The de Chirico exception in a modern painting devoid of architectural sense

The obsession with decadence, the love for ancient authors and for classicism. While the other 20th century artists invent new styles, he portrays the restless and dynamic environment in which everyone moves. In the bookstore the “Writings 1910-1978”

In the modesty of my pictorial skills and within the limits of my personal opinions on twentieth-century art, I have often thought of Giorgio de Chirico as the most important of modern painters. I use a deplorably banal and rhetorical term such as “important” to instead say something not commonly recognized: the fact that from the outset de Chirico had an advantage over other twentieth-century painters, that of having invented and painted the world, the environment , the landscape in which the other painters lived but which they did not paint, since they painted something else. What de Chirico most admired and felt lost in modern painting is the “architectural sense” of ancient painting: “The construction accompanying the human figure, alone or in group, the episode of life and the historical drama, was a great concern for the ancients who applied themselves to it with a loving and severe spirit, studying and perfecting the laws of perspective” (in Giorgio de Chirico, Written 1910-1978edited by Andrea Cortellessa, Sabina D’Angelosante, Paolo Picozza, La Nave di Teseo, 243 pp., 45 euros).