Giorgio de Chirico (Born 188) was an Italian artist best known for his influence on the Surrealist movement and for his inscrutable paintings of the 1910s and 1920s. He was in the town of Volos, in a region of Greece known as Thessaly. In his art, De Chirico was seeking to evoke the hidden meanings behind everyday life, and his inscrutable scenes of mysterious shadows, menacing statues, empty cities and strange combinations of everyday objects inspired many artists who were for the Surrealist movement. His important works from these years include "The Soothsayer's Recompense", "The Enigma of an Autumn Afternoon," and "The Mystery and Melancholy of a Street." They were all "metaphysical." De Chirico first studied art in Athens at the Higher School of Fine Arts. His father died in 1905, so his mother moved him together with other two children to Munich, where he (De Chirico) completed his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts.
The studies took him 2 years, after which he continued to educate himself. He took particular interest in Friedrich Nietzsche’s and Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophical writings. In 1908, he returned to Italy, traveling to Turin and Milan and finally settling in Florence. The European Symbolist artists had strong influence on De Chirico’s art. He fell in love with their use of dream-like imagery. As a young artist his works combined his love of the classical antiquities of Italy and Greece and his Symbolist sensibility. After a long career, he died in Rome, Italy, in 1978.
