On warm summer days, I did during my childhood and early youth join the bicycle caravan that meandered from Hässleholm to Birch Bay by the Finja Lake – a sandy beach with a jetty and a restaurant with outdoor seating.

 I remember every detail of the road. The downhill after the exit road to P2: The Scanian Dragon Regiment and how I used glance at the villa that lay by the hill slope. It belonged to Calle Preutz who boxed for Hässleholms BK and who together with the nation's pride, Ingmar Johansson, was active during the golden age of Swedish boxing. Preutz never became Swedish champion, but during his active time he conquered three silver medals at the Swedish boxing championships.

For some reason unknown to me, his son who was my age, once started a fight with me in the school yard. Of course, I did not stand a chance against him. At that time I avoided him, but we became friends when we much later did our obligatory military refresher training together. After the slope by Preutz's villa, some waterlogged marshes took over and where, below some impressive oaks, Hässleholm's city limit was marked by a milestone with the town´s coat of arms. there was always a compact swarm of gnats.

Finally we reached Finjasjön. In those days there was a solid jetty of the old-fashioned type, i.e. not the modern variant floating on pontoons but one that rested on properly piled down logs and provided with stairs leading down to the water. As a kid, I was fascinated by that jetty, perhaps mostly because my parents had told me I had to avoid drowning – once my four-year-older sister, had ended up in an underwater hole next to the jetty and had been close to drowning. When she suddenly disappeared, my parents had been sunbathing on the beach. My father told me he had not heard her cries for help and she had been rescued by others.

I often sneaked into the shade under the jetty where the water was cool and light dimmed. The water was striped by beams falling in between the wooden slats above me from where footsteps and faint voices could be heard. In the shadows I was alone in the middle of the world.

A feeling I am reminded of as I flip through a book where I found pictures of Giorgio de Chirico's Bagni Misteriosi, the Mysterious Baths. In 1934 he made his first images of such baths as illustrations to a book of poems by Jean Cocteau, until his death in 1978 Chirico created a vast amount of versions of the same motif.

He claimed that his idea for ​​The Mysterious Baths came when he remembered his childhood in the Greek city of Volos. At a place where the river Anavros met the sea at a sandy beach, there were jetties and small changing cabins. I have seen such cabins in several places, not the least here in Italy, though then they are generally not placed in the water, but by the beach, as in Ostia outside Rome to where we often take the car.

What made me react when I saw Chirico's pictures was that in some of them he described my childhood feelings when I hid myself under the jetty of the Finja Lake – the sunlight, the shadows, and the loneliness coming from watching other bathers play around me; the sound of cries and laughter. Such shadows and lights may be often found by Chirico, as well as multi-coloured beach balls and bathers.

As in so many of Chirico's works, Bagni Misteriosi emit, with their shadows, sun and strange desolation – exclusion and memories.

Chirco made his Bagni reflect his life. When he in 1937, while residing in New York, heard of his ever-overshadowing mother’s death in Rome he interpreted his feelings in a picture of Bagni Misteriosi.

The same, desolate silence, time and time again. Most often, Chirico's bathing places are not be found by the sea, but by canals cutting through barren land.

Bleak landscapes inhabited by alienated humans. Dressed youths watch youngsters,, some of them with featureless faces, wading naked in shallow canals with brown water similar to the water generally found in forest circumscribed lakes, like those of my youth and childhood.

Occasionally a dressed-up youth passes the bathers in a rowing boat.

Customed, silent men generally just watch the bathers, though from time to time they seem to be talking to them, some have even placed themselves on a box, or a chair, by the canal rim.

Even the bathers tend to be isolated, sometimes in tower-like, separate pools, to which ladders lead up.

Sometimes the sea is glimpsed, and then usually between buildings. In these claustrophobic, and nevertheless open landscapes, the sea is blue, contrasting the Bagni's brown waters. Like here where an individual in a suit is rowing towards a tunnel opening up to the sea.

Already as a child I had been fascinated by Chirico’s art. In one of my father's books, which I returned to time and time again, I had been attracted by one of Chirico’s early paintings, The Mystery of the Hour and I began to draw several variations on the artwork – the arches, the solitary figures, the clock. It had something to do with the passage of time, the loneliness, the isolated figures and the stillness that had taken hold of me.

When I am confronted with Chirico's art I tend to be surprised by such memory blocks. When I saw the rowing boat moving towards a tunnel opening towards to the sea, I came to think of a tunnel I once saw in Livorno. It is a canal that stretches under the city's central square and opens into its lively harbour.

And ... this strange, desolate exclusion – like when you arrive at a new workplace filled with future acquaintances. In Chirico's Bagni there is often a dressed young man who with a suitcase in his hand opens the door to a bathing cabin, where he is to undress to reunite with other bathers, but before he does so, perhaps with anticipation, anxiety and hesitation, he thoughtfully watches the surrounding bathers.

Among my memories are several such images and situations finding equivalents in Chirico's art. Sometimes his bathing cabins are not located by strange canals, but instead remind me of the bathing complexes you may find along the Swedish coasts, for example in Varberg and Malmö. So called kallbadhus, “cold bathing houses”, which were built in the early twentieth century, a time that seems to correspond to Chirico's constructions.

While I was working as a teacher in Malmö, it happened that I went out to Ribersborg's kallbadhus to visit its sauna and take swim afterwards. This quite impressive complex had been built by the end of a long jetty stretching into Öresund, the wide strait between Sweden and Denmark.

The strength of Chirico's art is at its best during a direct confrontation. In 2010, I did in Rome on several occasions visit a comprehensive exhibition covering Chirico’s very extensive production. The sight of the desolate cityscapes etched itself into my brain. When I after seeing them took to the streets again I found that Rome had been transformed into the alienating world of Chirico.

In addition to being an eccentric and quite unique artist, Chirico was a skilled writer, not only of the suggestive novel Hebdomeros but also of a number of articles on art, in among which he wrote about how architecture affects, yes… constructs our reality and our way of thinking. Several times he returned to how Renaissance artists dreamed of organizing life, making it clearer, more tangible, and in their quest applied mathematical rules created through speculations about the basic structure of the Cosmos.

In his art, Chirico tried to find an inner pattern and meaning of life. Not for nothing was his admired father, who died when Chirico was seventeen years old, a recognized and skilled engineer. Chirico's depictions of a dreamlike and alienating reality endow his versions of life with a peculiar timelessness.

In the late 1910s, Chirico wrote that the art of the “cave people” was already perfect since these unknown artists, while creating masterpieces on rock walls in the depths of dark caves, were fully aware of the fact that their hunting prey was “endowed with an inner meaning”, a reality far beyond what we can see, perceive with our senses, and only grasp through our imagination – a metaphysical realm.

One must picture everything in the world as an enigma, not only the great questions one has always asked oneself, why was the world created, why we are born, live and die, for after all, as I have said, perhaps there is no reason in all of this. […] On earth. There are many more enigmas in the shadow of a man walking in the sun than in all past, present and future religions.

Through such insights, Chirico wanted to anchor his art in reality and thus make it eternally true. His empty urban landscapes and soulless puppets seem to be freed from time and change and thus became eerily prophetic.

It may seem that Fascist architecture copied Chirico's art, like the beautiful, but ghostly EUR, a futuristic Roman suburb, which began to be built in the 1930s. It has constituted a backdrop to films by masters like Fellini, and especially Antonioni in whose L’Eclisse, Eclipse, alienated individuals move around in EUR, unable to find purpose or meaning in their lives.

In EUR we find a modern architecture, which incorporate classic elements; columns, arches and sculptures, similar to some of Chirico’s drawings of Bagni Misteriosi where an antique sculpture suddenly may appear among the bath-houses.

EUR’s vast piazzas and colonnades breath alienation, cold emptiness. No wonder that visual masters like Fellini and Antonioni appreciated the desolate aesthetics of this sterile grandeur.

It is not only in the EUR that Rome seems to reflect Chirico’s art, also Foro Italia, Mussolini's huge sports facility with its “heroic” marble statues and austere, but at the same time whimsical, almost kitschy buildings, also appears to borrow certain aspects from Chirico’s paintings.

Even the colouring and built-in sculptures seem to have been inspired by Chirico’s art.

The cities built in the formely malaria infested swamps of Pontina, just of south of Rome, have an appearance as they had taken Chirico’s paintings as a model. One example of this is the austere and quite pleasing architecture of the coastal town of Sabaudia.

Of course, among this Fascist architecture there were also threatening shadows lurking, emitting a nasty nervousness, skilfully portrayed in the American artist Peter Blume’s The Eternal City from 1937:

Blume's works are more baroque than the almost empty and dark cityscapes of the early Chirico, although Blume’s world is also a dreamscape of sorts, distorted but nevertheless firmly rooted in a tangible reality. As with Blume, Chirico’s oeuvre also contains its threatening shadows.

Sometimes they come from the buildings, though as in his Mystery and Melancholy of a Street, they may also be cast by invisible figures, like the ever-present threat of the Italian twenties and thirties – the Fascist Squadristi; black-clad thugs loyal to the suppressive regime.

Throughout his life, Chirico was influenced by German art, mainly Max Klinger and Arnold Böcklin, and it may seem that he in his paintings could have been inspired by the arte noir of German expressionism. The interplay between light and sharp shadows, so noticeable in a masterpiece like Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. as well as in Fritz Lang's and F.W. Murnau’s films. Although it was probably the other way around – Chirico began to paint his menacing, empty piazzas eight years before Wiene made his Dr. Caligari. 

Chirico told his nephew, who also became an artist, though not by far as fascinating as his father and uncle:

Yes, yes, the shadows. Darker and darker, but there is always a possibility of a brightening. It was the Saturnian melancholy that pushed me into darkness, making me forget about the tangibility and meaning of matter. Only death can claim that I have lived, had a history and a place where I was born. When I look back, I think of myself as one of those “born under Saturn”, who in the melancholy and misfortunes of his life, after all, owned himself, his body and soul, one who was able to create images of such a life and gain a home within it.

Because he believed, somewhat erroneously, it would benefit his art and incomes, Chirico did in 1933 join the Italian Fascist Party. However, he was far from being a convinced and loyal party member, perhaps an impossibility for such a hypersensitive, defiant, trapped, hypochondriac, and possibly latent homosexual man.

The populist rhetoric of Fascism, its superficial slogans, intrusive presence of the masses, the culture of bullying and constant tributes to war and violent actions, got on the nerves of the hyper-sensitive Chirico. Most of his life he suffered from chronic, nervous stomach pains and during the first fifty years of his life he spent more time in Paris than in Rome. Although Mussolini privately appreciated Chirico's art, the artist despised the superficial vulgarity of the pompous dictator and the stifling totalitarianism prevailing in Fascist Italy, despite of some degree of artistic freedom.

The Parisian atmosphere also irritated him. Chirico came to resent the “moral and materialistic garbage dump” that Parisian art, according to him, had become and from 1936 to 1938 he lived in New York, but there he felt even more alienated. In the United States, de Chirico was an admired artist, selling his paintings at high prizes while receiving lucrative assignments from millionaires such as Helena Rubenstein and fancy magazines like Vogue and Harper's Magazine. Nevertheless, he lamented the absence of Europe's ancient history, its art and intellectual debate.

In the United States, a catastrophic development began, which his American art dealer characterized as a “propensity for self-destruction, encapsulated in an aura of grandezza.” Driven by greed, and possibly under the influence of his new life companion, Isabella Pakszwer, combined with his dominating mother’s death and the geographical distance to his brother. Giorgio began to play out different art dealers against each other and to satisfy the market he began to execute slightly retouched copies of his bestselling earlier work, which he signed as if they had been made several years before. At the same time his current mode of expression had taken what he called a “baroque and classical direction” and he did in his writings pour invectives over “modern art”.

Chirico returned to Rome, but left after less than a year when the Italian racial laws were introduced, “disgusted by the decrees concerning the defence of the race.” However, his Parisian existence worsened, particularly since he was under constant attacks from his former and more radicalised Surrealist friends. When France capitulated to the Germans, Chirico moved to Italy, lured back by his brother, who at that time had become an earnest supporter of the Fascist regime. After actively seeking Mussolini’s support Chirico settled in Milan. Among other things, he painted official portraits of the dictator’s daughter Edda and her husband, Galeazzo Ciano, who had been Italy's foreign minister since 1936, until he took part in the ousting of Mussolini from power. In 1943, Galeazzo was in Rome caught by his father-in-law’s hooligans and taken to Mussolini’s German puppet regime, Saló, in northern Italy, where he was executed in January 1944.

Like so much else in his life, Chirico’s attitude toward fascism was marked by ambiguity. He wrote to Il Duce and asked to become director of an art academy:

To liberate Italian art from the yoke Paris has burdened it with and to the art of paitning return the qualities that now have been lost. An academy that will make use of every available means – didactic, moral, technical and yes … both disciplinary and compulsory ones.

In other words – Chirico presented himself as a presumptive Duce of Italian art. However, the actual leader smelled an opportunistic rat in the letter, written as it was by an “unpatriotic intellectual” lurking in Paris and he did not put much faith in Chirico’s proposal. Mussolini did willingly admit that he did “not have much understanding of the subtilities of painting,” in that specific area he preferred to listen to professional art historians and those with Fascist leanings assured Il Duce that Chirico was far from being a trustworthy Fascist, as a matter fact his art was decadent and “spineless”. Accordingly, Chirico did not obtain much success through his shameless complicity with the totalitarian regime. He did not get the prizes and commissions he pursued, even if media occasionally paid homage to him he gained most his income from privately commissioned portrait painting.

Mussolini was through his spies well informed about Giorgio de Chirco – that both his ex- and current wives were Jewesses, that he was a great admirer of “Jewish culture” and that he among friends exposed an unveiled contempt for Italy’s Fascist regime. Nevertheless, it was first after 1945 that Chirico openly and emphatically attacked Fascism and all that it represented, maybe under the false assumption that he had not been compromised by his former open support to the regime, though he was far too well-known to avoid such an accusation.

In all his isolationism Chirico was a chameleon who adopted himself to the market forces and not the least his controlling second wife, the intelligent, apparently tender but actually rock hard Isabella Pakszwer. Chirico was nevertheless able to maintain his dual nature and in his art continued to indicate sublime and often convoluted hints at irony. It is is mainly through his eloquent writings that de Chirico was able to expose his inner life – a sarcastic distance to much of what was happening to and around him, all imbued with an aesthetic view on human existence. Often he did not even try to publish all that he wrote, but quite generously gave it away to friends and acquaintances.

In an article that he in 1928 wrote for French magazine he did, in his usual contradictory and poetical manner, lament the increasing chauvinism which had begin to engulf arts and politics:

What about all these sublime and ridiculous declarations about returning to the soil, about popular art, dissociation from all sorts of things, honesty, truth, simplicity, nature worship, a cult of beauty and health in art, victory over oneself? […] Twaddle and utopia. Fantasies by a hysterical monk dreaming about ideal, platonic republics where the clergy, venerated by the masses, regularly and hygienically every night copulate with women beautiful as statues. Mere utopias! All that will remain is a handful of ashes […] while the centenarian elephant passes by.

The vast amount of depictions of fighting gladiators that Chirico painted by the end of the thirties and beginning of the forties were maybe an ironic comment to contemporary Fascist, muscle-bulging, naked athletes that totalitarian and other forms of chauvinistic art paid tribute to. Chirico’s gladiators is generally fighting inside ordinary apartments and do undeniably look quite ludicrous, far from being any muscular giants.

Chirico’s dense compositions with struggling men seem to have been inspired by the picturesque and baroque etchings of the siblings Diana (1547-1612) and Adamo Scultori (1530-1585), whose artwork Chirico returned to time and time again. The Scultori siblings’ pictures emit a claustrophobia similar to the one you are confronted with while looking at Chirico’s depictions of amassed gladiators, though the muscular scultorimen are far from being as ridiculous as Chirico’s gladiators.

Girgio’s brother Andrea did also paint several pictures depicting fighting, naked men, who might just as well constitute ironic allusions to official, Fascist art. However, contrary to his brother’s scrawny gladiators Andrea’s wrestling musclemen have exceptionally small heads, entirely lacking facial expressions, they are totally blank.

The gladiator fighting of his paintings is reflected in the novel Giorgio de Chirico wrote at the same time – Hebdomeros contains dreamlike, overloaded scenes characterized by a surreal sense of alienation. Chirco’s hero Hebdomeros is a cynical outsider, who wounded by a complicated childhood observes and makes a fool of the people and phenomena he encounters, at the same time as fantasy and Mediterranean life are praised:

compact groups of philosophers and warriors, like polycehpalic blocks in soft luminous colour, held mysterious secret meetings in corners of low-ceilinged rooms, just where the ornamental mouldings joining the walls to the ceiling formed a right angle. “I don´t like the look of those faces,” burst one of Hebdomeros’ youngest disciples, to whom he replied: “Alright, I understand, or at least I can guess what you are thinking; you would have preferred the well-behaved phantoms of puritanical society restricted by its laws, that avoids speeches referring to microbes and surgical instruments and turns pales when tactless people use expressions like breast-feeding, or discuss midwives and methods of childbirth, you would have preferred the company of these phantoms on an enclosed veranda ...

What I find strange about the man and artist Giorgio Chirico is that such a strangely anonymous and distant person through his cool and often technically unimpressive art touches my inner feelings. That I can identify with the worlds his paintings present and in them recognize a variety of my own thoughts, sensations, impressions and memories. Chirico has been to places where I have been, interpreting what I have seen and experienced. He had obviously read several of the books I read and was interested in the same work of art. And yet he seems to be so different, so strange.

The origins of Joseph Maria Albertus Georgius de Chirico are also enigmatic. He was born in 1888 in the Thessalian city of Volos. His father, Evaristo de Chrico, was a baron and railway engineer who by the birth of his son was overseeing the construction of the Thessaly Railway and designed Volo’s train station, which would eventually become the administrative headquarters of the railway company.

Giorgio Chirico and his unusually close brother Andrea used to refer to the family’s roots in Sicily and Tuscany, but they may actually be traced back to a certain Cajetan de Kirikó who by the end of the sixteenth century was a Venetian military commander in Ragusa, today´s Dubrovnik. In 1715, Cajetan's son was appointed as Venice’s representative by the Sublime Porte, the central government of the Ottoman Empire in Istanbul, where the Italian-speaking family remained. Giorgio Chirico's wealthy grandfather, also named Giorgio, became a key figure in several European powers’ contacts with the Turkish sultan. Georgio Kirikó was for a time the diplomatic representative of the Russian Tsar, the Emperor of Vienna, and the British and Sardinian kingdoms. The nobility of the family was granted from the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the dilapidated burial chapel of the Kirikós probably still remains in the Christian cemetery of Fériköy in Istanbul.

Giorgio's father was educated as engineer in Turin, where he became a convinced Italian nationalist and great admirer of Garibaldi, although he never settled in Italy but devoted himself to designing railways for the Ottomans before entering in service of the Greek government. He settled with his family in Volos, until they in 1899 moved to Athens, where Evaristo died in 1905. After his death his strong-willed and overprotective wife took single care of her boys, Giorgio and Andrea and to benefit Andrea’s education moved with them to Munich. The precocious boy was a musical prodigy. The boys claimed that their mother was a baroness from Genoa, but in fact she came from an Italian merchant family that for centuries had been established in Smyrna (present-day Izmir in Turkey).

The mother registered Andrea as a student for Max Reger, who at the time was greatly admired. He was called “the modern Bach”, a skilled pianist, conductor and composer, who although ugly and severely alcoholic became a revered teacher for a number of well-known students.

I associate Reger with fugues and preludes that the cantor Bengt Cimbrelius executed on the organ in Hässleholm’s church. At that time, I thought they were pretty boring and somewhat comprehensive, as I now find the piano pieces I have on CD. It was in Reger’s home that the young Giorgio first became acquainted with Arnold Böcklin’s art, which after that never ceased to fascinate him. Six years after the Chirico family had left Munich, Reger wrote Four Poems for Orchestra after A. Böcklin, which actually is skilfully orchestrated music and especially the first piece The Violin-Playing Hermit is quietly meditative. The famous opera composer Pietro Mascagni had in Munich listened to the only fifteen-years-old Andrea de Chirico presenting the score for his opera Carmela and immediately took the young composer under the shadow of his wings. The Chirico family first settled in Milan, and then moved to Florence.

The dominant Gemma overshadowed the lives of the two brothers. Until her death she alternately lived with one of them. They called her The Centaur, well aware that there are no female centaurs. The nickname was certainly in tune with her wildly powerful and stubborn nature. I do not know if her temperament could be related to Giorgio’s earliest works of art, which often depicted battles and death, not least with centaurs involved. Clearly, he was inspired by Böcklin, but the overshadowing mother certainly loomed in his imaginary world.

His brother Andrea also often portrayed their mother in his art, as here where he combined a photograph of the mother as newly-wed and placed in front of a map, probably an allusion to the small family´s meandering life. A Greek sculpture suggests Andrea’s Greek childhood and his great interest in classical art and literature. In the foreground, a crocodile-like monster glances at the mother, perhaps symbolising of Andrea’s rebellious, but still repressed, relationship with Gemma de Chirico.

The monster is apparently reminiscent of the horrifying, ancient monsters in Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth and do thus reflect images that Andrea since his early childhood had cut out, was inspired by and often used in his later, montage-like art, in which he often combined animal - and human bodies.'

Like in so much else, Giorgio shared his brother's interest in fantastic literature and illustrations they found in old, often forgotten books. In his art, and especially in his writings, Giorgio alludes to a childhood marked by strangeness and dreams, shared with his soulmate Andrea. Throughout their lives, the brothers were very close to each other and by their acquaintances they were called The Dioscuri, an allusion to the mythical twins Castor and Pollux, one of whom was mortal and the other immortal. Out of love for his brother, Pollux asked the gods to die at the same time as Castor. To an even greater degree than Giorgio, Andrea does in his art reflect a childhood filled with toys, monsters and ruins.

Time and time again, Andrea’s and Giorgio’s art surprise while I come across images that seemingly reflect my own childhood. For example, Andrea often painted brightly coloured building blocks against mysterious backdrops, taken from illustrations in books that were so abundant in my grandfather’s library. I realize that the Chirico brothers in good memory had the childlike experience of toys hiding a huge, imaginary world; fantasies that unfortunately happened to be counteracted by a much more dreary “reality”:

To live in the world as if in an immense museum of strangeness, full of curious many-coloured toys which change their appearance, which, like little children, we sometimes break to find out how they were made and look inside, only to disappointed realize that they are empty.

During their time together in Munich, the brothers read Schopenhauer, Weininger and especially Nietzsche, a reading that forever came to influence their art and thinking. As soon as they were together they exchanged thoughts and could until late in night engage in lively discussions. When the brothers in 1922 lived together in Rome, Giorgio painted a Roman Landscape and I assume that the two men talking on a terrace shaded by two villas, crowned with classic sculptures, may be Giorgio and Andrea involved in esoteric conversations, symbolized by the antique deity floating in the sky, while Gemma watches over them, seated by an open window.

Gemma was a constant presence in the brothers' lives, insistently committed to their art and company, especially the female one. Although the brothers occasionally tried to free themselves from Gemma’s yarn, they were deeply attached to her. In his surrealistically coloured storytelling, Giorgio described the relationship he had with his mother:

it’s not for nothing that he’s the son of a mermaid: one peculiarity with the sons of mermaids is that they never run the risk of falling in love with a woman, for they are always in love with their mothers.

While living with his mother and brother in Florence, Chirico went through a severe crisis and became seriously ill with his chronic, regularly recurring stomach ailments. When he recovered, he sat “on a clear autumn day” on a bench in Piazza Santa Croce aimlessly looking at its statue of Dante. Suddenly he was seized by a life-changing experience – everything around him appeared in an explained light. As if by a magic trick, life was transformed into something strange, though still exceptionally alive. Later, he did on several occasions describe the experience:

The autumn sun, warm and unloving, hit the statue and the church facade. Then I had a strange impression that I was looking at all these things for the first time, and the composition of my picture came to my mind eye. Now each time I look at this painting I once again see that moment. Nevertheless, to me the incident remains an enigma, it is inexplicable. This is the reason to why I to call the work which sprang from it an enigma.

He writes about An Autumn Afternoon Enigma, a work that became a talisman for everything Chirico came to create:

In the following months, Chirico painted several images in the same spirit. He read Homer's Odyssey and remembered a painting by Böcklin in which Odysseus on Calypso's island turns away from the beautiful nymph and thoughtfully looks out over the sea, gripped by a longing for new adventures, or perhaps he was thinking of Penelope’s warm embrace back home on Ithaca.

For a time, Chirico became obsessed with attempts to shape a new kind of painting:

… during a trip I made to Rome in October, after having read works by Friedrich Nietzsche, I became aware that there is a host of strange, unknown, solitary things which might be translated into painting. I meditated for a long time. Then I began to have my first revelations. I drew less, I even somewhat forgot to draw, but every time I did so, it was under the drive of necessity.

The result of these endeavours was The Enigma of the Oracle. A brown-clad figure stands in an opening and looks out over a Mediterranean landscape. The person, we do not know if it is a man or a woman, has after being presented with an oracle answer become engulfed by brooding. The sybil is probably sitting behind a curtain, above which lining the head of a Greek sculpture can seen – probably Apollo, the deity of oracle answers. The place is located high up, maybe on a mountainside. Oracles generally do not give simple answers, rather they evoke thoughts that might lead to solutions, or to despair. They are riddles.

While looking at the painting Chirico brought me back in time, more specifically to a visit to the Temple of Jupiter above the port city of Terracina. In general, antique oracles were associated with the cult of Apollo. However, in the temple of Terracina the sibyl served Jupiter and like the more famous oracle of Cumae further south, her cell was located below the temple area.

The abode of the sybil in Terracina may still be visited, you reach it through an archway under the temple plateau. If you turn your back to the sybil’s cell, where she in a state of sacred intoxication made her predictions, you can, like the dark-clad figure in the The Enigma of the Oracle, look out over a landscape stretching down to the Mediterranean.

Like so much else of his artwork, Giorgio shared experiences with his brother Andrea, who before Giorgio created had made a drawing of the enigma of an oracle. Simultaneously, while pondering on the “enigma of life”, Giorgio and his brother were becoming increasingly immersed in the writings of Nietzsche and Weininger.

Andrea coined the term “half-dead” by which he meant how art “functions in its fullest sense.” In his case this was mainly manifested in music, which he considered to be the most obvious manifestation of the what he assumed to be the “dual character” of Nietzsche’s Superman. True art was according to Andrea de Chirico born out of clairvoyance, by which he meant a mental state in which individuals enter an enigmatic, “oracle-like” sphere, located somewhere between wakefulness and sleep. A musician senses and interprets the hidden meaning, the “language” concealed in everything that surrounds us.

I emerge from each musical crisis as from a dreamless sleep. Because music both astonishes and stupefies.

Andrea combined his thoughts about the “half-death” with the Nietzschean idea of ​​time as an “eternal return” and “imperishable present”. For Andrea de Chirico, music was “sacred”, in the meaning of secluded, hidden and unknown. A reality situated between a past that has been long gone and a future that has not yet taken place. Art is found within a sphere akin to death, in a room from which doors can be opened in any direction.

The brothers tried to unite their insights in a jointly composed piece of music through which they intended to reflect on Nietzsche's Eternal Return. However, when their effort to interpret philosophy through music premiered in Munich in January 1911it resulted in a complete disaster. Giorgio gave up music entirely and painted a self-portrait he called: “What I love is a mystery”, while his brother went to Paris, which avant-garde circles he assumed would be more appreciative of his music and grasp his philosophical speculations.

Several years ago, by Viale Aventino, not far from where we then lived in Rome, there was a record store. Its unusually corpulent proprietor generally sat comfortably reclined on, or rather in, a large, leather sofa, leisurely smoking a cigar, while its scent mingled with the sound of music from one of rhe shelves that filled a room which walls were covered with CDs and LPs, many of them hard to find records of classical music and jazz. When the doorbell rang and I entered the room, he always greeted me with the words: “Hello again! Are you looking for something special today, or do you want me to recommend something I guess might interest you?” Since I recently had bought two CDs, one with Satie´s piano music and another one with Schönberg’s Six Songs for Soprano and Orchestra, he rose, with some difficulty, from the sofa, went to one of the CD-covered shelves. Picking out one of the discs: “Here, this might may possibly interest you. Certainly not a masterpiece, but a quite unique piece of music. Alberto Savinio ... are you familiar with that name?” I nodded and said I knew he was an artist and brother of Giorgio de Chirico. The shopkeeper, whose name I have forgotten, took the cigar out of his mouth, ashing it: “See, I was right again. This CD will interest you. Now you can also appreciate Savinio as a composer.” When I bought the CD, he said goodbye with his usual prase: Bona ascolta! Good listening.

"Appreciating" was an exaggeration. To me, Savinio’s Les Chants de la mi-mort, The Songs of My Half-Death, made a quite messy, albeit slightly charming impression – a kind of overly modernist Erik Satie. Certainly dynamic and skilfully executed music, spiced with a great deal of playful irony, yet annoying due to its extreme mixture of various styles, sudden emotional fluctuations and strange lyrics. A theatrical music that seemed to call for a stage performance accompanied by props and tableaux.

Contrary to expectations, Les Chants de la mi-mort’ s Parisian premiere, sometime during the spring of 1914, was a success. It was staged in one of the absolute hotspots of modernism – in the office of Apollinaire’s “literary and artistic review” Les Soirés de Paris. A reviewer wrote:

The audience was initially confused, but it was not long before they discovered the composer’s intentions. The simplicity of his dramatic music has now found its true proponents. Too much knowledge is harmful and unfortunately even modern music has now become its slave. The friends of classicism, on the other hand, were somewhat disappointed. To such an extent that, for a few moments, they were shocked, but soon they realized the profound originality and great inventiveness of the works that A. Savinio executed on the piano with perfect mastery.

It was the influential and energetic Guillame Apollinaire who became Andrea’s greatest supporter within the Parisian avant-garde. Appolinaire, whose full name was Wilhelm Albert Włodzimierz Apolinary Kostrowicki (1880-1918), had been born in Rome to a Belarusian noblewoman. The grandfather had been a successful Russian general, while Apollinaire's father was registered as “unknown”, since he did not want to acknowledge Apollinaire as his son. He has however been identified as an Italian nobleman.

The PR-minded, brilliantly witty and innovative Apollinaire had in a short time become the absolute storm centre for the artistic circles concentrated around Montparnasse. It was he who invented art concepts like Cubism, Orphism and not the Surrealism, a term which he first applied in 1917 in the prospect to Les Mamelles de Tirésias, The Breasts of Tiresas, which he had written already in 1903 but which not until the outbreak World War I was performed as an Opéra bouffe with music by Germaine Albert-Pirotest:

I have thought that one must return to nature itself, but without imitating it like photographers do. When man wanted to imitate walking, he created the wheel, which does not resemble a leg. By doing so, he created surrealism without knowing it.

Apollinaire came to regard the Chirico brothers as genuine Surrealists. For Apollinaire, there were no boundaries between poetry, philosophy, art and music and this was one of the reasons for his great appreciation of the multi-tasker Andrea Chirico, who under the influence of Apollinaire took the name Alberto Savinio. It was said that he did so to separate himself and his work from his increasingly famous brother, though another, more valid reason might be that Andrea Chirico throughout his life struggled with his identity. He considered himself to be a “liminal creature” and was in his art constantly preoccupied with hybrid creatures such as hermaphrodites and human figures with animalistic, or monstrous features. The unknown constantly broke into his existence and occasionally he was even terrified by his own art, especially music.

Before Andrea Chirico stuck to the name Alberto Savinio (actually the name of a contemporary Parisian publisher, Alberte Savine) he had used a number of other pseudonyms; Aniceto, Nivasio Dolcemare, Mr. Dido, Mr. Münster, Innocenzo Paleari, Animo, Carmelo, etc. etc. In a way, Andrea experimented with himself and assumed various roles, not the least total anonymity, “a man without qualities”, a faceless showroom dummy, or rather such a mannequin that seamstresses used in his time.

A figure that also became common in his brother Giorgio's paintings, but if Giorgio Chirico’s soulless figures had large heads, Savinio’s had small ones.

Even in Savinio’s “operetta” Les Chants de la mi-mort, the characters make their appearances as puppets, with denominations such as Bald Man, Yellow Man, Crazy King, Bird Man, and a peculiar individual, who perhaps is an allusion to Gemma de Chirico – A Mother of Stone, shrunken like a puppet”, there was also “a man without a voice, without eyes, without a face.” The two brothers’ fascination with puppets gradually grew, and as so often had been the case, Giorgio Chirico was inspired by Nietzsche:

To be really immortal a work of art must go completely beyond the limits of the human: good sense and logic will be missing from it. In this way we ill come close to the dream state, and also to the mentality of children.

I remember that often after having read Nietzsche’s immortal work "Thus Spake Zarathustra" I derived from various passages of this book an impression I had already had as a child when I read an Italian children’s book called “The Adventures of Pinocchio.” Strange similarity which reveals the profundity of the work. Here there is no naïvité: the work posses a strangeness similar to the strangeness that the sensation of a child sometimes has, but at the same time one feels that he who created it did so consciously.

By the end of 1911, Gemma and Giorgio followed Andrea to Paris and on their way there they spent a few weeks in Turin. A visit that became crucial for the sensitive Giorgio. The city where his father had studied engineering, the cradle of Italian unification and the place where Nietzsche, six months after Giorgio's birth, went insane. Already before his arrival in Turin Chirico had assumed that there was a mysterious connection between him and Turin, something he was able to confirm as soon as he in the fall of 1911 began wandering around in the town. Giorgio was seized by what he in German characterised as the city’s Stimmung, mood. How it preserved a sense of powerful exclusion that could be conveyed by Nietzsche's work. Giorgio sat for hours looking at the equestrian statue in Piazza San Carlo, the place where Nietzsche in January 1889 had collapsed and filled with compassion knelt by a fallen horse, embracing it and afterwards violently attacking those bystanders who wanted to take him from the place so he could receive medical care. After de Chirico’s short visit horses, Turin's sculptures and deserted squares regularly appeared in his paintings.

Sometime in 1912, Giorgio de Chirico returned from Paris to Turin to complete his two years of compulsory military service. He realized that his art would suffer a setback, but wanted to sacrifice himself for “his” Italy. However, the patriotic feelings of duty to his “Fatherland” quickly subsided. Admittedly, the de Chirico brothers were deeply attached to Italy and despite their fragmented international background they considered themselves to be Italian patriots. However, their longing for a homeland was apparently based on a dream of belonging. Italy was for them a source of inspiration and joy, but this did not include the fulfilment of any civic duties. After fourteen days of military life, Giorgio had had enough. By the end of World War I, he described war and militarism as “useless nonsense” and not at all the “deadly necessity” as his friends, especially those who had been indulged in Futurism, described it before they themselves had been struck down by its bloody and chaotic madness, several leading artists were killed in action and others suffered mental breakdowns. With a sigh of relief Chirico wrote:

Now all that is hopefully over […] Politics will teach us that hysteria and idiocy can now be condemned in general elections. I think everyone has by now become oversaturated by imbecilities, whether they have been political, literary or figurative.

Chirico discreetly departed from the barracks and took the train back to Paris. In his absence, he was sentenced to prison for desertion.

During my time in Paris, alone without my family, I found how easy it was to turn into a full-fledged flâneur, someone who engulfed by his own thoughts wanders up and down the streets; watching, pondering. This was for sure something Chirico engaged in and obsessed as he was by images he was probably, like several of his artist friends in the Montparnasse coterie, inspired by Eugène Atget's (1857-1925) photographs. A passionate flâneur who devoted his life to documenting life in and around Parisian streets and alleys. In Chirico’s paintings from the same period, impressions from Paris and Turin seem to be mixed up together while they become metaphysical townscapes.

Like the Chirico brothers, Aget was fascinated by the mannequins he saw in Paris’s shop windows.

An Atget photograph that seems to have gotten stuck in Giorgio’s mind was a picture of a sculpture of Ariadne in Versailles’s gardens. In Chirico’s paintings, this sculpture of the awakening Ariadne appears again and again.

As with Wagner, Chirico had his specific leitmotifs which constantly make their appearance, often after almost completely been dominating his art for longer or shorter periods – there are hundreds of versions of gladiators, mysterious baths, mannequins, horses by the beach, furniture in landscapes, suns attached to easels and self-portraits in different costumes.

The Ariadne motif can possibly be linked to Chirico’s Nietzsche fascination. After the Cretan princess, who through her ball of yarn and enchanted sword had made Theseus kill the Minotaur and escape from Knossos’s labyrinth, followed him on his ship on the way to Athens, though he abandoned her when she had asleep on the island of Naxos, home of the god Dionysus. The god awakened Ariadne, married her and eventually turned her into an immortal goddess. It would not surprise me if Chirico identified with Ariadne. His imagination and creativity had been brought to life by Nietzsche, who had hailed Dionysus as a deity of intoxication and glorification of both nature and intuition, while paying homage to an unbound existence, cross-bordering, and an impassioned art — in other words, what Chirico characterized as Metaphysics. The Greek-speaking Chirico was well acquainted with Aristotle, who had coined the term ta meta ta physika, “the work after physics,” as if he had imagined Metaphysics as a book which in an imaginary library had been catalogued just after his own work Phusike acroasis, Lectures on Nature – being a follow-up and further development of his physical examinations and accordingly superior to them. Metaphysics seeks knowledge of the inner meaning and function of Nature, just what Chirico intended to do through his art.

Giorgio settled with Gemma between Boulevard Raspail and Boulevard Montparnasse, in an apartment between Apollinaire’s editorial office and residence. The poet and public relations genius was impressed by the artistically gifted brothers, who like him counted upon an exotic, complicated, cosmopolitan and aristocratic past. He characterised Alberto Savinio as “a poet, musician, painter and playwright who through all this is reminiscent of the multifaceted geniuses of the Tuscan Renaissance.” Apollinaire also praised Savinio’s twenty-four-years-old brother Giorgio’s art as a tangible manifestation of a “metaphysical reality” and put him in touch with the equally enthusiastic art dealer Paul Guillaume.

Apollinaire did not perceive Giorgio Chirico's art as painting per se but as a “creation of dreams”. Through his almost endless rows of colonnades and facades, his expansive straight lines, fields of unmixed colours and almost funeral-like contrasts between darkness and light, Chirico had, according to the admiring Apollinaire, managed to express the sublime feelings of greatness, loneliness and immobility created during the stasis that create “states of memory” just before we fall asleep.

Like dreams, Chirico’s metaphysical paintings found their origin in what he had seen and experienced, albeit altered, distorted. Sometimes he lets himself be inspired by works of art. Since it is mainly the structure of his paintings, or single details, he makes use of, it is generally difficult to discern his models. For example, his Italian Piazza from 1938 might be compared to Giovanni Migliara’s depiction of St. Ambrose’s Basilica in Milan, painted in 1822. I do not know if they have any connection, though the perspective is the same and Chirico may have transformed the shadowed part into a pool and it is not impossible that he had seen Migliara’s painting during his recurrent visits to Das Neue Pinakohtek in Munich and then “modernized” it.

Giorgio Chirico seemed to have found a like-minded artist in the eight years older Apollinaire, a man who, like him, had “fallen ill from having been immersed in the hot bath of universal melancholy.” In 1914, Chirico painted a peculiar “metaphysical” portrait of Apollinaire, filled with associations evoked by the poet. In the image of his friend and mentor Chirico transformed what could have been traditional “mundane” depiction of a person into something beyond everyday existence, and to his own surprise Chirico had by trusting his “intuition” created a portrait that proved to be prophetic.

As his starting point, Giorgio took a collage that his brother Andrea had made and in which he had pasted a silhouette of Apollinaire. Giorgio enlarged this silhouette and draw a circle at the temple of of the poet, turning the shadow figure into a practising target; symbol of the critique the poet had to endure for being at the forefront of Parisian avant-garde.

That the “real” Guillame Apollinaire just became black silhouette is due to the fact that Chirico intended to produce a “philosophically aesthetic” image of the poet, whose name means “blessed by Apollo”. The result became a “metaphysical” portrait depicting “the singer's inner self and meaning.” In the foreground, Apollinaire is represented by a bust of Orpheus, Apollo’s son. Orpheus was a companion to the Argonauts, heroic adventurers of antiquity, among whom were the twins Castor and Pollux. These two brothers were under the protection of Orpheus, the divinely gifted poet who during his journey across the oceans through his song made fish lift their heads above the water surface to listen to his enchanting singing, two of whom by the gods were transformed into accompanying musicians.

The bust of Orpheus is in darkness and he wears black glasses, a hint that Apollinaire, like the ancient Homer and Tiresias, is a soothsayer. These poets were prophets and poets who, despite their blindness, was able look into the depths of their own souls. “The seer/poet who cannot discern the present, but is capable of reading the past and the future.” The black darkness surrounding Orpheus is furthermore reminiscent of his journey into the depths of Hades where his song softened the hard and dark heart of the Ruler of Netherworld, who allowed the fabulous singer to bring back with him his muse and beloved, Eurydice. If this is the case, the black glasses may indicate that Orpheus, during his journey from the Underworld, was forbidden to look at his beloved.

The shell behind Orpheus alludes to medieval seekers and pilgrims, who wore shells on their mantles as signs of penitence, it may also allude to Orpheus’s lyre, which after his being torn to pieces by Dionysus’s Menades carried the poet’s severed and continuously singing head to the island of Lesbos.

The fish is reminiscent of Orpheus’s adventures together with the Dioscuri, but also of Apollinaire's collection of poems Le Bestiaire: Cortège d'Orphée, which he wrote in 1913. It does for example contain a poem about the carp:

In your pools, in your ponds,

But also a short but multi-faceted poem about fish and Jesus:

Que ton coeur soit l’appât et le ciel, la piscine !

Car, pêcheur, quel poisson d’eau douce ou bien marine

Egale-t-il, et par la forme et la saveur,

Ce beau poisson divin qu’est JESUS, Mon sauveur?

That your heart is the bait and heaven the pond!

Since, fisherman, what fresh or seawater catch

equals him, both in form or saveur [flavour],

that lovely divine fish which is JESUS, My Saviour?

Through his word pun Apollinaire alludes to the ancient Christian symbol ICTHYS, Greek for fish, which stood for Iesous Christos Theou Yios Soter, Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour. The poem was both by Apollinaire and his acolytes interpreted as a hint of the affirmation of life that the new art entailed, or as Apollinaire put it – “Orpheus’s empire begins.”

On a more mundane level, Apollinaire associated his name with water and fish. The most popular mineral water of the day was Appolinaris, named after a spring that in 1852 had sprung up in Georg Kreuzberg's vineyard in Bad Neunahre, Germany. The bottled water was named after the Syrian saint Apollinaris, who lived during the first century after the birth of Christ and whose tomb was believed to be in Ravenna. Appolinaris was the patron saint of water and wine and was also worshipped as a helper in venereal diseases. The connections are unclear, but may be due to the fact that Saint Apollinaris during his martyrdom had boiling water poured into his open wounds.

Chirico’s portrait turned out to be truly prophetic. With the motivation that “a poet must take risks,” Apollinaire did during World War I enlist for “voluntary front service” and was on March 17, 1916 in his left temple seriously wounded by shrapnel. He suffered from fainting spells and partial paralysis of the left side of his body, but his condition improved when doctors, to relieve the pressure, drilled a hole in the skull two months after the injury. The hole was drilled in exactly the same spot that Chirico two years earlier had marked as a target. Appolinaire survived his head injury, but died two years later in the Spanish flu.

The same year he created his portrait of Apollinaire, Giorgio de Chirico had painted the Poet’s dream, depicting the same Orphic bust as in his Apollinaire portrait and here it was also accompanied by a fish and carried black glasses, but now Chirico had painted the bust in profile. It is the first painting in which he incorporated one of the mannequins that in the following years would become increasingly common in his art.

On May 23, 1915, Italy declared war on Austria-Hungary and offered amnesty to former “deserters” if they volunteered as soldiers. In France, the mass slaughter in the trenches was in full swing and the threat from the Entente was imminent in Italy as well. The Chirico brothers decided to accept the amnesty and enlisted in the Italian army. However, they were deemed to be “incapable of withstanding the strains of war” sent to serve at Villa del Seminario in Ferrara, this was a mental institution that during the war became a gathering place for intellectuals and artists, some were inmates, while others served as staff, among the latter was Giorgio Chirico who served with a corporal’s rank.

The time in Ferrara proved to be quite inspiring for the Chirico brothers. The medieval city with its proud traditions and art treasures provided new impressions and so did its social life. Not least the twenty-year-old Count Lugi Tibertelli, who called himself Filippo de Pisis. An eccentric and precocious young man who had already published himself as a poet and was in contact with the Dadaists in Zürich and Futurists in Rome. de Pisis collected insects and had turned his quarters within his parents’ dilapidated castle into Wunderkammern:

rooms with a strong hue of midnight, filled with spirits mixed with bric a brac; broken dolls, dried flowers, insects, old books, multicoloured balls, spinning wheels and paintings stimulating mysterious and aesthetic sensations, spiritism, hypnotism, and the fluency of thoughts.

The Chirico brothers soon joined the intellectual coterie which met in de Pisis’s strange rooms. A few years later, de Pisis described their nocturnal conversations:

Seized by a kind of sacred, poetic rage, they immersed themselves in the invisible, in what could be defined as a chaos of the unconscious, where there are only fragments, dashed lines, sensitively sharp images that are nevertheless unreal. Naughtiness caught the bird of the cuckoo clock, which began to shout the mysterious name Chirico: “Cìrico, cìrico… cìrico, cìrico ...”

Together, Giorgio and de Pisis walked through Ferrara and the young connoisseur introduced his older friend to what he in a later book came to call “the city of a hundred wonders.” de Pisis was proud of his acquaintance with the already famous artist.

What did it matter, some poor devil might have said, if the corporal walking by his side was an educated man and I a seminarian dressed in bourgeois fashion. […] I administered material ideas to my friend, he offered me images and sensations, he was looking for a painting never seen before, I spread a new prose.

In Ferrara, Chirico further developed his mannequins, transforming them into fantastic creatures, composed of a variety of geometric figures of coloured plank pieces combined with rulers, quadrants and disassembled seamstress dummies.

Or he placed his fashion doll heads on ancient sculptures, or archaic mother goddesses, such as those he in a painting placed on a square in front of Ferrara’s Sforza Fortress and factory chimneys naming it The Disturbing Muses.

On his return to Italy, Giorgio de Chirico sought to unite his fragmented personality and find a firm foothold in life. An endeavour illustrated by his Return of the Prodigal Son in which a complex, but soulless fashion doll, embraces a father who appears to be a compact stone sculpture. Perhaps an image of the cosmopolitan Giorgio seeking an embrace from a frozen Italy, which has becoma a monument of itself.

Through Chirico’s influence de Pisis developed into an increasingly skilled artist, and in tbhe following years, when his style took on a completely different character from de Chirico’s strict and complex, contour-sharp imagery, it nevrtheless repeated several motifs that had been introduced by Chirico. For example, his still life with Sacred Fish, which Chirico had painted as a tribute to Apollinaire:

or Chirico’s constantly repeated Ariadne sculpture:

Chirico was fascinated and irritated by the overly entusiastic Filippo de Pisis; ottuso e sensible, ardente ed oscuro, “thick-headed and sensitive, burning and dark.” When de Pisis praised both Chirico and his art in an article in La Gazzetta Farrarese, Chirico complained in a letter to the at the time internationally known essayist and journalist Giovanni Papini, characterizing de Pisis’s article as un vrai cochonnerie, genuine rubbish. The French word cochonnerie can also mean “swinery” and it is possible that Chirico, who like his brother was unsure about his sexual orientation, wanted to free himself from hints about his relationship with the openly homosexual de Pisis who had declared: Io amo i bei giovani, gli efebi fiorenti e splendidi. Io ami la volupta e la frenesia. “I love the beautiful youngsters, the flourishing and magnificent ephebs. I love opulence and frenzy!”

In April 1917, Carlo Carrá was taken in for “observation” at the Villa del Seminario, which now exclusively cared for soldiers who had been mentally injured by their war experiences. In 1909, Carrá and a group of like-minded people had in Milan founded Futurism and he had like his companions praised movement, increased dynamism and even to some extent violence and tumult. One of the first triumphs of Futurism was Carrá’s painting The Anarchist Galli’s Funeral, which in 1911 both admired and criticised had been exhibited in Paris, London and Berlin.

Angelo Galli had in 1904 been killed during a major strike in Milan. Authorities fearing a demonstration during the funeral had refused the funeral procession entrance to the cemetery and a violent riot broke out. Carrá, who was present, described the incident in his autobiography:

I saw in front of me how the coffin, covered with red carnations, swayed precariously on the shoulders of the pallet bearers. I saw how the horses became nervpus while blows were dealt with sticks and lances. It seemed to me that at any moment the corpse could fall to the ground and be trampled down by the horses ...

Like several of his Futurist comrades, Carrá had enthusiastically joined the war volunteers, but had soon after that suffered a severe nervous breakdown and ended up among the war-wounded in Villa del Seminario, where during his four months of acquaintance with the artist circle around Giorgio de Chirico completely changed his style and under the influence of their speculations about the “inner nature of things” like them began to depict mannequins, toys, maps and measuring instruments.

By the end of the war, Alberto Savinio was called in as an interpreter on the “Macedonian front”, and after returning to Italy he established himself as a theatre director in Rome. Already after his success in Paris in 1914, Savinio had left music composing behind and now devoted himself exclusively to writing, theatre and painting. Oddly enough, Savinio had become afraid of his own musical talent. He regarded music as an overwhelming, unknown force capable of destroying its practitioners:

The only suitable definition for music is the Impossible to Know – the unknowability of music is its driving force, the secret of its fascination. […] The time will come when this Strange Thing will revenge itself. The time will come when this Strange Thing will shatter its bonds and rediscover its wild freedom. We light our houses each evening with electricity, but one evening my friend Lorenzo Viano switched on his bedroom lamp and fell to the ground: it was electricity’s revenge. Thousands and thousands of people “play” with music, watering it down [...] one Day music will appear like a long spindly shadow beside the young conductor, it will seize him by the throat and hurl him from the podium. It is the Strange Thing´s revenge.

Nevertheless, after a break of twenty years Alberto Savinio returned to music when he in 1925 composed a ballet that was premiered in Rome.

By the end of 1918, Girogio and his mother Gemma had united with Alberto Savinio in Rome and after undergoing one of his regularly recurring nervous crises, Giorgio’s art took a new turn. Influenced by Böcklin and Poussin, he began painting in what he denominated as a “classical style” and created, among other things, several suggestive scenes, which in a dreamlike, “literary” manner depicted the presence of ancient history in the Italian landscape.

This style did not not at all impress most of Chirico’s friends within the avant-garde and when he followed his brother back to Paris in 1925, he returned to painting his mannequins, which were now joined by ancient ruins instead of geometric structures. Chirico was probably influenced by his new love, the Russian ballerina Raissa Guerivich Kroll, who had left the world of theatre and ballet to train as an archaeologist and she later became engaged in the excavations of the ancient port city of Ostia, outside Rome. Savinio's son, Ruggero, has described her:

They met during the rehearsals of a ballet my father had written the music for ... Niobe’s Death. Raissa danced the leading part and my uncle fell in love with her. For a time she became his model and they soon married. For five years they mostly lived in Paris. […] She belonged to the small group of women who in the early 20^th century had behaved with extreme freedom, both intellectually and in their way of dressing […] I remember her as a very witty lady who even in her old age had not lost nothing of her seductive charm. At lunch, a conversation ended, I do not remember how, with a mentioning of Kerensky, who before Lenin had taken power headed the Provisional Government of Russia. And I then asked Raissa, who had talked about him as if she had seen him the day before… but, is he not dead? She replied: “Not at all. He lives in New York and we often talk to each other. I had a small but intense love affair with him.” She was a remarkable  woman.

During his time in Paris, Chirico, in addition to his archaeologists, began painting a variety of furniture within landscapes. A result of his recurrent walks through the French capital, where he apparently moved in the same neighbourhood where I often ended up during my own time in Paris:

I was walking around Saint-Germain between Rue du Dragon and Rue du Vieux-Colombier.

On the side-walk in front of a used furniture shop, I saw sofas, chairs, wardrobes, tables, and a coat rack displayed right there on the street. By finding themselves so removed from the sacred place in which man has always sought repose, the place that each of us spent our earliest childhood – they suddenly appeared solemn, tragic, even mysterious.

That furniture preserve entire lives has often struck me and not the least my youngest daughter who gets very upset if we throw away, or even move, old furniture in our home in Bjärnum.

Like Magritte, who wrote that his first confrontation with Chirico's art had been a life-changing shock, Chirico often alluded to the inherent life of rooms and furniture, and he does furthermore, just like Magritte, repeatedly allow the outer landscape to penetrate enclosed apartments, and vice versa.

In the late twenties, with its economic depression and political unrest, Chirico once again suffered a profound crisis, which he tried to free himself from by writing his strange novel Hebdomeros. In connection with this, he met the Czech lady Isabella Pakszwer, who worked at a fashion house in Paris. He fell deeply in love and she “devoured him with flesh and hair.” For the rest of his life, Chirico lived in her shadow. His wife at the time, Raissa, never got over the shock she experinced when Chirico left her for Isabella. In an interview she gave in 1976, she died the following year, she aired her bitterness:

“It was a shot to the head,” she stated with a smile, while holding her beloved, beige dog in her lap. “She seduced a genius. A life of humiliation and difficulties must have created a remarkable repertoire of sexual audacity in that beautiful Polish woman. After quarrelling with a dozen critics who had defined him, artistically speaking, as a living corpse, de Chirico found in Isa Far a perfect instrument for his revenge. My husband at the time explained to the lady in question that he had made many mistakes in his life and she stated she was ready to save him. However, he soon came to consider her as a maniac and then came the first suspicions, the disagreements. The relationship crashed in the mid-60s when Isa became madly jealous of another woman whom de Chirico had fallen in love with."

Raissa was not alone in disliking the brittle but beautiful Isabella, whom one of Chirco’s biographers described as a woman who was neither interested in men, nor in Chirico as a man, but as someone whose notoriety she could make lots of money from. What Isabella offered Chirico was a “facade of solid bourgeoisie” behind which he could hide his apparent nervousness and low self-esteem. Isabella managed to assume the authoritarian role of Gemma and thus pull up Chirico’s “wounded attachment to his mother with its roots.” Giorgio’s beloved brother felt that due to Isabella’s domineering influence he was losing his grip on his brother and wrote in an article about the vast amount of self-portraits in historical costumes that Girogio had started to produce on a regular basis.

In recent years, Giorgio de Chirico depicts himself in various disguises. What psychological change are these disguises a sign of?

Friends and acquaintances described how Isabella ignored, or openly abused a servile and far too submissive Chirico:

Last night, after dinner, I went over to meet with de Chirico; the Master sat in an armchair while flipping through a copy of Hebdomeros, a novel which he on his own had translated and published in Italian: “My book is beautiful and sometimes I read it as if it had been written by another person.” However, his wife interrupted him, "Your Hebdomeroses! I'm sick and tired of having them in the closets. I have no space. For fifteen years you have filled my closets with your Hebdomeroses, if you don’t get rid of them immediately, I will myself throw them away tomorrow!”

During his crisis by the end of the twenties, Chirico had in Hebdomeros influenced by Nietzsche’s Zarathustra created his own literary ego. Hebdomeros is a man who after a tragic childhood indulges himself in a boundless nostalgia for the past. His greatest dream is to sail far away, crossing distant horizons and beyond them find islands “with temples built by the foot of hospitable mountains” making the world “both close and unknown.” Hebdomeros is like Zarathustra also a teacher who wants to teach his disciples the difficult game of turning time inside and out, and among the simplest objects find how such an endeavour is possible.

During his time with Isabella Pakszwer, Chirico created another alter ego – Mr. Dudron. As an anxious man, afraid of emotions, illnesses, and disasters, he seeks out closed rooms where he can close the window curtains, shut out reality, and step into his inner imaginations. The amount of manuscripts for an unfinished novel about Mr. Dudron eventually became a complicated, introspective self-portrait based on memories, thoughts, anecdotes and short stories. They were written in different phases of the thirties and forties, most episodes were by Chirico given away to friends he had read them to, others simply disappeared.

After 1945, Isabella Far appears as a new character in the stories about Mr. Dudron, it became a pseudonym for Isabella Pakszwer, whom Chirico married in 1946 after fifteen years of shared existence. In Mr. Dudron, Isabella Far comes forth as an intelligent teacher and inspiring muse who, at Mr. Dudron’s request provides him with speeches about the decadence of modern painting. When Isabella Pakszwer wrote about art, something she did during the forties, she used the pseudonym Isabella Far.

Alberto Savinio's death in 1952 was a hard blow to Chirico, who since then always wore a black tie when he went outdoors, declaring that he did so in remembrance of his beloved brother. For Chirico the sixties became a tragicomic farce. Every day he painted diligently in his studio, as well as he could spend hours sitting in front of a TV with its sound turned off. At the same time, he and his wife showcased a number of newly made paintings that were copies of the most commercially valuable time of his artistry, i.e. the period up to 1920. Chirico also willingly signed various forgeries made by other artists.

The situation was further complicated by Chirico’ s increasingly bitter attacks on former friends and allies – especially André Breton and his surrealist companions who regarded Chirco as a traitor after he had embarked on his “classic period”. Chirico wrote increasingly frantic attacks on every form of “modern art"” As a counter-strategy, some surrealists tried to drown the market with fake “Chiricos”. Particularly successful in this endeavour was the versatile, Spanish artist Óscar Dominguez. One of his forgeries was during several years exhibited at the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris as genuine artwork by Giorgio de Chirico.

Finally, it became almost impossible to orient oneself in the tangle of true, false and falsely signed and dated works. A madness skilfully and almost playfully manipulated by Chirico himself, while his wife did nothing to dispel the mists, in fact, many accused her of the misery, while Chirico became an increasingly popular, though distant, figure in the media. When he was seen in public, he generally adopted an ironically distant tone. It could seem as if he has shouldered the clown role that his good friend from his first Parisian soujorn, Ardengo Soffici, had described:

The clown is a personification of freedom, a discoverer of innovations, a kind of demon who, on his own accord, creates a world which eventually becomes a substitute for the one we live in, a world made of wonders.

Evil tongues claimed that Chirco’s attitude was the result of “a senile instinct of self-defence.” That he covered up a slowly advancing dementia by communicating with the help of jokes and paradoxes. He lined up for an occasional interview and had RAI do a more then one hour long programme about him painting one of his multiple Suns on the Easel while he short and abruptly answered the interviewer's questions, without telling or revealing anything about himself and his feelings. Nevertheless, while watching the spectacle I did not get the impression that it was a senile old man who was interviewed, rather someone who was hiding himself behind a rather bland facade.

Isabella controlled him. The only relief Chirico found was to work at his easel every day, devote himself to his sculptures and then walk down around the corner to Café Greco where he could be sitting alone by himself for several hours, with an aperitif in front of him. Every day he created something, it could be Christian motifs in murky colours:

slightly altered variations of his earlier metaphysical works:

or naive, crudely drawn versions of how the sun’s radiant power is brought down to the earth by cables, where it was transformed into a dead, spider-like shadow,

became extinguished in the sky,

or provided warmth inside the body or in a fireplace.

Chirico was apparently inspired by alchemical speculations, perhaps most of all by the fantastic illustrations in Salomon Trismosin’s Splendor Solis from 1582.

He also supervised bronze castings of his increasingly numerous sculptures.

Giorgio Chirico was active until the last day of his life. Late in life, he became fascinated by Michelangelo’s art:

At his death, he left on the easel the beginning of a copy of Michelangelo's Tondo Dono.

None of this gives me an impression of the dementia that so many have claimed he suffered from, not the least Isabella Pakszwer, who in 1966 had her husband declared incompetent to take care of himself due to “limited sense and will” and she arranged so she became the sole trustee of de Chirico's large fortune, meaning that she controlled her husband’s art production. Admittedly, this may have been a ploy to avoid legal problems that had arisen through complaints and notifications based on forged authenticity certificates, the sale of copies as originals, and a host of other art trade scams. It is clear, however, that the wife’s action was mainly caused by the discovery and publication of no less than five hundred letters sent by Chirico to the young wife of a high-ranking politician, to whom the famous artist harboured a platonic love.

All this did not prevent Chirco from in the autumn of his age being sincerely praised by a multitude of artists. For example, he was honoured in two large paintings by his compatriot Renato Guttoso, in which he depicted Giorgio at his afternoon aperitif at Café Greco. Chirico sits alsone at a table watching the crowd around him.

In the largest painting, the aged master is talking to a younger edition of himself, dressed in an ancient Greek himation. On a plate on the table in front of them, Chirico and his double have some of the biscuits that appear on several of his Ferrarese paintings.

Chirico seems to be glancing at Orpheus, who is sitting at a table further into the room; marble white and with black glasses.

Another modern master who was captivated by Chirico’s art was Andy Warhol, like Chirico an outsider in the midst of the world, an enigmatic hermit and innovator with a voyeur’s cool gaze. The two artists met in Washington in 1974 at the home of the Italian ambassador, where these two primadonnas, sacred and extremely odd monsters of the contemporary art scene, immediately warmed to each another and posed together for a strange photograph. The protagonists’ poses – Chirico, with a glass in his hand, looks like a demon, while Warhol pretends to be terrified, may seem to be taken from an old horror movie.

In addition to their outsider-ship, they both had much in common, not the least an extreme mother dependence. Since 1951, Warhol lived mostly with his mother Julia, who, like Chirico’s mother earlyon had become a widow. Like Gemma, Julia was artistically gifted and often made drawings with cats and religious motifs.

After his death in 1978, Chirico’s later artwork which generally had been despised by connoisseurs began to be vividly appreciated by younger, leading artists such as Sandro Chia, Francesco Clemente, Eric Fischl and Julian Schnabel. When Warhol in 1982 visited the New York Modern Museum of Arts’ retrospective Chirico exhibition, he was captivated and returned several times. In addition to the art itself, the scandal-fascinated Warhol was attracted by Chirico´s numerous “fakes” of his own works of art. When Warhol, after acquiring the exhibition catalogue, found a spread sheet with Chirico’s eighteen, almost identical, versions of his masterpiece The Worrying Muses, Warhol recognized his own series of Coca Cola - and Campbell jars. In an interview, he expressed his admiration:

Aren’t they great? How did he repeat the same images? Did he project the same image on canvas? Maybe he did it by dividing the canvas in sections … he could not have used a silkscreen!

Before the end of the year, Warhol had produced twenty-three series paintings based on six metaphysical paintings by Chirico.

Back to Chirico’s Mysterious Baths. His metaphysical way of thinking was that there is a life of its own behind every object. Of course, this also applied to his paintings. The reason I started writing about Chirico’s baths was that I, together with my youngest daughter, who is an archaeologist and now writes about the role of water in ancient Egyptian religion and the crucial importance of the Nile, about how its water was poured over sacrificial tables to nourish the dead and how it was stored in ponds for ritual purification, and as a source of fertility.

As I took a closer look at pictures of Egyptian representations of water, I discovered the same zigzag pattern that water is endowed with in Chirico’s bathing water. Surely there is a connection. Chirico was an avid reader of art books, but he claimed that the pattern did not emerge through his contemplation of ancient Egyptian art, but that it came from a memory that indicates Chirico’s “childish” manner of looking at the world, i.e. contemplating everything as part of an underlying adventure, an opportunity.

When I was a child, I often played that carpets were islands and the floor was the sea between them. I sat on a rug like Robinson Crusoe on his island, or jumped between them like Deerfoot jumping from tuft to tuft in a swamp. Chirico got similar associations when during a cocktail party he came to look at the well-polished parquet floor and then saw how the ladies’ high-heeled shoes were reflected in it. As so often before, he became fascinated by “the thing in itself” and forgot his surroundings, sank into the sight of the reflective parquet and the idea of the Mysterious Baths was born.

Five years before his death, Chirico was invited to an art exhibition in Milan and was then asked to make a fountain by the entrance to the palace where the event took place. He created the fountain as a Mysterious Bath, with a changing hut on stilts, a multicoloured beach ball, a toy swan and naked bathers.

Next to the pool, Chirico placed a large, multicoloured fish. When Chirico was asked why the fish was on land, he replied: “It’s me. I’ve always been an outsider. A spectator.”

Apollinaire, Guillaume (2017) Le Bestiaire: Cortège d'Orphée. Paris: Prairial. Baldacci, Paolo (2018) ”De Chirico”, Art e Dossier, No. 354. Carrá, Carlo (2011) La mia vita. Milano: Abscondita. Chirico, Giorgio de (1964 ) Memoirs. London: Da Capo Press. Chirico, Giorgio de (1992) Hebdomeros, with Monsieur Dudron´s Adventure and Other Metaphysical Writings. Cambridge: Exact Change. Chirico, Giorgio de and Isabella Far (2002) Comedia dell´arte moderna. Milano: Abscondita. Dell'Arco, Maurizio Fagiolo (ed.) (1982) De Chirico: Essays. New York: The Museum of Modern Art. Jona, Alberto (1991) ”Savinio and the Impossible to Know,” insert in Alberto Savinio: Le Chants de la mi-mort, Album 1914. Milano: Stradivarius. Garbesi, Marina (1990) ”Isa, Musa e Manager”, La Repubblica, 21 Novembre. Gnoli, Antonio (2014) ”Ruggero Savinio: Io,’figlio di’ e ’nipote di’ ho ereditato le loro osssesioni”, La Repubblica, 31 Agosto. Lista, Giovanni (2009) Giorgio De Chirico suivi de L’ Art métaphysique. Paris: Éditions Hazan. Mori. Gioia (2006) De Chirico. Milano: Il Giornale. Mori, Gioia (2007) ”De Chirico Metafisco”, Art e Dossier, No. 230. Oliva, Achille Bonito (ed.) (2010) La natura secondo de Chirico. Milano: Federico Motta Editore. Salvagini, Sileno (2006) ”De Pisis”, Art e Dossier, No. 219. Vivarelli, Pia (2003) ”Savinio”, Art e Dossier, No. 185.

RAI, Un opera d'arte: Il sole sul cavaletto (1973)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsV_qYEq27s&ab_channel=VittorioBallato

Varma sommardagar förenade jag mig under min barndom och tidiga ungdom med den långa cykelkaravan som slingrade sig från Hässleholm till Björkviken vid Finjasjön – en sandstrand med brygga och uteservering. 

Jag minns varje detalj av vägen. Nerförsbacken efter avtagsvägen till P2: Det Skånska Dragonregementet och hur jag där sneglade mot villan som låg vid dess början. Den tillhörde Calle Preutz som boxades för Hässleholms BK och som tillsammans med nationens stolthet, Ingmar Johansson, varit aktiv under svensk boxnings guldålder. Preutz blev aldrig svensk mästare, men tog under sin aktiva tid tre silver vid under svenska boxningsmästerskapen.

Av någon för mig okänd anledning prylade hans son, som var jämnårig med mig, vid ett tillfälle upp mig på skolgården. På den tiden undvek jag honom, men vi blev vänner då vi långt senare gjorde en repmånad tillsammans. Efter backen vid Preutzs villa tog några vattensjuka sankmarker vid och där Hässleholms stadsgräns under under några imponerande ekar markerats med en sten med statsvapnet, stod alltid en kompakt svärm med knott.

Slutligen nådde vi fram till Finjasjön. På den tiden fanns där en stadig brygga av gammaldags typ, alltså inte den moderna varianten på flytpontoner utan en som manshögt vilade på ordentligt nerpålade stockar och var försedd med trappor ner till vattnet. Som liten påg fascinerades jag av den där bryggan, kanske mest för att mina föräldrar berättat att jag måste akta mig för att drunkna – en gång hade min fyra år äldre syster, innan jag var född hamnat i ett undervattenshål invid bryggan och varit nära att drunkna. Mina föräldrar hade solat på stranden då hon plötsligt försvunnit. Far berättade att han inte hört hennes rop på hjälp och att hon räddats av en annan badgäst.

Jag smög mig ofta in i skuggan under bryggan, där vattnet var svalare och ljuset dämpat. Vattnet strimlades av solljus som föll ner mellan brädspjälorna, varifrån badgästers fotsteg och svaga röster hördes. I skuggan var jag ensam mitt i världen.

En känsla jag nu påminns om då jag bläddrar i en bok i vilken jag fastnat för bilder på Girogio De Chiricos Bagni Misteriosi, de Mystiska baden. Från 1934, då han gjorde sina första bilder av de mystiska baden som illustrationer till en diktsamling av Jean Cocteau, Mythologie, skapade Chirico ända fram till sin död 1978 en mängd versioner av samma motiv.

Han har berättat att tanken på de Mystiska baden kom då han mindes sin barndom i den grekiska staden Volos. Vid platsen där floden Anavros möter havet vid en sandstrand fanns bryggor med små omklädningskabiner. Sådana har jag sett på flera platser, inte minst här i Italien, men då ligger de i allmänhet inte i havet utan vid stranden, som i Ostia dit vi ofta tar bilen.

Vad som fick mig att reagera då jag såg Chiricos bilder var att han i en del av dem beskrev barndomskänslan då jag smög under Finjasjöns brygga – solljuset och skuggorna, ensamheten vid betraktandet av andra badandes lek och ljudet av deras rop och skratt. Sådana skuggor och ljus fanns hos Chirico, liksom badbollar och andra badande.

Som i så många Chiricos verk andas Bagni Misteriosi, med sina skuggor, sol och märkliga ödslighet – utanförskap och minnen.

Chirco låter sina Bagni spegla hans liv. När han i USA 1937 fick höra att hans allt överskuggande mor hade dött i Rom, tolkade han exempelvis sina känslor i en bild av Bagni Miteriosi.

Ständigt samma tystnad. Oftast ligger inte Chiricos badplatser vid havet, utan vid kanaler som skär genom (inre?) ökenområden.

De ödsliga landskapen befolkas av människor, men de tycks vara kontaktlösa. Påklädda ynglingar betraktar andra unga män som nakna vadar i kanaler med brunt vatten liknande det som i allmänhet finns i skogskantade insjöar.

Emellanåt passerar en påklädd yngling de badande i en roddbåt.

Oftast betraktar de påklädda, tigande männen enbart de badande, men en och annan gång tycks de samtala med dem, några har till och med placerat sig i en stol vid kanalkanten.

Även de badande kan vara isolerade, ibland i tornliknande, åtskilda bassänger, till vilka stegar leder upp.

Ibland skymtas havet, och då oftast mellan byggnader. I dessa klaustrofobiskt öppna landskap är havet är blått, i kontrast till Bagnis bruna vatten. Som här där en påklädd man ror mot en tunnel som öppnar sig mot havet.

Redan som barn hade jag fascinerats av Chiricos konst. I en av mina fars böcker återkom jag gång på gång till en bild av ett tidigt konstverk, Timmens gåta. Något senare tecknade jag ofta bilder som var variationer på konstverket – valven, de ensamma figurerna, klockan. Det var något med tidens gång, ensamheten, de frånvända figurerna och stillheten som gripit mig.

Då jag konfronterats med Chiricos konst återfinner jag allt som oftast sådana minnesblock. Då jag såg roddbåten som rörde sig mot en tunnel som öppnar sig mot havet kom jag att tänka på en tunnel jag en gång sett i Livorno. Det är en kanal som sträcker sig under hela stadens centrala torg och mynnar i dess livliga hamn.

Och ... detta märkligt, ödsliga utanförskap – som när du anlänt till en ny arbetsplats fylld med blivande bekantskaper. I Chiricos Bagni förkommer ofta en påklädd ung man som med en väska i handen öppnar dörren till en badhytt, där han skall klä om för att strax därefter förena sig med övriga badgäster, men som innan han gör det, kanske med såväl förväntan som oro och tveksamhet, tankfullt betraktar de badande

Bland mina minnen finns en hel del sådana bilder och situationer som finner motsvarigheter i Chiricos konst. Emellanåt är inte hans badhytter belägna vid de underliga kanalerna med sitt bruna vatten, utan påminner istället om de kallbadhus du finner i exempelvis Varberg och Malmö och som byggdes i början av nittonhundratalet, just vid den tid som tycks motsvaras av Chiricos konstruktioner.

Medan jag arbetade som lärare i Malmö hände det att jag tog mig ut till Ribersborgs kallbadhus för att basta och bada.

Styrkan i Chiricos konst är som störst vid en direkt konfrontation. 2010 besökte jag i Rom vid flera tillfällen en omfattande utställning med nedslag i hela hans omfattande produktion. Anblicken av de öde stadslandskapen etsade sig in i hjärnan. Då jag efter att ha sett dem och kommit ut på gatan hade Rom förvandlats till Chiricos landskap.

Förutom att vara en djuplodande konstnär var Chirico en skicklig skribent, inte enbart av den suggestiva romanen Hebdomeros utan även av en mängd artiklar om konst i vilka han bland annat skrivit om hur arkitektur påverkar, ja … konstruerar vår verklighet och vårt sätt att tänka. Flera gånger återkom han till hur Renässansens konstnärer drömde om att organisera tillvaron, göra den klarare, mer påtaglig och i sin strävan tillämpandet av matematiska regler som skapats genom deras spekulationer kring Kosmos grundläggande struktur.

I sin konst eftersträvade även Chirico att finna livets inre mönster och struktur. Inte för inte var hans beundrade far, som dog då Chirico var sjutton år, en erkänt skicklig ingenjör. Chiricos skildringar av drömmars och verklighetens inre beskaffenhet förlänar hans versioner av tillvaron med en märklig tidslöshet.

Chirico skriver i slutet av 1910-talet att redan grottfolkens konst var perfekt på grund av att dessa okända konstnärer, då de på klippväggar i djupet av mörka grottor skapade sina mästerverk, var fullt medvetna om att deras jaktbyten var förlänade med en inre mening, en verklighet utöver den vi kan se – en metafysik.

Man måste föreställa sig allt som finns i världen som en gåta, inte enbart de stora frågorna man alltid ställer sig – varför skapades världen, varför föddes vi för att leva och dö, ty trots allt, precis som jag ofta sagt, det finns kanske ingen mening i allt detta. Snarast bör vi försöka lösa gåtan hos alla de saker och ting som i allmänhet anses vara obetydliga.

Genom en sådan insikt ville Chirico förankra sin konst i verkligheten och därmed också göra den evigt sann. Hans ödsliga stadslandskap och själlösa marionetter tycks frigjorda från tid och yttre förändringar och blir därigenom även sällsamt profetiska.

Det kan tyckas som om den fascistiska arkitektur som präglade Mussolinis vackra, men kyliga spökstad EUR, som började byggas på 1930-talet, kopierade Chiricos konst. Stadsdelen har skildrats i filmer av mästare som Fellini, och speciellt Antonioni där den utgör bakgrunden till alienerade människor som inte finner något mål eller en mening med sina liv.

En modern arkitektur, som inkorpoerar klassiska inslag; kolonnader, valv och skulpturer, likt i en del av Chircos teckningar av Bagni Misteriosi där en klassisk skulptur plötsligt kan dyka upp bland badhusen.

I EUR finns pelargångarna och valven i Chircos öde stadslandskap; de stora piazzorna, folktomheten. Givetvis uppskattade bildkonstnärer och regissörer som Fellini och Antonioni den ödsliga estetiken i denna sterila storslagenhet.

Det är inte enbart EUR som i Rom tycks spegla Chiricos konst, även Foro Italia, Mussolinis väldiga sportanläggning som med sina marmorstatyer och strama, men samtidigt nyckfulla, i det närmaste kitschiga, byggnadsverk tycks även de spegla vissa aspekter av Chiricos konst.

Till och med färgläggning och skulpturer som har innefattats i byggnaderna tycks ha inspirerats av av Chiricos konst.

Även de städer som byggdes i de av fascisterna utdikade Pontinska träskmarkerna söder om Rom tycks vara gjorda med Chirico som förlaga – exempelvis Sabaudia, med sin stramt, vackra arkitektur.

Givetvis fanns det bland denna fascistiska arkitektur också hotande skuggor och en otäck nervositet, skickligt skildrat i amerikanen Peter Blumes Den eviga staden från 1937:

Blumes verk är annorlunda, betydligt mer barocka än stadslandskapen hos den tidige Chirico, fast även de utspelar sig i en drömvärld, fast förankrad i en högst påtaglig verklighet. Som hos Blume finns det hos Chirico även gott om hotfulla skuggor.

Ibland kommer de från byggnaderna, men de kan också som i hans En gatas mysterium och melankoli komma från osynliga gestalter, som tjugo- och trettiotalens ständigt närvarande hot från fascisternas  squadristi; regimtrogna, svartklädda ligister.

Under hela sitt liv var Chirico påverkad av tysk konst, främst Klinger och Böcklin, och det kan tyckas att skuggorna i hans tavlor inspirerades av den tyska expressionismens filmkonst. Samspelet mellan mellan ljus och skarpa skuggor som är så påtagligt i Wienes Dr Caligaris kabinett och Fritz Langs och Murnaus filmer. Fast antagligen var det tvärtom, Chirico började måla sina öde, skart beskuggade piazzor åtta år innan Wiene gjorde sin Dr. Caligari.

Chirico berättade för sin brorson, som även han blev konstnär, om än inte på långa vägar så fascinerande som sin far och farbror:

Ja, ja, skuggorna. Mörkare och mörkare, men det finns alltid tid för en ljusning. Det var det saturniska, melankolin som pressade mig mot mörkret och fick mig att glömma materien. Enbart döden kan hävda att jag har levt, har haft en historia och en plats där jag föddes. När jag ser tillbaka tänker jag på mig själv som en av de som ”fötts under Saturnus” som i sitt livs melankoli och olyckor trots allt ägde sig själva, sin kropp och själ, förmådde skapa bilden av en sådan tillvaro och skaffa sig en hemvist i den.

Eftersom han ansåg det kunde gynna hans konst och inkomster gick Chirico 1933 med i det fascistiska partiet. Han var dock långt ifrån en övertygad partianhängare, kanske en omöjlighet för en så överkänslig, trotsig, sluten, hypokondrisk, och möjligen latent homosexuell man.

Facismens populistiska retorik, de ytliga slagorden, massornas påträngande närvaro, mobbningskulturen och krigshyllningarna gick den känslige Chirico på nerverna. Han led av kroniskt, nervöst betingade magsmärtor, och tillbringade mer tid i Paris än i Rom. Även om Mussolini privat uppskattade Chiricos konst så föraktade konstnären diktatorns ytliga vulgaritet och den förkvävande totalitarism som trots en viss konstnärlig frihet rådde i Italien.

Även stämningen i Paris irriterade honom. Han ondgjorde sig över ”den moraliska och materialistiska soptipp” som den parisiska konsten förvandlats till och bosatte sig 1936 till 1938 i New York, men där kände han sig än mer främmande. Även om Chirico i USA var en uppburen och beundrad artist och fick inkomstbringande uppdrag från miljonärer som Helena Rubenstein och flådiga tidskrifter som Vogue och Harper’s Magazine, kände han att frånvaron av Europas anrika historia, dess antika konst och intellektuella debatt var kvävande. 

I USA inleddes också en katastrofal utveckling som hans amerikanske konsthandlare karaktäriserade som en ”en benägenhet till självförstörelse, inkapslad i en aura av grandezza.” Driven av girighet, och möjligen under inverkan av sin nya livsledsagarinna,  Isabella Pakszwer, det faktum att hans mor dött och att brodern inte befann sig i hans närhet som stöd och inspiration, började Chirico spela ut olika konsthandlare mot varandra och för att tillfredsställa marknaden skapade han lätt retuscherade kopior av tidigare verk, som han signerade som om de varit gjorda flera år tidigare, alltmedan han ändrade sin aktuella stil i en mer ”barock och klassisk riktning” och öste invektiv över ”den moderna konsten”.

Som så mycket annat i sitt liv präglades Chiricos inställning till fascismen av tvehågsenhet. Han skrev till Il Duce och bad att få bli föreståndare för en konstakademi:

För att befria italiensk konst från det ok Paris lagt på den och återge måleriet de kvalitéer som förlorats. En akademi som skall använda alla medel – didaktiska, moraliska, tekniska, såväl som disciplinära och tvångsmässiga .

Med andra ord – Chirico framställde sig själv som en konstens Il Duce, men den verklige Ledaren anade att en opportunistisk hund låg begraven i brevet och fann förslaget föga trovärdigt., Mussolini medgav villigt att han ”inte förstod sig på konst” och lyssnade därför till de inflytelserika konstkritiker som påstod att Chirico sannerligen inte var någon rekordelig fascist, att hans konst i själva verket var dekadent och ryggradslös. Chirico uppnådde inte så mycket genom sitt medlöperi. Han erhöll inte de priser han eftersträvade och även om han allt som oftast hyllades i pressen fick han från fascistiskt håll sina inkomster från olika privata beställningsarbeten, som de han utförde för Edda Mussolini och Galeazzo Ciano.

Mussolini var genom sina spioner informerad om att såväl Chiricos första som andra hustru var judinnor, att han beundrade ”judisk kultur” och i Paris umgicks med antifascister, där han inom skål och vägg uttryckte ett ohöljt förakt för Italiens fascistiska regim. Det var först efter 1945 som Chirico med enfas angrep fascismen, antagligen under uppfattningen att han inte kompromissat med regimen, men han var alltför välkänd för att undgå anklagelsen.

I all sin isolationism var Chirico en kameleont som anpassade sig till marknaden, politiken och inte minst till sin dominanta, andra hustru, den späda, intelligenta och innerst inne stenhårda Isabella Pakszwer. Han var dock en dubbelnatur som i sin konst ständigt låter ana sublima och ofta ytterst invecklade anslag av ironi. Möjligen är det främst i sina invecklade men likväl välformulerade texter som Chiricos förtäckta inre liv avslöjas – ett sarkastiskt avståndstagande till mycket som sker omkring honom parat med en estetisk syn på tillvaron. Ofta försökte han inte ens publicera vad han skrev, utan gav bort mycket av det till vänner och förtrogna.

I en artikel som han 1928 skrev för ett franskt magasin ondgjorde sig Chirico, på sitt sedvanligt motsägelsefulla och poetiska sätt, över den ökande nationalism som bredde ut sig inom samtidens konst och politik:

Vad med alla dessa sublima och idiotiska deklarationer om att återvända till jorden, om folkkonst, om uppriktighet, om avståndstaganden, om ärlighet, sanning, enkelhet, naturdyrkan, kulten av skönhet och hälsa i konsten, seger över sig själv […] Svammel och utopi? Fantasier av en hysterisk munk som drömmer om idealiska, platonska republiker där prästerskapet, vördat av gemene man, regelbundet och hygieniskt varje natt kan kopulera med kvinnor, vackra som statyer. Rena utopier! Av allt detta kvarstår nu inte annat än en handfull aska […] alltmedan den sekelgamla elefanten passerar.

Den stora mängd målningar med gladiatorer som Chirico gjorde i Paris under slutet av trettiotalet och början av fyrtiotalet var kanske en ironisk kommentar till fascismens muskelsvällande, nakna atleter. De kämpar i allmänhet i vanliga lägenheter och ser onekligen löjliga och knappast atletiska ut.

Kompositionerna tycks ofta ha inspirerats av de säregna och barocka etsningar som gjordes av Diana Scultori (1547-1612) och hennes bror Adamo. Verk som Chirco återkommer till även i senare verk. Syskonen Scultoris bilder andas en liknande klaustrofobi som den man finner hos Chiricos gladiatorer, men deras muskulösa gestalter är långt ifrån så löjliga som hans.

Girgios bror Andrea gjorde också en mängd bilder med kämpande nakna män, antagligen även de en ironisk anspelning på den fascistiska, officiella konsten. Till skillnad från broderns atleter har Andras muskelsvällande kolloser små huvuden och likt mannekänger saknar de ansiktsdrag.

Gladiatorstriderna reflekteras i den roman som Chirico skrev vid samma tid. Hebdomeros är fylld med drömlika, överlastade scener präglade av ett surrealistiskt utanförskap. Chirico gör narr av sådant han finner omkring sig, samtidigt som fantasi och medelhavskultur hyllas:

kompakta grupper av filosofer och krigare, likt polycephaliska block i mjukt skimrande färger, höll mystiska, hemliga möten i hörnen av ett rum med lågt tak, precis där prydnadslisterna sammanfogade väggarna så att taket kom att bilda en rätt vinkel. ”Jag gillar inte ansiktenas framtoning”, utbrast en av Hebdomeros yngsta lärjungar, på vilket han svarade: ”Okej, jag förstår, eller åtminstone kan jag gissa mig till vad du tänker; du skulle ha föredragit de väluppfostrade vålnaderna i ett lagomgärdat, puritanskt samhälle, där man undviker allt tal som hänvisar till mikrober och kirurgiska instrument och där man bleknar då taktlösa människor använder uttryck som bröstamning, eller diskuterar barnmorskor och förlossningsmetoder. Du föredrar att på en sluten veranda sällskapa med sådana spöken, alltmedan långsträckta stråk av blixtar, likt ögonlockens rörelse, ljudlöst, snabbt och regelbundet korsar himlen varslande en kommande storm.

Vad jag finner märkligt hos människan och konstnären Giorgio Chirico är att en så sällsamt anonym och fjärran person i sin kyliga och egentligen tekniskt sett föga imponerande konst berör mig så djupt. Att jag kan identifiera mig med den värld hans tavlor framställer och i dem känna igen en mängd egna känslor, tankar, förnimmelser, intryck och minnen. Chirico har varit på platser där jag varit, tolkat sådant jag sett och upplevt. Han hade uppenbarligen läst flera av de böcker jag läst och intresserat sig för samma konstverk. Och likväl tycks han mig så annorlunda, så främmande.

Joseph Maria Albertus Georgius de Chiricos ursprung är gåtfullt även det. Han föddes 1888 i den thessaliska staden Volos. Fadern Evaristo var baron och järnvägsingenjör som vid sonens födelse förestod konstruktionen av den Tessaliska Järnvägen och ritade Volos stationshus, som skulle bli administrativt högkvarter för järnvägen.

Giorgio Chirico och hans ovanligt närstående bror Andrea brukade hänvisa till släktens rötter på Sicilien och i Toskana, men dess ursprung kan spåras till en viss Cajetan de Kirikó som vid sextonhundratalets slut var venetiansk militärkommendant i Ragusa, dagens Dubrovnik. Cajetans son blev 1715 utsedd till Venedigs representant vid Höga Porten, Osmanska Rikets styrelse i Istanbul och där förblev den italiensktalande släkten. Giorgio Chiricos förmögne farfar, även han med namnet Giorgio, blev en nyckelperson vid flera europeiska makters kontakter med den turkiske sultanen. Georgio Kirikó var under en tid diplomatisk representant för den ryske tsaren, kejsaren i Wien, samt de brittiska och sardiska kungadömena. Släktens adelskap härstammade från det Österikisk-ungerska imperiet och de Kirikós förfallna gravkapell finns antagligen fortfarande kvar på den kristna kyrkogården i Fériköy i Istanbul.

Giorgios far, Evaristo, utbildade sig till ingenjör i Turin och hade i Italien blivit övertygad italiensk nationalist och beundrare av Garibaldi, fast han bosatte sig aldrig i Italien utan ägnade sig, innan han trädde i tjänst hos den grekiska regeringen, åt att konstruera järnvägar för ottomanerna. Med sin familj bosatte han sig i Volos, fram tills de 1899 flyttade till Athen, där Evaristo dog 1905. Hans stränga och överbeskyddande hustru tog då ensam hand om pojkarna Giorgio och Andrea och flyttade med dem till München för att därigenom gynna Andreas musikutbildning. Den brådmogne pojken var ett musikaliskt underbarn. Pojkarna påstod att deras mor var baronessa från Genua, men i själva verket kom hon från en italiensk köpmanssläkt som i århundraden varit etablerad i Smyrna (Izmir i dagens Turkiet).

Modern anmälde Andrea som elev till den på sin tid uppburne Max Reger. Han kallades för ”den moderne Bach”, var en skicklig pianist, dirigent och kompositör, om än ful och gravt alkoholiserad var han vördad lärare för en mängd välkända elever.

Jag associerar Reger till fugor och postludier som kantorn Bengt Cimbrelius exekverade på orgeln i Hässleholms kyrka. På den tiden tyckte jag de var tämligen tradiga, liksom de pianostycken jag nu har på CD. Det var i Regers bostad som den unge Giorgio först blev bekant med Arnold Böcklins konst, som han aldrig upphörde att beundra och inspireras av. Sex år efter det att familjen Chirico lämnat München skrev Reger Fyra tondikter för orkester efter A. Böcklin, som faktiskt är skickligt orkestrerad musik och speciellt det första stycket Den fiolspelande eremiten är stillsamt meditativt.

Redan efter ett år lämnade Gemma tillsammans med sina pojkar München. Den uppburne operakompositören Pietro Mascagni hade då lyssnat till den sjuttonnårige Andrea Chiricos utkast till en opera, Carmela, och tog omedelbart den unge kompositören under sina vingars skugga. Chiricofamiljen bosatte sig först i Milano och flyttade sedan till Florens.

Den dominerande Gemma överskuggade brödernas liv. Hon bodde ömsom hos Andrea, ömsom med Giorgio. De kallade sin mor för kentauriskan, väl medvetna om att det inte fanns några kvinnliga kentaurer. Namnet var säkerligen i samklang med hennes vilt kraftfulla och envetna natur. Vet inte om hennes temperament kan ha samband med Giorgios tidigaste konstverk, som ofta skildrade strider och död, inte minst med inblandade kentaurer. Helt klart var han inspirerad av Böcklin, men den överskuggande modern skymtade säkert i hans föreställningsvärld.

Även brodern Andrea skildrade ofta modern i sin konst, som här där han kombinerat ett fotografi av modern som nygift, tillsammans med en karta, en anspelning på deras kringflackande liv, samt en grekisk skulptur som antyder Andreas grekiska barndom och stora intresse för klassisk konst och litteratur. Längst fram på bilden sneglar ett krokodilliknande urtidsmonster mot modern, kanske en sinnebild av Andreas upproriska, men likväl undertryckta förhållande till Gemma.

Monstret påminner skräcködlorna i Jules Vernes Resan till Jordens Medelpunkt, en av de böcker som börderna Chirico slukade i sin ungdom. Under resten av sitt liv ägnade sig ofta åt att klippa ut bilder ur obskyra magasin och föråldrade böcker, som de sedan använde i sina konstverk.

Speciellt Andrea var inspirerad av sådana illustrationer och omtolkade dem i sin montageliknande konst, i vilken han ofta kombinerade djur och människokroppar.

Som så mycket annat delade Giorgio sin brors intresse för fantastisk litteratur och illustrationer de fann i gamla, ofta bortglömda böcker. Även i sin konst och framförallt i sina skriverier hänvisar Giorgio till en barndom präglad av främlingskap och drömmerier, som han delade med sin själsfrände Andrea. Bröderna stod under hela livet varandra mycket nära och kallades av sina bekanta för Dioskurerna, anspelande på de mytiska tvillingarna Castor och Pollux, av vilka den ene var dödlig och den andre odödlig. Av kärlek till sin bror bad Pollux gudarna att få dö samtidigt som Castor. I än högre grad än Giorgio anspelade Andrea i sin konst på barndomen och även den var fylld av monster och ruiner.

Gång på gång överraskar jag mig med att i Andreas, liksom i Giorgios konst, hamna inför bilder som skildrar min barndom. Exempelvis målade Andrea ofta bjärt färgade byggklossar mot mystiska bakgrunder hämtade från illustrationer i sådana böcker som det fanns gott om i min morfars bibliotek. Jag inser då att bröderna Chirico i gott minne hade den barnsliga upplevelsen av att leksaker döljer en väldig, fantasistimulerande värld, som dessvärre ständigt motverkas av en betydligt tristare ”verklighet”:

Att leva i världen som som om den vore ett enormt, konstigt museum, fyllt av lockande mångfärgade leksaker, som dock förändrar karaktär då vi, som små barn ibland brukar göra, plockar sönder dem för att se hur de är gjorda på insidan och då besvikna inser att de är tomma.

Bröderna läste under sin gemensamma tid i München Schopenhauer, Weininger och framförallt Nietzsche, något som för alltid kom att prägla deras konst och tänkande. Så fort de var tillsammans utbytte de tankar och kunde då till långt in på nätterna ägna sig åt livliga diskussioner. Då bröderna 1922 bodde i Rom målade Giorgio ett Romerskt landskap. Jag antar att de två männen som samtalar i skuggan på en terrass mellan två villor, krönta med klassiska skulpturer, kan vara Giorgio och Andrea inbegripna i ett esoteriskt samtal, symboliserad av den klassiska gudomen som svävar i skyn, alltmedan Gemma vakar över dem, sittande i ett öppet fönster.

Gemma var en ständig närvaro i brödernas liv, påstridigt engagerad i deras konst och umgänge, speciellt det kvinnliga. Även om börderna emellanåt försökte frigöra sig ur Gemmas garn, var de djupt fästade vid henne. Giorgio beskriver i sin surrealistiskt färgade berättarkonst sitt förhållande till modern:

det var inte för inte som han är son till en sjöjungfru: en märkvärdighet med sjöjungfrurs söner är att de aldrig riskerar att bli förälskade i en kvinna, eftersom de alltid är förälskade i sina mödrar.

Medan han med mor och bror bodde i Florens genomgick Chirico en svår kris och insjuknade allvarligt i sin kroniska magåkomma. Då han tillfrisknat satt han ”en klar höstlig dag” på en bänk på Piazza Santa Croce och betraktade, som så ofta förr, dess Dante-staty. Då greps han av en livsförändrande upplevelse – allt omkring honom framstod i ett förklarat ljus. Som genom ett magiskt trick förvandlades tillvaron till något främmande, men likväl besynnerligt levande. Senare beskrev han vid flera tillfällen upplevelsen:

Jag befinner mig i ett sjukligt tillstånd av känslighet. Höstsolen, varm och kärlekslös, lyser upp statyn och kyrkofasaden. Då grips jag av en märklig känsla som får mig att betrakta alla dessa ting som om det vore första gången jag ser dem. För mitt inre öga framstod då, fullkomligt klart, kompositionen av målningen jag arbetade på. Varje gång jag nu betraktar den återupplever jag det ögonblicket. Det har förblivit en gåta för mig, ty det är oförklarligt. Det är därför jag ville benämna mitt verk så att det framgick att det härrörde från en gåta.

Han skriver om En hösteftermiddags gåta, ett verk som blev en talisman för allt Chirico kom att skapa:

Under de följande månaderna skapade Chirico att målningar i samma anda. Han läste Homeros Odyssé och mindes en tavla av Böcklin i vilken Odysseus på Calypsos ö vänt sig från den vackra nymfen och tankfullt ser ut över havet, gripen av en längtan efter nya äventyr, eller kanske han tänker på Penelopes trygga famn i hemmet på Itaka.

Under en tid var Chirico helt upptagen av försök att skapa en ny version av den målningen:

Genom läsningen av Friedrich Nietzsches verk blev jag medveten om att det finns en mängd märkliga, okända, ensliga ting som jag borde skildra i min målning. Jag mediterade länge. Sedan fick jag mina första uppenbarelser. Jag tecknade mindre, glömde till och med att rita, men varje gång jag gjorde det så gjorde jag det driven av nödvändighet.

Resultatet blev Oraklets gåta. En brunklädd gestalt står i en öppning och blickar ut över ett medelhavslandskap. Personen, vi vet inte om det är en man eller en kvinna, som efter att ha delgetts ett orakelsvar försjunkit i grubblerier. Sibyllan befinner sig antagligen bakom förhänget ovanför vilket huvudet på en grekisk skulptur skumtas – antagligen Apollo, orakelsvarens gudom. Platsen är belägen högt upp, kanske på en bergssida. Orakel ger i allmänhet inga enkla svar, snarast väcker de tankar som kan leda till lösningar, eller förtvivlan. De är gåtor.

Åter för mig Chirico tillbaka i tiden, närmare bestämt till besök i Jupitertemplet ovanför hamnstaden Terracina. I allmänhet var Antikens orakler kopplade till Apollokulten, men i Terracinas tempel var sibyllan troligen i tjänst hos Jupiter, fast liksom i det mer kända Cumae längre söderut, var hennes cell belägen under tempelområdet.

Sibyllans rum finns kvar och du når den genom en valvgång. Om du vänder ryggen mot cellen där sibyllan i heligt rus gjorde sin förutsägelser kan du likt den mörkklädda gestalten i Oraklets gåta blicka ut över ett landskap som sträcker sig ner mot Medelhavet.

Som så mycket annat i sin konst delade Giorgio sina upplevelser med brodern Andrea, som innan Giorgio skapade sin Oraklets gåta hade gjort en teckning med ett liknande motiv. Samtidigt med sina funderingar kring livets ”orakel” hade Giorgio tillsammans med brodern alltmer fördjupat sig i Nietzsche och Weiningers skrifter.

Andrea skapade vid samma tid begreppet ”halvdöd” varmed han menade att konsten, och i hans fall främst musiken, var en manifestation av övermänniskans ”dubbelnatur”. Sann konst kom sig av en klärvoajans som innebar att vissa individer kunde stiga in i en gåtfull, ”orakelmässig” sfär, belägen mellan vakenhet och sömn. En musiker anar och tolkar det dolda språk som ligger förborgat i tingen omkring oss. Andrea förenade sina tankar om halvdöden med den nietzscheanska idén om tiden som ”evig återkomst” och ”oförgänglig nutid”. För Andrea Chirico var musik ”helig”, i betydelsen ”avskild”. En realitet belägen mellan ett förflutet som passerats och en framtid som skall äga rum. Konsten finns inom en sfär besläktad med döden, i ett rum från vilket dörrar kan öppnas i båda riktningarna.

Bröderna försökte förena sina insikter i ett gemensamt komponerat musikstycke i vilket de sa sig tolka Nietzsches Eviga återkomst. Dess uruppförande i München i Januari 1911 blev dock ett grundligt fiasko. Giorgio gav för alltid upp musiken, målade ett självporträtt han kallade: ”Vad jag älskar är en gåta” medan brodern begav sig till Paris, vars avantgardistiska kretsar han antog skulle uppskatta hans musik och förstå hans filosofiska spekulationer.

För flera år sedan fanns vid Viale Aventino, inte långt från vår dåvarande bostad i Rom, en skivaffär. Dess ovanligt korpulente innehavare satt i allmänhet bekvämt tillbakalutad i en stor skinnsoffa, lättjefullt rökande en cigarr, alltmedan dess doft blandades med klassisk musik som fyllde en lokal vars väggar var täckta med CD- och LPskivor. Då dörrklockan pinglat och jag stigit in lokalen hälsade han mig alltid med orden: ”Söker du något speciellt idag, eller vill du att jag skall rekommendera något jag antar kan intressera dig?” Eftersom jag nyligen köpt två CD:n, en med Saties pianomusik och en annan med Schönbergs Sex sånger för sopran och orkester, reste han sig med viss möda ur soffan, gick fram till en av de CDtäckta väggarna och letade fram en CD: ”Den här kan möjligen intressera dig. Förvisso inget mästerverk, men tämligen speciell. Alberto Savinio ... känner du till honom?” Jag nickade och sa att jag visste att han var konstnär och bror till Giorgio de Chirico. Butiksinnehavaren, vars namn jag glömt, tog cigarren ur munnen och askade den: ”Se, där jag hade rätt igen! Den här CD:n kommer att intressera dig. Nu kan du även uppskatta Savinio som kompositör.” Då jag köpt CD:n bad han farväl med sitt sedvanliga Bona ascolta! Gott lyssnande.

Uppskatta var ett överord. På mig gör Savinios Les Chants de la mi-mort, Sångerna om min halvdöd, ett rörigt, om än lätt charmigt intryck, en slags alltför modernistiskt uppbruten Erik Satie. Förvisso dynamiskt och skickligt genomförd musik, kryddad med ett stort mått av skämtsam ironi, fast likväl irriterande genom sin extrema stilblandning, plötsliga känslosvängningar och underliga sångtexter. En teatralisk musik som tycks kräva att bli illustrerad på en scen med ackompanjerande kulisser och tablåer.

Mot förmodan blev styckets parisiska uruppförande någon gång under våren 1914, en succé. Det ägde rum i en av modernismens brännpunkter – kontoret för Appolinaires tidskrift Les Soirés de Paris. En recensent skrev:

Publiken var till en början förvirrad men det dröjde inte länge innan den upptäckt kompositörens avsikter. Enkelheten i framställningen av ”hans” dramatiska musik har nu funnit sina rätta förespråkare. Alltför mycket kunnande är skadligt och tyvärr har även den moderna musiken nu blivit dess slav. Klassicismens vänner blev däremot något besvikna. Till en sådan grad att de, för några ögonblick, var chockerade, men snart insåg även de den djupa originaliteten och stora uppfinningsrikedomen hos de verk som A. Savinio med fulländat mästerskap tolkade på pianot.

Det var den inflytelserike och energiskt aktive Guillame Appoliniare som inom det parisiska avantgardet blivit Andreas störste supporter. Appolinaire, vars fullständiga namn var Wilhelm Albert Włodzimierz Apolinary Kostrowicki  (1880-1918), hade i Rom blivit född av en vitrysk adelsdam. Morfadern hade varit en framgångsrik rysk general, medan Appolinaires far angavs som ”okänd”, emedan han inte ville erkänna sonen som sin. Han har lång senare identifierats som en italiensk adelsman.

Den fenomenalt uppslagsrike och spirituelle Apollinaire hade på kort tid blivit det absoluta stormcentret för konstnärskretsarna kring Montparnasse. Det var han som uppfunnit konstbegreppen kubism, orfism och inte minst surrealism, en term som han 1917 först tillämpade i programförklaringen till Les Mamelles de Tirésias, Tiresias bröst, som han skrivit redan 1903 men som under Första Världskriget uppfördes som en Opéra bouffe med musik av Germaine Albert-Pirotest:

Jag tänker att vi vi borde återgå till naturen, men utan att imitera den såsom fotografer gör. När människan ville imitera gåendet skapade hon ett runt hjul som inte alls ser ut som ett ben, därmed skapade hon surrealismen utan att ens vara medveten om det.

Apollinaire kom att betrakta bröderna Chirico som autentiska surrealister. För Apollinaire fanns det inga gränser mellan poesi, filosofi, konst och musik och det var ett av skälen till hans stora uppskattning av mångsysslaren Andrea Chirico, som under Appolinaires inflytande tog sig namnet Alberto Savinio. Det sades att han gjorde det för att skilja sig och sina verk från sin alltmer berömde bror, men ett annat, giltigare skäl kan vara att Andrea Chirico hela sitt liv kämpade med sin identitet. Han såg sig som en gränsvarelse och var i sin konst ständig upptagen med hybridvarelser som hermafroditer och mänskliga gestalter med djuriska eller monstruösa drag. Ständigt bröt sig det okända och även skräckinjagande sig in i hans konst.

Innan Andrea Chirico fastnade för namnet Alberto Savinio (egentligen namnet på en samtidig parisisk förläggare, Alberte Savine) hade han använt sig av en mängd andra pseudonymer; Aniceto, Nivasio Dolcemare, Herr Dido, Herr Münster, Innocenzo Paleari, Animo, Carmelo, etc. etc. På sätt och vis experimenterade han med sig själv och antog olika roller, inte minst total anonymitet, ”mannen utan egenskaper”, en ansiktslös skyltdocka, eller snarast en sådan provdocka som sömmerskor använde på hans tid.

En skepnad som också kom att bli vanlig i brodern Giorgios målningar, men om Giorgio Chiricos själlösa gestalter hade stora huvuden, så hade Savinios små.

Även i Savinios ”operetta” Les Chants de la mi-mort framstår rollgestalterna som marionetter, med beteckningar som Skallig man, Gul man, Galen kung, Fågelman, och en märklig figur, kanske en anspelning på Gemma Chirico? – ”En mor av sten, hopkrympt som en marionett”, där fanns även ”en man utan röst, utan ögon, utan ansikte”. Brödernas fascination för marionetter växte successivt och som så ofta varit fallet tog Giorgio Chirico vägen över Nietzsche:

För att vara riktigt odödligt måste ett konstverk gå helt utöver människans gränser och därmed sakna såväl förnuft som logik. På så vis kan vi genom det närma oss drömtillståndet och därmed även ett barns syn på världen.

Efter att ha läst Nietzsches odödliga verk Sålunda talade Zarathustra kommer jag ofta att tänka på det Jag fick från olika avsnitt i denna bok intryck som jag haft då jag som barn läste en italiensk bok med namnet Pinocchio´s äventyr. En märklig likhet som avslöjar verkets djup. Här finns ingen naïvité. Ingenting av den primitiva konstnärens naiva charm; verket besitter en märkvärdighet liknande de känslor som ett barn ibland kan ha, men samtidigt känner man att den som skapat det gjorde så helt medvetet.

Vid slutet av 1911 följde Gemma och Giorgio efter Andrea till Paris och gjorde någon veckas uppehåll i Turin. Ett besök som blev avgörande för den känslige Giorgio. Staden där hans far studerat till ingenjör, vaggan för Italiens enande och platsen där Nietzsche blivit vansinnig, ett halvår efter Giorgios födelse, hade redan spökat i skallen på honom och han antog att det fanns ett mystiskt samband mellan honom och Turin, något han fick bekräftat hösten 1911. Giorgio greps av vad han kallade stadens Stimmung, stämning. Hur den bevarat den känsla av mäktigt utanförskap som Nietzsches verk förmedlat, han satt länge och betraktade ryttarstatyn på Piazza San Carlo, platsen där Nietzsche i januari 1889 hade kollapsat och på knä ömkat sig över en kullfallen häst, för att strax därefter våldsamt angripa de som ville ta honom därifrån. Efter det korta besöket dyker hästar, Turins skulpturer och öde torg ständigt upp i Giorgios konst.

Någon gång under 1912 återvände Giorgio De Chirco från Paris till Turin för att där fullgöra sina två års obligatoriska militärtjänst. Han insåg att hans konst skulle lida avbräck, men ville offra sig för ”sitt” Italien. De patriotiska pliktkänslorna avtog dock snabbt. Visserligen var bröderna de Chirico djupt fästade vid Italien och betraktade sig, trots sin splittrade internationella bakgrund, som italienska patrioter. Deras längtan efter ett hemland var dock baserad på drömmen om en tillhörighet. Italien var för dem en källa för inspiration och glädje, men innefattade inte uppfyllandet av några medborgerliga plikter. Efter fjorton dagars soldatliv hade Giorgio fått nog. Efter Första världskrigets slut beskrev han krig och militarism som ”ett värdelöst nonsens” och inte alls någon ”dödlig nödvändighet” som hans vänner, speciellt de som hängav sig åt futurismen, beskrivit det innan de drabbades av all dess galenskap. Med en suck av lättnad skrev han:

Nu är allt det där förhoppningsvis förbi […] Politiken kommer att lära oss att hysteri och idioti nu kan fördömas i de allmänna valen. Jag tror att alla nu har blivit övermätta på idiotier, vare sig de varit politiska, litterära eller bildliga.

Chirico avvek diskret från kasernen och tog tåget tillbaka till Paris. I sin frånvaro dömdes han till fängelse för desertering.

Under min tid i Paris, ensam utan min familj, fann jag hur lätt det är att i den väldiga staden förvandlas till en flâneur, någon som i egna tankar vandrar gata upp och ner; betraktar, funderar. Något som Chirico säkert ägnade sig åt och besatt som han var av bilder var han säkert som flera av sina konstnärsvänner i Montparnasse-kotteriet även inspirerad av Eugène Atgets (1857-1925) fotografier. En passionerad flâneur som ägnade sitt liv åt att i sina bilder dokumentera livet på Paris gator. I Chiricos målningar från den tiden tycks intryck från Paris och Turin blandas samman till ”metafysiska landskap”.

Aget var liksom bröderna Chirico fascinerad av de skyltdockor han såg i Paris butiksfönster.

En bild av Atget som Giorgio Chirico tycks ha fastnat alldeles speciellt inför är en skulptur av Ariadne i Versailles trädgårdar. Skulpturen av den uppvaknande Ariadne dyker därefter gång på gång upp i hans konst.

Som hos Wagner fanns det hos Chirico ledmotiv som efter att under en tid i det närmaste fullständigt ha dominerat han konst – det finns hundratals versioner av gladiatorer, mystiska bad, mannekänger, hästar vid stranden, möbler i landskap, solar kopplade till stafflier och självporträtt i olika kostymeringar – för att sedan mer sparsamt återkomma i olika sammanhang.

Ariadnemotivet kan möjligen kopplas till Chiricos nietzschedyrkan. Efter att den kretensiska prinsessan genom sitt garnnystan och förtrollade svärd hjälpt Theseus att döda Minotauren och ta sig ut ur Knossos labyrint förde han henne på sitt skepp på väg Athen, men övergav henne sovande på ön Naxos, guden Dionysos hemvist. Guden väckte den övergivna Ariadne, gifte sig med henne och gjorde henne till en odödlig gudinna. Det skulle inte förvåna mig om Chirico identifierade sig med Ariadne. Hans fantasi och skaparkraft hade väckts till liv av Nietzsche som hyllat Dionysos som  berusningens och naturförhärligandets gudom, herre över intuition, existensens helhet, gränsupplösning och passionerad konst – med andra ord sådant som Chirico benämnde Metafysik. Den grekisktalande Chirico var väl förtrogen med Aristoteles som skapat begreppet ta meta ta phisca, ”verket efter fysiken”, som om han tänkt sig Metafysiken som ett bok som i ett imaginärt bibliotek hade katalogiserats strax efter han eget stora verk Phusike akroasis, Föreläsningar om Naturen – alltså en följd av hans fysikaliska undersökningar och därmed även överlägset dem. Metafysik söker kunskap om Naturens inre mening och funktion, sådant som Chirico sökte i sin konst.

Giorgio bosatte sig med modern Gemma mellan Boulevard Raspail och Boulevard Montparnasse, i en lägenhet mellan Apollinaires tidningsredaktion och bostad. Den originelle poeten och public relations geniet imponerades av de unga konstnärerna, som liksom han räknade med ett komplicerat, internationellt och aristokratiskt förflutet. Alberto Savinio beskrevs av poeten som ”en poet, musiker, målare och pjäsförfattare som genom allt detta minner om den toskanska Renässansens mångfacetterade genier”. Han hyllade även den tjugofyraårige brodern Giorgios konst som en påtaglig manifestation av tillvarons ”metafysiska verklighet” och satte honom i kontakt med den lika entusiasmerade konsthandlaren Paul Guillaume.

Apollinaire uppfattade Giorgio Chiricos konst inte som måleri utan som ett ”skapande av drömmar”. Genom sina i det närmaste oändliga rader med kolonnader och fasader, sina utsträckta raka linjer, fält av oblandade färger och nästan begravningsmässiga kontraster mellan mörker och ljus, lyckades Chirico enligt Apollinaire uttrycka känslor av storhet, ensamhet och orörlighet, präglade av den ”stasis” som vissa ”minnestillstånd” åstadkommer strax innan vi somnar.

Liksom drömmar skapas Chiricos metafysiska målningar i allmänhet genom sådant han sett och upplevt, fast förändrat, förvridet. Ibland låter han sig inspireras av olika konstverk. Eftersom det främst är strukturen, eller enstaka detaljer, han använder sig av är det hos honom, till skillnad från Picassos versioner av andra konstnärers verk, svårt att identifiera hans förlagor. Jämför hans exempelvis han Italiensk piazza från 1938 med Giovanni Migliaras avbildning av Sankt Ambrosius basilika i Milano, målad 1822. Inte vet jag om de har något samband, det är dock möjligt att Chirico sett Migliaras målning i Neue Pinakohtek i München och sedan ”moderniserat” den.

Giorgio Chirico tyckte sig ha funnit en like i den åtta år äldre Apollinaire, en man som likt honom hade ”insjuknat i den universella melankolins heta bad”. Ett märkligt ”porträtt” av Apollinaire som Chirico målade 1914 är fyllt med associationer som poeten väckt hos honom. Här låter Chirico en bild av sin vän och mentor förvandlas till något bortom det vardagliga och till sin egen förvåning åstadkom Chirico genom ”intuition” ett verk som visade sig vara profetiskt.

Giorgio tog som utgångspunkt i ett collage som Andrea gjort och i vilket han klistrat en silhuettbild av Apollinaire. Giorgio målade av silhuetten och målade en cirkel vid Apollinaires tinning varigenom skuggestalten förvandlades till en skottavla; symbol för den kritik poeten fick utstå som förgrundsgestalt för den parisiska avantgardismen.

Att den ”reelle” Guillame Apollinaire blivit en skuggfigur berode på att Chirco avsåg att framställa en ”filosofiskt estetisk” bild av poeten, vars namn betyder ”välsignad av Apollo”. Det är ett ”metafysiskt” porträtt som framställer ”sångarens inre och mening”. I förgrunden representeras Apollinaire av en byst av Orfeus, Apollos son. Orfeus var följeslagare till argonauterna, Antikens heroiska äventyrare, bland vilka tvillingarna Castor och Pollux befann sig. De stod under Orfeus beskydd, den gudabenådade poeten som under färden över haven genom sin sång fick fiskar att lyfta sina huvuden ur vågorna för att lyssna, två av dem förvandlades genom gudarnas försorg till ackompanjerande musiker.

Bysten av Orfeus befinner sig i mörker och bär svarta glasögon, en antydan om att Apollinaire likt Antikens Homeros och Tiresias är en siare. Dessa poeter var även profeter, som trots sin blindhet klarsynt kunde blicka in i djupet av sina egna själar. Det svarta mörkret kring Orfeus minner även om hans färd ner i Hades för att där hämta sin musa och älskade, Eurydike. Om så är fallet kan de svarta glasögonen anspela på att Orfeus under sin färd upp ur Underjorden var förbjuden att betrakta sin älskade.

Snäckan bakom Orefus anspelar på medeltidens sökare och pilgrimer, som på sina mantlar bar en snäcka som särtecken, den kan även anspela på Orfeus lyra, som efter det att han slitits i stycken av Dionysos menader bar hans fortsatt sjungande huvud till ön Lesbos.

Fisken minner om Orfeus äventyr tillsammans med dioskurerna, men också om Apollinaires diktsamling Le Bestiaire: Cortège d'Orphée som han skrev 1913. I den finns en dikt om karpen:

I era fisktankar, i era dammar,

karpar, hur länge ni lever!

Det är som om döden glömt er,

Melankolins fiskar.

Men också en mångbottnad dikt om fiskarna och Jesus:

Que ton Coeur soit l'appat et le del la piscine!

Car, pecheur, quel poisson d'eau douce ou bien marine

Egale-t il, et par la forme et la saveur,

Ce beau poisson divin q u'est Jesus, Mon Sauveur?

Må ditt Hjärta vara betet och vattendammen!

Ty, fiskare, vilken fisk kan,

oavsett om den är kommen ur sött eller salt vatten,

genom form och smak [saveur] mäta sig med

den vackert gudomliga fisk som är Jesus, Min Frälsare [Sauveur]?

Genon sin ordlek anspelar Apollinaire på den fornkristna symbolen ICTHYS, grekiska för fisk, som stod för Iesous Christos Theou Yios Soter, Jesus Kristus, Guds Son, Frälsare. Dikten tolkades av såväl Apollinaire som hans akolyter som en antydan om den livsbejakelse som den nya konsten innebar, eller som Apollinaire uttryckte det – ”Orfeus välde tar sin början”.

På ett mer banalt plan associerade Apollinaire även sitt namn till vatten och fiskar. Samtidens mest populära mineralvatten var Appolinaris som fått sitt namn efter en källa som 1852 sprungit fram i Georg Kreuzbergs vingård i det tyska Bad Neunahre. Det buteljerade vattnet hade fått sitt namn av det syriska helgonet Sankt Apollinaris, som levde under det första seklet efter Kristi födelse och vars grav antogs vara belägen i Ravenna. Appolinaris var vattnets och vinets skyddshelgon och dyrkades även som en hjälpare vid veneriska sjukdomar. Sambanden är oklara, men kan bland annat komma sig av att Sankt Apollinaris under sitt martyrskap fick kokande vatten hällt i sina öppna sår.

Till Chiricos egen förskräckelse visade sig hans porträtt vara profetiskt. Med motiveringen att ”en poet måste ta risker” anmälde sig Apollinaire under Första världskriget till ”frivillig fronttjänst”och skadades den 17:e mars 1916 av granatsplitter i vänster tinning. Han led av svimningsanfall och partiell paralys av vänster kroppssida, men tillståndet förbättrades då läkare två månader efter skadan borrade ett hål i skallen för att lätta på trycket. Hålet borrades på exakt samma ställe som Chirico två år tidigare markerat med en måltavla. Appolinaire överlevde sin skallskada, men dog två år senare i Spanska sjukan.

Samma år som han skapade sitt porträtt av Apollinaire hade Giorgio de Chirico målat Poetens dröm, som avbildade samma Orfeusbyst som i hans Apolliniareporträtt och även här var den i sällskap med en fisk och utstyrd men svarta glasögon, men nu målade Chirico bysten i profil. Det är den första målning i vilken han inkorporerade en av de mannekänger som under de följande åren skulle bli allt vanligare i hans konst.

Den 23:e maj 1915 deklarerade Italien krig mot Österrike-Ungern och erbjöd amnesti till tidigare ”desertörer”, om de anmälde sig som frivilliga. I Frankrike pågick masslakten i skyttegravarna för fullt och hotet från Ententen var överhängande även i Italien. Bröderna Chirico beslutade sig för att acceptera amnestin och anmälde sig till italienska armén. De bedömdes dock som ”oförmögna att uthärda krigets påfrestningar” och sändes att tjänstgöra vid sjukhuset Villa del Seminario i Ferrara. I själva verket var det ett mentalsjukhus som under under kriget blev till en samlingsplats för intellektuella och konstnärer, en del var intagna, medan andra tjänade som personal, bland de senare var Giorgio Chirico som enrollerats med korprals grad.

Tiden i Ferrara blev inspirerande för bröderna Chirico; den medeltida staden med sina stolta traditioner och konstskatter tillförde dem nya intryck och så gjorde även deras umgänge. Inte minst den tjugoårige greven Lugi Tibertelli, som kallade sig Filippo de Pisis. En originell och brådmogen yngling som redan publicerat sig som poet och hade kontakt med dadaisterna i Zürich och futuristerna i Rom. de Pisis samlade insekter och förvandlade sina rum i föräldrarnas förfallna slott till Wunderkammern med allsköns bric-a-brac, trasiga dockor, gamla böcker, mångfärgade bollar och vindsnurror, torkade blommor, fjärilar, och egenhändigt förfärdigade tavlor, som han skapat för att stimulera “flytande tankar, hypnotism och mångfärgad estetik”.

Bröderna Chirico sällade sig snart till det intellektuella kotteri som träffades i de Pisis märkliga rum. Några år senare beskrev de Pisis de nattliga samtalen:

Gripna av ett slags heligt, poetiskt raseri fördjupade de sig i det osynliga, i sådant som skulle kunna definieras som ett det omedvetnas kaos, där det enbart existerar fragment, streckade linjer, känsligt skarpa bilder som likväl är overkliga. Gökurets fågel ropade det hemlighetsfulla namnet Chirico: ”Cìrico, cìrico … cìrico, cìrico ...”

Tillsammans promenerade Giorgio och de Pisis genom Ferrara och den unge konnässören förevisade den äldre vännen vad han i en senare bok kom att kalla ”staden med hundra märkvärdigheter”. de Pisis var stolt över sin bekantskap med den redan då berömde konstnären.

Vad gjorde det att den skolade korpralen var vid min sida, skulle vilken stackars djävel som helst kunna säga, och tillägga att jag var en borgerligt klädd seminarist. […] Jag delgav min vän påtagliga idéer och han återgäldade med bilder, känslor och förnimmelser. Han sökte en bild som aldrig skådats och jag kastade fram en ny slags prosa.

I Ferrara vidareutvecklade Chirico sina marionetter och förvandlade dem till fantastiska väsen, sammansatta av en mängd geometriska figurer utskurna ur färgade plankbitar som kombinereats med linjaler, kvadranter och sönderplockade provdockor.

Eller så placerade han sina modedockshuvuden på antika skulpturer, eller arkaiska modersgudinnor, som de han i en tavla placerat på ett torg framför Ferraras Sforzafästning och fabriksskorstenar och givit namnet De oroande muserna.

Den splittrade Giorgio de Chirico sökte vid sin återkomst till Italien en förankring i tillvaron. En strävan som kan illustreras genom hans Den förlorade sonens återkomst i vilken en sammansatt, men själlös modedocka, omfamnar en far som som består av en kompakt stenskulptur. Kanske en bild av den kosmopolitiskt sammansatte Giorgio som söker en omfamning från ett förstelnat Italien, ett monument över sig själv.

Genom Chiricos påverkan utvecklades de Pisis till en allt skickligare konstnär och under senare år, då hans stil fått en helt annan karaktär än de Chiricos strikt sammansatta, konturskarpa framställningssätt, upprepade de Pisis gång på gång Chiricos motivkrets. Exempelvis hans stilleben De heliga fiskarna som Chirico målat som en hyllning till Appolinaire.

Eller Chiricos ständigt upprepade Ariadneskulptur:

Chirico fascinerades och irriterades av den översvallande Filippo de Pisis, ”tjockskallig och känslig, brinnande och mörk.” Då de Pisis hyllat såväl Chirico som hans konst i en artikel i La Gazzetta Farrarese ondgjorde sig Chirico i ett brev till den på sin tid internationellt kände essäisten och journalisten Giovanni Papini och karaktäriserade de Pisis artikel som un vrai cochonnerie, riktigt skräp. Det franska ordet cochonnerie kan även betyda ”svineri” och det är möjligt att Chirico, som liksom sin bror var osäker om sin sexuella läggning, ville frigöra sig från antydningar om hans relation till den öppet homosexuelle de Pisis som deklarerat: ”Jag älskar de vackra ungdomarna, de blomstrande, magnifika efeberna. Jag älskar yppighet och frenesi!”

I april 1917 blev Carlo Carrá intagen för ”obeservation” vid Villa del Seminario, som nu uteslutande vårdade soldater som av sina krigsupplevelser blivit mentalt skadade. Carrá hade 1910 med en grupp likasinnade grundat futurismen och liksom de hyllat rörelse, uppdriven dynamik och även i viss mån våld och tumult. En av futurismens första triumfer var Carrás målning Anarkisten Gallis begravning, som till beundran och kritik ställdes ut i Paris, London och Berlin. Angelo Galli hade blivit dödad under en storstrejk 1904. Myndigheterna som fruktade en demonstration vid begravningen vägrade begravningsföljet tillträde till kyrkogården och ett våldsamt tumult uppstod. Carrá, som var närvarande, beskrev det hela i sin självbiografi:

Jag såg framför mig hur kistan, täckt av röda nejlikor, vacklade betänkligt på pallbärarnas axlar. Jag såg hur hästarna oroades medan slag utdelades med käppar och lansar. Det tycktes mig att när som helst kunde liket falla till marken och trampas ner av hästarna ...

Likt flera av sina futuristkamrater anslöt sig Carrá entusiastiskt till krigets frivilliga soldater, men drabbades kort därefter av ett nervöst sammanbrott och hamnade då bland de krigsskadade i Villa del Seminario, där han under sina fyra månaders bekantskap med konstnärskretsen kring Giorgio Chirico fullständigt ändrade sin stil och under påverkan av deras spekulationer kring ”tingens inre natur” började liksom de avbilda mannekänger, leksaker, kartor och mätinstrument.

Alberto Savinio kallades vid krigets slutskede in som tolk vid den ”makedoniska fronten” och då han återkommit till Italien etablerade han sig som teaterregissör i Rom. Redan efter sin succé i Paris 1914 hade han lämnat musiken därhän och ägnade sig nu uteslutande åt skriveri, teater och konst. Märkligt nog var Savinio rädd för sin musikaliska talang. Han betraktade musiken som en överväldigande, okänd kraft kapabel att förgöra sina utövare:

Den enda möjliga definitionen av musik är det Omöjliga att veta – musikens obestämbarhet är dess drivkraft, hemligheten bakom dess fascination. […] En tid skall komma då detta Märkliga Ting hämnas. En tid skall komma då detta Märkliga Ting bryter sönder sina bojor och återupptäcker sin vilda frihet. Vi lyser varje kväll upp våra hus med elektricitet, men en kväll tände min vän Lorenzo Viano sin sovrumslampa och föll dödligt elchockad till golvet: det var elektricitetens hämnd. Tusentals och åter tusentals människor “leker” med musik, urvattnar den [...] men en dag kommer musiken att bredvid den unge dirigenten uppenbara sig som en lång, spindellik skugga, den kommer att gripa honom vid strupen och slunga honom från dirigentpallen. Det blir det Märkliga Tingets hämnd.

Efter ett uppehåll på tjugo år återvände dock Alberto Savinio till musiken då han 1925 komponerade en balett som uruppfördes i Rom. Giorgio och modern Gemma hade 1918 förenat sig med Alberto Savinio i Rom och efter att ha genomgått en av sina regelbundet återkommande nervösa kriser tog sig Giorgios konst en ny vändning. Påverkad av Böcklin och Poussin började han måla i ”klassisk stil” och åstadkom bland annat flera suggestiva scenerier som i en drömlikt, ”litterär” anda skildrade den antika historiens närvaro i det italienska landskapet.

En konst som inte alls imponerade hans vänner inom avantgardet och då han 1925 följde brodern till Paris återgick han till att måla sina mannekänger, som nu istället för geometriska strukturer sammanfogats av antika ruiner. Antagligen påverkades Chirico av sin nya förälskelse, den ryska ballerinan Raissa Guerivich Kroll, som lämnatteatervärlden för att utbilda sig till arkeolog och sedermera kom att bli aktiv i utgrävningarna av den antika hamnstaden Ostia utanför Rom. Savinios son, Ruggero, har beskrivit henne:

De träffades under föreställningen av en balett som min far skrivit musiken till ... Niobes död. Raisa dansade huvudrollen och min farbror blev kär i henne. En tid blev hon hans modell och de hade snart gift sig. Under fem år vistades de mestadels i Paris. […] Hon tillhörde den lilla grupp kvinnor som i början av 1900-talet hade agerat med extrem frihet, såväl intellektuellt som i sitt sätt att klä sig […] Jag minns henne som en mycket humoristisk dam som även då hon blivit gammal och fattig inte hade förlorat något av sin förföriska charm. Vid en lunch slutade ett samtal, jag kommer inte ihåg hur, med ett omnämnande av Kerensky, som innan Lenin tog makten förestått den provisoriska regeringen i Ryssland. Och jag frågade då Raisa, som talat om honom som om hon hade sett honom dagen innan … men, är han inte död? Hon svarade då: ”Inte alls. Han bor i New York och vi talar ofta med varandra. Jag hade en liten men intensiv kärleksaffär med honom.” Hon var en fantastisk kvinna.

Under sin tid i Paris började Chirico, förutom sina arkeologer måla en mängd Möbler i landskap. Ett resultat av hans ständiga promenader i den franska huvudstaden, där han i samma kvarter där jag ofta brukade hålla till då jag bodde i Paris fick se:

på trottoaren framför en begagnad möbelbutik soffor, stolar, garderober och bord som ställts upp på trottoaren. Att finna dem där, avlägsnade från denheliga plats där människan alltid sökt sin vila, den vistelseort som var och en av oss kallar ”hem” – väckte tankar och känslor från min tidiga barndom; allvarliga, tragiska, till och med mystiska minnen.

Att möbler i sig innefattar hela liv har ofta slagit mig och inte minst min yngsta dotter som ofta blir mycket upprörd om vi slänger, eller till och med flyttar om gamla möbler i vårt hem i Bjärnum.

Liksom Magritte, som skrivit att hans första konfrontation med Chiricos konst var en livsförändrande chock, anspelar Chirico ofta på rummens och möblernas inneboende liv, gång på gång låter han det yttre landskapet tränga sig in i lägenheter, och tvärtom.

I slutet av tjugotalet, med dess ekonomiska depression och politiska oro genomgick Chirco på nytt en djup kris som han försökte ta sig ur genom att skriva sin märkliga roman Hebdomeros. I samband med detta träffade han tjeckiskan Isabella Pakszwer, som arbetade på ett modehus i Paris. Han blev djupt förälskad och hon slukade honom med hull och hår. Under återstoden av sitt liv vistades han helt i hennes skugga. Hans dåvarande hustru Raissa kom aldrig över chocken hon fick då Chirico lämnade henne för Isabella. I en intervju hon gav vid Chiricos död 1978, hon dog året därefter, luftade hon sin bitterhet:

”Det var ett skallskott” konstaterade hon leende, medan hon höll sin älskade, beiga hund i knäet. ”Hon förförde ett geni. Ett liv av förödmjukelser och svårigheter måste hos den vackra polska kvinnan ha skapat en anmärkningsvärd repertoar av otukt. Efter att ha grälat med ett dussintal kritiker som definierat honom, konstnärligt sett, som ett levande lik, fann de Chirico i Isa Far ett redskap instrument för sin hämnd. Min man förklarade för damen ifråga att han begått många misstag i sitt liv och hon sa sig vara redo att frälsa honom. Han började snart skildra henne som en galning och sedan kom de första misstankarna, oenigheterna. Förhållandet kraschade vid mitten av 60-talet då Isa blev galet avundsjuk på en annan kvinna som de Chirico blivit förälskad i.”

Raissa var inte ensam om att tycka illa om den sprött vackra Isabella som en av Chircos biografer beskrev som en kvinna som varken varken var intresserad av män eller av Chirico som man, utan som någon vars ryktbarhet hon kunde slå mynt av. Vad Isabella erbjöd honom var en ”fasad av solid borgerlighet” bakom vilken Chiroco kunde dölja sin nervositet och dåliga självförtroende. Isabella lyckades ta på sig den auktoritära modersrollen och därmedd rycka upp Chiricos ”såriga modersbundenhet med rötterna”. Giorgios älskade bror kände att han på bekostnad av Isabellas dominans höll på att tappa greppet om sin bror och skrev i en artikel om den mängd självporträtt i olika förklädnader som Girogio börjat producera på löpande band.

På senare år målar Giorgio de Chirico sig själv som förklädd. Vilken psykisk förändring är dessa förklädnader ett tecken på?

Vänner och bekanta beskrev hur Isabella hunsade den servilt underdånige Chirico:

Igår kväll, efter middagen, gick jag över för att träffa de Chirico; mästaren satt i en fåtölj och bläddrade i ett exemplar av Hebdomeros, hans roman som han själv översatt och publicerat på italienska: ”Min bok är vacker och ibland läser jag om den som som om den skrivits av en annan person.” Men, hans hustru fräste åt honom: ”Dina Hebdomeros! Jag är trött på att ha dem i garderoberna. Jag har inget utrymme. I femton års tid har du fyllt mina garderober med dina Hebdomeros, om du inte omedelbart gör dig av med dem, slänger jag dem imorgon!”

Under sin kris vid tjugotalets slut gick Chirico upp i den gestalt han i Nietzsches efterföljd skapade som sitt litterära ego. Hebdomeros är en man som sedan sin sorgliga barndom hängivit sig åt en gränslös nostalgi för det förflutna. Hans största dröm var att segla bort mot avlägsna horisonter för att bortom dem finna öar ”med tempel byggda vid foten av gästvänliga berg” som förmådde göra världen såväl nära som okänd. En man som ville lära sin samtid det svåra spelet att vända tiden ut och in och bland de enklaste föremål finna hur ett sådant företag vore möjligt.

Under sin samvaro med Isabella Pakszwer skapade Chirico en annan litterär gestalt – Herr Dudron. En ängslig man, rädd för känslor, sjukdomar, och katastrofer söker han sig till slutna rum där han kunde dra för gardinerna, stänga ute verkligheten och stiga in i sin inre fantasi. Mängden av manuskript till en oavslutad roman om Herr Dudron blev till ett introspektivt självporträtt av minnen, tankar, anekdoter och små berättelser. De skrevs i olika faser av trettio- och fyrtiotalen, en del avsnitt gav Chirico bort, andra försvann.

Efter 1945 dyker Isabella Far upp som en ny karaktär i berättelsen, det blev till en pseudonym för Isabella Pakszwer som han efter femton år av samvaro gifte sig med 1946. I Herr Dudron blir Isabella Far en intelligent lärarinna och inspirerande musa som på Herr Dudrons begäran håller långa tal om måleriets dekadens. Då Isabella Pakszwer skrev om konst, något hon ägnade sig åt under fyrtiotiotalet, använde hon sig av pseudonymen Isabella Far.

Alberto Savinios död 1952 blev ett mycket hårt slag för Chirico, som sedan dess till hans åminnelse alltid bar svart slips då han vistades utomhus. Sextiotalet blir för Chirico en tragikomisk fars. Varje dag målade han flitigt i sin studio, eller tillbringade timmar sittande framför en TV med nerskruvat ljud. Samtidigt prånglade han och hustrun ut en mängd nygjorda målningar som var kopior från den marknadsmässigt värdefullaste tiden av hans konstnärskap, d.v.s. tiden fram till 1920. Han signerade även villigt diverse förfalskningar gjorda av andra konstnärer.

Situationen komplicerades av Chiricos allt bittrare attacker mot tidigare allierade – speciellt André Breton och hans surrealistvänner som betraktade Chirco som en förrädare efter det att han inlett sin ”klassiska period”. Han skrev allt fränare angrepp på varje form av ”modern konst”. Som en motstrategi försökte en del surrealister dränka marknaden med falska ”Chiricos”. Speciellt framgångsrik blev den versatile, spanske konstnären Óscar Dominguez. En av hans förfalskningar var under flera år utställd på Musée National d’Art Moderne i Paris som ett original av Giorgio de Chirico.

Slutligen blev det nästan omöjligt att orientera sig i härvan av sanna, falska och falskskyltade verk. En galenskap som skickligt och i det närmaste lekfullt manipulerades av Chirico, medan hans hustru inte gjorde någonting för att skingra dimmorna, i själva verket var det många som anklagade henne för eländet, alltmedan Chirico blev alltmer folkskygg. Sågs han i offentligheten antog han i allmänhet en ironiskt distansierad ton. Det kunde tyckas som om han axlat en clownroll som hans gode vän från den första paristiden, Ardengo Soffici, beskrivit:

Clownen är personifikation av friheten, en upptäckare av nymodigheter, en slags demon som för egen räkning skapar en värld som ett substitut för den som vi lever i, en värld gjord av underverk.

Elaka tungor hävdade att Chircos attityd var ”en senil instinkt av självförsvar”. Att han skylde över en smygande demens genom att kommunicera sig med hjälp av skämt och paradoxer. Han ställde upp för en och annan intervju och lät RAI göra en entimmesprogram av honom målande en av sina flerfaldiga Sol på staffli alltmedan han enstavigt på intervjuarens frågor, utan att berätta någonting eller avslöja något om sig själv och sina känslor. Jag fick inte uppfattningen av att det rörde sig om en gammal senil gubbe, snarare någon som dolde sig bakom en tämligen intetsägande fasad.

Isabella kontrollerade honom. Den enda befrielse Chirico fann var att varje dag arbeta vid sitt staffli, ägna sig åt sina skulpturer och därefter gå ner runt hörnet till Café Greco där han ensam kunde bli sittande flera timmar i sträck med en aperitif framför sig. Varje dag skapade han något, det kunde röra sig om kristna motiv i murriga färger:

lätt förändrade variationer av sina metafysiska verk:

eller naiva, grovt tecknade versioner av hur solens strålkraft genom sladdar förs ner till jorden, där den förvandlades till en död, spindellik skugga,

slocknade på himlen,

och  gav värme åt vårt inre, eller i hemmets öppna spis.

Uppenbarligen inspirerades Chirco av alkemistiska spekulationer, kanske framför allt av de fantastiska illustrationerna i Salomon Trismosins Splendor Solis från 1582.

Han övervakade även avgjutningar av sina alltmer talrika skulpturer.

Giorgio Chirico var verksam till den yttersta dagen av sitt liv. Den sista tiden var han fascinerad av Michelangelos konst.

Vid sin död efterlämnade han på stafflit början till en kopia av Michelangelos Tondo Dono.

Inget av detta ger på mig intryck av den demens som många påstod att han led av, inte minst Isabella Pakszwer, som 1966 fick maken omyndighetsförklarad på grund av ”begränsat vett och vilja” och hon blev därmed ensam förvaltare av de Chiricos stora förmögenhet, samt makens konstproduktion. Det kan visserligen ha rört sig om ett knep för att undvika de juridiska problem som uppkommit genom klagomål och anmälningar baserade på förfalskade äkthetsintyg, försäljningen av kopior som original, samt en mängd annat konsthandelsfiffel. Klart är dock att hustruns åtgärd främst förorsakades av upptäckten och offentliggörandet av inte mindre än femhundra brev som Chirico sänt till den unga hustrun till en högt uppsatt politiker, till vilken den berömde konstnären hyste en platonsk kärlek.

Allt detta hindrade inte att han på sin ålders höst uppriktigt hyllades av en mängd konstnärer. Exempelvis ägnades han på två stora målningar av sin landsman Renato Guttoso, i vilka denne avbildade Giorgio vid sin eftermiddagsaperitif på Café Greco. Chirco sitter vid ett bord och betraktar vimlet omkring sig.

På den största målningen sitter den åldrade mästaren och samtalar med en yngre upplaga av sig själv, utstyrd i en antik, grekisk himation. På ett fat på bordet framför sig har Chirico och hans dubbelgångare några av de kex som förekommer på flera av hans målningar från Ferrara.

Chirico tycks snegla mot Orfeus som sitter vid ett bord längre in i lokalen, marmorvit och med svarta glasögon.

En annan modern mästare som fängslades av Chiricos konst var Andy Warhol, liksom Chirico en outsider mitt i världen, en gåtfull ensling och innovatör med en voyeurs kyliga blick på världen. De två konstnärerna träffades i Washington 1974 hemma hos den italienske ambassadören där de två primadonnorna, konstens heliga och ytterst udda monster, fann varandra med en gång och poserade tillsammans på ett märkligt fotografi. Protagonisternas poser; Chirico som med ett glas i handen ser ut som en demon, alltmedan Warhol låtsas vara skräckslagen, kan tyckas vara hämtade ur en gammal skräckfilm.

Förutom sitt outsiderskap hade de båda mycket annat gemensamt, inte minst en extrem modersbundenhet. Sedan 1951 bodde Warhol för det mesta tillsammans med sin mor Julia, som liksom Chiricos mor tidigt blev änka. Julia var liksom Gemma konstnärligt begåvad och gjorde ofta teckningar med kattor och religiösa motiv.

Efter sin död 1978 började Chiricos tidigare av konnässörerna så föraktade senare konst att livligt uppskattas av yngre, tongivande konstnärer som Sandro Chia, Francesco Clemente, Eric Fischl och Julian Schnabel. Då Warhol 1982 besökte New Yorks Modern Museum of Arts retrospektiva Chiricoutställning blev han betagen. Förutom konsten i sig fascinerades den skandalintresserade Warhol av Chircos ”förfalskningar” av sina egna konstverk. Då Warhol efter att ha införskaffat utställningskatalogen fann ett uppslag med Chiricos arton i det närmaste identiska versioner av sitt mästerverk De oroande muserna kände Warhol igen sina egna serier med Coca Cola- och Campbellburkar. I en en intervju uttryckte han sin odelade beundran:

Är de där muserna inte enastående? Hur kunde han repetera samma bild? Projicerade han dem på en vägg? Kanske han delade in målarduken i sektioner? Han kan inte ha använt silkscreen.

Innan årets slut hade Warhol producerat tjugotre seriemålningar baserade på sex metafysiska målningar av Chirico.

Tillbaka till Chiricos Mystiska bad. Hans metafysiska tankegångar gick ut på att det bakom varje föremål finns ett liv. Givetvis gällde det även hans målningar. Anledningen till att jag började skriva om Chiricos bad var att jag tillsammans med min yngsta dotter, som är arkeolog och nu skriver om vattnets roll i antik egyptisk religion – om Nilens avgörande betydelse, om hur dess vatten hälldes över offerbord för att ge näring åt de döda och hur det i dammar förvarades för rituell rening och som källa till fruktbarhet.

Då jag tittade närmare på bilder av egyptiska framställningar av vatten upptäckte jag samma sicksackmönster som vattnet i Chiricos badvatten. Säkerligen finns ett samband. Chirico var en ivrig läsare av konstböcker, men han påstod att mönstret uppkom inte uppkommit genom betraktandet av egyptisk konst, utan att det härrörde från ett minne som visar på Chiricos ”barnsliga” sätt att betrakta världen, det vill säga att se ting som delar av ett underliggande äventyr, en möjlighet.

Då jag var barn lekte jag ofta att mattor var öar och golvet hav emellan dem. Jag satt på en matta som Robinson Crusoe på sin ö, eller hoppade mellan dem som Hjortfot på tuvorna i ett träsk. Liknande associationer fick Chirico då han på ett cocktailparty kom att betrakta det välputsade parkettgolvet och såg hur damernas högklackade skor speglade sig i det. Som så ofta förr fascinerades han av tinget i sig och glömde sin omgivning, sjönk in i åsynen av den speglande parketten och som om han sänkts ner i ett varmt bad föddes tanken på de Mystiska baden.

Fem år före sin död bjöds Chirico in till en konstutställning i Milano och man bad honom då att göra en fontän vid éntren till palatset där evenemanget ägde rum. Han skapade fontänen som ett Mystiskt bad, med en omklädningskabin, en badboll, leksakssvan och nakna badgäster.

Vid sidan om bassängen placerade han en stor, mångfärgad fisk. Då Chirico blev tillfrågad varför fisken var på land svarade han: ”Det är jag. Jag har alltid varit utanför. En betraktare.”

Apollinaire, Guillaume (2017) Le Bestiaire: Cortège d'Orphée. Paris: Prairial. Baldacci, Paolo (2018) ”De Chirico”, Art e Dossier, No. 354. Carrá, Carlo (2011) La mia vita. Milano: Abscondita. Chirico, Giorgio de (1964) Memories. London: Da Capo Press. Chirico, Giorgio de (1992) Hebdomeros, with Monsieur Dudron´s Adventure and and Other Metaphysical Writings. Cambridge: Exact Change. Chirico, Girogio de och Isabella Far (2002) Comedia dell´arte moderna. Milano: Abscondita. Dell'Arco, Maurizio Fagiolo (ed.) (1982) De Chirico: Essays. New York: The Museum of Modern Art. Jona, Alberto (1991) ”Savinio and the Impossible to Know,” inlägg i Alberto Savinio: Le Chants de la mi-mort, Album 1914. Milano: Stradivarius. Garbesi, Marina (1990) ”Isa, Musa e Manager”, La Repubblica, 21 Novembre. Gnoli, Antonio (2014) ”Ruggero Savinio: Io,’figlio di’ e ’nipote di’ ho ereditato le loro osssesioni”, La Repubblica, 31 Agosto. Lista, Giovanni (2009) Giorgio De Chirico suivi de L’ Art métaphysique. Paris: Éditions Hazan. Mori. Gioia (2006) De Chirico. Milano: Il Giornale. Mori. Gioia (2007) ”De Chirico Metafisco”, Art e Dossier, No. 230. Oliva, Achille Bonito (ed.) (2010) La natura secondo de Chirico. Milano: Federico Motta Editore. Salvagini, Sileno (2006) ”De Pisis”, Art e Dossier, No. 219. Vivarelli, Pia (2003) ”Savinio”, Art e Dossier, No. 185.

In Roman religion and art, Genius Loci, Spirit of Place, could occasionally be depicted as a youth holding a cornucopia, a large, hollow buckhorn filled to the brim with fruits, flowers, coins and other richesm an abundance of what you might possibly crave for.

It does not surprise me that the idea of a cornucopia in the hands of a Spirit of Place originated in Italy, a country that has given rise to delicious food, good wines and where every village, every part of its varied landscape, harbour secrets and surprises from every conceivable age.

Although COVID-19 was still raging unchecked across the country on the ninth of August last year, Rose and I could not refrain from accepting our friend Ghassan’s offer to spend a day in Perugia with him and his family. Ghassan is attached to the city because it was where he studied medicine when he more than forty years ago arrived in Italy from Beirut. Like several other Italian towns, Perugia has a well-established and respected university, which in its case was founded as early as 1308.

Perugia has a long and complicated history. The first settlements on the hill where it is located date from 1000 BCE and 600 years later it had become a walled city, one of the twelve lucumonie, city states, of the Etruscans.

As part of his travelogue Pictures from Italy Charles Dickens did in 1846 describe Perugia. It is a strange and uneven book in which Dickens seems to picture Italy as seen within a dream – an enchanted landscape as if projected through a Laterna Magica. The highlight is his Venetian visit, though there are several other observations that remain in memory. Dickens seems to be incessantly fascinated by violent contrasts and seem to be aunable to absorb the vast amount of impressions that shower him:

things that are picturesque, ugly, mean, magnificent, delightful, and offensive, break upon the view of every turn.

Impressions are mounting upon Dickens, filling his brain and all too often he seems to be confused by the crowds and an unfathomable diversity. Travelling through the country his depictions occasionally appear to turn into a carousel of experiences spinning round at a breakneck speed – incomparable buildings, exquisite art, fascinating processions, stately fairs, soothing landscapes, glowing sunsets, abysmal chasms down into history, small, smoky osterias with delicious food, opulent feasts in palaces of aristocrats and religious potentates, all mixed up with dirt, poverty, beggars, lousy hotel rooms, the chiming of church bells, the odour of incense and filth.

The socially conscious author is alarmed by injustices that to him seem to be even worse than in England, more hopelessly confused and incomprehensible here than in his homeland. Dickens walks and walks, looks around, thinks and thinks, but there is no order to it all – the visual opulence, the mixture of aesthetic sophistication and grotesque tastelessness, sensitivity and meanness, deep knowledge and astonishing superficiality. Abundance and abject poverty coexist side aside innovation and decay. Dickens’s depictions are coloured by incomprehensible contrasts and constant, albeit varied, repetitions, whether it be Genoa, Rome, or, as here, Naples, a city of:

Polcinelli and pickpockets, buffo singers and beggars, rags, puppets, flowers, brightness, dirt, and then universal degradation.

Of course, we are now living in other times, globalization has made everything increasingly uniform. The modern, well-developed Italy I now live in is completely different from the poor, run-down and disease-stricken country that Dickens visited, but somehow I recognize myself in the contrast between chaos and liveliness. I am familiar with the sudden calm that engulfed Dickens after walking through Rome's crowded tourist lanes only to end up within the tranquillity of deserted, narrow alleys between crumbling, old buildings, or in abandoned, unkempt parks secluded in the middle of the city's bustle. I might then be overtaken by the mystique of Rome’s “dark spots” where moonlight illuminates stately pine trees and overgrown ruins and might with the long ago deceased Dickens share a feeling of what he called a “tremendous solitude” and above all an insight that the present is a result of the past, that history is part of our current existence.

After visiting a number of towns and villages on his way down to Naples, Dickens hurries after his descriptions of that city up to the north. It seems as if he now is eager to leave the country behind and his portrayal of, for example, Florence becomes strangely sketchy. Arriving in Perugia, he is impressed by the colourful spectacle during a market day and the light that rests over the ancient city:

Perugia, strongly fortified by art and nature, on a lofty eminence, rising abruptly from the plain where purple mountains mingle with the distant sky, is glowing, on its market-day, with radiant colours.

The light and liveliness that struck Dickens seems to linger. Perugia’s dreamy atmosphere is emphasized already upon arrival. After finding a parking space during complicated tours around the foot of the city height, you enter one of the mysterious caves leading up to the city centre by means of stairs, halls and high arched corridors. After wandering through these vaults you step out into dazzling sunshine, finding yourself surrounded by stately Medieval and Renaissance buildings lining marble-covered streets, on which people quietly stroll along.

One of the city's treasures is its Palazzo del Priori. Like so many other Italian cities, fighting broke out in and around Perugia – popes, emperors and surrounding princely houses conquered and lost the city. At the same time, its bourgeoisie grew in importance and influence. Craftsmen, prelates and bankers formed interest groups and during the Middle Ages representatives of Perugia’s various craft guilds became the city´s actual rulers. Conquerors came and went, but it was the guilds that, through their Magistratura dei Priori, the Parish Leaders’ Court, ruled and administered the city. Each of the city´s forty guilds and parishes elected ten representatives each, who lived in the city hall for two months, until they were replaced by a new group of decision-makers.

The Palazzo del Priori now houses the Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria, an exquisite newly renovated art museum, filled with astonishing treasures. While waiting for Ghassan and his family, Rose and I visited the museum again (we had been there before). Like the suggestive, underground passages leading up to the city centre, the halls of Perugia´s art museum, with one exquisite masterpiece after another, lead to an incomparable point of light – Piero della Francesca's St. Antonio's Polyptych, which he between 1467 and 1468 painted for the church of a Franciscan women monastery.

St. Antonio is Padua's patron saint. However, as a devout Franciscan he had of course contacts with Assisi near Perugia; birthplace of Saint Francis and headquarters of the Franciscan Order. As a young man, Saint Francis was after a revolt against Perugia for a year kept as a prisoner of war in the city’s dungeons, an experience that eventually led to his “conversion” three years later.

Undoubtedly, St. Antonio di Padova (1195-1231) is, after the in my opinion incomprehensibly popular St. Pio da Pietrelcina (1887-1965), Italy's most beloved saint. Although he was canonized a year after his death and even by then enjoyed an intense cult dedicated to him, it was not until a few hundred years later that St. Antonio became even more popular. This happened after the spreading of a myth that the saint, while reading Matthew’s account of the birth of Jesus, became so inspired that he imagined the baby Jesus so intensely that he found the Bible he was holding in his hand had been converted into a child. It then became common for artists to depict St. Antonio with the baby Jesus in his arms and thus he became children’s special patron saint. Mothers pray to him to heal their sick children and orphaned, or abused, children seek his protection.

When Piero della Francesca painted St. Antonio next to the enthroned Madonna, he was not, as in later representations, a dreamy, young man with a child in his arms, though a robust monk holding a heavy book. St. Antonio was a learned man, a trained theologian and skilled preacher who contributed to the Franciscans’ more academic orientation.

Although St. Francis early on was inspired by Provençal troubadours and was a gifted poet, he hesitated to recommend in-depth theological studies to the members of his newly established monastic order. St. Francis feared that studies would lead to a lack of commitment when it came to selflessly serving others and living in poverty. However, when he met the thirteen years younger Antonio, St. Francis found a soulmate who shared his vision of a company of self-sacrificing, pious and poor men and women willing to dedicate their lives to helping others. Antonio was already known as a brilliant preacher and at that time a person endowed with the divine gift of eloquent speech could attract large crowds. Like today’s rock artists preachers like Antonio travelled around the country. In 1224, St. Francis entrusted the planning for the education of all brethren to Antonio – hence the heavy book in his hands, and he became instrumental for a rising reputation of the Franciscans as both learned and popular preachers.

Speaking of St. Antonio’s preaching talents, I cannot avoid mentioning a painting I once saw in Zürich. Legend has it that when Antonio came to Rimini people did not want to listen to his talk about compassion with the poor and sharing wealth, but booed him out. Disappointed, Antonio went down to the sea shore and began to spread his message across the water. While he was speaking, a crowd of fish gathered and stuck their heads out of the sea to listen. On the Swiss Arnold Böcklin's painting from 1892, a shark listens attentively to St. Antonio, only to return to its usual predatory behaviour shortly afterwards.

Piero della Francesca, like the much later Böcklin, also had his curious whims. An unexpected detail in his portrait of St. Antonio in Perugia is the depiction of how the saint’s tonsure is reflected in his polished halo.

In parentheses, Piero della Francesca was a master at reproducing such barely noticeable, extremely subtle details. A marvellous example is the small grains of dust swirling in the sunshine behind an angel in his Madonna di Senigallia.

As when you trhough Perugia's underground passages ascend from darkness to light, della Francesca's polyptych appear as a kind of journey from darkness to light, from night to dawn. Your gaze rises from the predella, which at the bottom left shows an episode from St. Antonio’s life, when he through prayer rises a child from death.

On the right side of the predella, an already deceased Saint Elizabeth of Hungary (1207-1231) does from her heavenly abode save a boy from drowning in a well.

Elizabeth, who also is presented next to St. Francis on the right side of the enthroned Madonna, was a daughter of King Andreas of Hungary and she became early on widowed after the death of a Bohemian regent. She gave away her wealth to the poor, had a home built for destitute women and a hospital, something that made he into a symbol of charity and the patron saint of nurses, bakers, brides, countesses, dying children, refugees, homeless people, lace-makers and widows. Her presence on della Francesca's altarpiece, intended for a Franciscan convent, is due to the fact that St. Elizabeth became a Franciscan nun.

The predella scenes scenes with St. Antonio and St. Elisabeth appear to be more clumsily executed than the rest of the altarpiece, something that have made art connoisseurs prone to assume they were made by della Francesca´s students. However, the middle scene of the predella is so peculiar that it might have been painted by the master himself, for here we find those qualities of della Francescas’s art that the pioneer of modern art history, Bernhard Berenson, observed in 1897:

he was perhaps the first to use the effects of light for their direct tonic or subduing qualities; and finally, judged as an Illustrator, it may be questioned whether another painter has ever presented a world more complete and convincing, has ever had an idea more majestic. Or endowed things with more heroic significance.

The scene takes place within a desolate, nocturnal landscape where St. Francis obtains his stigmata through a heavenly vision of a crucified Jesus. A monk, perhaps St. Antonio, sits at a short distance from the saint with an open book on his lap and looks up at the vision of the crucified Christ, which lights up the nocturnal space. The calm with which he views the miracle makes us unsure if he really sees the same thing as St. Francis. The whole scene is engulfed in a strange stillness, entirely undramatic.

Gazing upwards we perceive how the altarpiece gradually lightens up. At the centre we find the enthroned Madonna, serious and majestic like all of della Francesca’s Virgin mothers. However, he has created even better executed virgins and children than the ones on this polyptych, something that may indicate that he also left some of the work with this central part of altarpiece to one, or two, of his disciples.

The polyptych is crowned by a miracle – the part of the assemblage that seems to have been entirely executed by Piero della Francesca himself. During a restoration a few years ago, fingerprints were found in the colour, indicating that the master had applied the wonderfully clear colours while using both fingers and brushes.

A kneeling angel, clothed in a flowing robe with the same ethereal, bluish colour as the sky from which the radiating dove of the Holy Spirit sends his fruitful bundles of light down to Mary, who while humbly affirming her fate bows her head. A crystalline clear daylight envelops the scene, which takes place not in a simple Galilean house, but in an exquisite, airy palace, which behind the celestial messnger opens onto a garden. The angel's bird wings in white and subtly nuanced light blue tones emphasize its character as a natural being. However, Mary and the angel are perfect creatures from different worlds, separated by a colonnade leading to a blue- and white shaded marble wall. Sunshine falls in, making the columns shade the floor's light pink marble floor. The room behind Mary is pitch black. As the Virgin meekly receives and accepts the angel's message and the fruit-bearing rays of God, the compact darkness behind her is maybe a premonition of the sacrificial death of her son to be.

Majestic Madonnas characterized by a self-assured tranquility is one of Piero della Francesca's hallmarks. Originating from the small town of Borgo Sansepulcro in the Upper Tiber Valley, Piero was the son of a well-to-do merchant in hides. The family also owned crops with woad, a cabbage plant from which a deep blue dye, indigo, is extracted, darker than the blued shades of della Francesca's Annunciation scene, but indigo could possibly be the origin of hues in the angel's wing and Virgin's mantle. Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574), the great biographer of Renaissance artists, mentioned that when Piero's father died his mother was pregnant with Piero, hence the name della Francesca, From Francesca. Vasari wrote that the name was given to him because his mother “brought him up and enabled him to reach the eminence to which his destiny called him.” Actually, Piero's last name was di Benedetto. According to Vasari, the artist was throughout his life deeply attached to his mother and Borgo Sansepulcro, signing his works with Opus Petri de Burgo Sci Sepulci, Work by Petri from San Sepulcro.

Piero della Francesca made several frescoes and altarpieces in his home-town. Among them an early work depicting the Madonna of Compassion, who protectively holds her indigo-coloured mantle above men and women placing their trust in her. Was Piero maybe inspired by the love he had for his protective mother?

A striking feature in the Annunciation Scene of the St. The Antonio Polytych is its centrally located colonnade with a deep, perfectly executed perspective. It cannot be ruled out that Piero created such a perspective as a reflection of the divine harmony he, like many of his contemporaries, was trying to capture trough his artistry.

When della Francesca painted his polyptych, the central perspective was a relatively new invention and had for the first time been successfully demonstrated in 1427 through Masaccio's depiction of Trinity in the Florentine church of Santa Maria Novella. According to Vasari, it was the ingenious architect Filippo Brunelleschi (1379-1446) who was behind this revolutionary fresco:

Filippo took special pains to teach the young painter Masaccio, who was a close friend of his and who did his teacher credit.

According to the all-knowing Vasari, the universal genius Filippo Brunelleschi did between 1415 and 1420 execute a series of painting experiments in accordance with his mathematical calculations. These paintings have now been lost, though Masaccio's fresco in Santa Maria Novella is considered to be the first completely successful result, on a large scale, of Brunelleschi's theories and instructions.

If Brunelleschi can be considered as the inventor of the central perspective, it was his friend and disciple Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472) who came to provide his master's theories with an orderly and pedagogically perfect form, mainly through his influential writings De Pictura, On Painting, from 1435 and De re aedificatoria, About architecture, from 1452. Alberti was one of those intellectual and incredibly talented monsters who were produced by the Renaissance – fiction writer, mathematician, painter, linguist, architect, poet, priest, philosopher and expert in cryptology and optics. In addition, according to his admiring biographer Vasari, Alberti could “leap over a standing man [and] amused himself by taming wild horses and climbing mountains.”

Leon Battista was an admirable citizen, a man of culture and friend of talented men and very open and courteous with everyone. He always lived honourably and like the gentleman he was. He spent his time finding out about the world and studying the proportions of antiquities; but above all, following his natural genius, he concentrated on writing. [...]

Now none of our modern craftsmen has known how to write about these subjects, so even though very many of them have done better work than Alberti, such has been the influence of his writings on the pens and speech of scholarly men that he is commonly believed to be superior to those who were, in fact, superior to him.

This genius was a close good friend of Piero della Francesca and together they discussed theories con cerning proportions and perspectives, while doing various mathematical calculations. Alberti actively campaigned for his friend's great talent and did for example recommended him to the ruthless but cultured condottiero, mercenary soldier, Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta and convinced a wealthy man named Luigi Bacci that Piero was the right man to decorate the apse behind the high altar in Arezzo's Cathedral. Perhaps one reason why Piero della Francesca portrayed Alberti as a trumpet blower on one of the frescoes he came to make in Arezzo.

Vasari, who was born in Arezzo and owned a house opposite the cathedral, enthusiastically described della Francesca's frescoes, which depict the story of the True Cross as it was told in Jacobus de Varagine's (1230-1298) collection of more or less imaginative Christian legends – Legenda Aurea, The Golden Legend.

In fresco after fresco, della Francesca's monumental images (in some disorder) tell how Adam dies and his sons plant a seed from the Tree of Knowledge that got stuck in his throat. How the Queen of Sheba on her way to her meeting with King Solomon crosses a bridge made of wood from the tree that had grown out of the seed in Adam's throat. On the night before the battle of Pons Milvius, a bridge over the Tiber, Emperor Constantine the Great dreams of an angel showing him the True Cross telling him “in this sign you shall win.” During the battle, Constantine holds in his hand a small cross and at this sight the whole army of his opponent, his father-in-law Augustus Maximian, retreat from the battle. Constantine's mother Helene later finds the buried True Cross, after torturing a group of Jews who knew where to find it. When the rediscovered True Cross is carried into Jerusalem, a dead man is resurrected. The Byzantine Emperor Heraclius (575-641) defeats with the help of the True Cross a pagan Persian army at Nineveh, but when he tries to carry the True Cross back into Jerusalem and celebrate his victory, he can only do so after humiliating himself and barefoot carry it between kneeling potentates. Piero della Francesca ends his picture cycle with the Annunciation (a scene not included in Varagine's story).

What now appears as quite strange is that few writers after Vasari draw any attention to the astonishing masterpieces della Francesca had created in Arezzo's Cathedral. For example, in the detailed description of Arezzo he gave in his Italian Hours from 1909, an aesthetically acute traveller like Henry James, in spite of mentioning several other paintings, does not say anything about della Francesca´s frescoes. The popular art historian Kenneth Clark found such contemptuous oversights astonishing and wrote in his appreciative monograph on Piero della Francesca that this previously so shamefully forgotten artist now finally is considered as the truly great artist he is:

quietly, inexorably, almost unobserved, Piero della Francesca has taken his place as one of the greatest artists of the fifteenth century, and thus one of the greatest artists who have ever lived. […] few of our bewildering revolutions in taste would have been more incomprehensible to the aesthetes of the nineteenth century.

Pioneers in modern art such as Cezanne and Seurat were inspired by Piero della Francesca and their admiration was somewhat later shared by the great poet Rainer Maria Rilke:

I found myself for the whole afternoon in front of Piero's frescoes ... Being alone with him was almost surreal, I was immersed in the heart of painting ... I almost felt like I was penetrating the secret of the world.

An admiration reflected in the art of several modern masters – such as Balthus, de Chirico, Casorati and Campigli. Balthus did for example make a number of copies of della Francesca frescoes and his own art indicate a wealth of influences from the great master.

Vasari describes how in the fifteenth century he could be standing in front of Piero della Francesca's Arezzo frescoes. He only had to walk across the street in front of his house to be able to admire them, and thus appreciate their, in their time, great modernity:

But above every other consideration, whether of imagination or of art, is his painting of Night, with an angel in foreshortening who is flying with his head downwards, bringing the sign of victory to Constantine, who is sleeping in a pavilion, guarded by a chamberlain and some men-at-arms who are seen dimly through the darkness of the night; and with his own light the angel illuminates the pavilion, the men-at-arms, and all the surroundings. This is done with very great thought, for Piero gives us to know in this darkness how important it is to copy things as they are and to ever take them from the true model; which he did so well that he enabled the moderns to attain, by following him, to that supreme perfection wherein art is seen in our own time.

How the presence of the past nourishes the present is ubiquitous in Italy. If I read or see something in this country, associations are constantly aroused to temps perdu, lost times. Sometime during my travels in the nineties, as so often before I bought at an airport a novel unknown to me, In the Skin of a Lion. The title was apparently an allusion to a scene in the Gilgamesh Epic. As with most of my impulsive purchases, I was attracted by the cover.

It was a strange novel. Written by the Sri Lankan-Canadian author Michael Ondaatje, it takes place in Toronto in the 1930s. At the centre is a dynamite expert, Patrick Lewis, involved in the construction of a huge bridge, a tunnel and a water treatment plant, while hanging out with millionaires, immigrants, and criminals. It is a winding story, told in an unusually dynamic language. A dense tale filled with suspense, mystery, wealth, misery and a lot of violence it depicts reality in the form of a kind of collective novel, told through a magic-realistic, personal filter. The novel undeniably provides an impression of being artfully constructed, though in a positive sense. It does not hide that it is as a desk product. With its intricate structure and a variety of coincidences and encounters across class and ethnic boundaries, the novel is nevertheless in no way a disturbing work of art. Its tempo and imaginative richness of ideas contribute to a “lyrical” atmosphere impregnating the entire story.

With equal fascination I read Ondaatje's The English Patient, which he wrote in 1992, five years after In the Skin of a Lion. The latter novel is written in the same lyrical fashion, with a similar mix of well-documented history, local knowledge and real-life individuals. A seamless mixture of the present with the past. Centuries-old history breaks into the lives of the main characters while living in a completely different age, under completely different conditions. East meets West, obviously incomprehensible coincidences take place in an environment characterized by a unique Spirit of Place.

The English Patient is not about Toronto's witches’ cauldron during the city's construction, but about Piero della Francesca's landscape – the border areas between Umbria and Tuscany and takes place during the final stages of World War II, and the North African Desert War. In the novel, characters from In the Skin of the Lion reappear; people who in that novel influenced Patrick Lewis' dramatic fate – the thief and drug addict Caravaggio and the twenty-year-old Hana. Among the prominent characters in The English Patient is also a dynamitard, the Sikh sapper Kirpal (Kip) Singh, who together with the Canadians lives in a dilapidated villa where the English patient is also cared for. He is so called because he speaks an unusually sophisticated English, though he is in fact a severely burnt Hungarian, who initially suffers from memory loss but is gradually recalling a passionate love affair, which with tragic consequences took place against the backdrop of English diaspora circles and war scenes in North African deserts.

Ondaatje describes how among the Allied troops there are historians and art connoisseurs who assist the military leadership in identifying features of the surroundings and carry out risk assessments for soldiers, locals, as well as for the landscape and its cultural heritage. Their average age is sixty years and

They spoke of towns in terms of the art in them. […] if you dug deep beneath the tank ruts, you found blood-axe and spear. Monterchi, Cortona, Urbino, Arezzo, Sansepolcro, Anghiari. At Monerchi there was the Madonna del Parto by Piero della Francesca, located in the chapel next to the town graveyard.

It is within a badly damaged villa inside this landscape that the drama between the main characters of the novel evolves:

The Villa San Girolamo, built to protect inhabitants from the flesh of the devil, had the look of a besieged fortress, the limbs of most of the statues blown off during the first days of shelling. There seemed little demarcation between house and landscape, between damaged building and the burned and shelled remnants of the earth.

The villa, which had been inhabited by Italian aristocrats and then served as the headquarters of the German war command, housed remnants of its past life; books, works of art and a still functioning gramophone.

At one point, Kip enters Arezzo's Cathedral and directs his field binoculars at Piero della Francesca's frescoes. His gaze is fixed on the Queen of Sheba's face when she is received by King Solomon. Her majestic air of beauty and serenity, as well as the quiet meeting between East and West, moved the young man. As he in rain and cold tries to follow the directions of confusing maps and orders, while wading through flooded river crossings and under the enemy's torrential storm of steel witnesses how men and equipment are being snatched away by merciless currents, the thought of the Queen of Sheba calms him. While Kip is disarming a mine, desperately pressing himself down into the mud of a river brink, his inner vision evokes the image of the serene queen:

The young Sikh sapper put his cheek against the mud and thought of the Queen of Sheba´s face, the texture of her skin. There was no comfort in this river except for his desire for her, which somehow kept him warm. He would pull the veil off her hair. He would put his right hand between her neck and olive blouse. He too was tired and sad, as the wise king and the guilty queen he had seen in Arezzo two weeks earlier.

A suggestive scene describes how Kip, at the request of one of the art historians accompanying the Eighth Army, during night on his motorcycle takes him to Arezzo's Cathedral. In its nocturnal abandonment, the interior of the cathedral presents an almost eerie vastness, smelling of cold stone and old wood. Kipp quickly and efficiently rigs up hoists and ropes, thus making it possible to raise the elderly professor so he at eye level may examine della Francescas frescoes. When the exhausted professor, knee-trembling after his dizzying experience, though deeply satisfied after having his life's wish fulfilled, rests in a pew, Kip does with the help of his mechanism raise himself with his own hands:

Looking down he saw the mediaevalist sitting on a bench, exhausted. He was now aware of the depth of this church not its height. The liquid sense of it. The hollowness and the darkness of a well. The flare sprayed out of his hand like a wand. He pulleyed himself across to her face, his Queen of Sadness, and his brown hand reached out small against the giant neck.

It was with some anticipation I looked forward to the prematurely deceased Anthony Minghella's 1996 acclaimed film version of The English Patient. Unfortunately, I became somewhat disappointed when I saw it. Minghella's Oscar-winning script had made major changes to the plot, but that in itself did not have to be a shortcoming. A few years later, Minghella made an interesting reinterpretation of Patricia Highsmith's already excellent novel The Talented Mr. Ripley and made a great movie.

Minghella's version of The English Patient indicates the dangers of filming a lyrical, multi-faceted and visually strong novel. This is admittedly a great temptation, though results are often unsatisfactory, especially if the spectator has read the model. Like the multiple versions of Anna Karenina I have seen throughout the years. However, that did not hinder Minghella's film from being beautiful and in several aspects quite ingenious, though I also found it to be rather boring and occasionally too flat, at least if compared to the novel.

A scene that stayed in memory took place in Arezzo's Cathedral; suggestive, but too short, in which the old professor had been transformed into the attractive Hana. It is she who allows herself to be hoisted up to watch the Queen of Sheba's face. Minghella turned the scene into an erotically charged interaction between Kip and Hana.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DlxO2frMPE&ab_channel=Movieclips

In the novel, Ondaatje contrasts the sublime serenity Piero della Francesca's art creates with World War II´s bloody, muddy chaos. By della Francesca, even war is stylized and beautiful, as in Arezzo's battle scenes.

Ever since childhood, della Francesca had been considered to be a genius and his interest in symmetry and geometry was deepened through his acquaintance with men like Leon Alberti. The statuary composition and depiction of figures in his paintings and frescoes are obviously inspired by mathematical speculations and the inspiration della Francesca obtained while studying ancient Roman sculptures in papal collections in Rome and of his North Italian patrons.

In the 1460s, Piero della Francesca wrote an extensive mathematical treatise, Trattato de Abaco, Dissertation on the Abacus, which he donated to a merchant in Sansepolcro, and for most of his life he worked on a textbook on proportion theory in which he proceeded from simple descriptions and geometric figures around surfaces and different planes, to then move on to increasingly complex descriptions of fixed, multidimensional structures, seen from a variety of points of view, to finally arrive at detailed calculations about the dimensions and relations of the human body. When Piero della Francesca became blind at the end of his life, he donated his two manuscripts – De quinque corporibus regularibus, On the Five Regular Bodies, and De prospectiva pingendi, On Perspective in Painting, to the son of his generous patron Federico da Montfeltro of Urbino of Urbino.

Piero della Francesca, who spoke fluent Latin, based his theories on Euclid's (325 BC-265 BC) Elements, thirteen books in which the Greek mathematician summarized all the by then known geometric knowledge. His Regular Bodies corresponded to what Plato in his dialogue Timaeus had described as the convex polyhedra which, according to him, constituted the basic structures of the Universe. Euclid, who was Plato's student, proved by a variety of mathematical calculations that there are only five such basic polyhedra. In alchemy, well known among Renaissance artists who mixed their own colours, Plato's bodies corresponded to the four classical elements, which in turn comprised a fifth structure – the Dodecahedron.

As in most of Plato's dialogues, Timaeus is a conversation between friends and as always is Socrates' the leading character of the group. The discussion begins with Socrates, who the day before had presented his ideas about the ideal form of government, a discourse Plato described in his most extensive dialogue, Politeia, the State, stating that he is not entirely satisfied with what he had said and he now asks his friends if they have anything to add. The one who speaks most is Timaeus, a wealthy aristocrat and philosopher from what is nowadays the city of Lokri in Calabria. He had recently withdrawn from his communal duties, left his home town and settled in Athens. As a mathematician and philosopher from southern Italy, Timaeus is certainly a member of Pythagoras' sect, though Plato does not say so up front. Timaeus tries to explain why he assumes Socrates' ideal State to be compatible with the inherent order of the Universe and does so through a series, for me far too complicated, descripotiuons of geometrical intricacies.

Timaeus claims that each basic element corresponds to a geometric geometrical shape – fire to a tetrahedron, air to an octahedron, water to an icosahedron, and earth to a cube. The combination of these forms forms our physical universe. Each of these perfect polyhedra is composed of triangular faces forming 30-60-90 and 45-45-90 triangles. Such faces of each element could be broken down into its component right-angled triangles, either isosceles or scalene, which if combined form all of physical matter of the Universe. Particular characteristics of matter, such as water's capacity to extinguish fire, was then related to shape and size of the constituent triangles. A fifth element is in the form of a dodecahedron, which sides are not triangular and which represents the whole of the Universe, possibly in the same manner as the basic elements are assumed to form a sphere.

According to Timaeus, knowledge of the interrelationships of geometric structures can help us understand how the Universe is constructed and thus also realize what absolute beauty and harmony really is.

Artists like Piero della Francesca assumed that the determination of theoretically perfect forms would provide artists with templates for measurable relationships, facilitating a reproduction of the inherent harmony of nature.

Someone who was inspired by Piero della Francesca's calculations was the Franciscan monk Luca Pacioli (1447-1517). Thirty years younger than Piero, he also came from Sansepolcro and devoted his entire life to mathematical studies. Pacioli taught at universities and academies in Perugia, Bologna, Milan, Rome and Venice. His masterpiece was De Divina Proportione, The Divine Proportions, written after he had been summoned to Milan in 1497 by Duke Ludovico Sforza, who also had employed Leonardo da Vinci. Pacioli lived together with Leonardo and taught him mathematics, while his grateful pupil illustrated several of the structures Pacioli described in his book, in which he searched for the basic structures of Creation, especially how they all were related to the so-called Golden Section. Pacioli’s influential writings were 1509 in Venice published in three parts. The third part turned out to be a direct Italian translation of Piero della Francesca's Latin manuscript De quinque corporibus regularibus, without citing the source, which when he discovered it made Vasari furious.

Piero and Pacioli were close acquaintances. In his Brera Altar, originally commissioned by Federico da Montefeltre (seen kneeling at the bottom right), Piero della Francesca portrayed his friend Pacioli as the Franciscan martyr St. Peter, standing behind St. Francis to the right of the Virgin, who has her uncommonly sleeping child in the lap.

As we have seen, the Renaissance's speculations about the “measure of all things” did not arise out of nothing, but were firmly based on millennial thinking and calculations. The Greek philosopher Protagoras' (481-420 BC) dictum that man is the measure of everything has often been used as a motto for the Renaissance's revival of centuries-old beliefs in humans' unique ability to reshape and interpret their reality on the basis of firm, universal rules. Protagoras’s exact formulation of his statement about man as the centre of Universe was: “Man is the measure of all things: of the things that are, that they are, of the things that are not, that they are not.” Protagoras's writings have been lost, but his now classical utterances are preserved in one of Plato's dialogues, Theaetetus, which in the 15th century was brought to Florence by Byzantine scholars. Protagoras's opinion has often been referred to by the Latin homo mensura, a term that regularly appears in the context of what has been called Humanism.

When I some years ago worked at UNESCO in Paris, the Organization tried to find a motto that would interest the general public in its activities. This is common within the UN system where for example FAO has the motto Fiat Panis, Let there be bread, WFP: Saving Lives, Changing Lives, UNICEF: For Every Child, WHO: Health for All, UNDP: Empowered Lives, Resilient Nations, etc., etc. UNESCO, lacked such a descriptive motto and its Secretary General, Irina Bukova, tried to launch A New Humanism for the 21st Century:

Being a humanist today means adapting the strength of an age-old message to the contours of the modern world. By definition, this work is an ongoing effort that knows no end. […] This work of “self-fashioning” is a collective requirement, and here lies the importance of another critical aspect of the humanist message, which emphasizes the necessarily collective dimension of all accomplished human living. Individuals become whole in society, as members of a community.

According to me – somewhat too idealistic, convoluted and generalizing. Bokova's attempt at a motto was never realized, probably due to the plethora of difficulties encompassing every concept that has to do with culture and humanism.

Humanism can, for example, be associated with what has been called Human Sciences, or Humanities, a concept comprising all forms of knowledge, from philology to neuroscience, which try to understand what it means to be “human”. Generally speaking, however, the term humanism tends to be used in a more narrow sense and then refer to anthropology, history, psychology, sociology, economics, and especially linguistics.

Humanism can be narrowed down even further and the concept is then usually labelled as Secular Humanism, denoting an opinion that denies all dogmatically and religiously based explanations of the Universe and the human condition. In other words, a form of atheism which means that humans can shape their existence without taking into account any god-determined fate. Of course, a world view that was absolutely out of the question within a UNESCO, which at least while I was there, proved to be hypersensitive to any questioning, or even discussion, concerning religious dogmas, even those that opposed fundamental human rights.

What did humanism and “the measurement of all things” mean for a Renaissance artist like Piero della Francesca? A difficult question to answer, though some clues might be discerned in his art and of course through his mathematical writings with their references to Euclid and Plato.

In his fresco depicting Constantine's Victory at the Battle of Ponte Milvio, Constantine holds up a small cross, the sight of which makes Maximian and his army flee in wild panic.

 Constantine wears a strange hat that identifies him as the Byzantine emperor John VIII Palaiologos. That this really is the Emperor is confirmed by a medal made by Antonio del Pollaiolo (1431-1498) in memory of Paliologos's entry into Florence in 1438, twenty years before Piero della Francesca began painting his frescoes in Arezzo.

Pollaiolo had witnessed the Byzantines' entry and in a sketchbook been drawing their exotic costumes and the strange animals they brought with them.

Pollaiolo also drew a profile portrait of Palaiologos, which he later used to make a commemorative medal, on the back of which he depicted the emperor on horseback, as he had previously sketched him.

Polllaiolo's image of the emperor corresponds to a painting that strangely enough is kept in the remote monastery of Saint Catherine in the Sinai desert.

By the way, the image of Palailogos in his fresco depicting the battle of Ponte Milvio is not Piero della Francesca's only allusion to Pollaiolo's sketches of the Byzantines' entry into Florence and their strange headdresses. Dignities and priests in the fresco The Exaltation of the Cross, which depicts how Emperor Heraclius is bringing the True Cross into Jerusalem, are equipped with high hats similar to those found in Pollaiolo's drawings.

In his film The Gospel of Matthew from 1964, Pier Paolo Pasolini was in several scenes inspired by Piero della Francesca, not the least when it came to the high priests' costumes and hats.

Why do Palailogos and the Byzantines appear in della Francesca's renderings Christianity's victory over paganism? As in Ondaatje's novels and Renaissance artists' speculations about the measure of everything, we find in della Francesca how the present and history are mixed together, or in Faulkner's words that “the past is not dead, it is not even past.”

The search for the Universe's inherent order was in full swing already 500 years BCE when it was common among Greek philosophers. Much of the revolutionary thinking of the Renaissance was stimulated by translations of ancient Greek texts. During the Middle Ages, such knowledge had been conveyed mainly through Latin, and to some extent, Arabic translations and interpretations. This stream of knowledge became a river when Constantinople, where Greek erudition had been kept alive for more than a thousand years, in the early 15th century became increasingly threatened by Turks and a host of other peoples who were rebelling against Byzantine rule. In the face of this worsening crisis, Greek diplomats as well as other luminaries, came to Italy, either as refugees or to try to whip up support for their efforts to keep the Muslims at bay.

For two centuries, it had gone downhill for the Byzantine Empire. Its capital, Constantinople, had not recovered from the terrible looting to which it had been subjected in 1204 by Western European crusaders and their greedy sponsors. Although the Byzantines had during Palaiologo's imperial dynasty succeeded in recapturing the city and partially regained power over its former empire, Constantinople was in 1346 struck by the Black Death; half of the city's inhabitants died while Oguz Turks under their Ottoman rulers relentlessly attacked the crumbling empire´s borders.

Internal power struggles and confused faith battles in both the East and the West mingled with incessant power struggles based on unlimited greed ran havoc witin both the German-Roman - and Byzantine empires. For a hundred years, the Turks had relentlessly staged a pincer manoeuvre around Constantinople. A short respite was provided when the Mongol armies of the world conqueror Timur Lenk fell on the Turks' backs and made peace with the Byzantines. However, after Timur Lenk's death in 1405, the Ottoman Turks took back what they had lost, and more.

Byzantine emperors had early on understood that their only hope for salvation rested with Catholic potentates in the West. In 1369, John V Palaiologos had been secretly baptized as a Catholic by the pope in Rome. His son Manuel II maintained his orthodox faith and fought incessantly against the Turks, sometimes with very expensive Venetian and Castilian support, sometimes without. When Timur Lenk kept the Turks occupied and Manuel's brothers had began to reconquer their empire, Manuel II sailed in 1399 with four large galleys and 1,200 companions to Venice, from where his large retinue continued towards England. On their way to London, the Greeks were greeted with pomp and circumstance in the northern Italian cities and Paris. Manuel II had brought with him priests and philosophers, who discussed matters of faith and ancient philosophy at the University of Sorbonne and the then famous Theological Centre in Canterbury. However, when the Ottomans in 1403 had been defeated by the Mongol rulers, Manuel II returned to Constantinople. Timur Lenk died two years after the emperor's return and the Turks retaliated with violent force, while Manuel II found that the promises of aid from the Italians, the French and the English were only empty words.

His son, John VIII Palaiologos, found no other resort than to resume his father's attempts to get Western princes and ecclesiastical potentates to assist him in his defence against the infidels. After tough negotiations, Europe's most powerful leaders agreed to organize a comprehensive church meeting in Ferrara in 1438, to revoke the schism which in 1054 had separated Eastern Orthodoxy from Catholicism. It was part of a desperate attempt by Palailogos to convince the wealthy northern Italian princes, the German-Roman Empire and the Pope's representatives that it was high time to realise a large crusade against the threatening Muslims. The call for a gathering was heard and obeyed by theologians, philosophers and princes from East and West. As Muslims generally accepted the Christian faith, several monks and priests, already subjugated by the Osman Empire, also came to Ferrara, where they met with other prelates from Europe's most remote areas – Catholic Irish monks from the West and Orthodox Muscovites from the East. When, after a couple of months of meetings, the plague hit Ferrara, the deliberations were moved to Florence.

After intensive debating, the delegates agreed in July 1438 to unite the Orthodox and Catholic faiths under the supremacy of the Pope in Rome. However, after Johannes Palaiolologos had returned to Constantinople in 1440, the split was once again a fact. His desperate initiative had only provoked protests and divisions at home in Byzantium. Soon everything was lost. Only 2,000 Western mercenaries, mostly from northern Italy, assisted the Greeks in their final struggle while the mighty city and its empire were lost to the Turks in 1453, five years after Palaiologo's death. Few people, however, could have predicted that the men and writings that had accompanied Palaiologos on his journey to the West would forever change the art and thinking of Europe, and perhaps even of the entire world.

Among the Byzantine scholars in Palaiologos' entourage were John Argyropoulos and Georgius Gemistus. During the Council of Florence, John Argyropoulos lectured interested intellectuals in Greek language and literature, until after four years in Italy he accompanied Palaiologos when he returned to Constantinople. By then Argyropoulos spoke fluent Italian and had obtained a doctorate from the University of Padua. After the fall of Constantinople, he returned to Florence where he taught for fourteen years, before continuing to Rome where he died in 1487, according to rumour after eating to many watermelons.

Under Argyropoulos´s aegis several important Italian writers and translators became well acquainted with the Greek language and its ancient writers, and not least Koiné, the Greek dialect in which the New Testament had been written. Although Georgius Gemistus stayed in Florence for a shorter period than Argyropoulos, after five or six years he had returned to his home-town of Mystras on the Peloponnesos, his influence became greater than that of Argyropoulos.

Argyropoulos was an expert on Aristotle, whose writings in Latin translations already had had a great impact on European scholars. Gemistus, who changed his name to Plethon to pay homage to his master, was a devoted follower of Plato, whose writings by then were virtually unknown in the West. When Marsilio Ficino, who had learned Greek from Argyropoulos got to know Plethon, he was captured by Plato and translated all the writings of the Greek philosopher into Latin. Ficino also succeeded in persuading his friend and patron, the wealthy Cosimo de Medici, to establish a Platonic Academy.

Cosimo bought a villa called La Fontanelle, later replaced by Villa di Careggi, as a haunt for his L'Accademia neoplatonica, whose members taught and studied Greek literature, translated texts into Latin and Italian, and immersed themselves in discussions about ancient philosophy. On a fresco made by Domenico Ghirlandaio in the late 1480s, we discern some members of L'Accademia . Its founder Marsilio Ficino talks to Cristoforo Landino, an expert on Latin and Greek rhetoric, the genius Agnolo Poliziano, who before the age of nineteen had translated The Iliad into Latin, and the Greek humanist Demetrios Chalkondyles, who in 1447 had come to Italy as a refugee.'

Ten years earlier, Ghirlandaio had on a fresco in the Sistine Chapel depicted Argyropoulos as a bearded man who, in a crowd watches Jesus calling Peter and Andrew to become his apostles.

It seems that several of the Florentine artists moved in the circles around L'Accademia neoplatonica and were well aware of the great importance that the Greek injection of ancient learning had for the emergence of a radical philosophy, which stressed independent, innovative thinking above a slavish devotion theological dogmas. Perhaps the most impressive tribute to the entry of ancient Greek knowledge into Florentine cultural life are the magnificent frescoes that Benozzi Gozzoli in 1459 began to paint in the Chapel of the Medici in the Riccardi Palace, where we glimpse Georgius Gemistus Plehton in the retinue of The Three Magi.

The fresco was in fact a tribute to John VIII Palaiologos and created in memory of the Byzantine emperor´s 1438 triumphant entry into Florence. Although Constantinople was lost to Christianity and John VIII was long dead and buried when Gozzoli made his fresco, it is a tribute to Greek learning that with the Byzantine emperor made its entrance into Florence and for ever changed it´s intellectual outlook. It is probably not far-fetched to connect a depiction of the Three Magis´ arrival at Jesus' birthplace as a hint to how the Greeks donated their gifts of knowledge to what would be the Renaissance´s flourishing in Florence.

It is mainly by Gemistus Plethon that we find Humanism in full bloom. His thinking, thoroughly based on Plato's writings, constituted the last branches of a tradition that stubbornly had survived for more than a thousand years of Christian dominance. The philosophers and writers who had tried to keep ancient education alive were generally, both by themselves and their opponents, called, Hellenes. Several Hellenes had over the centuries been accused of organizing secret societies to preserve Greek, “pagan” ideologies that asserted free will and critical thinking against Christian dogma, and there is ample evidence that dogmatic Christians’ allegations basically had been true.

The great Byzantine author and philosopher Michael Psellos (1018-1078), who exercised great influence over several emperors, was a diligent writer of both history and philosophy, and as such he perfected the art of rewriting and describing “heretical” thoughts in such a manner that it appeared as he refuted them by carefully accounting for the delusions they exposed, when he, as a matter fact, spread and commented upon them.

Following in the footsteps of Psellos and Plato, Gemistus Plethon argued that eternal, cosmic laws governed human existence, and in his most detailed writing Nómōn syngraphḗ or Nómoi, the Book of Laws, he tried to present and explain those natural laws, whether they were benevolent or not. Plethon described a Universe that is basically perfect, eternal, and without beginning or end. The human soul is, just like the gods (if they now exist), immortal, originally good and reincarnated into a succession of moribund and resurrected bodies. When Plethon, during his stay in Italy fearlessly exposed such insights to an audience educated in the limited world of Catholicism, which rather than abiding to any cosmic laws were governed by dogmas established by an almighty church and political rulers, he either terrified or enchanted his audiences.

While in Florence, Plethon wrote De differentiis Platonis et Aristotelis, On the Differences Between Aristotle and Plato. He wrote the book during a time of illness “with no other purpose than to correct various misconceptions” concerning the teachings of the two philosophers, “to comfort myself and please those who are followers of Plato.” In his writings, Plethon claims that God is the creator of “every conceivable, existing and separate substance… and thus our entire universe.” Like Psellos before him, Plethon taught views that could be perceived as heretical and anti-Christian, but he did so in such a manner that he seemed to share the common view of God, which in fact, at least in conservative, Byzantine circles, forbade any speculation about His true nature, as it had been established during various councils.

Plethon described the fundamental difference between Plato and Aristotle by explaining that God for the latter was only the ultimate cause of movement and change, while Plato's God was identical with the all-encompassing existence of Universe and the natural laws that governs it all. Plethon's argumentation is quite akin of the one Spinoza provided two hundred years later, even the mathematically based “realism” that made the Dutch philosopher claim that “all matter is God”.

Plehon's Nómoi was after his death burned by hostile priests, although his personal summary is preserved. He gave it to the Orthodox Patriarch of Constantinople Joseph II, who on Gozzoli's fresco in the Medici Riccardi Palace leads the triumphal procession of the Three Magi. In Nómoi, Plethon described how man has been able to compensate for his limitations and intellectual shortcomings by constantly developing technical tools and appliances, while writing books which preserved insights and thoughts. Accordingly, our ability to change and understand the nature of the world is constantly evolving. An ability that constitutes the basis for Plethon's positive belief in how human existence is gradually being improved by increasingly effective and fairer laws. What Plethon advocates is not, as often has been claimed, the establishment a political ideology leading up to the creation of a totalitarian utopia, but rather a plea for a progressive decoding of the secrets of Universe. An effort that will free us humans from delusions and superstitions, which manipulative despots and fundamentalists use to exercise their destructive power over our way of thinking.

After returning from his Florentine sojourn, Gemistus Plethon isolated himself in his home-town of Mystras on Peleponnesos, not far from the former Sparta, where he gathered a circle of faithful disciples around himself and in his writings defended his faith in Plato and other antique philosophers from increasingly intense dogmatic attacks he was subjected to from conservative monks and prelates living in Constantinople and on Mount Athos. These defenders of obscurantism stubbornly clung to the thesis that God reveals himself and communicates his knowledge through inner experiences and mysticism. Accordingly it was useless to explore the nature and rules of Universe. The true nature of God and his creation is revealed through the Bible and how it has been interpreted by dogmas established by the Church Councils. Denying this could only lead to heresy, atheism and anarchy. To them, philosophers like Plethon, with their soft spot for Greek paganism and Persian Zorastrianism, posed a grave threat to the true Christian religion, and they were suspected, perhaps rightly, of trying to establish a syncretistic mixture of religions and philosophies — in other words, they acted as wolves in sheep's clothing.

The reading of Siniossoglu's excellent study Radical Platonism in Byzantium made me re-read Plato's dialogue Theatetus. Unfortunately, I have occasionally been influenced by perceptions that have concentrated on the totalitarian nonsense that philosophers like St. Paul, Nietzsche, Marx or Plato have hatched, making me ignore a wealth of insights that these philosophers could have provided me with if I had been more open-minded and attentive in my reading of their books. Like while listening to music it is important for me to be able to open up to philosophy and not let any preconceived notions hinder me from enjoying what is really good and challenging.

Theatetus's layout is superb, worthy of an excellent play, or a fascinating film. In the port city of Megara, the old friends Euclid and Terpsion meet in its town square. They have not seen each other for several years and Terpsion, who has just arrived from Athens, can tell Euclid that he in that town had encountered their mutual friend Theatetus, who mortally wounded after a battle at Corinth had returned to the city and furthermore was seriously infected with dysentery. In this context, Terpsion says that several years earlier, just before Socrates had been sentenced to death, he had visited a gymnasium, or gym as it now is called. In one of its porticos he had met with Socrates and a philosopher named Theodorus, a student of Protagoras and when Terpsion had sat down with them, young Theatetus appeared, sweaty after his gymnastic exercises. According to Terpsion, Theatetus was a bright but rather ugly, young man, “he actually reminds me of Socrates”. Socrates, appreciated Theatetus’s youthful enthusiasm and curiosity, enjoying listening to his observations while contrasting them with Theodorus's more thoughtful reflections.

A conversation unfolded, which, according to Terpsion, differed from the speeches he, as a lawyer, had been forced to listen to during court proceedings, where everyone clung to preconceived opinions. On the other hand, any conversation that included a genius like Socrates constituted an exquisite pleasure. During such lively discussions, original insights and opinions developed, constantly changing in an exciting and unexpected way.

When the elated Terpsion had returned home, he decided to write down, as accurately as possible, what he had listened to in the gymnasium´s portico. He had presented what he had written to Socrates, who read the whole thing with great interest while correcting and commenting upon everything. Terpsion had had that scripture lying around for several years, but now when Theatetus was dying and Socrates and Theodorus were dead, it might be high time to listen to what Euclid thought about it all. Together, the two friends went home to Terpsion where they listened to how his slave read aloud what Terpsion had written and that was the dialogue Plato claimed to reproduce.

Through this sophisticated background story, Plato avoids claiming that it is his own opinions that he is presenting, while Socrates is provided with an opportunity to compare the young Theatetus´s intuitive knowledge with Theodorus's more “mature” points of view, which nevertheless are coloured by Protagoras's teachings. What are they talking about? Well, whether is possible to achieve an accurate understanding of the Universe. Is it correct to assert, like Protagoras, that all knowledge is unique to each individual human being? That everything is relative, that “man is the measure of everything?” Socrates claims that human knowledge is only a small fraction of an extremely complicated reality. Foxes have one kind of knowledge, badgers another and so do humans. But – “no dog and no ordinary person is a measure of anything unless he understands it.”

Each of us perceives the reality around us based on the ability of our own senses and those differ from person to person. We are furthermore affected by our environment and upbringing. What we have heard, seen and read.

The conversation spins on from one perception to another. Protagora's theorem that man is the measure of everything is scrutinized from all kind of angles, affirmed and denied. The discussion is incessantly amusing and stimulating. In the end, Socrates's view seems to be that there can be no denying that wise men exist (Plato was, like so many other ancient Greeks philosophers, blatantly misogynic), though it is clearly not easy to pass a definite judgement about what is true or false. However, some things and opinions are “better” than others, but whether they are “more true” remains an open question. However, Socrates considers himself to be like a doctor who, through his experience, can recommend remedies he assumes are more benevolent than harmful. Everything changes, everything flows, but one thing remains the same throughout the ages and that is that if we try to do good for others and they perceive it that way, then it is certain that good deeds benefit both them and us.

In me Plato´s Theatetus aroused associations to Piero della Francesca´s art. At one point in the dialogue, Socrates mentions his mother:

Haven´t you heard that my mother Phainarete was a good, sturdy midwife? […] barren women are not recipients of the gift of midwifery, because human nature is too weak to become skilled in matters of which it has no experience. […] isn’t it necessary, in fact, that midwives are better than others recognizing whether, or not women are pregnant […] and that’s no end to their abilities; their chants and the drugs they administer can induce labour and relieve the pains, as they see fit; and can bring on a miscarriage, if that seems best. And have you also noticed that they know all there is to know about pairing types of women and men to produce the best children.

Socrates then declares that he from his mother has inherited the best qualities of a midwife – he has become able to assess whether a person can come up with any valuable thoughts. He has enough experience to be able to do so because he has read texts and listened to wise men and thus got to know the words that stimulate a development of original thoughts. He is also able to halt a debate if it goes off track and in addition to all this, he has learned to discern who among his friends and acquaintances may be paired with others to give rise to the most rewarding conversations.

There is probably no connection, though Piero della Francesca is one of the few artists who has created a truly majestic depiction of a pregnant woman. As Ondaatje mentioned above, della Francesca's fresco Madonna del Parto, the Madonna of Birth, can be admired next to the cemetery outside the village of Monerchi. He created it in the chapel of the cemetery, next to the place where he had buried his beloved mother. I visited Monerchi with Rose and our friends Jaqueline and Joe when we in a torrential shower were on our way to Arezzo to admire Piero della Francesca's frescoes.

La Madonna del Parto is yet another of Piero's stately, triumphant female figures. An example of what Bernhard Berenson considered to be della Francesca's ability to create a parallel reality, which seems to be more real, more universal than the one we live in, something achieved through his almost uncanny, skilful manner of transmitting a sense of imperturbability.

In della Francesca's art we witness how something new is born, based on his knowledge and experience firmly rooted in a thousand-year-old tradition, but let us now for the time being leave philosophy and art aside and enter the world of crime.

On February 6, 1975, a desperate appeal was broadcast over all Italian radio and television channels:

“Don´t touch the colours,” the spokesman said. “Cover the paintings with velvet fabric and wrap them in the kind of plastic material that is used to keep ice cream cold. Keep the paintings cool and dry” and he further noted that the Flagellation was particularly fragile. 

Just a few hours after the authorities' appeal, a young lady did, at the market in Pesaro, at her boyfriend's request purchase several metres of velvet fabrics. It was the carpenter Elio Pazzaglia who had asked her to buy the textiles. However, the girl had already listened to the authorities' appeal and knew that two of Piero della Francesca's paintings and a portrait painted by Rafael had been stolen and now had to be protected by the thieves. Concerned, the young lady turned to her mother, who called a relative, a retired carabinieri, who alerted the Italian State's Command for Protection of the Cultural Heritage.

At ten o'clock in the evening of the fifth of February 1975, the carpenter Elio Pazzaglia and three companions had through the scaffolding in front of the Prince's Palace in Urbino after breaking a window, entered one of the halls and from their frames cut out Piero della Francesca's Senigallia Madonna and Flagellation of Christ, as well as a portrait painted by Raphael, called The Mute One. The palace lacked an electronic alarm system, but at half past two in the morning the theft had been discovered by the night watchman, a national alarm was activated and after a few hours a hunt for the art thieves was in full swing.

However, it turned out to be difficult to save the paintings. The perpetrators had disappeared in Italy, Germany and Switzerland. Like much in Italy, the whole story was soon lost in a tangle of Mafiosi, abysmal leftists and shady businessmen. It took a year before the paintings turned up again, unscathed and wrapped in velvet fabric and cooling plastic.

Intermediary between perpetrators and authorities appers to have been a shady art dealer from Rimini, with business in Bologna and contacts with the terrorist group Brigate Rosse. He negotiated a ransom of one billion lira per work of art (equivalent of 1.5 million USD), an imaginary sum that the State could not possibly pay out and a planned exchange failed completely. Nevertheless, a second attempt at a deal was made. The art dealer managed to make the thieves await an exchange in a hotel room in Locarno in southern Switzerland, a well-known centre for murky deals. Balena, the art dealer, had promised contacts with a Swiss millionaire, but instead the carabinieri showed up, catching the thieves and saving the paintings. Despite his involvement in the affair, Balena apparently managed to avoid to be involved in any legal aftermath. In any case, a week after being salvaged, the paintings were returned to Urbino, where the carbinieri´s armoured car was received by a jubilant crowd.

Apart from being stolen, and even then it was in a poor condition, Flagellation of Christ is without a doubt Piero della Francesca's most puzzling painting. Several books have been written about it, presenting several imaginative and often contraindicative attempts to interpret it. Despite its warm colours, it is a cool image, divided into two levels. In the foreground, three men are engaged in a discussion, apparently completely uninterested in the whipping of Christ that takes place in the background. The frigid torture of Jesus appears as if it was part of an established rite, following fixed rules, completely lacking any signs of violence and suffering. The flagellation of Christ takes place in an open, antique marble-decorated gallery, and is watched by a figure sitting on a folding chair. It is obviously not Pontius Pilate, but possibly Palaiologos, who is depicted in profile and with the same hat he has on the Arezzo fresco, Pollaiolo's medal and the painting in the Sinai monastery.

But, what does Palaiologos have to do with a presentation of the flagellation of Jesus? Did he not try to save Christianity from the Muslim onslaught? He can thus not be a representation a Pontius Pilate. who actually was part of an effort to annihilate Christianity. Nevertheless, here is Palaiologos seemingly unmoved watching how Jesus is tormented by a gang of insensitive executioners, who for sure are no followers of Jesus' teachings. Perhaps these tormentors are representing the Oguz Turks who threatened Palaiologos´s capital and after his death finally conquered Constantinople. But why is the emperor a passive observer? Perhaps because he was helpless, without the assistance of the three figures who seemingly unaffected by Christ's suffering discuss something in the foreground?

Who these men represent has been proposed several times. It was Kenneth Clark who in 1950 came up with a theory indicating that the Flagellation of Christ, just like the Arezzo frescoes, in a historical/legendary disguise represented a piece of extremely important, contemporary history. Clark linked the paintings to the fall of Constantinople and the preparations made by Pope Pius II for a crusade against the Turks. When the Flagellation was created, sometime in the 1460s, such a crusade was at the very centre of the political plans of the Italian small states’ and the German-Roman Empire, and not the least so for the intellectual condottiere Federico da Montefeltro, Urbino's prince and customer of the painting

If that could be the case, Clark interpreted the discussing men in the paintings foreground as a bearded Greek philosopher involved in a conversation with an Italian prince and a third, mediating participant in the debate. The famous ethnologist Carlo Ginzburg, who writes extensively about medieval and modern heretical sects, went further than Clark and identified the people as politicians contemporary with Piero della Francesca. According to Ginzburg, the bearded man would then be Cardinal Giovanni Bessarion, who had the pope's ear and was eager for a crusade, in the process of trying to convince the man in green, Giovanni Bacci, who ordered the frescoes in Arezzo and tried to persuade his friend Federico da Montefeltro to participate in and fund an anti-Turkish crusade.

That Bessarion appears in this context may be due to the fact that he was closely acquainted with Federico da Montefeltro, who even had included Bassarion's portrait among the twenty-eight “famous men” whose portraits he had chosen to decorate his studiolo, study chamber. The sight of these illustrious men would inspire the old mercenary while he was reading the writings he considered most worthy of an in-depth study. As in della Francesca's art, these portraits mix the present with the past, as well as near and far. Here Euclid, Aristotle, Plato, Thomas Aquinas and Gregory the Great mingle with modern scholars like Bessarion and Enea Piccolomini. Moses and Solomon are found side by side with Homer and Virgil. Ancient poets mingle with Dante and Petrarca.

Bessarion was born in Trebizond, a port town on the south-east coast of the Black Sea. After studies in Constantinople, he joined Gemistus Plethon's Academy in Mystras and then accompanied his master on his journey to Italy, where Bessarion remained until his death in 1472. Bessarion's Roman villa, where he headed a Platonic Academy, like the one in Florence, remains and is actually not far from our Roman apartment.

For Bessarion, Plethon was an unrivalled master and Plato almost divine. Furthermore was Bessarion himself already during his lifetime by his followers considered to be “a reincarnation of Plato”.

If Piero della Francesca in his Flagellation of Christ actually had portrayed contemporary personalities, such as Bessarion and Bacci, the third man in the foreground's discussion group could be Thomas Palaiologos, younger brother of Constantine XI Palaiologos, the last emperor of the Byzantine Empire. When Piero della Francesca painted the Flagellation, Thomas Palaiologos was exiled in Venice. Carlo Ginzburg explained that Thomas Palaiologos is depicted barefooted since he has not yet become emperor.

Ginzburg's theory might be correct, though it appears as somewhat too speculative for my liking. I willingly admit´that the Flagellation of Christ may allude to crusader plans and that the background symbolizes Constantinople's suffering under the Turks, which Palaiologos was unable to prevent, though I am inclined to simply consider the people in the foreground to be an Italian prince and a Byzantine emperor, whose discussion is mediated by an angel symbolizing their Christian duty to reconquer Constantinople from the Muslims, and that the man in the middle is an angel, whose heavenly origin is demonstrated by the fact that he his barefoot, like most angels depicted by della Francesca, and there are quite a few. Additionally, the golden-haired figure bears no resemblance at all to Thomas Palaiologos, but with several of the angelic figures that appear in other della Francesca paintings.

That the bearded man wearing a brown cloak and a rather strange headdress could represent a Byzantine emperor is underlined by the fact that he does not look like Bessarion (his portrait can be found in the same building as the painting) but instead reminds of how Benozzo Gozzoli depicted John VIII Palaiologos on his magnificent fresco in the Medici Riccardi Palace.

This apotheosis of how Greek knowledge makes its entrance into Florence, a moment which also constituted the Medici's proudest moment since they were the generous hosts of this conference that would unite East and West and which brought Greek learning to the Renaissance, which that under Medici's aegis would be born in Florence.

Benozzo Gozzoli began his frescoes in the Riccardi Chapel twenty years after Palaiologos's entry into Florence, six years after the fall of Constantinople and nine years before 1468 when Piero della Francesca is believed to have painted the Flagellation of Christ.

When the Florentines witnessed the triumphant entrance of the exotically costumed Byzantines in 1438, Benozzo Gozzoli was eighteen years old and “deservedly loved and appreciated by his master Fra Angelico.”

Although Gozzoli made his frescoes long after Palaiologos's entry into Florence, they are filled with portraits of people who were active at the time and he depicted himself next to the bearded Gemistus Plethon. It is not impossible that Gozzoli came to know Plethon, or at least associated with his disciples. Opus de Benotii d…, Work by Benootii d ..., it says on red red cap Gozzoli wears as he as a young man rides beside Plethon. 

The festive impression from the triumphal procession must have lingered with Gozzoli because it is difficult to imagine a more magnificent and elated representation of a triumphal procession, where each member of the brilliant company is identifiable. In the lead is the Orthodox patriarch of Constantinople, Joseph II, who rides a mule, followed by the handsome John VIII Palaiologos on a white stallion. 

The third Mago would probably have been the German-Roman emperor Sigismund, though he had died the year before the conference. Pope Eugene IV was also unable to attend since he had just before the event been deposed by a hostile faction within the Catholic Church, the so-called Ecclesiastical General Assembly based in Basel. How Gozzoli solved the problem with the third Magi remains unknown, though in 1469 he painted in his place the young Lorenzo Medici, who would later to be called Il Magnifico, the Magnificent.

Lorenzo Medici was not even born in 1438, but Gozzoli painted him as he appeared in 1469 during a festive tournament held when the heir to the power and wealth of the Medicis at the age of twenty was going to be married. Lorenzo became known as an active member and generous benefactor of the Florentine Platonic Academy and especially its new, young leader Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, became especially dear to him. della Mirandola appear as the embodiment of the absolute pinnacle of the Florentine Renaissance as a beacon in art and philosophy. Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494), who here on a fresco by Cosimo Roselli is seen as protectively flanked by the Platonic academicians Marsilio Ficino and Agnolo Poliziano, was already at a very young age known for his extensive learning and knowledgable reading of Jewish Kabbalah and Greek philosophy, as it had been mediated by Gemistus Plethon.

In 1488, della Mirandola published his book Oration on the Dignity of Man, which has been called a Renaissance Manifesto. della Mirandola claimed that man is different from other beings in that he is free to think whatever he wants, is self-aware and thus able to exercise power over others and his natural environment. Humans are to, within the limits set by God, satisfy their desires, regardless of what the Church's time-limited hegemony and dogmas dictate.

However, it was not only philosophers who were impressed by the ancient  Greek  philosophy, transmitted by men like Gemistus Plethon. Even an unusually brutal ruthless and unfaithful warlord and mercenary, who already during his lifetime was feared and slandered – Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta – read and admired the Greek philosopher. We glimpse him on Gozzolo's fresco, though he is better known from Piero della Francesca's portrait of him.

Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta was, as it is currently called in the US, a gun for hire. Twice he joined the powerful Este family and twice he betrayed them for customers who paid him better. He behaved in the same manner in his dealings with Pope Pius II. Malatesta was considered to be one of the most skilful commanders of his time, but even according to contemporary historian Francesco Guicciardini, he was describeds as despicable person prone to “rape, adultery and incest, an enemy to every form of peace and well-being.” Someone who wholeheartedly hated Maltesta was Pope Pius II (Enea Silvio Piccolomini), the only pope who has written his memoirs. In his Comentarii, Pius II makes an attack on Maltesta, which in its unique rage is worth quoting, especially since the man Pius II describes as a grotesque beast had read both Plato and Gemistus Plethon, written passionate love poetry and been a generous employer of both Leon Battista Alberti and Piero della Francesca:

Sigismondo belonged to the noble Malatesta family, although he was born out of wedlock; he was very vigorous in body and mind and gifted with great eloquence and military prowess. Whatever he was inclined to do, he seemed to be born for. However, bad inclinations always had the upper hand: he was to such a point a slave to avarice that he did not hesitate, I do not say to plunder, but to steal; in his lust he was so unrestrained that he went as far as violating his own daughters and sons. As a young man he dressed himself up as a woman and played the part of the female in the company of effeminated men. There was no marriage that sacred to him. He defiled holy virgins and had intercourse with Jewish women. Boys and girls who did not consent to his vile desires he had killed or cruelly whipped. When it came to cruelty he exceeded any barbarian. His gory hands inflicted heinous punishments on both the guilty and the innocent. He oppressed the poor, he snatched goods from the rich; and he did not spare widows and orphans either. No one could live safely under his rule. Wealth was not enough, nor a beautiful wife, nor any children of pleasant appearance, to avoid Malatesta transforming their possessor into an offender. The truth was rare on his lips; an excellent teacher when it came to simulating and dissimulating, a perfidious and perjuring man ... Such was Sigismund: intolerant to any peace, devoted to pleasures, although capable of enduring any kind of toil and greedy for war, a bad man among all the men who have lived and will live in this world, a dishonour to Italy and a shame of our century.

It was probably Pius II's aggressive anathema and the hatred of his notorious infidelity aroused in powerful men like Francesco Sforza of Milan, which forced Maltesta to seek support from the Venetians. To offer protection to his dominion, Rimini and its surrounding areas, the Venetians demanded that he, on their behalf, recaptured the Despostate of Morea, which included the Peloponnese peninsula and which until 1463 had been a province within the Byzantine Empire, actually the last area of the former empire to fall into the hands of the Turks. Morea's capital was Mystras, wher of Plethon's Academy was situated. The philosopher had died in Mystras around the fall of Constantinople in 1453.

On May 7, 1464, after his men had been blessed by Cardinal Bessarion in the Venetian Basilica of San Marco, Malatesta sailed to Greece with seven large galleys, soon followed by six more, with a total of 1,200 horses and 4,000 men, fewer than the 3,000. riders and 5,000 infantrymen he had been promised. In addition, the soldiers' morale was extremely bad. Delayed salaries, lack of supplies and fodder made them loot and rape the local population, which instead of considering them as liberators sought protection and support from the Turkish conquerors.

Through draconian measures – mass executions among his own men, the removal of officers and the concession of free looting of strongholds conquered from the Turks, Malatesta tried to overcome the wretched discipline and finally succeeded in conquering Mystras. However, as the city was besieged by a far superior Turkish army, combined with a miserable weather, shortages and contagious diseases raged among Malatesta's exhausted troops, they were soon forced to desperately withdraw from the Turkish encirclement and leave the country.

Malatesta brought with him Gemistus Plethon's ashes, which he on his return to Rimini entombed within his Tempio Malatestiano “so that the great Teacher may be among free men.”

The cathedral of Rimini, was renovated by Malatesta and in that connecton he had Leon Battista Alberti create a completely unique and revolutionary, classical façade. The religious building thus no longer had the character of a Christian church and was therefore called a “temple” instead of a “cathedral”. Of course, Malatesta's constant nemesis, Pius II, resented this and declared that the godless Malatesta had turned Rimini´s cathedral into a mausoleum and a memorial dedicated to himself. 

The pope actually had some justification for his opinion. The sculptor Agostino di Duccio, who like Piero della Francesca was brought from Perugia, adorned the interior of the cathedral with elegant reliefs depicting unusually lightly dressed angels and Roman deities.

Piero della Francesca made a fresco showing how Malatesta worships St. Sigismund of Burgundy, patron saint of Bohemia , though the saint actually has the features of the German-Roman emperor Sigismund of Hungary. During a visit to Rimini in 1433, this emperor had knighted Malatesta and what on della Francesca's fresco may seem like the adoration of a saint is in fact a picture of how Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta swears an oath of allegiance to his namesake and feudal lord.

A nice detail is della Francesca's portrayal of Malatesta's veneration of Sigismund is his depiction of the duke´s two greyhounds. The white one waits faithfully for his master, while the black vigilantly raises his head and pricks up his ears.

After Piero della Francesca had finished St. Antonio's Polyptych in 1468, which Rose and I had admired in Perugia, he entered in the service of Malatesta's  arch  enemy,  the  condottiero  Federico da Montefeltro, ruler of Urbino. Like Maltesta, da Montefeltro was a skilled and ruthless mercenary who made his services available to the anyone who paid him the best. He was suspected of coming to power by having his half-brother murdered, but despite his brutal desire for power, da Montefeltro was a more likeable person than Malatesta. It seems that the large number of writers and artists who were attracted to his court had a sincere respect and admiration for da Montefeltro, who in his youth had received a solid humanistic upbringing from his uncle Vittorino da Feltre, known for his innovative pedagogical methods. Among the twenty-eight portraits of famous men that Federico kept in his studiolo, he had included Vittorino d Feltre, and there he also had a portrait of Pius II, Malatesta's relentless enemy.

Despite his fierce reputation and disfigured appearance, he had broken his nose during a tournament in his youth and lost his right eye, da Montefeltro was much loved by his wife Battista Sforza, his seven daughters and three sons.

Piero della Francesca also appreciated him and discussed philosophy and mathematics with the educated mercenary. It was at his request that della Francesca had created the mysterious  Flagellation of Christ. When da Montefeltro died in 1482, Piero della Francesca retired to his home-town, Sansepolcro, the artist was then virtually blind and could after a couple of years no longer paint. Piero della Francesca died on October 12, 1492, the same day that Columbus landed on the Caribbean island of Guanahani, which he named San Salvador, and thus began the European conquest of America.

As so often before, this blog post resulted in a long-winding journey. It began with a description of a visit to Perugia and ended with the death of Piero della Francesca. The meaning of the journey is not much more than a statement that an Italian sojourn easily gives rise to feelings that time and space flow together, that the present includes the past, that everything is much more multifaceted than it seems to be at a first confrontation. A few hours in Perugia turned out to be filled with influences from widely differing places and time periods – present and Renaissance, Constantinople and Florence, and much more than that.

Berenson, Bernhard (1960) The Italian Painters of the Renaissance. Glasgow: Fontana. Cattabini, Alfredo (2018) Santi D’Italia: Vita, leggende, iconografia, patronati, culto. Milano: Mondadori. Clark, Kenneth (1969) Piero della Francesca. London: Phaidon Press. Dickens, Charles (1998) Pictures from Italy. London: Penguin Classics. Ginzburg, Carlo (2001) Indagini su Piero: Il Battesimo. Il ciclo di Arezzo. La flagellazione di Urbino. Con l'aggiunta di quattro appendici. Torino: Einaudi. Halimi, Suzy (2014) ”A new humanism? Heritage and future prospects,” International Review of Education, Volume 60, Issue 3.  James, Henry (1995) Italian Hours. London: Penguin Classics. Law, Stephen (2011) Humanism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mirandola, Pico della (2016) Oration on the Dignity of Man. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nardone, Domenico (2011) ”La spedizione in Morea di Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta (1464-1466),”  https://wwwbisanzioit.blogspot.com/2011/10/la-spedizione-in-morea-di-sigismondo.html. Oliveri, Vincenzo (2015) Albergo Muralto camera 116. Loreto: Controvento Editrice. Ondaatje, Michael (1987) In the Skin of a Lion. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Ondaatje, Michael (2004) The English Patient. London: Bloomsbury. Pauli, Tatjana (1999) Piero della Francesca: The neglected master of the Renaissance – his life in Paintings. London/New York: Dorling Kinderley. Plato (2004) Theatetus. London: Penguin Classics. Plato (2008) Timaeus and Critias. London: Penguin Classics. Siniossoglou, Niketas (2016) Radical Platonism in Byzantium: Illumination and Utopia in Gemistos Phleton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vasari, Giorgio (1971) Lives of the Artists: A Selection. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Classics. Voragine, Jacobus de (2012) The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Zuffi, Stefano et.al. (2006) L’Umanesimo: La Grande Storia dell’Arte, 16. Milano: Mondadori. Williamson, Hugh Ross (1974) Lorenzo the Magnificent. London: Michael Joseph Ltd.

I romersk religion var Genius Loci, Platsens ande, en gestalt som ibland framställdes som en yngling som i händerna höll en cornucopia, ett ymnighetshorn. Cornucopian var ett stort, ihåligt bockhorn fyllt till brädden med frukter, blommor, mynt och all annan rikedom och överflöd som du kan tänkas trängta efter.

Det förvånar mig inte att tanken på och framställandet av ett cornucopia i handen på Platsens ande uppstod i Italien, ett land som gett upphov till utsökt mat, goda viner och där varje by, varje del av av dess varierade landskap hyser hemligheter, överraskningar och oanade skatter från varje upptänklig tidsålder.

Trots att COVID-19 under den nionde augusti i år fortfarande rasade ohämmad över hela landet kunde Rose och jag inte avstå från att nappa på vår vän Ghassans erbjudande att tillsammans med honom och hans familj tillbringa en dag i Perugia. Ghassan är fäst vid staden eftersom det var där han för mer än fyrtio år sedan sedan studerade medicin, efter att ha anlänt till Italien från Beirut. Liksom flera andra italienska städer har Perugia ett anrikt och ansett universitet, som i dess fall grundades redan 1308.

Staden har en lång och komplicerad historia. De första bosättningarna på höjden där den ligger härstammar från 1000 år f.Kr. och 600 år senare var den en muromgärdad stad, en av etruskernas tolv lucumonie, stadsstater.

I sin reseskildring Pictures from Italy från 1846 beskriver Charles Dickens Perugia. En del i en märklig och ojämn bok i vilken Dickens tycks betrakta Italien som i en dröm – ett förtrollat landskap sett genom en Laterna Magica, en trollykta. Höjdpunkten blev hans venetianska besök, men det finns flera andra iakttagelser som stannat i minnet. Dickens tycks oavbrutet fascineras av våldsamma kontraster och gripen av en oförmåga att ta till sig den mängd av intryck som rasar över honom:

saker och ting är pittoreska, fula, elaka, magnifika, förtjusande och kränkande, de bryter sig vid varje hörn in i min uppfattningsförmåga.

Intryck tränger sig på Dickens, fyller hans hjärna och allt som oftast tycks han förvirras av mängden och mångfalden. Eftersom han är på resande fot tycks skildringarna emellanåt förvandlas till en karusell av upplevelser som spinner förbi i våldsam fart – makalösa byggnader, utsökt konst, fascinerande processioner, ståtliga mässor, rogivande landskap, glödande solnedgångar, bråddjup ner i historien, små, rökbemängda osterier med utsökt mat, opulenta festmåltider hos aristokrater och religiösa potentater, allt uppblandat med smuts, fattigdom, tiggare, usla hotellrum, klangen av kyrkklockor, doften av rökelse och snusk.

Den socialt medvetne författaren grips av orättvisor som tycks honom värre än i England, mer hopplöst sammanblandade och obegripligare här än i hans hemland och Dickens är långt ifrån blind för det elände som råder även i England. Han går och går, ser sig omkring, funderar och tänker, men det blir ingen ordning på det hela – det visuella överdådet, blandningen av estetiskt raffinemang och grotesk smaklöshet, finkänslighet och tarvlighet, djup kunskap och förbluffande ytlighet, överflödet och fattigdomen som samexisterar sida vid sida, innovation och förfall. Dickens skildringar färgas av de svårbegripliga kontrasterna och ständiga, om än varierade, upprepningar, vare sig det rör sig om Genua, Rom, eller som här Neapel, en stad av:

harlekiner och ficktjuvar, operasångare och tiggare, trasor, dockor, blommor, ljus, smuts och allmänt förfall.

Visst, vi lever nu i andra tider och globaliseringen har gjort allt mer likriktat. Det moderna, välutvecklade Italien som jag nu vistas i är fullkomligt annorlunda det fattiga, nerslitna och sjukdomsplågade land som Dickens besökte, men på något vis känner jag igen mig i kontrasten mellan stök och livlighet och det plötsliga lugn som kan inträda då jag efter att ha promenerat genom Roms överfyllda turiststråk hamnar i lugnet på folktomma gator mellan åldriga byggnader, eller i övergivna, vildvuxna parker mitt i stadens vimmel och då grips, liksom Dickens, av mystiken hos Roms ”mörka stråk”; månskenet över de ruvande ruinerna och en känsla av ”enorm ensamhet” och framförallt av en insikt om att nutiden är ett resultat av det förgångna, historien en del av vår tillvaro.

Efter att på väg ner mot Neapel ha besökt en mängd städer hastar Dickens efter sin skildring av den staden norrut. Det verkar som om han nu har bråttom att lämna landet och hans beskrivningar av exempelvis Florens blir märkligt skissartade. Då han stannat till i Perugia imponeras han av det färgrika skådespelet under en marknadsdag och ljuset som vilar över den urgamla staden:

Perugia, på en hög höjd starkt befäst av konst och natur stiger den abrupt från en slätt omgiven av blånande berg som i fjärran tycks förena sig med himlavalvet, flammande av strålande färger lyser den på sin marknadsdag.

Ljuset och livligheten som frapperade Dickens tycks dröja sig kvar. Perugias drömska atmosfär understryks fortfarande redan vid ankomsten. Efter att under komplicerade rundturer kring stadshöjdens fot ha funnit en parkeringsplats träder du in i någon av de mystiska grottor som medelst trappor, salar och högvälvda gångar leder upp till staden. Efter att ha vandrat under dunkla valv stiger du ut i bländande solsken och finner dig omgiven av ståtliga medeltids- och renässansbyggnader längs marmorbelagda gator, på vilka folk stillsamt strosar kring.

En av stadens skattkammare är dess Palazzo del Priori. Som så många andra italienska städer uppstod stridigheter kring Perugia – påvar, kejsare och kringliggande furstehus erövrade och förlorade staden. Samtidigt växte dess borgarskap i betydelse och inflytande. Hantverkare, prelater och bankirer bildade intresseföreningar och under Medeltiden blev representanter för Perugias olika hantverksskrån stadens styresmän. Erövrare kom och gick, men det var skråna som genom sin Magistratura dei Priori, Församlingsledarnas domstol, styrde och förvaltade staden. Vart och ett av stadens fyrtiotal skrån och kyrkoförsamlingar valde tio representanter, som under två månader bodde i stadens rådhus, tills de ersattes av en ny grupp beslutsfattare.

Palazzo del Priori hyser nu Galleria Nazionale dell´Umbria, ett utsökt nyrenoverat konstmuseum fyllt med häpnadsväckande skatter. I väntan på Ghassan och hans familj besökte jag och Rose åter museet (vi hade varit där tidigare). Liksom de suggestiva, underjordiska gångarna som leder upp till stadens centrum, leder konstmuseets salar, med det ena utsökta mästerverket efter det andra, fram till en oförliknelig ljuspunkt – Piero della Francescas S:t. Antonios polyptyk som han mellan 1467 och 1468 målade för kyrkan i ett franciskanskt kvinnokloster.

S:t Antonio är Paduas skyddshelgon, men som franciskan hade han givetvis kontakter med det till Perugia närliggande Assisi; den Helige Franciskus födelsestad och franciskanernas högkvarter. Som ung man satt Franciskus efter ett krigiskt uppror mot Perugia under ett år som krigsfånge i staden, en upplevelse som ledde till hans ”omvändelse” tre år senare.

Utan tvekan är S:t Antonio di Padova (1195-1231), givetvis strax efter den i min mening obegripligt populäre S:t Pio da Pietrelcina (1887-1965), Italiens folkkäraste helgon. Även om han blev helgonförklarad ett år efter sin död och redan då ägnades en intensiv kult var det först några hundra år senare som S:t. Antonio blev än populärare. Det skedde efter spridningen av en myt om att helgonet vid läsningen av Matteus berättelse om Jesu födelse blivit så inspirerad att han så intensivt föreställde sig Jesusbarnet att han fann att Bibeln han höll i sin hand hade förvandlats till ett barn. Det blev därefter vanligt för konstnärer att framställa S:t. Antonio med Jesusbarnet i famnen och därmed blev han barnens speciella skyddshelgon. Mödrar ber till honom för att deras sjuka barn skall tillfriskna och föräldralösa, eller misshandlade, barn söker hans beskydd.

Då Piero della Francesca målade S:t Antonio bredvid den tronande Madonnan var han dock inte som i senare framställningar en drömsk, ung man med ett barn i sin famn, utan en robust munk med en en rejäl lunta i händerna. S:t Antonio var nämligen en lärd man, utbildad teolog och en skicklig predikant som bidrog till att franciskanerna fick en mer akademisk inriktning än tidigare.

Trots att S:t Franciskus tidigt inspirerats av provensalska trubadurer och var en begåvad poet, tvekade han inför att rekommendera några djuplodande teologiska studier för medlemmarna av sin nyinstiftade munkorden. S:t Franciskus fruktade att studier skulle leda till bristande engagemang då det gällde att osjälviskt tjäna andra och leva i fattigdom. Då han träffade den tretton åt yngre Antonio fann St. Franciskus dock en själsfrände som delade hans vision av ett sällskap med självuppoffrande, fromma och fattiga män och kvinnor som skulle ägna sina liv åt att hjälpa andra. Antonio var redan då känd som en lysande predikant och på den tiden kunde en skicklig sådan locka stora åhörarskaror. Predikanter som Antonio reste som nutidens rockartister land och rike kring. År 1224 anförtrodde S:t Franciskus planeringen för ordensbrödernas utbildning till Antonio – därav den stora boken i hans hand och franciskanernas stigande rykte som såväl lärda som folkkära predikanter.

På tal om S:t Antonios predikotalang kan jag jag inte undgå att nämna en tavla jag sett i Zürich. Legenden berättar att då Antonio kom till Rimini ville folk inte lyssna till hans tal om medlidande och fattigdom utan buade istället ut honom. Besviken gick Antonio då ner till havsstranden, vände sig ut mot havet och började där med hög röst sprida sitt budskap över vattnat. Medan han talade samlades en mängd fiskar som stack upp sina huvuden ur havet för att lyssna. På den schweiziske Arnold Böcklins tavla från 1892 lyssnar en haj uppmärksamt på S:t Antonio, enbart för att strax därefter återgå till sitt sedvanliga rovdjursbeteende.

Piero della Francesca hade liksom den långt senare Böcklin även sina små, kuriösa infall. En oväntad detalj på hans porträtt av S:t Antonio i Perugia är framställningen av hur helgonets tonsur speglas i hans blankpolerade gloria.

Inom parentes sagt är Piero della Francesca en mästare på att återge sådana knappt märkbara, ytterst subtila detaljer. Ett förundransvärt exempel är de små, vita dammkorn som virvlar i solskenet bakom en ängel i hans hans franställning av  La Madonna di Senigallia.

Som då du från Perugias underjordiska gångar stiger från mörker till ljus framstår della Francescas polyptyk som en färd från mörker till ljus, från natt till gryning. Blicken stiger uppåt från predellan, som längst ner till vänster visar en episod ur S:t Antonios liv, då han genom bön uppväcker ett barn från döden.

På predellans högra sida räddar en redan avliden S:ta Elisabet av Ungern (1207- 1231) från himlen en pojke från drunkningsdöden i en brunn.

Elisabet, som också framställs bredvid S.t Franciskus till höger om den tronande Madonnan, var dotter till kung  Andreas av Ungern och blev tidigt änka efter en böhmisk regent. Hon gav sin rikedom till de fattiga, lät bygga ett hem för medellösa kvinnor och ett sjukhus, något som gjort henne till symbol för välgörenhet och skyddshelgon för sjuksköterskor, bagare, brudar, grevinnor, döende barn, landsflyktiga, hemlösa, spetsknypplerskor och änkor. Hennes närvaro på della Francescas altartavla för ett franciskanskt kvinnokloster beror på att S:ta Elisabet lät sig vigas till franciskansk nunna.

Predellans scener med S:t Antonio och S:ta Elisabeth ter sig klumpigare utförda än resten av altartavlan, något som gjort att konstkännare antagit att de utförts av della Francescas elever. Mittscenen är dock så märklig att den kan ha skapats direkt av mästaren själv, ty här finns de egenskaper som pionjären inom modern konsthistoria, Bernhard Berenson, 1897 observerade:

han var kanske den förste som förmådde använda ljuseffekternas antingen framhävande eller dämpande egenskaper; och slutligen, betraktad som en Illustratör, kan det ifrågasättas om någon annan någonsin har lyckats framställa en mer komplett och övertygande värld, om någon konstnär haft en mer majestätisk världsbild och förmått förmått förse saker och ting med mer heroisk betydelse och närvaro.

Scenen utspelar sig i ett ödsligt, nattligt landskap där S:t Franciskus får sina stigmata genom en himmelsk vision av en korsfäst Jesus. En munkbroder, kanske S:t Antonio, sitter en bit ifrån honom med en uppslagen bok i knäet och blickar upp mot visionen av den korsfäste, som lyser upp den nattliga nejden. Det lugn med vilket han betraktar miraklet gör oss osäkra om han verkligen ser samma sak som S:t Franciskus. Hela scenen är märkligt stillsam och fullkomligt odramatisk.

Vi lyfter blicken och altartavlan ljusnar kring den tronande Madonnan, allvarlig och majestätisk som samtliga madonnor av della Francesca. Han har dock skapat både bättre jungfrur och barn än så, något som möjligen kan betyda att han överlåtit en del av arbetet till någon av sina lärjungar.

Altartavlan krönes av ett underverk – den del av polyptiken som med all säkerhet har skapats direkt av Piero della Francesca – under en restauration för några år sedan fann man till och med fingeravtryck i färgen något som visar att mästaren hade anbringat de förunderligt klara färgerna med både fingrar och penslar.

En knäböjande ängel, klädd i samma skira, blåklara färg som den himmel från vilken Den helige andes ljusomstrålade duva sänder sina livgivande ljusknippen mot Maria, som ödmjukt bejakande böjer sitt huvud. Ett kristallinskt klart dagsljus omsluter scenen som inte utspelar sig i något enkelt galliléenskt hus utan i ett utsökt, luftigt plats, som bakom ängeln öppnar sig mot en trädgård. Ängelns fågelvingar i vitt och subtilt, nyanserat ljusblå färgtoner framhäver den som en naturvarelse. Maria och ängeln är fulländade gestalter från olika världar, skilda åt genom en perfekt framställd pelargång som leder fram till en blå-vitschatterad marmorvägg. Solsken faller in och skuggar golvets ljusrosa marmorgolv. Rummet bakom Maria är däremot kolsvart. Då Jungfrun saktmodigt tagit emot och accepterat ängelns budskap och Guds fruktbärande ljusstrålar blir kanske det kompakta mörkret bakom henne en föraning om den kommande sonens offerdöd.