Pittura Metafisica
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Pittura Metafisica ("Metaphysical Painting") was an Italian art movement founded in 1917 by Carlo Carrà and Giorgio de Chirico in Ferrara.
A short-lived but significant Italian movement, it sprang from the chance meeting 1917 of Carrà, de Chirico and the latter's brother, the poet (and occasional painter) Alberto Savinio, in a military hospital in Ferrara.
The two painters already knew of each other and formed an immediate alliance, being able to paint in the hospital, and were encouraged by Savinio's poetry. Carrà had been among the leading painters of Futurism. De Chirico had been working in Paris, admired by Apollinaire and avant-garde artists as a painter of mysterious urban scenes and still lifes.
Metaphysical Painting sprang from their urge to explore the imagined inner life of familiar objects when represented out of their explanatory contexts: their solidity, their separateness in the space allotted to them, the secret dialogue that may take place between them. This alertness to the simplicity of ordinary things "which points to a higher, more hidden state of being" (Carrà) was linked to an awareness of such values in the great figures of early Italian painting, notably Giotto and Uccello about whom Carrà had written in 1915.
Their art, normally seen as purposeful naturalistic representation of figures, objects and actions in a controlled scenic space, could also seem mysteriously still and removed from the ordinary world; in the midst of war it offered a poetic language both inturned and strong and a corrective to the disruptive, fragmenting tendencies within Modernism. This desire to reattach his art to the great Italian past was stronger in Carrà, whose paintings of the time are also more economical and focused than de Chirico's; the latter continued to explore the enigmatic nature of the daily world in a more wide ranging manner.
The two artists were together for only a few months in the spring and summer of 1917. Other painters were affected by their example and ideas, most notably Morandi. The movement, as such, may be said to have dissolved by 1920 but its reverberations were felt for a long time, contributing both to the more poetic aspects of Surrealism and to the revival of classicism in the painting of Sironi and others in the 1920's.
They aimed to depict an alternative reality which engaged most immediately with the unconscious mind. In this style of painting, an illogical reality seemed credible. Using a sort of alternative logic, Carrà and de Chirico juxtaposed various ordinary subjects - typically including starkly rendered buildings, trains, and mannequins.
"Mystery" is the most familiar word of de Chirico. He wrote the following: "there is much more mystery in the shadow of a man walking on a sunny day, than in all religions of the world".
There were other artists associated with the movement including Giorgio Morandi, Mario Sironi and Filippo de Pisis.
Their alliance lasted less than a year and in 1919 all members of this group went into copying the paintings by old masters. Pittura Metafisica provided significant impetus for the development of Dada and Surrealism.
Their main slogan was following: the essence of things can be conceived not by reason but only using intuition.
