Giorgio de Chirico

Born in  Volos, Greece, on the 10th of July 1888 and died on the 20th November 1978 in Rome, Italy, Giorgio was an Italian artist.

In the years before the World War he had founded the scuola metafisica art movement which then went on to influence artists and surrealists. After 1919 he had became interested in traditional painting techniques, working in a neoclassical or neo-baroque style while revisiting the 'metaphysical' themes of his work from before.

He studied art in Athens under the guidance of the Greek painters Georgios Roilos, one of the most important and  influential Greek painters in the late 19th and early 20th century, and Georgios Jakobides, a painter of one of the main representatives of the Greek artistic movement of the 'Munich School'.  

The Uncertainty of the Poet

The torso in Giorgio de Chirico's work is the sculpture of Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love, beauty, procreation and pleasure, also identified with the planet Venus. The block like, distorted shadows supposedly the conventions of  pictorial space and time. Though his early work was embraced by many other surrealists who saw them as dream-like and in a parallel existence.