The trains, arches and architectural designs that fill De Chirico’s paintings were images he was exposed to from childhood. One of the originators of Pittura Metafisica (Metaphysical Art), De Chirico was born to railway engineer, Evaristo De Chirico and lived in Volos, a town bisected by railways and the main port of Thessaly, Greece, from his birth in 1888 to 1891 and between 1896 and 1898.
Evaristo de Chirico
“My father”, writes De Chirico, “was a man of the 19th century... an engineer and also a gentleman of olden times, courageous, loyal, hard-working, intelligent and good”. Head of “Enterprise E. Chirico and Cie” Evaristo was engaged by the Greek government in the construction of the Thessalian railway network, following the region’s annexation to Greece in 1881. He eventually became director of the Thessalian Railway Company.
Apart from supervising the building of the Thessalian railways, Evaristo also built the railway station of Volos, two tunnels, a distinctive narrow-gauge railway line and a total of nine bridges, one of which – a feat of engineering – bears his name. It is no wonder then that for De Chirico trains were strongly associated with his father’s image as well as they represented images from his childhood in Volos.
In his Memoirs De Chirico refers fondly and with admiration to his father for his many virtues and capacities and as the person who first taught him how to draw. The loss of his father (Evaristo died in 1905) is a constant theme of De Chirico's early works. The frequent use of trains in De Chirico's paintings is seen by many as symbolising and commemorating his father.
De Chirico’s Images of Childhood in Volos
“Life in the little city of Volos – the city of the Argonauts – was full of metaphysical and provincial events”, De Chirico writes. The eight-year-old Giorgio became a master of kite flying and catapult stone shooting. The trains that passed through Volos, the street urchins, the Volos seaside promenade with its elegant evening entertainment, the fine food, the concerts at the house of the Austrian consul were all part of his childhood images in Volos in 1896-8.
De Chirico enjoyed going on fishing expeditions accompanied by his mother, younger brother and two railway employees, Messaritis, “a dreamer and a romantic and a specialist in the driving of locomotives” and Calojeropoulos, “a sceptic and a joker”. “The sea was a mirror”, he wrote. “Never in other countries afterwards did I see a mirror of water so beautiful”. The “spectacles of exceptional beauty” De Chirico had seen in Greece as a boy left a powerful impression on his mind.
Drawing Lessons
De Chirico was a lonely, impressionable child who had a passion for drawing. His father always encouraged him to draw and took an interest in his progress. Evaristo de Chirico made sure that drawing instructors were always at hand to teach his son.
Mavrudis, a Greek from Trieste and employee in the railways of Volos, was employed to give Giorgio his first drawing lessons.De Chirico remembers Mavrudis as the first to teach him the love of clean, beautiful lines and well-modelled forms and the love of good materials. He speaks very highly of him in his memoirs as a teacher who left a lasting impression on him.
De Chirico and his family left Volos in 1898 for Athens where they stayed until 1905.
Sources:
The Memoirs of Giorgio de Chirico, Da Capo Press 1994
K. Androulidakis, "Thessalian Railways", Kathimerini, 30 January 1994 (in Greek)
Chistos Photou, "Thessalian Railways", in Volos 1881-1955. The Place and the People, Volos 2004, pp.93-103
Robert Hughes,”Giorgio de Chirico”, in Nothing If Not Critical: Selected Essays on Art and Artists, Penguin 1992, 160-3.
Elizabeth Frank, "Archetypes and Anxiety Dreams", Artnews, Sept. 1982, p.103
Lito Apostolakou - Lito is a historian with an interest in digital archives and online historical resources. She is the author of blog Palimpsest.
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