Metaphysical art

Giorgio De Chirico definitely stands out as a peculiar character of the Italian Novecento and his art ties directly with Nietzsche’s philosophy whose eternal questions paved the way to his “immanent metaphysics” which is typified and pervaded by an ever-present melancholia brought about by a heightened awareness of the death of God.
Grappling with “the world seen for the first time” De Chirico’s narrative doesn’t depict reality rather its ghost, the latter is seen by dint of revelations and hallucinations.
This paper sheds light onto some crucial kinships between the two characters as not only philosophical concerns are vital but illness too. The philosopher suffered since his very childhood from severe migraine and then from a psychiatric illness with depression while the painter unknowingly suffered from migraine aura. This ailment, affecting the fragile border amid perceived reality and hallucinated reality, turned out to be a remarkable source of inspiration which boosted the visions and the enigmas the artist was entwined with.
Overall, Nietzsche ushered in a picture of the world that De Chirico has wholeheartedly shared, however, in the light of his disorder, the empathy went even further and this is the noteworthy aspect this paper aims at underscoring.

Why didn’t Lamberto Vitali praise the artistic products of Morandi’s metaphysical phase as he did for works completed at other moments of the artist’s career? In Vitali’s writings on Morandi – in, for example, the different editions of his catalogue raisonné – the art historian doesn’t explicitly declare a preference. However, there is an evident change in the way he discusses the works of the artist’s metaphysical years (1918–1919). For instance, when he writes about the artist’s landscapes painted in the following years, between 1921 and 1925, he claims that they have a “tender sweetness in the representation, very far from the intellectual lucubrations of the Metaphysical Still Life.” This apparently banal and marginal question allows us, on the contrary, to consider Vitali’s reading of Morandi’s œuvre with a far broader perspective for which it becomes pivotal to take into consideration the collecting taste of the time. Through this reading of Vitali’s texts and of Morandi’s images, as well as an analysis of the contemporary market tendencies, it becomes possible to define the cultural reasons underlying Vitali’s taste.

De Chirico’s Metaphysical art aimed at admiring (then painting) the world in its quintessence, i.e. to look at the world “as if it were the first time”. During his life the painter suffered from various health disorders, however, one of them somehow  helped him in reaching his artistic goal: the migraine aura and its consequent hallucinations. The latter, were sometimes mistaken for true reality as De Chirico was totally unaware of his disease. As a consequence, the artist, who was also deeply influenced by the Nietzsche’s notion of the Übermensch, believed to possess alleged powers of perception-intuition. This “higher or parallel dimension perceived only by him”, ended up nourishing that purely elitist character that the Pictor Optimus automatically attributed to his figure, both artistically and existentially.
My paper intends to determine how the aforementioned disease was also a concrete source of inspiration and revelation, furthermore my study aims at highlighting how this disease increased the already voluminous ego of the painter along with his conviction of alleged divinatory or initiatory powers.

The brief course of Anton Inglott's artistic career, the presumption of his orthodox formation, and the conformity of his thematic program has wholly obscured the distinct uniqueness of his spirit. At the age of twenty three, Inglott qualified for a formative course of study at the Accademia in Rome.  But his real inspiration came from the metaphysical environment that had swept over Italian art in between the two World wars, that found a natural bond with Inglott's own mysticism in the final years of his life, aggravated by failing health as well as the desperate conditions of wartime Malta - a travailed saga that gave birth to a stirring art.

Much has been written about the relationship between John Ashbery's poetry and avant-garde art, particularly the painting of the Abstract Expressionists. Two of the earliest articles dealing with this subject—by Fred Moramarco (1976) and Leslie Wolf (1980)—have considered ...

The practice of Ontography deployed by OOO, clarified and expanded in this essay, produces a highly productive framework for analyzing Salvador Dalí’s ontological project between 1928 and 1935. Through the careful analysis of paintings and original texts from this period, we establish the antecedents for Dalí’s theorization of Surrealist objects in Cubism and Italian Metaphysical art, which we collectively refer to as ‘Ontographic art,’ drawing parallels with the tenets of Graham Harman’s and Ian Bogost’s object-oriented philosophical programmes. We respond to the question raised by Roger Rothman concerning Object-Oriented Idealism in Dalí’s work by showing pivotal changes to Dalí’s ontological outlook, from Idealism to Realism, across the aforementioned period, positing the Ontographic intentionality of Dalí’s ontological project in Surrealist art.

This article approaches Alberto Savinio’s multifaceted oeuvre by interpreting his avant-garde novel Hermaphrodito (1918) through its epistemological, linguistic, and political implications. Hermaphrodito challenges the identification between languages and peoples by radicalising Nietzsche’s etymological research begun in The Genealogy of Morals (1887). Through the autobiographical yet fantastic narrative of his ‘homecoming’ to his native Greece during World War I, Savinio reveals the neglected ontological multiplicity at the core of Western civilisation, questioning one of its fundamental myths – the original unity of languages represented by the world before the Tower of Babel, a world in which translation was not needed. While realising at the end of the novel that ‘home is the real enigma’, Savinio ventures into a linguistic territory where untranslatability defies what Derrida has named ‘the identificatory modality’ between the autobiographical ‘I’ and a singular mother tongue. Savinio’s own reappraisal of Hermaphrodito during World War II parallels his conversion to democratic ideas after a long self-imposed repression of his own diversity. His unorthodox prose illuminates the void of meaning behind the assumed stability of national narratives and gender divides.

Analyzes Cézanne's role as a model for techniques of dissolving solid form, creating a new pictorial architecture, imposing a pattern on the painted surface, distorting naturalistic contours, and generating an atmosphere of metaphysical mystery.

The practice of Ontography deployed by OOO, clarified and expanded in this essay, produces a highly productive framework for analyzing Salvador Dalí’s ontological project between 1928 and 1935. Through the careful analysis of paintings and original texts from this period, we establish the antecedents for Dalí’s theorization of Surrealist objects in Cubism and Italian Metaphysical art, which we collectively refer to as ‘Ontographic art,’ drawing parallels with the tenets of Graham Harman’s and Ian Bogost’s object-oriented philosophical programmes. We respond to the question raised by Roger Rothman concerning Object-Oriented Idealism in Dalí’s work by showing pivotal changes to Dalí’s ontological outlook, from Idealism to Realism, across the aforementioned period, positing the Ontographic intentionality of Dalí’s ontological project in Surrealist art.

All’interno del vastissimo opus narrativo di Massimo Bontempelli, la raccolta di racconti Viaggi e scoperte. Ultime avventure, uscita per la prima volta presso Vallecchi di Firenze nel 1922, occupa un posto singolarissimo dal punto di vista editoriale, poetico e, in fin dei conti, anche quello ricettivo. Pur inserendosi cronologicamente e poeticamente nel periodo più innovativo dell’attività letteraria, saggistica e giornalistica del fondatore del realismo magico italiano, la raccolta non è mai stata oggetto di uno studio più approfondito. Perciò questo articolo propone una lettura di questa raccolta e in particolare del racconto "Quarto viaggio"  nel contesto del sodalizio personale ed artistico di Bontempelli e Alberto Savinio.