Merjian_De Chirico Untimely Objects

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Figure 1. Giorgio de Chirico, The Evil Genius of a King, springsummer 1914. Oil on canvas, 61 x 50.2 cm; 24 x 19 in. Digital Image The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, New York.

For their perceptive comments and criticisms, I wish to thank Emily Braun, T. J. Clark, Jennifer Marshall, Francesco Pellizzi, Barbara Spackman, Anne Wagner, and the two anonymous RES peer reviewers. Any errors or oversights that remain are my own. Thanks also to Valerie McGuire for her indispensable help with images, and to Ester Coen for her moral support. Research for this essay was supported by a Fulbright Full Grant to Italy, the Paul Mellon Fellowship of the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, and the Stanford Humanities Postdoctoral Fellows program. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from the French and Italian are my own. Where possible I have cited from extant English translations.

1. F. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Epigrams and Interludes, #149, Basic Writings of Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: Modern Library, 2000 [1967]), p. 280.

2. G. de Chirico, Meditations of a Painter/What the Painting of the Future Might Be, Paulhan MSS, reprinted in Hebdomeros and Other Writings, ed. J. Ashbery (Cambridge: Exact Change, 1992), p. 205.

3. As this article was going to press, the Fondazione Giorgio e Isa de Chirico, Rome, challenged the authenticity of three canvases from the Evil Genius seriesall of which are included in Paolo Baldaccis 1997 catalogue raisonnand denied permission to reproduce the images herein: Still Life: Turin 1888 (Spring 1914; cat. no. 62) Metaphysical Composition with Toys (summerautumn, 1914; cat. no. 66), and Metaphysical Composition (summerautumn, 1914; cat. no. 67). The documentation and forensic evidence leading to the Fondaziones verdict regarding these three pictures have not yet been made public.

yawning space, abutted by the corner of a poker-faced arcade (fig. 1).

What does this strange constellation of objectspinned with gravity-defying immobility to a sharply tilted planepropose? Does it imagine what modern commodities in a shop window would look like to an uncultured primitive? Or, conversely, how exotic fetishes appear to the urbane European? Do these shapes and colors suggest elaborate drafting implements, seen by a wide-eyed infant who lacks a language to describe them? Or do they instead utter some neoteric language, shared only by elect members? Does this space represent a prehistoric Greek or Roman altar, strewn with eviscerated organs, awaiting an augur? Or else pastries glimpsed in a store front, da sotto in s, by a child passing by? Do they allude to a museum display case of artifacts, of ancient utensils, or jewels? Or, conversely, to the most modish gadgets and devices in a modern European appliance shop?

This swell of uncertainties unfurls in the wake of a decidedly reticent painting, The Evil Genius of a King. Giorgio de Chirico completed this canvas in Paris during the spring and summer of 1914, along with a cluster of closely related paintings, all of which share the same basic compositional premise: Still Life: Turin 1888 (spring 1914), The Sailors Barracks (fig. 2) The Generals Illness (springsummer 1914), and Metaphysical Composition with Toys and Metaphysical Composition (summerautumn, 1914).3 These six canvases, which I shall hereforth refer to as the Evil Genius series (since this is the best known and most reproduced of the group), all figure objects with purposes that vacillatein the shape

What a time experiences as evil is usually an untimely echo of what was formerly experienced as goodthe atavism of a more ancient ideal.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil1

To see everything, even man, in its quality of thing. This is the Nietzschean method. Applied to painting it might produce extraordinary results. This is what I try to demonstrate in my pictures.

Giorgio de Chirico, What the Painting of the Future Might Be, Parisian Notebooks, ca. 191119132

A gnarled orange barb pokes up out of its slate-blue base, notched with indecipherable markings and huddled in the shadow of a lopsided red frame; an orb of emerald green perches miraculously on a tilted plank, showing off the measured loops of its intersecting parabolas; a hexagonal tube or container or incantatory object, markedlike its neighboring, flattened arrowwith strange ciphers, inches upward against a vertiginously tipped plane. Bounded by a wedge of ink-black shadow at right and a swatch of brick wall and flushed horizon at left, this narrow space appears close, yet strains upward and away. The ginger-colored ledge rears up at an angle oblique to the picture plane, climbing like a drawbridge toward a steep vanishing point, the edge of which spills over into an unseen,

Giorgio de Chiricos The Evil Genius of a King (1914) between the antediluvian and the posthuman

ARA H. MERJIAN

Untimely objects


Figure 2. Giorgio de Chirico, The Sailors Barracks, springsummer 1914. Oil on canvas, 81.2 x 65 cm. The Norton Gallery of Art, West Palm Beach.

Merjian: Untimely objects 189

7. M. Raynal, La Peinture en France de 1906 nos jours (Paris: ditions Montaigne, 1927), p. 100.

8. B. Tokine [sic], Lettres Italiennes: Futuristes e Noprimitivistes, Action I, no. 4 (July 1920): 5457.

9. M. Fagiolo dellArco was the first to document extensively de Chirico and Savinios interactions with the avant-gardes. See, in particular, Fagiolo dellArco, Giorgio de Chirico. Il Tempo di Apollinaire. Paris 19111915 (Rome: De Luca, 1981). In his editorial notes to de Chiricos essay, Noi Metafisici, Fagiolo briefly mentions the painters likely familiarity with Paul Guillaumes collection of African objects. See Il meccanismo del pensiero: Critica, polemica, autobiografia, ed. M. Fagiolo dellArco (Turin: Einaudi, 1985), p. 444.

4. G. de Chirico, letter to Paul Guillaume, undated, ca. autumn 1915; reprinted in La pittura metafisica (Venice: Palazzo Grassi, 1979), p. 118.

5. P. Baldacci, Giorgio de Chirico: The Metaphysical Period, 18881919, trans. J. Jennings (New York: Bullfinch, 1997), pp. 240, 237.

6. J. T. Soby, Giorgio de Chirico, Toys of a Prince [sic] wall text for Picture of the Month, Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute, Utica, N.Y., Oct. 129, 1944; archives of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

in this vein. Maurice Raynalone of the artists earliest critics and a prominent voice in French avant-garde circlesascribed de Chiricos architecture, shadows, and unusual objects not to Mediterranean classicism, but rather to mythical monsters, ancient oriental divinities, negroes, characters out of fairy-tales or English novels from the nineteenth century.7 Writing in 1920, the French critic Tokine quipped acidly about de Chiricos attempted neoprimitive constructions. He added: But if Cubism is a discipline and not an aesthetic, this neoprimitivisma kind of quasi art ngre [espce de petit ngre de lart]leaves even more to be desired.8

The art historian Maurizio Fagiolo dellArco rightly notes that de Chiricos work consistently avoids the topic of art ngre.9 But avoidance does not, in this instance, constitute unconcern. De Chiricos stance vis--vis avant-garde primitivism and art ngre was not one of mere indifference, but rather of calculated and subtle distancing, particularly after his arrival in France, where he could not have escaped an encounter with these artifacts. While he claimed a divergence between his work and his peers primitivist tendencies, the eras criticism suggests that this constituted a narcissism of small differenceor, to invoke Tokines patronizing terminology, a petit ngre of art, rather than its full-fledged version. Classical and primitive themes are not, as has long been assumed, mutually exclusive in de Chiricos early Metaphysical painting; rather these form two sides of the same coin, particularly with regard to de Chiricos evocation of objects as sources of revelatory, mythical, and divinatory power. More specifically, de Chirico used ancient and prehistoric ritual practices as the model for his depiction of objects. I hope to shed some light on how de Chirico pursued these strategies, particularly with the Evil Genius, mining the Greco-Roman tradition for its own origins in mystery and irrationality. To this end he turnedquite self-consciously and declarativelyto the writings of his imagined mentor, Friedrich Nietzsche.

of balls and rods, checkered grids and colored scrapsbetween the ostensibly practical and the seemingly meaningless. If some of these objects resemble instruments of science and calculation, others appear useless. A few of the objects possess each of these qualities in equal measure. In a letter to his dealer from the fall of 1915, soon after he had left Paris for service in the Italian army, de Chirico describes these canvases simply as containing objets indterminsa laconicism matched by the modest place of these paintings in the reception of Metaphysical art.4 In the entire body of scholarship on de Chirico, this group of canvases has received scant attention, despite the subsequent prominence of The Evil Genius of a King in both Dadaist and Surrealist circles between the World Wars.

One consistent element of writing on the Evil Genius pictures, when they are mentioned at all, is an insistence upon their incomprehensibility. The art historian Paolo Baldacci recently remarked that the series iconographical elements pose formidable interpretive problems in the form of strange and brightly-colored objects that are extremely difficult to interpret.5 James Thrall Soby, the author of the first major monograph on de Chirico, notes the paintings curious objects of omen, not easily described but strangely disquieting.6 But what, exactly, is strange or curious about the objects in the Evil Genius paintings? Of what, more precisely, might they constitute omens? Indeed, is it not tautological to call these objects strange or ominous in the context of de Chiricos Metaphysical aesthetic, which expressly conjures up a world of enigma, of non-sense, of menacing disquiet?

Scholars rarely, if ever, discuss de Chiricos Metaphysical paintings in connection with early twentieth-century primitivism. This is due to the widespread notion that these works, which he completed mostly in Paris in the early 1910s, evoke only classical, Greco-Roman themes and settings. Indeed, de Chiricos canvases make no overt formal references to the Polynesian and African objects that so preoccupied his colleagues in avant-garde Montparnasse. Yet certain early critics discussed de Chiricos painting precisely


14. See P. Guillaume, Actualits . . . A propos dart ngre (signed Paracelse) in Les Arts Paris no. 1 (March 1918): 4.

15. A 1914 exhibition poster for Guillaumes Rue Miromesnil atelier announces the display of Tableaux Modernes, including works by Pierre Roy, Francis Picabia, and de Chirico, in addition to Sculptures Ngres.

16. On Savinios contacts with Marius de Zayas, as well as the conferenza di Savinio sullarte negra at 291, see Fagiolo dellArco, Giorgio de Chirico (see note 9), p. 46. See also A. Savinio, Di mensa in mensa, Souvenirs (Palermo: Salerio, 1976), p. 152, fn. 3.

10. E. Bertram, Nietzsche: Essai de mythologie, trans. Robert Pitrou (Paris: ditions du Flin, 1990 [1932]), pp. 330, 334. Importantly, Bertram discusses how Turin served for Nietzsche as a kind of transition back to this internal Orient.

11. F. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. and ed. W. Kauffmann (New York: The Modern Library, 1968), pp. 15144, p. 21.

12. On de Chiricos uses of Nietzsche, see Baldacci (note 5) and The Function of Nietzsches Thought in de Chiricos Art, in Nietzsche and An Architecture of Our Minds (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 1999), pp. 91113; A. H. Merjian, Urban Untimely: Giorgio de Chirico and the Metaphysical City, Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2006. Baldaccis monograph is a model of both historical diligence and theoretical sophistication, and he is the first scholar to pay sustained attention to de Chiricos reading of Nietzsche (and to a lesser extent, Schopenhauer and Heraclitus). Baldaccis book serves as both a comprehensive monograph and a catalogue raisonne of the Metaphysical period. Throughout this essay, I have adopted Baldaccis scrupulous documentation of dates and titles.

13. A. Savinio, Hermafrodito (19141918), reprinted in his Hermaphrodito e altri romanzi (Milan: Adelphi, 1995), p. 37; italics in the original.

after serving in the Italian army abroad, de Chiricos brother and collaborator, Alberto Savinio (n Andrea de Chirico), eagerly downplayed his and Giorgios participation in the more fashionable aspects of French modernism before the Great War. De Chiricos later attempts to disassociate his work from the prewar, Parisian avant-gardesand their uses of primitivist sculpturewere no less emphatic than his brothers. It is telling, however, that de Chiricos young art dealer was none other than Paul Guillaume.

As early as 1912, Guillaume had amassed a large collection of African sculpture and founded the Socit des Mlanophiles in 1913 to further its study and promulgation. In Guillaumes own words, by 1918 his gallery boasted la collection la plus importante, la plus riche et la plus belle des statues ngres in Paris, and perhaps all of Europe.14 De Chiricos close confidant, the prominent poet and critic Guillaume Apollinaire, was himself an early collector and enthusiast of primitive sculpture, even penning essays such as Mlanophilie ou mlanomanie, and the volume Sculptures ngres in 1917, partly to promote Guillaumes enterprise in this area. As the Gallrie Guillaume gained prominence in the mid-1910s, de Chiricos work was frequently displayed there alongside African and Oceanic artifacts, in addition to paintings by Andr Derain, Amadeo Modigliani, and Pablo Picassoartists who expressly engaged with the aesthetics of primitivism.15 Guillaume even sent de Chiricos The Generals Illness (one of the Evil Genius series) and four other Metaphysical works to Alfred Stieglitzs 291 gallery for inclusion in the landmark exhibition, Statuary in Wood by African Savages: The Root of Modern Art (November 3December 8, 1914). Savinio, too, participated in absentia, recording on Path disc a lecture on art ngre, which was played in conjunction with the exhibition (fig. 3).16

Throughout the 1910s and 1920s, Guillaume made pronouncements such as: It will be the glory of a few men endowed with certain prophetic vision to have

Nietzsche attempted to resurrect the forgotten strangeness of the classical tradition: a strangeness tantamount, despite its ostensible familiarity, to the most extrinsic of avant-garde orientalisms. Or, rather, it was precisely the ostensible familiarity of this worldof its instruments and objects, its architecture and commonplacesthat afforded a covert fetishizing by the philosopher-genius. It is this Greece, Ernst Bertram writes, that represented for Nietzsche a secret, interior Orient.10 As a Greek-born Italian, de Chirico believed himself to possess a privileged relationship to the classical past and felt directly interpellated by Nietzsches call for the perversion of antiquarian studies.11 As is now patent in scholarship, from Sobys first monograph up through Paolo Baldaccis more comprehensive studies, de Chiricos early encounter with the works of Nietzsche informs the entire trajectory of his Metaphysical project.12 Despite mounting recognition of de Chiricos debts to Nietzsche, we lack a close reading of precisely how de Chirico applied Nietzsches philosophy to painting. Along these lines, I argue here for certain aspects of form, composition, and even color in the Evil Genius paintings as deriving from Nietzsches writings on pre-Socratic Hellenism, myth, and ritual.

De Chirico and avant-garde Primitivism: Affinities and resistances

Intellectual appetites glutted themselves on little specialized menus: I even recall the drunkenness of art ngre that seizedante bellumParisian moderns after copious mythical meals.13 Definitively settled in Italy

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19. The note, written in German and illegible in places, reads as follows: Comparative mythology / Manhard / Robertson Smith; Salomon Reinach; Ancient IndiaOldenburg / Maspero; Pencan [?] mythical history; Tower / Horse / Courier [?] / queen [?] / all of them [?] not [?]; ZendAvesta / Zarathustra; Ernst Renan / Christian [?] and Hebrew History. A photocopy of this note is reproduced in Roos (ibid.), between pages 16 and 17.

20. Baldacci rightly notes the importance of such a document in comprehending de Chiricos early intellectual formation. De Chiricos burgeoning interest in Nietzsche and Schopenhauer seems to have extended also to include some of the Eastern theories of myth and religion that informed these philosophers antirationalist imperatives

17. P. Guillaume, African Art at the Barnes Foundation (written in English), Les Arts Paris, no. 8 (October 1923): 9.

18. See G. Roos, De Chirico e Alberto Savinio: Ricordi e documenti (Monaco, Milano, Firenze, 190611) (Rome: Edizioni Bora, 1999).

of religion, as well as various related words, including mythical history . . . ZendAvesta / Zarathustra.19 Roos suggests that this listdashed off without clear orderwas probably not intended for Gartz, but was written by de Chirico for himself, though it remains unclear to what end. Listing, among others, the Scottish theologian and scholar of Hebrew William Robertson Smith (18461894), the Indologist Hermann Oldenberg (18541920), and the Egyptologist and author of Histoire ancienne de peuples de lorient (1875) Gaston Camille Charles Maspero (18461916), de Chiricos note forms a veritable inventory of contemporary scholarship on Semitic and non-Western philology and anthropology.20

inscribed in the history of the beginning of the Twentieth Century the revelation of the primitive statues of the African black race.17 Such declarations, by Guillaume and others, violated de Chiricos own conceptions of revelation and of primitivismconceptions at once more recondite than the fad for art ngre, and stubbornly endemic to the Western tradition. Recent archival discoveries now afford a closer consideration of these conceptions, of their etiology and implications. Gerd Rooss unearthing of a note written by de Chirico in January 1911 has brought to light previously undisclosed aspects of de Chiricos primitivist interests, which manifested themselves from the very start of his Metaphysical pursuits, during his student days in Munich from 19061909.18 On the back of a musical program by Saviniowhich de Chirico translated from Italian to German and sent to his friend Fritz Gartz in Munichde Chirico has scribbled the names of various scholars of non-European cultures and anthropologists

Figure 3. Alfred Stieglitzs 291 gallery, Statuary in Wood by African Savages: The Root of Modern Art, November 3December 8, 1914, Library of Congress [LC-USZ62-100177].


22. W. Schmied, Turin als Metaphor fr Tod und Geburt, in De Chirico und seine Schatten (Munich: Prestel-Verlag, 1989); Baldacci (see note 5).

23. G. de Chirico, letter to Fritz Gartz, December 26, 1910 (dated Florence 26 [24 Juillet crossed out] Januarii 1910), Via Lorenzo il Magnifico 20 Florence; reprinted and translated in Paolo Picozza, Giorgio de Chirico and the Birth of Metaphysical Art in Florence in 1910, Metafisica: Quaderni della Fondazione Giorgio e Isa de Chirico no. 7/8 (20072008): p. 6364. The date of this letter has become the subject of profound, ongoing polemics within de Chirico scholarship. While I do not have room to discuss the origins and implications of this controvery here, it is likely that the letter indeed dates to December 26, 1910, as recently adduced by Paolo Picozza in the light of new analyses. In another vein, from de Chiricos extant letters to Gartz, originally brought to light by Gerd Roos, we know for certain that by the summer of 1909 Giorgio and his brother Alberto had read at least Ecce Homo and Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in addition to French translations of The Birth of Tragedy, The Case of Wagner, and probably The Gay Science. See G. Roos, De Chirico e Alberto Savinio: Ricordi e documenti, as well as Baldaccis discussion of Rooss findings and of de Chiricos early readings of Nietzsche, in Baldacci (note 5), especially pp. 6774.

24. G. de Chirico, letter to Fritz Gartz, undated (January 5, 1911), reprinted and translated in Paolo Picozza, Giorgio de Chirico and the Birth of Metaphysical Art in Florence in 1910, Metafisica: Quaderni della Fondazione Giorgio e Isa de Chirico no. 7/8 (20072008): p. 66.

(The ZendAvesta / Zarathustra pairing is a case in point). But I think Baldacci slightly overstates the consequence of de Chiricos list of scrawled names, claiming that it prefigures later avant-garde trends and reveals that Metaphysical art anticipated many of the discoveries of linguistics and semiology, sociology and structuralism, and the philosophy of symbolic form. Only an extremely small number of European thinkers had arrived at the point of being able to completely overturn basic cultural assumptions, still mired during those years in the conflict between idealism and positivism (Baldacci [see note 5], p. 90). Whatever de Chiricos level of familiarity with the authors mentionedwhich appears to have been quite superficialhis application of their work cannot have constituted an overturning of basic cultural assumptions, much less linguistic or semiotic ones.

More fundamentally, we do not even know, as Gerd Roos notes, if this impromptu list names books already read or to be read, though de Chirico likely consulted at least some of the books in subsequent years and was certainly familiar with Reinachs work. See Roos (note 18), p. 372.

21. J. T. Soby, Giorgio de Chirico (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1966), p. 99.

have demonstrated in separate studies, de Chiricos paintings from 1914 expressly conjure up Nietzsches sojourns in Turina presence that de Chirico famously interpreted as a fated prefiguration of his own later presence in that city.22 He came increasingly to identify with Nietzsche in ways both intellectual and psychopathological, even half-jokingly claiming to be the philosophers metempsychotic reincarnationa notion that their similar stomach illnesses and migraines, along with their elective exiles in various lands, seemed to confirm. Already in 1910, writing from Florence to his friend Fritz Gartz in Munich, de Chirico declares: I will now whisper something in your ear: I am the only man to have truly understood Nietsche [sic]all of my work demonstrates this.23 Subsequent declarations confirmedalong with his burgeoning iconographical changesthat such an affinity was not merely a passing diversion, but the source of a wholesale aesthetic and existential conversion. It is only with Nietzsche that I can say I have begun a real life, he writes in a later letter.24 Even by 1914 this initiation had done anything but subside. De Chiricos poster for the Paul Guillaume Gallerysince titled The Enigma of the Horse (1914)depicts a rearing horse in the shadow of one of his trademark arcades. Completed just months before the Evil Genius canvases, the image alludes to the famous episode in which Nietzsche clutched a horse in the streets of Turin as it was beaten by its master.

As I will discuss in detail, de Chiricos main primitivist sympathies remained with the more rarefied realm of Nietzschean and pre-Socratic texts. Rather than a prefiguration of certain discourses on primitivism and non-Western cultures, de Chiricos familiarity with these trends evidences his works contiguity with avant-garde experiments and undermines the received notion of de Chiricos paintings as rooted in a matrix of straightforward classicism. I would contend that this aspect of de Chiricos cultural formation, at once parallel to and bound up with his readings of Nietzsche, locates de Chirico more fixedly in the intellectual climate of his time, rather than signals his distance from or anticipation of it. If de Chirico resisted the vogue of Parisian primitivism, his canvases from this period are no less concerned with enlisting a kind of atavism in the service of modern paintinghowever self-consciously untoward and untimely. Just as his oeuvre at large argues for strangeness and enigma as immanent to the ordinary physical environment, these pictures insist upon the non-sense at the heart of theseemingly familiarGreco-Roman tradition. It is precisely due to its superficial familiarityits embeddedness in a presumably classical worldthat de Chiricos Nietzschean primitivism has gone largely unaddressed.

Nietzsche, Heraclitus, and the language of oracle

Speculating on the genealogy of the Evil Genius paintings, James Thrall Soby remarks: In 1914 [de Chirico] added cryptic objects [to his paintings], seen or imagined on his solitary walks through the streets of Paris.21 Yet as Wieland Schmied and Paolo Baldacci

paintings propose the merging of de Chiricos own subjectivity not only with Nietzsches, but also with that of Nietzsches own imagined mentor, the pre-Socratic philosopher, Heraclitus.

De Chiricos first truly Metaphysical painting, The Enigma of the Oracle (summerautumn, 1909), as well as an early drawing by Savinio, both allude to the image of Heraclitus, wrapped in a chlamys and framed by architecture against the sky (fig. 4). Like his paintings, de Chiricos earliest writings reveal a profound interest in aspects of preclassical Hellenism, sparked by Nietzsches extensive references to Heraclitus and other pre-Socratic philosophers. In his first Parisian manuscript, de Chirico figures the world of enigmatic, preclassical antiquity as a realm tantamount to the solemnity and silence of earths prehistory. He imagines those soothsayers tending to the voice of the waves receding from that ancient land. I have pictured them head and body wrapped in a chlamys, waiting for the mysterious revealing oracle. So I also once imagined the Ephesian [Heraclitus] meditating in the first light of dawn under the peristyle of the Temple of Artemis of the hundred breasts.26 De Chiricos interest

But iconographic and biographic cues get us only so far in reading these images. As with the Metaphysical images at large, a close reading of the Evil Genius works reveals that de Chirico does not translate Nietzsches philosophy into some esoteric iconography, but rather into a pictorial language that is itself esoteric. Only months after he had completed the Evil Genius paintings,de Chirico wrote to his dealer in Paris:

In order to thrill to such metaphysical things, so to speak, you must, my dear friend, possess a rare intelligence, very rarefor, the more people I meet, the more I realize that this God-given gift is an uncommon thing; I even think that intelligence as we others understand itNietzschean intelligence [lintelligence nietzschienne]the intelligence of God and of the acrobat, of the hero and the beast, is so rare as to be nearly unobtainable, and we who have been entranced by the gleam of the sky, we who seewe can be proud and happy, since joy, sweet and divine joy, is our due, whatever the destiny of our lives. So be it.25

What de Chirico deems lintelligence nietzschienne is not a set of objects or images, anecdotes or events. It is a way of seeingor re-seeingthe world. The Evil Genius

25. G. de Chirico, letter to Paul Guillaume, undated (ca. November 1915), reprinted in La Pittura Metafisica (Venice: Neri Pozza Editore, 1979).

26. G. de Chirico, Paulhan MSS (ca. 19111913), in Ashbery (see note 2), p. 192.

Figure 4. Giorgio de Chirico, The Enigma of the Oracle, summerautumn 1909. Oil on canvas, 42 x 61 cm. Private collection. Cameraphoto Arte, Venice / Art Resource, N.Y.



28. De Chirico and Savinio took a particular interest in this practice, as well as related ancient Mediterranean practices of divination and prophecy. One of Savinios musical compositions dated December 29, 1914, is titled Les viscres oeuills [sic]. A line from his contemporary Hermafrodito reads: My entrails need a haruspex [Il faut un aruspice pour mes entrails]. See Savinio (note 13), p. 6.

29. M. Calvesi, Lincontro di de Chirico con Apollinaire, Storia dellarte no. 102 (May/August 2002). Calvesi argues convincingly for Apollinaires Le Roi de Babylone as an inspiration for the title, the content, and the generally vatic atmosphere of The Evil Genius of a King. As I argue below, however, de Chiricos Evil Genius series cannot be ascribed solely to a visual transcription of Apollinaires text. It is equally bound up with de Chiricos other interests in Nietzsche, European pre- and proto-history, and even the work of his brother, Savinio.

30. My thanks to Vincent Jolivet, Etruscologist at the Acadmie de France in Rome for sharing with me his knowledge of the Piacenza bronze in 2004. After submitting my dissertation in May of 2006 and having proposed the Piacenza sculpture as a potential source of the Evil Genius series, I was alerted to Calvesis essay, which sets forth a similar proposal regarding the Piacenza bronze. Calvesi relates the object only to The Evil Genius; while this general assimilation seems certain, certain objects in The Generals Illness and Metaphysical Composition with Toys echo more pointedly the forms and markings of the Piacenza bronze.

27. And are not those who indicate by signs, without a word, what must be done, very much praised and admired? Plutarch, De garrulitate 17, on Heraclitus, in Heraclitus, Fragments, trans. and ed. T. M. Robinson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987).

and purpose is also indecipherable, vacillating between the status of playthings and more ceremonious objects, such as the entrails read by ancient augurs.28 As Maurizio Calvesi has demonstrated, de Chiricos curiosity for the rituals of augury was sharpened by the contemporary novel La fin de Babylone (1914), penned by his early champion and confidant Apollinaire. Some of Apollinaires references to the arcane objects of ancient divination appear in de Chiricos canvases from this same period, such as the divinatory arrow in the Evil Genius of a King and other strange objects in The Generals Illness and Metaphysical Composition with Toys.29

The isolated objects in these works seem to further derive from the second-century-b.c. Etruscan bronze sculpture of a sheep liver (The Piacenza Liver), a teaching tool, which Etruscan augurs used to demonstrate their procedures to initiates (fig. 5). The lumpy shape at left, in particular, is notched with markings similar to those that appear on the barbed and bulbous Piacenza Liver, which de Chirico likely saw in reproduction.30 Like The Generals Illness, The Evil Genius of a King contains objects with similar markings, inscribed on flattened shapes. The Piacenza bronze liver is divided into quadrants corresponding to the movements of celestial bodies. That the Etruscan example was preceded by Babylonian practices likely attracted de Chiricos attention even more (fig. 6); his

in Heraclitus was sparked by Nietzsches own affinity for the Ephesian, particularly his embodiment of a Hellenic world prior to Socratic reason and dialectics. Heraclituss enigmatic, terse fragmentswhich praised silence and enigma over pedantic garrulityattracted Nietzsche and de Chirico in turn.27 Ancient accounts of Heraclituss elitism, anti-social behavior, and willful estrangement from his contemporaries further enhanced his appeal.

While The Evil Genius of a King aspires to evoke a solemnity and solitude similar to that in The Enigma of the Oraclea world of mystery, ritual, and revelationthe dimensions of the scene have shifted: from a demonstrably ancient scene, to one less transparent in its temporality. The Evil Genius of a King evokes not (only) a remote and secret oracle, but (also) the contents of a shop window. Withquite literallypedestrian aplomb, the Evil Genius paintings take the language of oracular painting to new heights, even as it brings it down to the level of the street. De Chiricos entire Metaphysical corpus is bound up with tropes of prophecy, augury, and divination: from the oracles of his earliest paintings, to his depictions of Roman augurs staffs in several canvases, to his evocation of Soothsayers and Seers in later works. With the Evil Genius series, these tropes become focused in and on ambiguous objects: vaguely grounded in ancient vatic ritual, but impossible to tell apart from modern commodities.

Toys and templums

The Metaphysical Composition with Toys (summerautumn 1914) and The Generals Illness offer a number of parallels with The Evil Genius of a King in this regardparallels that bear upon the series as a whole. The objects in the former two pictures represent the most biomorphic, oddly shaped figures to appear in de Chiricos oeuvre. Until this point in his corpus, de Chirico had evoked a sense of strangeness only by setting familiar objects in jarring juxtapositionwhether a bust of Jupiter alongside a cluster of bananas, or a cannon and two artichokes, or a modern clock face in the same space as an ancient galley. In The Generals Illness and Metaphysical Composition with Toys, however, not only the objects relationships to one another appear incongruous or unfathomable, but their very identity


33. G. de Chirico, Epode (1917), reprinted in Filippo de Pisis, Futurismo, Dadaismo, Metafisica (Milan: Scheiwiller, 1981).

34. A. Savinio, Speaking to Clio (Marlboro, Vermont: Marlboro Press, 1987 [1946]), p. 92.

35. Ibid., p. 89.36. Ibid.

31. See M. Cristofani, Dizionario della Civilt Etrusca (Florence: Giunti Martello, 1985), pp. 2728.

32. See R.E. Kuttner, Protohistoric Hepatomancy: An Oracular Form of Pathology, Proc Inst Med Chic 35, no. 1 (JanMarch 1982): 14; L. B. van der Meer, The Bronze Liver of Piacenza: Analysis of a Polytheistic Structure (Amsterdam: J. C. Gieben, 1987).

occasional invocation in their paintings and writings, specifically in the context of de Chiricos decidedly urban revelations. A poem from his early Parisian manuscripts (19111913) reads: One day I too will be a man-statue / widowed husband on an Etruscan sarcophagus / that day in your great grip of stone /hug me, O mother city.33 In his later meditation on the funerary tumuli of Etrurian cities such as Cerveteri and Tarquinia, Savinio writes of the Etruscans as [g]reat psychologists of death.34 He also likens the disparity between Rome and Etruria to the difference between logicians and metaphysicians35a contrast that, by the 1940s, aims to favor Roman logic (written at the height of Fascism, Savinios text makes various rhetorical concessions to the regimes chauvinism). Still, his description of Etrurian religion in terms of cruelty and malignity . . . a taste for the absurd, distortion of reality, reversal of values,36 suggests why it would have appealed to de Chiricos pursuit of evil genius in the

writings and paintings frequently evoke Babylonia and Chaldea as admirable manifestations of pre-Hellenic tradition. Like its Babylonian, Hittite, and Chaldean precedents and like its Greek and Roman contemporaries, Etruscan religion viewed the bodys organs as condensations and reflections of cosmological order.31 Various objects extant in Etruscan and Roman archaeology depict priests in the act of augury, bent over an altar or slab on which viscerae have been placed. A bronze mirror from the Vatican Museums Etruscan collection, for example, reveals Calchusa winged priest of Apolloengaged in this act of extispicy (the examination of animal entrails), or hepatoscopy, or hepatomancy (divination using the liver of sacrificial animals.)32

De Chirico and Savinios interest in the Etruscanslike their attraction to Babylonian, Chaldean and, later, Jewish cultureswas rather dilettantish. But the affinities between these cultures and Greek prehistory led to

Figure 5. The Piacenza Liver, late second century b.c., Etruria; front and top views. Museo Civico, Piacenza.

Please spell out complete name.


38. F. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in The Portable Nietzsche, trans. and ed. Walter Kauffmann (New York: Viking, 1954), p. 256.

39. F. Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), # 130, p. 80. F. Nietzsche, Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense, reprinted in Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsches Notebooks of the 1870s, trans. and ed. D. Breazeale (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press International, 1990 [1979]), p. 85. Though de Chirico would not have had access to the latter text (which

37. F, Nietzsche, Attempt at Self-Criticism, The Birth of Tragedy, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche (see note 1), p. 21.

Zarathustra alone it rears up on nearly every other page as the benchmark of the transvaluation of values: [T]here is yet a future for evil too.38

Even aside from these more abstract concepts, Nietzsche specifically discussesand esteems the sacrificial and mystical practices of Greek and Roman societies. Daybreak, for example, addresses the framing and isolating of religious objects by the Greeks, while Truth and Lies in an Nonmoral Sense discusses the practices bound up with objects such as the Piacenza liver: the Romans and the Etruscans cut up the heavens with rigid mathematical lines and confined a god within each of these spaces thereby delimited, as within a templum.39 In the same vein, in a passage titled On

1910s, particularly as an ancient alternative to reason (Roman or otherwise), without seeming demonstrably exogenous.

That Savinio rehearses Etrurian culture in decidedly Nietzschean termsthe flaunting of logic, the transvaluation of values, a kind of evilis by no means coincidental. From his earliest published works, such as The Birth of Tragedy, up through his last anti-Wagnerian polemics, Nietzsche championed the underbelly of Hellenism: the good, severe will of the older Greeks to pessimism, to the tragic myth, to the image of everything underlying existence that is frightful, evil, a riddle, destructive, fatal?37 The confluence of evil and a riddling fatality in Nietzsches rhetoric underscores the extent to which such language appealed to de Chiricos burgeoning conceptions of an alternative Hellenism. The Evil Genius of a King surely resonates expressly with Nietzsches notion of evil as the domain of the bermenschian artist-philosophera notion threaded insistently throughout Nietzsches entire oeuvre. In

Figure 6. Sheeps liver in clay, 14.6 cm across. Old Babylonian, ca. 19001600 b.c. British Museum, London, Western Asia Collection # ME 92668. The Trustees of the British Museum.


44. See Roos (see note 18), pp. 315320.45. Between 1911 and 1915, James George Frazers 1890 work

The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, for example, was reedited in twelve volumes. Frazer gives equal treatment to descriptions of Greek sacrifices and their Yakut, Javan, and Indian counterparts. His comparative method discerns a striking resemblance between the rude oracles of the Polynesians, and those of the celebrated nations of ancient Greece. In his scrutiny of savage beliefs about death, superstition, healing, and taboos, Frazer treats the Roman augurs staff, the Athenian Dionysian festivals, and the funerary rights of the Pidhireanes in the same breath. It is uncertain whether or not de Chirico read Frazers books. See J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, vol. 1, The Magic Art and the Evolution of Kings (New York: Macmillan, 1922 [19111915]), p. 377.

was published posthumously), numerous other writings by Nietzsche allude to rituals of ancient Greek sacrifice, astronomy, and Heraclitusall of which, as I will discuss, de Chirico noted and incorporated in his writings and paintings.

40. F. Nietzsche, On Viewing Certain Ancient Sacrificial Utensils, #112, Human, All Too Human, trans. M. Faber and S. Lehmann (London: Penguin, 1994), p. 84.

41. G. de Chirico, Arte metafisica e scienze occulte, in Meccanismo (see note 9), p. 64.

42. Angelo Bardi (pseudonym of Giorgio de Chirico), La vie de Giorgio de Chirico, in Slction: Chronique de la vie artistique, cahier no. 8, ditions Slction (Antwerp, 1929), p. 23.

43. On the precise Bcklinian sources of this image, see Baldacci (see note 5), p. 58.

ancient Iolchos, from which Jason and the Argonauts set sail in search of the Golden Fleecede Chiricos Departure of the Argonauts (summer 1909) reveals a slaughtered lamb or goat laid at the feet of a statue of Athena, a propitiatory sacrifice to the goddess in advance of the Argoss departure. As Bardis account attests, de Chiricos interest in these aspects of Hellenic mythology deepened as he and Savinio moved across Europefrom Munich, to Milan, to Florence, to Parisand as their readings of Nietzsche came to inform their work more comprehensively. The brothers eventually coauthored a musical score entitled The Most Profound Music Ever Written: Revelations on the Enigma of the Eternal Return (This concert, scheduled for a performance in Florence on January 9, 1911, was never held.44) One subtitle of this work is The Passage of the Pelasgiansreferring to the mythical inhabitants of the pre-Hellenic Aegean.

To be sure, de Chiricos imaginings of the ancient Greco-Roman world as nigmatique, mysterious, and violent must have derived, in part, from sources other than Ecce Homo.45 We know for certain that de Chirico consulted Salomon Reinachs manuals, including Apollo: An Illustrated Manual of the History of Art through the Ages, for reproductions. De Chirico seems to have gleaned from Reinachs books not only a model for his Ariadne figures, but also references to xoana (proto-Archaic statues), Etruscan sarcophagi, and prehistoric grottoes, as well as the Chaldean sculpture of The Architect with the Rule (which appears, slightly altered, in The Disquieting Muses). I do not argue that de Chirico set out to isolate any of these sources as the exclusive basis for a self-consciously primitivist modernism. More interesting and important, I think, is the way in which he weaves them into generic tropes of Greek prehistory and strangely Roman poetryterms that appear in his earliest Parisian notebooks and which form the

viewing certain ancient sacrificial utensils, he laments that [t]he combination of farce, even obscenity, with religious feeling, show us how some feelings are disappearing; the sensibility that this is a possible mixture is vanishing . . . this a later age will perhaps no longer understand.40 That Nietzsche used these objects as instantiations and metaphors of his concepts of time, myth, and history bear significantly on de Chiricos workparticularly his pursuit of what he called the metaphysicality discovered in objects.41

De Chiricos Greeks from the Pelasgians to the pre-Socratics

In an autobiographical text, published in Belgium in 1929 under the pseudonym Angelo Bardi, de Chirico makes plain what kind of Greco-Latin world he sought to evoke in his early work. Bardi/de Chirico declares that during his Metaphysical period, he had discovered an enigmatic Greece quite different from the Greece illustrated in schoolbooks, just as, after reading Nietzsches Ecce Homo, [he] set about discovering the mystery of Italy [le mystre italien].42 De Chiricos early paintings, completed during his residencies in Munich and Milan, had pictured a Mediterranean world of savage, mythical battles. His Battle of Centaurs (1909) treats a theme from the annals of his native Thessaly, namely that of the clash between the Centaurs and Lapiths (fig. 7).43 To Arnold Bcklins mythological subject matter and brooding style, de Chirico has added even more frenzied brushwork and placed the grim detail of skulls at the left corner of the skirmish. His earlier Sphinx (19081909) depicts a seashore littered with skulls and bones, awash in the wake of a plainly unforgiving riddler, whose profile juts proudly from the cliff walls. Taking up the thread of Thessalian myth, specifically that of his birthplace, Volos, Greece


47. Nietzsche (see note 11), section 11, p. 78. 48. Ibid., section 20, p. 122; emphasis mine.49. F. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and

R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1967), p. 524, #1015; emphasis in the original.

46. This book belongs to the very few, noted Nietzsche in the preface to The Antichrist, subtitled The Transvaluation of All Values, which he penned in Turin in 1888.

works of art of the great period simply did not exist, he sneers in The Birth of Tragedy (1872).47 It was just these abjured origins that Nietzsches works reclaimed. The best German cultural figures, he adds, have learned best to come to terms with the Greeks . . . by skeptically abandoning the Hellenic ideal and completely perverting the true purpose of antiquarian studies.48 We are not afraid of the reverse side of good things . . . e.g. of Hellenism, of morality, of reason he later vows in The Will to Power.49 Such pronouncements echoed similar recuperations of the long-abjured underbelly of classicism that took place in the realm of art history and archaeology. The early nineteenth-century rediscovery of the paint that once adorned classical temples formed a physical counterpart and forerunner of Nietzsches philological diggings. The recuperation of this architectures, and sculptures, original, vivid coloration

philosophical-aesthetic umbrella for a range of images, reaching a kind of synthetic climax in the Evil Genius images. Nietzsches writings encouraged de Chiricos evocation of Greek myth as something that haunts the modern world to its very marrow, though visible only to those endowed with the vision to see it.46

Ridendo dicere severum: Color, form, and affect in the Evil Genius paintings

Why should we attribute to the ancient Greeks an immunity from primitive modes of thought? asks E. R. Dodds in The Greeks and the Irrational (1951). Doddss query had, of course, long been anticipated by Nietzsches philosophy. From his very first writings, Nietzsche assailed the prevalent notion of Greek culture as the birthplace of rationalism. [A]s if there had never been a sixth century with its birth of tragedy, its mysteries, its Pythagoras and Heraclitus, as if the

Figure 7. Giorgio de Chirico, Battle of the Centaurs, spring 1909. Oil on canvas, 75 x 110 cm. Galleria Nazionale dArte Moderna, Rome. Photo: Art Resource, N.Y.


52. G. de Chirico, Some Perspectives on My Art (1935), in Ashbery (see note 2), p. 252.

53. Ibid.54. See P. Klossowski, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, trans. D.

W. Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997 [1969]), and R. J. Hollingdale, Introduction to Dithyrambs of Dionysus, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Redding Ridge, CT: Black Swan Books, 1984).

50. G. de Chirico, Augusto Renoir (1920) and Max Klinger (1920), in Meccanismo (see note 9), pp. 150, 183.

51. G. Apollinaire, Giorgio de Chirico, LIntransigeant, October 30, 1913.

suggestion may have influenced him. But de Chiricos study of Nietzsche also surely informed the increased vibrancy of The Evil Geniusa vibrancy subtly coded in its applications and evocations.

In a 1935 essay de Chirico discusses the debt of his 19121915 paintings to Friedrich Nietzsche, whom I read passionately at the time:

His Ecce Homo, written in Turin shortly before he succumbed to madness, greatly helped me to understand the citys peculiar beauty. The best season for Turin, the one that lets its metaphysical charm show through most clearly, is autumn. This autumn has nothing in common with the autumn of the Romantics, with cloud-laden skies and dead leaves and departing swallows. . . . Autumn, as it revealed Turin to me and as Turin revealed it to me, is joyful, although certainly not in a gaudy, dazzling way. It is something huge, at once near and distant; a great peacefulness, great purity, rather closely related to the joy felt by a convalescent finally cured of a long and painful illness.52

Joyful, but not gaudy; charming, but not dazzling. De Chirico has internalized Apollinaires disapproval of dead leaves and suggests that his Metaphysical works avoided just such an evocation. The cloud-laden skies of his own earliest paintings evaporate to reveal sun-baked, limpid lines. In the Evil Genius works, Turins autumnal Stimmunga season of death, of Nietzsches madness falling like twilightappears instead bright and jubilant, at least to the discerning observer: This [Turins] autumn is made for the happy few, de Chirico writes.53

Nietzsche had famously turned Heraclituslong deemed The Crying Philosopher for his supposedly nihilistic observationsinto a different kind of prophet, whose solitary pain could be transmuted into the delectation of individual genius. In their mounting insanity, Nietzsches own late writings conjure up aspects of the pre-Socratic world that so long held him in thrall: an ecstasy and exhilaration in the embrace of tragedy. Numerous writers, from Pierre Klossowski to R. J. Hollingdale, have characterized Nietzsches growing psychosis as a pathological euphoria.54 Already in the epigraph to The Case of WagnerRidendo dice[re] severum [Through what is laughable say what is

seemed to unveil a repressed, Dionysian element: one that literally flushed the pristine, white face of J. J. Winckelmanns Greek ideal.

But de Chiricos Metaphysical paintings held out against eccentric coloration and formal distortion as the means to suggest enigma and mystery. He viewed this as too facile a strategy, equivalent, for example, to Gabriele DAnnunzios florid and rhetorical neoclassicism. As the Metaphysical aesthetic evolved into a clear, architectonic construction of crisp forms and lines, the loose, Dionysian strokes of de Chiricos first Centaur and Sphinx canvases became more tame and dry. The Enigma of the Oracle, his first categorically Metaphysical work, reveals a decidedly muted palette and architectural solidity. Though Delacroixs throbbing surfaces and rich coloration would return as a model for de Chiricos painting during the 1940s, the young de Chirico condemned both Delacroixs disregard for [linear] construction [negligenza del disegno] and his oriental influences as late as 1920.50 Like Nietzsche, de Chirico sought to exploit Romanticisms affect (solemnity, wildly vacillating emotions, pathos, gravitas), while rejecting the Romantics effects (vague mistiness, lachrymose histrionics, the evocation of indeterminacy as a condition of surface).

De Chirico avoided vibrant colors so much, in fact, that Apollinaire gently rebuked him in the French press, in October of 1913: I must add that Monsieur de Chiricos color is too somber, evoking the hue of ponds covered in dead leaves, and these enigmas would gain much from being rendered in happier colors.51 It is surely no coincidence that with the Evil Genius canvases, which he completed soon after, de Chirico moves decidedly away from the drab tones of his previous worksfrom The Sphinx and The Procession up a Mountain (summerautumn 1909), up through The Enigma of Arrival (winter 19111912). Early in 1914just months after Apollinaires critiquede Chiricos The Philosophers Conquest emerged as his most vibrant image to date, with a ground of gingery orange set off against a red silo and brick tower, and a sky of Veronese green that had already become a staple of the Metaphysical canvas. The Evil Genius of a King surpasses even The Philosophers Conquest in its use of bright tones. In fact, almost all of the small objects in the Evil Genius series are vividly tinted. Apollinaires


58. Nietzsche (see note 47), #419 (1885). 59. G. Scott, The Architecture of Humanism: A Study in the History

of Taste (London, 1914), p. 242.

55. This is Walter Kaufmanns translation; see Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche (note 1), p. 609, fn. 1. Kaufmann further notes that this is a variation of a dictum by Horace (whom de Chirico invokes in his earliest manuscripts): ridentem dicere verum, quid vetat (What forbids us to tell the truth, laughing?) from Satires I.24.

56. I know an Italian spirit, de Chirico writes, that is sad, even in its joy, and more profound in its joy than in its sadness, I know a classical Italian nature which is languid and adventurous, and in which I find elements of every country of the world: from the clear, immobile beauty of ancient Greece to the demons of Africa and of the North. G. de Chirico, Seventeenth-century Mania (1921) reprinted in Metaphysical Art, ed. M. Carr (New York: Praeger, 1971), p.148.

57. F. Nietzsche, On Viewing Certain Ancient Sacrificial Utensils, in Human, All Too Human, trans. M. Faber and S. Lehmann (London: Penguin, 1994), #112.

Symbolist histrionics. His early Battle of Centaurs is unabashed in its inclusion of lumps of flesh, pools of blood. By the time of Metaphysical Composition with Toys and The Evil Genius of a King, however, the horrible image of flesh and limbs torn out during Dionysian mysteries is only implicit. Furthermore, this dour reference is now visually embedded within its opposite: toys, playthings.

Painting inhumanism, springautumn 1914

Not only early works like The Birth of Tragedy and Human, All Too Human, but even Nietzsches later, anti-Wagnerian texts propose a return to long-obscured aspects of Hellenic antiquity as the only way forwarda trajectory that rounds back on itself with the stubborn circularity of the Eternal Return: the digging up of ancient philosophy, above all the pre-Socraticsthe most deeply buried of all Greek temples! . . . Today we are getting close to all those fundamental forms of world interpretation devised by the Greek spirit through Anaximander, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Empedocles, Democritus, and Anaxagoras . . . at first, as is only fair, in concepts and evaluations, as Hellenizing ghosts, as it were: but one day, let us hope, also in our bodies!58 It is significant that Nietzsche figures his reclamation of pre-Socratic philosophyhere and in other writingsas both the excavation of a buried temple and a corporeal transmutation. For, particularly after Winckelmann and the rise of Neoclassicism, the principles of classicism had come to be visually metaphorized and idealized in Greek and Roman architecture and sculpture. Furthermore, this twin ideal perpetuated itself through the notion of an architecture whose scale both derived from and epitomized the canons of the human form. By one early twentieth-century account: The architecture of humanism rose in Greece; and of the Greeks it has been said that they first made man at home in the world. Their thought was anthropocentric: so also was their architecture.59

This passage, from Geoffrey Scotts The Architecture of Humanism: A Study in the History of Taste (1914)published the year that de Chirico painted the Evil Genius seriesillustrates a prevalent strain of contemporary European thought, one that took for granted a wholesome correspondence between physical proportion and moral rectitude, between the body and

somber]55Nietzsche tersely adduced his disdain for Romanticisms moroseness. Of course, in his earliest works, Nietzsche intoned against the (Goethian and Winckelmannian) notion of Greek cheerfulness. But after his break with Wagner and Schopenhauerian thought, he came to increasingly campaign against the dour portentousness of Romanticism, insisting that art must be cheerful, gay, and frivolous in order to be profound. For Nietzsche as for de Chirico after him, the profundity of myth was inseparable from its (apparent) opposite: joy and joyfulness, a will to form, an exultance in life.56 The Evil Genius canvases incorporate this paradoxical affect in various ways. The pessimism and shock that de Chirico claims to have withstood during these years become mixed, in the Evil Genius pictures, with their respective opposites: a certain frivolity, on the one hand, and a blas, protracted stillness on the other.

Human, All Too Human argues that the ancient worlds admixture of opposite ideals would escape the comprehension of most modern subjectsthe sensibility that this is a possible mixture is vanishing, he writes. Only Heraclitus, Nietzsche, and their ilk now possess the acumen to recognize the combination of farce, even obscenity, with religious feeling . . . the sublime in league with the burlesque, the sentimental blended with the ludicrous.57 That such an argument arises from Nietzsches reflections on viewing certain ancient sacrificial utensils reveals again the proximity of de Chiricos project to Nietzschesespecially the attempt to resuscitate a vanished sensibility as the tool of an elite few. The funereal gravitas of the Evil Genius paintings is bound inseparably to their affective obverse. If de Chirico sought to avoid the Greek cheerfulness of so much insipid neoclassicism, so too did his paintings increasingly shun the morbid bathos of Romantic and


67. G. de Chirico, On Metaphysical Art, see Carr, ed. (note 56), p. 89.

68. G. de Chirico, We Metaphysicians, in Meccanismo (see note 9), p. 67.

60. Architecture is a humanized pattern of the world, a scheme of forms on which our life reflects its clarified image ibid, p. 240.

61. F. Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, trans. and ed. Marianne Cowan. Washington, D.C.: Regnery Gateway, 1991 [1962], p. 46; emphasis mine.

62. F. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kauffmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), book 3, #109, p. 168.

63. Ibid.64. G. de Chirico, Eluard MSS, in Ashbery (see note 2), p. 178.65. Ibid., section 10, translation slightly altered.66. G. de Chirico, Meditations of a Painter/What the Painting of

the Future Might Be, Paulhan MSS, reprinted in ibid., p. 205.

in the anecdotal sense of subject matter, or the sense of human individualityoccurs increasingly as de Chiricos painting progresses away from Bcklins example. The deliberate eviction of the human from his scenes after 1912as the Metaphysical venture gathered momentumseems to have sprung in equal parts from a close study of Nietzsche, and, as we shall see, some particular strains in the history of painting and archaeology.

Antediluvian/posthuman: Edouard Riou and Hans Holbein the Youngers Portrait of Nicolas Kratzer

In his essay On Metaphysical Art, de Chirico recalls being impressed as a child by Louis Figuiers book, La terre avant le dluge, illustrated by Edouard Riou (fig. 8). Figuiers books, from La terre avant le dluge to Merveilles de la Science, documented a range of landscapes, objects, and technologies, illustrated in ways similar to Jules Vernes popular narratives (particular favorites of de Chiricos). This affinity is not coincidental given the fact that Riou (a student of Daubigny and Gustave Dor) also provided the plates for Vernes Cinq Semaines en Ballon (Hetzel, 1863) and Voyage de la terre la lune (Hetzel, 1867), among other books. Reedited several times throughout the end of the nineteenth century, La terre avant le dluge features various plates of vues idales: brachiopods hauling themselves ashore out of the primal slough; amphibian ancestors poking their noses out of swamps draped with giant ferns; skies split with lightning, roiled with billowing storm clouds. The plate that de Chirico remembers in particular represented a landscape of the Tertiary period. Man was not yet present. I have often meditated upon the strange phenomenon of this absence of human beings in its metaphysical aspect.67 As de Chiricos comments indicate, Rious pictures make possible a figurative world without human figures. De Chiricos proposed return back along the railway line of centurys old art thus revisits not only Trecento and Quattrocento primitives, not only the caves of the pre-verbal troglodyte, but even a geological primitivisma world prior to human inhabitation.68

In this same essay, de Chirico links Figuier and Rious antediluvian histories to landscapes of a different sort. There are paintings by Bcklin, Claude Lorrain, and

the spaces that the body inhabits.60 Seeking to shatter this comforting reciprocity, Nietzsche assailed precisely the metaphor of the human body as the origin and emblem of reason. Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks sets its sights against our era, infected with the biographical plague . . . indulging in a highly anthropomorphic metaphor.61 The Gay Science intones against the drive to naturalize humanity, against order, arrangement, form, beauty, wisdom, and whatever other names there are for our aesthetic anthropomorphisms.62 Whereas humanist logic argues that beauty inheres naturally to classical architecture, such that architecture stands as the canon of aesthetics, Nietzsche deflates this reasoning with withering corporeal (and misogynist) metaphors: What does the beauty of a building mean to us now? The same as the beautiful face of a mindless woman: something mask-like.63

De Chiricos writings from 19111919 assail anthropomorphism as one of the most egregious philosophical and aesthetic commonplacesone that Metaphysical painting endeavors to undermine. Thus religion and philosophy are like two symbols of what we call the universe in general, de Chirico writes in his Parisian manuscripts. We believe in religion, we believe in philosophy, but we dont believe in these two eternal nemeses having a human crust [crote humaine].64 Again and again, de Chirico seeks to pry apart painting from its parasitical codependence upon the commonplaces of humanism and its corporeal counterparts. In fact, nearly all of de Chiricos earliest writings assimilate Nietzsches call to overcome man as one of their main leitmotifs. De Chirico writes in these same Paris notebooks that after reading Nietzsche and traveling to Rome, My imagination no longer bore any subjects.65 He insists upon paintings new vocation as the stripping of everything routine and accepted, and of all subject matter . . . to suppress completely man as guide, or as a means to express symbol, sensation or thought.66 This stripping of subjectswhether

centuries-old art?


70. G. de Chirico, Riflessioni sulla pittura antica (1921), reprinted in ibid., pp. 196200.69. Ibid.

Another picture from the Louvre seems to have informed the making of The Evil Genius of a King even more pointedly: Hans Holbein the Youngers Portrait of Nicolas Kratzer (1528) (fig. 10). De Chirico briefly mentions this work in his essay Reflections on Ancient Painting in which he expounds at length on the architectonic nature of Poussin and Claudes works. The essay was published in Il Convegno, in 1921, by the time de Chirico was back in Italy, suggesting that he had seen and studied Holbeins painting during his 19111915 residency in Paris. Holbeins portrait of Kratzer, de Chirico writes, has pushed [sentiment] to its limits with architectural detail . . . in which the figure surrounded by the lines of the walls and the shelf, by the geometric precision of the T-squares, compasses, rulers and sextants, assumes the fantastic aspect of an apparition.70 This compositional formulaof an invasive foreground set off against a neatly framed recession into the distancecharacterizes many of de Chiricos experiments in self-portraiture from the early 1920s. We find a partial anticipation of this spatial construction not only in The Childs Brain (wintersummer 1914) , but also in the contemporary Evil Genius. In the latter image

Poussin which are inhabited by human figures but which, in spite of this, bear a close relationship with the landscape of the Tertiary. Absence of humanity in man.69 Indeed, the formal and compositional fundaments of Rious landscapes bear striking similarities to Poussin and Claudes works, for instance, in the framing of a central scene by coulisse-like trees, or a prominent foreground that gives way to a meandering spatial recession reminiscent of Baroque landscapesa fact not altogether surprising given Rious formation in French Salons. In Poussins Landscape with Pyramus and Thisbe (1651) or Winter: The Flood (16601664; Louvre), even the lightning that tears silver seams in the sky resonates later in Rious stormy rendering of Permian prehistory (fig. 9). Though Poussins foregrounds proffer human forms instead of primeval ones, his originary flood conveys its Biblical solemnity through an austere economy of space. The human body in these landscapes is wholly subjected toor prostrated before, dwarfed bythe physical environment. The sight of Poussin and Claudes canvases, which de Chirico studied closely at the Louvre during his years in Paris, must have resonated with his childhood recollections of La terre avant le dluge.

Figure 8. Edouard Riou, illustration for Louis Figuiers La terre avant le deluge (Devonian period). (Paris: L. Hachette, 1863). Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, N.Y.


gizmos as much as scientific contraptions. The barbed object at the canvass bottom left similarly vacillates between a childs spinning top and something more seriouseven sinisterlurking in a crook of shadow, yet clearly illuminated. This object might be partly derived from an Egyptian sun clock, perhaps seen in illustrated histories of Pharaonic religion, again relating to de Chiricos interest in Near Eastern astrology. The Generals Illness and The Sailors Barracks also reveal objects that are indistinguishable as either toys or tools: a pointed, egg-like thing; a miniature checkerboard; a piece of paper folded into a diminutive tent; balls and wands; a scroll or stone volute; and other items that elude definition or description.

That de Chiricos father, Evaristo, studied engineering in Turin adds a further layer of meaning to the Evil Genius series. The objects in The Evil Genius of a King, like those in de Chiricos Ferrarese interiors that follow shortly after, conjure the tools that lay around his fathers workshops in Athens and Volosjust as they are sprawled across Nicolas Kratzers workspace in Holbeins

and its related works, however, even the human aspect of spectralitywhether that of Nicolas Kratzer, Drer, or the looming, ashen body of the artists deceased fatheris conspicuously absent. The apparition of Kratzers body has been eclipsed by the tools of his trade. The sole subject of these paintings is a group of inanimate objects.

Look at Evil Geniuss long, hexagonal object, just above the green ball. Its shape clearly echoes the ten-sided sundial that Kratzer grips with his left hand. (A similar sundial also appears in Holbeins The Ambassadors [1533; fig. 11]). The nearest surface of The Evil Geniuss tapered object is similarly marked in the center. Its sides are likewise striated with various ciphers, albeit more cryptic than Kratzers numbered integers. If one looks at this object along with its two small, neighboring balls and antennaed head, The Evil Geniuss object can also be seen as a caterpillar-like creature. This droll (and perhaps awkwardly erotic) transformation seems almost to defuse the solemnity of the ciphers that cover the surface of these objects. They may be simultaneously read, in other words, as nonsensical

Figure 9. Nicolas Poussin, Winter, The Flood, 1660-1664. Oil on canvas, 118 x 160 cm. Louvre, Paris. Erich Lessing/Art Resource, N.Y.


71. Paolo Baldacci suggests, for example, that the division of space in the Evil Genius paintings forms a geometric metaphor of the two principle zones of time, the past and the future, lying on either side of the eternal present Baldacci (see note 4), p. 240.

The Evil Genius, but rather sleek. The partition may be identified as a gnomona primitive form of sundial, introduced to the Egyptians by Chaldean and Babylonian astronomers and brought from Babylonia to Greece by the pre-Socratic philosopher Anaximander (fig. 12). The gnomon was not, despite its exotic origins, foreign to the Renaissance interest in geometry and perspective. The allegorical plates accompanying Girard Desarguess prominent treatise, Manire Universelle de Monsieur Desargues pour pratiquer la perspective, for example, depict both perspective and La Gnomonique in kind (fig. 13 a, b). The gnomon particularly evinces the rapport between the practice of linear perspective and the phenomena of geometry and shadowsaspects prominent in de Chiricos entire oeuvre.

Of course, these gnoma are not the first time-telling devices to appear in de Chiricos cityscapes. They represent ancient, primitive counterparts to the clocks that appear in The Enigma of the Hour, Gare Montparnasse, and The Philosophers Conquest. It is tempting to read the sundial plane as a literal partition of eras or epochs.71 They form part of de Chiricos invocation of ancient mathematical, nautical, astronomical, and horological practices, whichin both ancient Mesopotamia and Hellenic antiquity, and even Renaissance Europewere interrelated enterprises. But as I have been arguing, the Evil Genius paintings seek to confuse time more generally, rather than separate epochs or eons into discrete pictorial metaphors. In de Chiricos images, surface never betrays time, but rather purposely dissembles or effaces its trace. A Metaphysical space as painted by de Chirico never, I think, encloses pure time, in itself. Even if the gnoma in The Evil Genius of a King, The Sailors Barracks, and Metaphysical Composition with Toys separate their contents into two distinct sides, for instance, none of these objects transparently denotes a specific age or history.

Interestingly, the gnoma in the remaining four canvases of the Evil Genius seriesThe Generals Illness, The Sailors Barracks, Metaphysical Composition with Toys, and Metaphysical Compositioncannot carry out their pruported function as sundials, for the platform on which they have been erected is pitch black. We cannot make out where these gnoma cast their shadows. But the word gnomon itself contains a multiplicity of meaning and uses, and the objects presence here

picture. In the Evil Genius pictures, instruments are bound up not with exacting measurements, but rather an aura of magic and marvel. If Nicholas Kratzer suddenly left his post on Holbeins canvas, we would be left with something akin to what we find in The Evil Genius of a King: mere things, solitary and isolated. In the absence of their users, these tools seem to utter a new language, more like poetry than the workaday practicality to which human presence submits them.

The Gnomon, gnosis, and metaphysical time

The Evil Genius of a Kings central red slab (which stands slightly inclined to the left, attached laterally to some kind of frame) prefigures a thin, tilted plane that reappears in the four subsequent canvases. In The Generals Illness, The Sailors Barracks, Metaphysical Composition with Toys, and Metaphysical Composition, this central plane is not clunky and corpulent, as in

Figure 10. Hans Holbein the Younger, Nicolas Kratzer, astronomer to King Henry VIII, 1528. Oil on wood panel, 83 x 67 cm. Louvre, Paris, France. Erich Lessing / Art Resource, N.Y.


72. Gnomon, Websters Third New International Dictionary of the English Language (Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster, 2002); see also Oxford English Dictionary, 3d ed.

73. P. Zellini, Gnomon: Una indagine sul numero (Milan: Adelphi, 1999); The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 4th ed. (Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000).

itself, as well as its philological versatility. Like the etymological condensation of various meanings into this one word, de Chiricos painted gnoma strive to conflate scientific knowledge with celestial intuition, to confound geometric and temporal exactitude with a sense of intuitive, aphoristic insight. In short, the Evil Genius series invokes instruments of science and mathematics

may perform a role less practical, than semantic and literary. The etymology of gnomon attests to its status as both a scientific and mathematical instrument and a metaphor for knowledge, wisdom, and revelation. The Latin and Greek root for gnomon denotes (at least) three meanings at once: the index of a sundial, a carpenters square, and one that knows.72 The Indo-European root gno- signifies knowledge in its various manifestations and applications. The Greek gnwmnw literally means one who discerns; in some contexts, the word means, more broadly, indicator, or something that points. For example, gnomon can refer either to the rod, which casts a shadow and thus measures time, or to a cipher or geometric figure (such as a parallelogram) used by mathematicians.73 Accordingly, Heraclituss fragments are widely described as gnomic. The extent to which de Chirico paid attention to the semantics of gnomonics is uncertain. But he seems to have been well attuned to the multilayered meanings of the object

Figure 12. A modern gnomon. Photo by Valerie McGuire; reproduced with permission.

Figure 11. Hans Holbein the Younger, The Ambassadors. Oil on oak panel, 207 x 209 cm. National Gallery, London/Art Resource, N.Y.


Genius of a Kings objects unequivocally as artefactual or newfangled, for they confuse these dimensions beyond discernmenteven if that confusion is not flaunted as a formal, plastic element on the objects surfaces. To wit, in Carl Einsteins book, Die Kunst des 20 Jarhunderts, published in 1931, The Evil Genius of a King appears with the title Ruinen (Ruins). In Sobys original monograph on the artist, however, it was listedalso mistakenlyas Toys of a Prince. The painting has thus kept playing out the ambivalences between fossil and futuristic commodity, between talisman and toy. To tease apart the layers of autobiographical, philosophical, topographical, and semiotic references in these imagesto treat them separatelyis to disavow their

as touchstones for more rarefied notions. The tools of Western astronomy become vectors of vaguely astrological allusions.

Conclusion: Silence, signs, and untimely echoes

The Evil Genius paintings condense and layer various references in singular objects, bounded by crisp outlines. Different spatial and temporal registers continually loop back upon themselves, overlapping, diverging, and rejoining even in the most local (and immobile) of physical detailsa toy that might be a sophisticated engineering instrument, a piece of candy that might actually be a fossilized relic. We cannot read The Evil

Figure 13 a) Frontispiece, Allegory of Girard Desargues Gnomonique, La Manire universelle de M. Desargues Lyonnois pour poser lessieu et placer les heures et autres choses aux cadrans du soleil, par A. Bosse, graveur en taille douce, en lIsle du Palais, devant la Megisserie, la Roze Rouge, A Paris, De limprimerie de Pierre Des Hayes, re de la Harpe, la Roze Rouge, 1643, in-8, Bibliothque Nationale, Paris, Est. Ed 30, rs. Photo: Rare Books Division. Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library; b) Frontispiece to Manire Universelle de Monsieur Desargues pour pratique la perspective (Paris, 1648). The British Library, London.


75. Ibid., p. 202. 76. G. Steiner, Silence and the Poet, Language and Silence:

Essays on Language, Literature, and the Inhuman (New York: Athaneum, 1967), pp. 4647.74. G. de Chirico, Eluard MSS, X, in Ashbery (see note 2), p. 186.

calls in his Parisian notebooks the triviality of crowds.75 The peculiarity of De Chiricos painting obtains, in great part, from the tension created between their exceedinglyindeed, uniquelypublic presentation and their increasingly esoteric appearance, between their solicitous exposure and stubborn silence. George Steiner writes: This election of silence by the most articulate is, I believe, historically recent. [But] the strategic myth of the philosopher who chooses silence because of the ineffable purity of his vision or because of the unreadiness of his audience has antique precedent. It contributes to the motif of Empodocles on Aetna and to the gnomic aloofness of Heraclitus.76 Like Heraclituss aphorisms (some of them only a few words long), The Evil Genius of a King points with gnomic economy. But what it indicates is uncertain.

Like Nietzsche and Heraclitus, de Chirico leaves behind terse gems of lyrical wisdom, to be passed over by those in a hurry, or else seized upon by like-minded initiates. Of course, Nietzsches writings and Heraclituss gnomic aphorisms are not the only sources of the Evil Genius configurations. But when de Chirico claims consciously to evoke at once the somber wisdom of both ancient Hellenic priests and earths first primitives; when he strips plastic dimensions to their most basic configuration in order to condense and conceal (to the general public) a multitude of esoteric allusions, it is undoubtedly to Nietzsche and Heraclituss precedents that he turns. For, their aphoristic examples epitomized the tension that could be established between the plain presentation of language, and a recondite, abstruse significance, one that alienates the mass of individuals while attracting a select few. All of de Chiricos early Metaphysical paintings evince that paradox. But the Evil Genius canvases especially rehearse the tension between a visual offering and an intellectual absconding, between a physical availabilityeven solicitationand a semantic, hermeneutic withholding.

In an ironic twist of art historical fate, The Evil Genius of a King was reproduced for the first time in one of the most radically antielitist, anti-Art forums in the history of aesthetics: the second issue of the journal Dada, published in Zurich in 1917 (fig. 14). The canvas sits opposite Tristan Tzaras Pomes Ngres and is the only figurative painting included (the other paintings by Jean Arp, Wassily Kandinsky, Robert Delaunay, etc.,

stubborn reconciliation of opposites. For each valence doubles back onto its obverse: commodity fetishism and the fetishism of the prehistoric Hellenes; the childs plaything and the engineers tool; droll punning and dead-serious morbidity; a history of art and a navel-gazing narrative of the self; duration and immediacy. Into one framed point of view they distill various subject positions: that of prehistoric man and the bermenschian philosopher; the older, mad Nietzsche and the young de Chirico; the ancient augur and the modern Metaphysician.

This last conflation is perhaps the most dramatic. More than any of de Chiricos previous still lifes, the Evil Genius paintings liken the picture plane to an oracular space in its own right: a sheltered slab or shrine upon which is strewn a constellation of objects whose meaning seems to lie in the way the objects are staged and framed, as much as what those objects are. If de Chiricos early The Enigma of the Oracle (fig. 4) captures the moment of waiting for the mysterious revealing oraclea moment embedded into a larger pictorial narrativeThe Evil Genius of a King figures the very canvas as a kind of sacred configuration. Whereas the former paintings sense of mystery hinges upon a veiling curtain and an attendant officiant, The Evil Genius of a King places the viewer himself before an exposed altar. You are invited to read these objects as if you were the priest of Apollo, the Etruscan hepatomancer, the chlamys-draped soothsayer. You are invoked as the live subject of the scene, in real time. Offered up in plain day, in the most public of places, the Metaphysical still life seems here to propose that the everyday objects of the world are the stuff of collective poetrylike architecture, a domain of workaday lyricism. This is the general condition that de Chirico intends when he aspires to live in the world as if in an immense museum of strangeness.74

Not every viewer will grasp or heed such an invocation, however. Only he who recognizes the philosophical shibboleth that these images whisperlike de Chirico in his friends Gartzs earto the elect. Despite the transparency of these images displays, they do not propose any collective use. If the objects in de Chiricos still lifes appear to have broken through museum walls into the public square, they are nonetheless painted and framed with deliberation. I think de Chirico chose to paint increasingly esoteric imagery in the public space of the piazza as a foil to what he


77. F. Nietzsche, Sporadic-Proverbial Preliminary Stage of Philosophy, The Pre-Platonic Philosophers, trans. and ed. G. Witlock (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001), p. 14; emphasis mine.

In its hushed dumbness, The Evil Genius of a King tempts us to fall into a similar misreadingto mistake an untimely echo, an antiquarian atavism, for something new. De Chirico would likely have scoffed at the false analogies drawn from his paintings by his contemporariesthe analogy, for example, that landed The Evil Genius of a King alongside a series of abstract works in a journal dedicated to eradicating art. For the paintings strangeness derives from archaisms and anachronisms that his contemporaries duly mistook for novelties. The images superlative philosophical sophistication passes for nave nonsenseeven a kind of primal grunt. The entire Evil Genius series hinges on this rarefied combination of clarity and confusion, ingenuousness and concealment, the apodictic and the unsure. The paintings timed silences ensure misrecognition by us citizens and, conversely, identification by initiates into their Nietzschean mysteries. Their true apprehension is meant, ultimately, only for a happy few.

are all decidedly abstract works). Something about this painting, then, spoke to the Dadaists about the language of abstractionor at least the potential abstraction of figurative language, whittled back down to a primal utterance. The Evil Genius of a King approachesperhaps even caricaturesabstract painting, but never fully renounces figurative contours. I think this is a purposeful strategy on de Chiricos part. He must have relished the notion that the novelty of The Evil Genius of a King be rooted in figurative forms, that it evince the privileged nobility of silence without nihilistically renouncing its purchase on physical sense. Rather than a flight out of the discursive, these images would perform an involution of ordinary representation, back to its obscured corea return to what Nietzsche calls the Sporadic-proverbial preliminary stage of philosophy:

Homeric language . . . contains an indefinite number of archaic formulations on which the genuine ancestry of the language dependsformulations that would no longer be grammatically understood by later singers and for this reason would be imagined, by false analogies, to be new expressions.77

Figure 14. Dada 2, December 1917, Zurich, frontispiece; Tristan Tzaras Pomes Ngres facing de Chiricos The Evil Genius of a King.

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Merjian_De Chirico Untimely Objects

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