Touching Statues

Abstract The painter Giorgio de Chirico was fascinated by the remnants of classical sculpture. Famous fragments, statues and statuesque objects frequently appear in his ‘metaphysical’ scenes which prefigure the work of the surrealists. In his paintings and in his writings de Chirico imagined a world in which statues left their pedestals and joined the human race. The surprise of seeing statuary in unaccustomed places reveals the invisible barriers that usually keep it apart. We are most familiar with these barriers in the highly regulated environment of the museum and de Chirico reacts against its conventions when he imagines the ‘mysterious aspect’ of a statue in a real armchair, or looking out of a window, or in the unfamiliar context of a bedroom. Like Wilenski he invokes the ubiquity of statues in the ancient world, in this case to underpin his fantasy of nonmuseological settings: ‘Among the ancients one saw [the statue] everywhere: on the outside and inside of palaces and temples, in gardens and towns, in sea-ports and in the courtyards of houses.’