The enigma of empty squares: When giorgio de chirico invented silence in painting
Imagine an autumn afternoon in Ferrara, 1917. The slanting sun carves long shadows across the cobblestones of Piazza Ariostea, while a man walks slowly, hands buried in his coat pockets. He stops suddenly, captivated by the scene before him: an empty square, lined with geometric arcades, where two ancient statues seem to converse in silence. No living soul, only the distant echo of a clock and the rustle of a flag in the wind. This man is Giorgio de Chirico, and what he contemplates is not merely an Italian square, but the stage for a revelation: what if emptiness were not absence, but presence? What if these deserted spaces held a truth deeper than the world’s tumult?
By Artedusa
••9 min readThus were born the metaphysical squares, those canvases where architecture becomes enigma, where time freezes like in a waking dream, and where the unease of emptiness becomes a visual melody. De Chirico did not paint landscapes, but states of mind—places where one senses something is about to happen, without ever knowing what. His paintings, now hanging in the world’s greatest museums, continue to haunt our imagination. Why? Because they capture a universal truth: that of waiting, of absence, of the shiver that runs through us when we stand at the edge of the known.
01The city as a mirror of the soul: when architecture becomes psyche
Ferrara, Turin, Paris—it matters little which city, for de Chirico extracts its essence like an alchemist distilling gold. His squares are never faithful reproductions, but condensations of memory and symbols. Take The Italian Square (1913): the buildings are reduced to pure forms, cubes and cylinders that seem to float in an undefined space. The shadows, a deep black, stretch like accusing fingers, while a locomotive on the horizon—a recurring motif in the artist’s work—belches white smoke that mingles with the clouds. Everything is at once precise and unreal, as if the city had been rebuilt by a mad architect.
What strikes is this impression of distorted familiarity. You recognize the elements—an arcade, a tower, a statue—but their arrangement defies logic. Perspectives collide, scales play with perception. In The Transformed Dream (1913), a giant banana sits in the middle of a square, like an object fallen from another world. De Chirico delights in blurring the lines: is this a dream? A hallucination? Or simply reality, seen through the distorting prism of anxiety?
This distortion is not gratuitous. It reflects a psychological truth: our cities are not neutral backdrops, but projections of our fears and desires. De Chirico’s squares are mental spaces, where every element—the solitary statue, the stopped clock, the half-open door—becomes a symbol. As the philosopher Walter Benjamin wrote, "architecture is the silent witness of history." In de Chirico’s work, it also becomes the witness of the unconscious.
02Suspended time: when clocks lie
It is noon, yet the shadows are those of dusk. Clocks show different hours, trains arrive but never depart. In de Chirico’s universe, time is not a straight line, but a labyrinth where one goes in circles. Take The Philosopher’s Conquest (1914): a clock reads 2:55, while a cast shadow suggests a much later hour. Elsewhere, in Melancholy of a Beautiful Day (1913), the sundial and the mechanical clock contradict each other, as if time itself had become schizophrenic.
This temporal confusion is not merely a stylistic effect. It expresses an obsession of the artist: that of eternal return, the Nietzschean idea that everything repeats itself, endlessly. De Chirico, who read Thus Spoke Zarathustra like one devours a grimoire, saw in these empty squares places where time had stopped, where past and future merged. "The present does not exist," he wrote in his memoirs. "There are only moments stolen from eternity."
This suspension of time has something unsettling, yet deeply poetic. It evokes those moments in real life when we find ourselves staring at a landscape, a street, a face, and suddenly the world seems to hold its breath. De Chirico’s squares are these crystallized moments, these parentheses where anything is possible, even the impossible.
03The unease of emptiness: why these squares send a chill down our spine
There is something deeply disturbing in de Chirico’s paintings. It is not violence, nor ugliness—it is emptiness. These deserted squares, these streets without passersby, these shadows stretching like omens... They awaken in you a strange sensation, as if you had just missed an important appointment, or forgotten something essential.
This unease, psychoanalysts call it "abandonment anxiety." De Chirico’s squares are its perfect illustration: spaces designed for crowds, but where there is no one. The arcades, the statues, the benches—everything is there, ready to welcome life, but life eludes it. In The Disquieting Muses (1916), two faceless mannequins sit in the middle of a square, like guardians of an inaccessible mystery. Their presence is both reassuring and terrifying: who are they? What do they watch over?
De Chirico plays with this ambiguity. His paintings are neither entirely real nor entirely dreamlike. They exist in this in-between, where the rational and the irrational mingle, where every detail—a discarded glove, a half-open door, a flag flapping in the wind—becomes a clue, a piece of a puzzle with no solution. It is this indecision that fascinates and chills us. Like in a dream, we know something is wrong, but we cannot put our finger on it.
04Light as an accomplice to mystery
If de Chirico’s squares disturb us, it is also because of their light. A golden, almost supernatural light, as if coming from elsewhere. It bathes the scenes in a twilight glow, as if the sun were about to set—or rise, one never knows. In The Enigma of a Day (1914), this raking light sculpts volumes, deepens shadows, and gives the buildings an almost organic presence, as if they were breathing.
This light is not realistic. It does not follow the laws of physics, but those of poetry. It evokes those moments in real life when light suddenly seems charged with meaning: a sunbeam through stained glass, a golden glow filtering through trees, the halo of a streetlamp in the fog. De Chirico captures these magical moments and freezes them on canvas, as if to remind us that beauty often lies in the ephemeral.
But this light also has a narrative function. It guides our gaze, draws our attention to certain details, leaves others in shadow. In The Song of Love (1914), it is the light that highlights the red glove suspended in midair, like an enigmatic symbol. Without it, the scene would lose all its power. It is both accomplice and revealer—an ally in the construction of mystery.
05Objects speak: when the mundane becomes symbol
A glove. A banana. A billiard ball. A headless statue. In de Chirico’s paintings, the most ordinary objects become actors in their own right, charged with secret meaning. Take The Son of Man (1914): a red glove, a green apple, and a white billiard ball float in an undefined space, like relics of a vanished world. What do they signify? No one really knows, and that is precisely what makes them fascinating.
De Chirico draws inspiration here from the vanitas of Baroque painting, those still lifes where skulls, hourglasses, and withered flowers remind us of life’s fleeting nature. But in his work, the symbols are more subtle, more personal. The glove, for example, appears often in his oeuvre. Is it a reference to the artist’s hand? To the absence of the one who wore it? Or simply an object that has lost its function, like these squares that have lost their passersby?
These enigmatic objects play a key role in the construction of mystery. They are at once familiar and foreign, like words in a language you do not speak, but whose meaning you sense. They create a tension between the known and the unknown, between the real and the imaginary. And it is this tension that gives de Chirico’s paintings their hypnotic power.
06The legacy of a dreamer: when the Surrealists stole the fire
In 1924, André Breton published the Surrealist Manifesto. In this foundational text, he cited de Chirico as one of the movement’s precursors, alongside Lautréamont and Rimbaud. "De Chirico was the first to understand that painting should cease to be a window open to the world and become a door open to the unconscious," he wrote. The Surrealists, in search of oneiric images and hidden symbols, saw in him a master.
Dalí, Magritte, Ernst—all drew from de Chirico’s universe. Dalí borrowed his distorted perspectives and floating objects (The Persistence of Memory owes much to the metaphysical squares). Magritte adopted his taste for enigma and the subversion of objects (The Red Model eerily recalls The Song of Love). As for Ernst, he embraced his technique of improbable collages, where disparate elements meet to create new meaning.
Yet de Chirico would eventually renounce this lineage. In the 1920s, he turned toward a more classical style, rejecting his own innovations. "I painted what I saw, not what I dreamed," he would later declare, as if to distance himself from those who had adored him. Irony of history: the artist who had paved the way for Surrealism would become one of its fiercest critics.
07Why these squares still speak to us today
More than a century after their creation, de Chirico’s metaphysical squares continue to haunt us. Why? Because they capture a timeless truth: that of isolation, of waiting, of the moment when the world seems to hold its breath. In an era where everything moves too fast, where cities are saturated with noise and motion, these paintings offer a parenthesis of silence. They remind us that emptiness is not absence, but possibility.
Today, architects draw inspiration from his distorted perspectives to create spaces that play with perception. Filmmakers, from Fellini to David Lynch, borrow his framings and lighting to evoke dream and anxiety. Even fashion has embraced his influence: in 2021, Dior presented a collection inspired by the metaphysical squares, where models walked through sets reminiscent of de Chirico’s paintings.
But beyond these influences, it is their evocative power that makes them unforgettable. These deserted squares, these long shadows, these enigmatic objects... They speak to us because they reflect our own anxieties and dreams. They are the mirror of a world that is at once real and unreal, where time stretches and contracts, where emptiness is a presence.
Perhaps that is why, before a de Chirico painting, you feel that particular shiver. It is not just beauty you contemplate—it is a part of yourself, brought to light. And in that silence, you suddenly hear the murmur of eternity.