Giorgio de Chirico: Neometafisica

By Jonathan Shih

In July 1973, journalist Franco Simongini filmed Giorgio de Chirico painting inside his home studio at Piazza di Spagna in Rome, part of a RAI documentary on how a work of art comes into being. De Chirico was eighty-five at the time and had lived in that same studio for nearly thirty years.

The painting taking shape on camera, Il sole sul cavalletto, belongs to what de Chirico called his Neometafisica period, a return in his final decades to the enigmatic imagery he had pioneered as a young painter in the 1910s. The sun-on-an-easel motif first appeared in 1930, in a series of lithographs de Chirico made for an edition of Apollinaire’s Calligrammes, and he picked the theme back up repeatedly in his later years, treating his own earlier work as source material the same way he once treated classical architecture and myth.

Footage: Giorgio de Chirico, Il sole sul cavalletto, 1973. Filmed live at his studio in Piazza di Spagna, Rome, for the RAI documentary “Come nasce un’opera d’arte.” Film © RAI (Radiotelevisione Italiana). Artwork © Fondazione Giorgio e Isa de Chirico.

This footage has been edited, condensed, and captioned for educational and editorial purposes under fair use. All rights remain with the original footage and respective rights holders. No copyright infringement intended.