Giorgio de Chirico and the Metaphysical City

For the artist Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978), a founder of the Metaphysical art movement, the year 1914 marked a momentous and pivotal time in his aesthetic production. He completed most of his well-known paintings of metaphysical cityscapes that year, just before the advent of World War I, while living in Paris. These paintings emerged within the context of the city's avant-garde circles, and they ultimately redirected the course of modernist painting. Ara H. Merjian's fascinating text considers the artist's representation of architectural space in relation to his sustained engagement with the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche and addresses why the painter's Nietzschean method takes architecture as its means and metaphor, a physical premise for metaphysical revelation. This remarkable book is the first significant academic study of Metaphysical painting to be published in English. It not only sheds light on a key figure in the history of 20th-century aesthetics but also contributes to an understanding of Nietzsche's impact on modernism.