Giorgio De Chirico Quotes | Famous Quotations About Art

Who is Giorgio De Chirico?

Giorgio de Chirico was an Italian artist and writer born in Greece. In the years before World War I, he founded the Scuola metafisica art movement, which significantly affected the surrealists. His most notable works regularly include Roman arcades, long shadows, mannequins, trains, and an irrational point of view.

Giorgio De Chirico Famous Quotations:

Quotes About Art & Life

The Song of Love by Giorgio De Chirico

Giorgio De Chirico Quotes About Art & Life

“To become truly immortal, a work of art must escape all human limits: logic and common sense will only interfere. But once these barriers are broken, it will enter the realms of childhood visions and dreams.”― Giorgio de Chirico

“A work of art must narrate something that does not appear within its outline. The objects and figures represented in it must likewise poetically tell you of something that is far away from them and also of what their shapes materially hide from us.”― Giorgio de Chirico

“Art is the fatal net which catches these strange moments on the wing like mysterious butterflies, fleeing the innocence and distraction of common men.”― Giorgio de Chirico

“Profound statements must be drawn by the artist from the most secret recesses of his being; there no murmuring torrent, no birdsong, no rustle of leaves can distract him.”― Giorgio de Chirico

“It is essential that the revelation we receive, the conception of an image which embraces a certain thing, which has no sense of itself, which has no subject, which means absolutely nothing from the logical point of view... should speak so strongly in us... that we feel compelled to paint...”― Giorgio de Chirico

“Although the dream is a very strange phenomenon and an inexplicable mystery, far more inexplicable is the mystery and aspect our minds confer on certain objects and aspects of life.”― Giorgio de Chirico

Inspiring Female Artist Quotes 

Mystery and melancholy of a street print by Giorgio de Chirico

“We must hold enormous faith in ourselves.”― Giorgio de Chirico

“One must picture everything in the world as an enigma, and live in the world as if in a vast museum of strangeness.”― Giorgio de Chirico

“There is much more mystery in the shadow of a man walking on a sunny day, than in all religions of the world.”― Giorgio de Chirico

“Painting is the magic art, the fire set alight on the windows of the rich dwelling, as on those of the humble hovel, from the last rays of the setting sun, it is the long mark, the humid mark, the fluent and still mark that the dying wave etches on the hot sand, it is the darting of the immortal lizard on the rock burnt by the midday heat, it is the rainbow of conciliation, on sad May afternoons, after the storm has passed, down there, making a dark backdrop to the almond trees in flower, to the gardens with their washed colours, to the ploughmen's huts, smiling and tranquil, it is the livid cloud chased by the vehement blowing of Aeolus enraged, it is the nebulous disk of the fleeting moon behind the ripped-open funereal curtain of a disturbed sky in the deep of night, it is the blood of the bull stabbed in the arena, of the warrior fallen in the heat of battle, of Adonis' immaculate thigh wounded by the obstinate boar's curved tusk, it is the sail swollen with the winds of distant seas, it is the centuries-old tree browned in the autumn.”― Giorgio de Chirico

“Everything has two aspects: the current aspect, which we see nearly always and which ordinary men see, and the ghostly and metaphysical aspect, which only rare individuals may see in moments of clairvoyance and metaphysical abstraction.”― Giorgio de Chirico

“I believe, however, that such abnormal moments can be found in everyone, and it is all the more fortunate when they occur in individuals with creative talent or with clairvoyant powers.”― Giorgio de Chirico

“Perfect knowledge of the space an object should occupy in a picture, and of the space that separates one object from another, establishes a new astronomy of things attached to our planet by the magic law of gravity.”― Giorgio de Chirico

“What I hear is valueless; only what I see is living, and when I close my eyes my vision is even more powerful.”― Giorgio de Chirico

Edgar Degas Quotes

The Enigma of an Autumn Afternoon by Giorgio De Chirico 

“What I have created here in Italy is neither very big nor profound (in the old sense of the word), but formidable. This summer I painted paintings that are the most profound that exist in the absolute. Let me explain these things somewhat.. .. profoundness as I understand it, and as Nietzsche intended it, is elsewhere than where it has been searched for until now. – My paintings are small (the biggest is 50 x 70 cm), but each of them is an enigma, each contains a poem, an atmosphere (Stimmung) and a promise that you can not find in other paintings. It brings me immense joy to have painted them – when I exhibit them, possibly in Munich this spring, it will be a revelation for the whole world”― Giorgio de Chirico

“You misunderstood my words when I said that Michelangelo was a stupid artist.. .Because I have drunk from another source and a new and marvelous thirst burns my lips – how can I still believe in such artists?! I know what you are thinking when you ask me: 'isn't David a superman? This is how I used to feel, this is what I used to think. The majority of the world's great spirits thought it so.. ..but now a new air has entered my soul, a new song has reached my ears and the whole world appears totally changed – the autumn afternoon has arrived, the long shadows, the clear air, the serene sky –, in a word: Zarathustra has arrived, do you understand??.. ..It is only with Nietzsche that I can say I have begun a real life.”― Giorgio de Chirico

“I remember one vivid winter’s day at Versailles. Silence and calm reigned supreme,. Everything gazed at me with mysterious, questioning eyes. And then I realized that every corner of the palace, every column, every window possessed a spirit, an impenetrable soul. I looked around at the marble heroes, motionless in the lucid air, beneath the frozen rays of that winter sun which pours down on us 'without love', like perfect song.”― Giorgio de Chirico

“Among the many senses that modern painters have lost, we must number the sense of architecture. The edifice accompanying the human figure, whether alone or in a group, whether in a scene from life or in an historical drama, was a great concern of the ancients. They applied themselves to it with loving and severe spirit, studying and perfecting the laws of perspective. A landscape enclosed in the arch of a portico or in the square or rectangle of a window acquires a greater metaphysical value, because it is solidified and isolated from the surrounding space. Architecture completes nature.”― Giorgio de Chirico

Fine Art Quotes By Famous Artists

Piazza d'Italia by Giorgio De Chirico 

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