Metaphysical art – pittura metafisica, de Chirico, Carrà, and the poetry of the empty square

Metaphysical art, or pittura metafisica in Italian, is the short-lived but highly influential art movement launched by Giorgio de Chirico around 1910, with empty squares, long shadows, and arcades that lead nowhere. The movement flourished above all between 1911 and 1920, and although it lasted less than ten years as an organized school, its visual language colored almost everything that followed: Surrealism, New Objectivity, film, and even Italian architecture in the 1930s. The name comes from the Greek meta ta physika, “beyond the physical,” and refers to painting what lies behind the visible: the stillness, anxiety, and wonder that can arise when an everyday place suddenly feels like a riddle.

This page is Bozetto’s Swedish fact guide to metaphysical art. Here we explore how the movement was born in Florence, Paris, and Ferrara, who the artists were, which works define the style, and where you can see them today, including Moderna Museet’s Le cerveau de l'enfant from 1914 in Stockholm. We explain the techniques behind the strange perspectives and show you how to bring the mood home with posters that bring calm and mystery to a room rather than decoration. The entire text is based on verifiable information about dates, works, and museums.

Contents
↓ What is metaphysical art?
↓ History: from Florence to Ferrara
↓ The most important works
↓ Techniques, subjects, and visual language
↓ The artists behind the movement
↓ Legacy and influence
↓ Metaphysical art in Sweden
↓ Metaphysical art at home
↓ Timeline
↓ Related artists and movements
↓ Frequently asked questions about metaphysical art

What is metaphysical art?

Metaphysical art is an Italian painting movement that emerged just before the First World War and is characterized by dreamlike, silent cityscapes. According to Wikipedia and Encyclopædia Britannica, the movement began around 1910, and Britannica states that it flourished mainly between 1911 and 1920. The paintings are realistically rendered but utterly impossible to read as reality: arcades in sharply straight lines, a train steaming past behind a wall, a statue on a pedestal, and shadows far too long for the time of day. The artists wanted to depict not the world, but what lay unseen behind it.

Key facts: Movement: pittura metafisica (metaphysical art). Beginning: around 1910 with Giorgio de Chirico’s The Enigma of an Autumn Afternoon (Enigma of an Autumn Afternoon), painted with Piazza Santa Croce in Florence as its model. The term “metaphysical” was used by Guillaume Apollinaire in 1913. The scuola metafisica school was formulated in Ferrara in 1917 by de Chirico, Carlo Carrà, and Alberto Savinio. The journal Valori Plastici was founded by Mario Broglio in Milan in 1918. Carrà’s book Metaphysical Painting was published in 1919, the same year as de Chirico’s first exhibition in Rome. Key artists: de Chirico (1888–1978), Carrà (1881–1966), Giorgio Morandi (1890–1964), Alberto Savinio (1891–1952), Filippo de Pisis, and Mario Sironi (1885–1961). The movement dissolved around 1920.

The word metaphysical

Wikipedia states that Guillaume Apollinaire first used the word “metaphysical” to describe de Chirico's paintings in 1913. Apollinaire wrote about de Chirico's “metaphysical landscapes” and praised his use of surprise as “the most modern of all devices.” The word has deeper roots than that: it refers to the branch of philosophy that asks about the ultimate nature of existence, and de Chirico drew his way of thinking from Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Otto Weininger, all of whom he read while studying in Munich.

The movement at a glance

Unlike Futurism, which celebrated speed and machines, or Cubism, which fragmented forms, Metaphysical art went in the opposite direction: everything stops. According to Wikipedia, Carrà replaced dynamism with stillness after leaving Futurism. The result is painting in which time seems to have stood still on a late afternoon, and loneliness is the subject itself. It is precisely this mood that has made the movement so popular with those who want art with depth in their homes.

History: From Florence to Ferrara

The history of Metaphysical art is essentially the story of de Chirico between 1905 and 1920, a decade that took him from Greece via Munich and Florence to Paris and finally to a military hospital in Ferrara. The movement's true core spans only fifteen years of a long artistic career, but it was during these very years that the images were created to which later Surrealists, film directors, and architects would return.

Munich and Nietzsche, 1905–1909

Giorgio de Chirico was born on July 10, 1888, in Volos, Greece, to Italian parents. According to The Art Story, his father died in 1905, after which his mother moved the family to Munich, where he began studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in 1906. There he encountered the Symbolist landscapes of the Swiss artist Arnold Böcklin, including Isle of the Dead from 1880, and the dreamlike prints of Max Klinger. Klinger's Paraphrase on the Finding of a Glove (1877–78) later became a direct source of inspiration for The Song of Love. It was also here that he read Nietzsche, whose descriptions of empty arcaded streets in Turin made a particularly deep impression on him, according to Britannica.

The Revelation in Piazza Santa Croce, 1910

According to de Chirico himself, the decisive moment came one autumn day in Florence in 1910, when he was sitting on a bench in Piazza Santa Croce and suddenly saw the square as if for the first time. The result was The Enigma of an Autumn Evening, dated around 1910 and today one of the most famous works in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice. The Art Story quotes him: “I tried to express the intense, mysterious feeling I had found in Nietzsche: the melancholy of beautiful autumn days in Italian cities.” He himself called the works that grew out of the moment enigmas.

Paris, 1911–1915

In 1911, de Chirico moved to Paris, where he quickly made contact with leading critics. Britannica states that he had already exhibited such paintings in Paris in 1911, and The Art Story links his first public appearances to the Salon d'Automne. It was here that Apollinaire became his chief advocate and gave the movement its name in 1913. During these years, he painted The Red Tower (1913), Longing for the Infinite (1913–14), and The Song of Love (1914), all featuring empty squares, trains, and towers.

Ferrara 1917 and scuola metafisica

When the war broke out, de Chirico returned to Italy. According to Wikipedia, in February 1917 he met Carlo Carrà in Ferrara, where both were stationed, and they worked together for several months at a military hospital in the city. The Art Story adds that Filippo de Pisis was present. Britannica states that de Chirico, Carrà, and Alberto Savinio formulated “the rather obscure principles” of scuola metafisica that year. It was in Ferrara that the concept itself moved from a private visual world to a movement program.

Valori Plastici and the Dissolution, 1918–1920

Mario Broglio founded the magazine Valori Plastici in Milan in 1918, and it published de Chirico and Carrà extensively. Broglio also opened a gallery in Rome with the same name, whose exhibitions traveled to Germany and reached Dadaists such as Max Ernst. In 1919, Carrà published the book Pittura Metafisica, which, together with his 1917 exhibition in Milan, led critics to attribute the movement’s origins to him. The relationship between the two artists broke down. Britannica states that the school disbanded around 1920 because of disagreements over who had founded the group, while Wikipedia says that by 1919 both had largely abandoned the style for a neoclassical approach.

The Most Important Works of Metaphysical Art

The most important metaphysical works were painted between 1910 and 1921 and are now held in collections from New York to Venice and Stockholm. Just a few titles are enough to understand the entire movement, and several can be seen in museums.

The Enigma of an Autumn Evening (around 1910)

The movement’s starting point and, according to The Art Story, the first metaphysical work. The painting depicts an empty piazza with a large statue and a long arcade, beneath a pale sky that is neither day nor night. The work belongs to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice. The same museum also has Carrà’s L'amante dell'ingegnere (The Engineer’s Mistress) from 1921, which The Art Story describes as the last of his metaphysical paintings.

The Song of Love (1914)

A Greek plaster head sculpture, a red surgical glove, and a green ball are brought together on a building facade while a train steams by in the distance. The painting is part of the collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. De Chirico himself described it as an example of “the Nietzschean method,” and it went on to have enormous historical significance. According to The Art Story, René Magritte said of a reproduction of it, “my eyes saw thought for the first time.” Read more about Magritte on our René Magritte page.

“One must discover the demon in every thing.” – Giorgio de Chirico, 1918 (quoted by The Art Story)

The Child’s Brain (1914) at the Moderna Museet

One of the movement’s most enigmatic portraits is Le cerveau de l'enfant (The Child's Brain) from 1914, depicting a mustachioed man with a closed gaze beside a drape. The work is in the Moderna Museet’s collection in Stockholm under inventory number NM 6068, and according to the museum’s collection database, it is on display in Stockholm. It is therefore one of the few original works by de Chirico from those pivotal years that visitors in Sweden can see without traveling abroad.

Carrà and Morandi: the quiet approach

Carrà’s L'ovale delle apparizioni (Oval of Apparitions) from 1918 is at the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna in Rome. In 1919, Giorgio Morandi painted Metaphysical Still Life with Triangle, which, according to The Art Story, is part of the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan. Mario Sironi’s Venere dei porti (Venus of the Harbors), also from 1919, is on display at Casa Museo Boschi Di Stefano in Milan and is made with tempera and collage. Together, they show that metaphysical art was not just about squares, but about a general sense of the silence of things.

Technique, subjects, and visual language

Metaphysical paintings can be recognized by a few deliberately repeated techniques. Wikipedia describes them as having “sharp contrasts between light and shadow,” deserted squares surrounded by arcades in steep perspective, and small distant figures with long shadows or anonymous tailor’s mannequins instead of people. Everything works to create a sense of displacement in time and space.

Perspective in pieces

De Chirico used classical linear perspective, but with several vanishing points in the same image. The horizon is low, the arcades slope in different directions, and the buildings cannot stand on the same plane. Britannica describes “deep perspective space and a dark-toned sky.” The image is precise, but impossible to orient yourself in, which is the point. According to Wikipedia, Carrà, by contrast, stuck to correct perspective and a thicker paint surface, giving his paintings less irony and more weight.

Motifs: statues, mannequins, trains, and towers

The Art Story lists the movement’s recurring motifs: statues, mannequins, fish, mirrors, and geometric objects in unexpected settings. Trains, factory chimneys, and tall buildings show the presence of the modern city alongside the classical world. According to the same source, de Chirico’s iconography shifted from statues in his earliest paintings to mannequins around 1914, a change that turned the human figure into an empty shell and proved decisive for the Surrealists.

The titles and the light

The titles are part of the work. De Chirico gave his paintings enigmatic names such as Longing for the Infinite, The Conquest of the Philosopher (1914), and Turin Melancholy (1915), and they shape how the image is read. We have summarized research on how a title changes what we see in our article Does the Title Matter?. The light is low, soft, and directed from the side, making the shadows the real protagonists of the image.

The artists behind the movement

The movement had a small core of artists born between 1881 and 1891, all active in Italy. They were friends, rivals, and sometimes opponents, but what they shared was an interest in making the everyday seem strange.

Giorgio de Chirico and Alberto Savinio

De Chirico (1888–1978) was the movement’s founder and died in Rome on November 20, 1978. His younger brother Alberto Savinio (1891–1952) was a poet, musician, and painter and, according to Wikipedia, one of the school’s founders along with him and Carrà. Together, the brothers created a shared mythology of ancient gods, modern cities, and dreams.

Carlo Carrà

According to The Art Story, Carrà (1881–1966) came from Futurism and studied Giotto and Uccello from around 1915. His metaphysical period was short but intense, from around 1917 to 1921. Read more about his background on our page about Futurism.

Giorgio Morandi, de Pisis, and Sironi

According to The Art Story, Morandi (1890–1964) met de Chirico in Rome in 1919 and went on to become a distinguished still-life painter, with strict outlines, earth tones, and “severe, sculptural” forms. Filippo de Pisis was already there in Ferrara in 1917, and Mario Sironi, who helped found the Novecento movement in 1922, painted metaphysical images of harbors and suburbs. See also our page about still life.

Legacy and influence

Metaphysical art was short-lived but became one of the most versatile sources of inspiration of the 20th century. By the 1920s, almost every new movement in Europe had borrowed something from de Chirico, and his influence has never really faded.

The Surrealists

Wikipedia states that René Magritte, Salvador Dalí, and other Surrealists used formal and thematic elements from metaphysical art. The Art Story adds that André Breton, Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy, Magritte, and Dalí all credited de Chirico with leading them to Surrealism, and that Ernst believed I pesci sacri (The Sacred Fish, 1919) led the German Dadaists to turn toward Surrealism. Read more on our pages about Surrealism, Salvador Dalí, and Dadaism.

Germany and New Objectivity

According to Wikipedia, exhibitions of metaphysical art in Germany in 1921 and 1924 inspired George Grosz and Oskar Schlemmer to use mannequin imagery. This connects the movement with New Objectivity in the Weimar Republic, where cool, precise realism found a new application.

Architecture, Film, and Literature

Wikipedia notes that Italy built squares in a metaphysical spirit between the wars, including in Brescia, Varese, Sabaudia, and Aprilia, as well as the unfinished EUR district in Rome. The Art Story also links the movement to films by Valerio Zurlini and Michelangelo Antonioni and to writers such as Sylvia Plath and John Ashbery. Its visual legacy lives on in pop culture, advertising, and modern interior imagery.

Metaphysical Art in Sweden

Metaphysical art is sparsely represented in Swedish collections, but it is there. In November 2026, the Moderna Museet collection database lists five works by Giorgio de Chirico: two paintings, two posters, and a print. According to the database's location filter, two of them are at Moderna Museet in Stockholm, and one is registered under an unknown artist. In addition to Le cerveau de l'enfant (1914), the database mentions Cavallo (around 1925), inventory number NM 2900, which is displayed in the museum's study gallery. Moderna Museet is therefore the foremost place in Sweden to encounter de Chirico's art in person.

For a deeper understanding of how modernism came to the Nordic countries, we recommend our page on Nordic art. You can also explore further in Bozetto's Swedish artworks collection, where the quiet, light-filled Swedish tradition reveals its own side of silence.

Metaphysical Art at Home

Metaphysical art works in the home because it is quiet. The images have a powerful effect but a limited palette: ochre, terracotta, dark green, pale blue, and brown shadows. This makes them easy to pair with both light and dark rooms. At the same time, they are atmospheric enough to carry an entire room on their own. We've summarized research on why we still choose sad images in Why do we hang sad art on the wall?.

Room and light

Place the artwork where you can see it from a distance, for example in a hallway, stairwell, or at the far end of a living room. De Chirico's images rely on depth and length, and work best when the viewer can slowly approach them. Avoid places with strong direct sunlight, which fades paper over time.

Frames and mats

Slim, dark wooden or black frames enhance the sharp lines, while a wide white mat gives the image the museum-like silence that metaphysical art deserves. Our mat buying guide covers measurements and acid-free quality.

Combine with other styles

Metaphysical motifs work beautifully alongside surrealist posters and abstract art. Explore Bozetto's collections Artworks by famous artists, Abstract posters and Retro & vintage posters to find motifs that share the muted color palette.

Tip: Hang a metaphysical poster in a corridor or hallway where the eye can travel along the room, just as it does in de Chirico's arcades. Choose a large format (for example, 50x70 cm) with a wide mat, and leave the rest of the wall bare so the image's own silence can take effect.

Timeline: metaphysical art 1888–1978

1888 – Giorgio de Chirico is born in Volos, Greece.
1906 – De Chirico begins studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich.
1910 – The Enigma of an Autumn Evening is painted after the revelation in Piazza Santa Croce in Florence.
1911 – De Chirico moves to Paris.
1913 – Apollinaire uses the word “metaphysical” to describe de Chirico's painting.
1914 – The Song of Love and Le cerveau de l'enfant are painted.
1917 – Carrà and de Chirico meet in Ferrara; scuola metafisica is formulated.
1918 – Mario Broglio founds the magazine Valori Plastici in Milan.
1919 – Carrà's book Pittura Metafisica is published; de Chirico's first exhibition in Rome; Morandi meets de Chirico.
1921 – Carrà paints L'amante dell'ingegnere, his last metaphysical work; exhibition in Germany.
1922 – Sironi helps found Novecento.
1978 – De Chirico dies in Rome on November 20.

Related artists and movements

Metaphysical art is connected to several of Bozetto’s other fact pages. These are the closest: Giorgio de Chirico (the movement’s founder, with a biographical fact page of his own), Surrealism (the movement’s most direct successor), Symbolism (the tradition of Böcklin and Klinger), Futurism (Carrà’s origins), Cubism, and Modernism as a whole. You’ll find all our guides in the Knowledge Bank, and an overview of the entire history of art in Art History – Complete Guide.

If you’d like to read more about the style beyond Bozetto, we recommend Wikipedia’s article on Metaphysical painting, Encyclopædia Britannica, and Moderna Museet’s collection database for Giorgio de Chirico. Also read about encounters with modern art in Leonora Carrington 2026 and Peggy Guggenheim in London 2026.

Frequently asked questions about metaphysical art

Want to bring home the metaphysical silence? Explore Bozetto’s selection of artworks by famous artists and find pieces that bring depth, mystery, and calm to a room.