a betrayal of metaphysical painting's aim or its fulfillment at the scale of the thing?
• The metaphysical interior (de Chirico's biscuit-filled rooms, 1916) is the wiki's earliest designed-interior-with-desiring-objects: does it give the interior cluster a prehistory before the decorator and the domestic scientist — a room theory painted rather than written?
• Savinio's morality of distortion and Descartes's suspicion of disguised images (truth-and-illusion) meet in the appearance/truth disjunction: is metaphysical art the ethical inversion of the Cartesian position — distortion as honesty about nature's hiding?