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Cosmic Fragments: De Chirico, Calligrammes and Particles of the Skyi
[This long quarrel] I judge: tradition—invention
Order—Adventure
You whose speech is made in the image of God’s speech
Speech equal to order’s own self
Be easy on us when you are comparing
Us and those who were the perfection of order
Us looking all around for adventure
Us not your enemy
Who want to present you strange mighty lands
Where flowering mystery surrenders itself to the takers
Where new fires are and colors unseen
Phantasms by the thousands weightless
Which need to be given reality
And we want to explore bounty’s enormous land all stillness
Where time is to banish to call back
Pity us battling always at the limits
Of limitlessness and tomorrow
Pity our errors pity our sins.
--Guillaume Apollinaire
from “La Jolie Rousse” (Calligrammes)ii
It took almost a decade following the war and the death of Apollinaire for some
artists to attempt a return to Paris. Still real the loss of idealism, the suspension of hope
amid memories of annihilation. In 1928 the writer Massimo Bontempelli described these
years as the “fatigue of a great epoch, exhausted by age after nineteen centuries of the
most complicated life.”iii For many it was a period defined by historic fatalism,
comprised of a lost, incredulous generation that according to Gertrude Stein had
ironically survived itself and a world war. In this atmosphere of disintegration and
negation a yearning for transcendence flickered among artists long associated with the
“agonism” of the avant-garde. It was in this wider sea of longing that an affirmation of
life, Adorno’s standard by which all thought is to be measured, struggled to revive.iv
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Framed by two World Wars, and originating in events surrounding the Great War
followed by the death of the poet Guillaume Apollinaire in 1918, the sixty six lithographs
produced by De Chirico for Apollinaire’s Calligrammes: Poems of Peace and War
(originally published in 1918 by Gallimard with a frontispiece of Apollinaire by Picasso,v
but reissued in 1930 with the De Chirico lithographs) represent an homage to Apollinaire
based in the conflicted consciousness of the avant-garde.vi (Figure 1) (Figure 2) It does so
by engaging in a series of historical and mystical appositions that locate signs of temporal
“decrepitude,” the failure of directional history beside Aristotelian visions of eternity. At
the same time, unfolding quasi as a cinematic storyboard, Calligrammes extends the
possibility of movement to a fixed historical order increasingly signaled by crepuscular
demise.
This article proposes that De Chirico’s lithographs for Calligrammes which have
eluded scholarly analysis invoke cosmic and cyclical paradigms of spiritual renewal
alongside denigrations of history; that such imagery derives in part from a variety of
mystical and occult sources then current among the Parisian avant-garde; that these
quotations took the form of a paradoxical apposition of destructive and regenerative
forces based in a confrontation between European historicism and Oriental mysticism (a
confrontation that links De Chirico with Dada, neo-Futurism and more recent neo-Dada
iconoclasm and post-structuralism, as well as to the protean mystical aspirations of early
modern abstraction); and finally that De Chirico’s purpose in so doing was to apotheosize
and to eulogize Apollinaire in illo tempore, so as to reenact a creative process of fading
luminosity.vii
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Cosmos and Chaos
Since remote antiquity, time has been mythologized in terms of a cosmos and
chaos dichotomy in which a primeval abyss (or darkness) existed before (and in some
cosmogonies co-existed beside) creation, with history and human realization occurring
along evolutionary lines. Such a conception of deep time embodies polarities of thought
surrounding the subject of time, described by geologist Stephen Gould as time’s arrow
and time’s cycle, linear arrows of history and circular cycles of immanence represented in
the symbolism of the mandala.viii At one end of the dichotomy history is an irreversible
sequence of events moving directionally, or non-directionally as it were, in a temporal
series with psychological affinities to conscious individuation.ix At the other end is
directionless eternity and never changing being, spiritual transcendence that corresponds
to universal Wholeness. Mircea Eliade in The Myth of Eternal Return (or Cosmos and
History) argues that archaic societies, though conscious of certain forms of “history”
made every effort to disregard it in favor of time’s archetypal cycle, a revolt against
historical time with various parallels to transcendent abstraction in contemporary art.x At
the same time Eliade points out, the recurrence of events within historic time and the
discovery of “historical man” as one who “makes himself within history” reflect
variations of periodicity among a vast array of devaluative “historicisms” (Hegel,
Heidegger, Nietzsche) that constitute philosophies of finitude despite their cyclic
modalities.xi
Along these lines are twentieth century visions of time conceived as historic
rupture and fragmentation. For Sylviane Agacinski, modern consciousness represents a
unique form of temporality that renounces eternity in favor of increasingly unstable shifts
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towards Benjamin’s One Way Street, the blind oblivion and “endless interlacing of the
irreversible and the repetitive” incapable of either past or future orientation.xii
As an alternative to the exclusive valorization of what lasts, what remains,
or what could one day come to completion, we may have no other choice
anymore but to accept the passing, even to commend the futile. Having become
strangers to the ancient dreams, it remains for us to consider ‘passingness,’ to
accept the lightness of what passes.xiii
Paradoxically in Agacinski’s discourse of Time Passing we may also locate
intimations of art by means of her acknowledgement of images emerging from the
shadows of a transitory world that can become capable of truth. More importantly she
identifies Plato’s transient illusions, present in the Parable of the Cave, as participating in
incessant movements or sequences that in their mobility constitute a suspension of time.
For the purposes of De Chirico’s lithographs for Calligrammes, for which temporal and
historic fragmentation may be considered paramount, we will find that it is more the
movement (the metamorphosis or flux) of the eternal than the substance of the ephemeral
that will be seen to comprise an affirmation of being situated between the two polarities
of cosmos and chaos, light and shadow, permanence and change. Such an emphasis
echoes pre-Socratic ideas of becoming espoused in Heraclitus’ fragmentary “passages,”
inherently anhistoric conceptions of time that are in close proximity to the timeless
cyclicality and centeredness of Oriental philosophies.xiv These allusions are redoubled in
De Chirico’s own writings of the period, beginning with the group of Frammenti (titled
by the artist) corresponding to the war years in Ferrara from 1916-1918 containing the
poem Frammento, its stanzas burdened by the repetitive: sono un immobile ipotecato (I
am an immobile hypothetical);xv and sustained in his literary “fragments” collected by
Waldemar George in Le fils de l’ingénieur of 1928.xvi It is perhaps worth noting that in
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the same year that De Chirico’s lithographs for Calligrammes were prepared, 1929, the
first edition of Richard Wilhelm’s The Secret of the Golden Flower appeared in
Germany, a work that considered the highly paradoxical relation of Western to Eastern
thought in terms of opposition and partiality.
The transcendent urge that manifested itself in the later nineteenth and early
twentieth century, expressed in terms of spiritualist theory and cosmic imagery must
therefore be considered no less than Cubismxvii as indicative of the socio-temporal
dislocation that accompanied the onset of modernity. Accordingly, in retrospect, both the
pre-war spiritualist momentum of mysticism, as well as post-war essentialism and
transcendental abstraction express a schizophrenic historic consciousness increasingly
incapable of reconstituting itself. In his Memoirs, De Chirico idealized the nineteenth
century as one of “hysteria, impotence in the plastic and creative fields, envy, snobbery,
mechanization, agitation, stupidity, cruelty and the total lack of balance and integral
thought.”xviii
Seen from this promontory, a sense of pathos (Abacinski’s “foretaste of
mourning”) seems to accompany invocations of “colossal” mythic archetypes (the
Hegelian belief in le voyant, the visionary artist-philosopher who could penetrate truth) as
well as the anachronistic promise of harmony and cosmic order to appear in “purified”
abstraction. Despite aspirations to the contrary Calligrammes reveals much of the
melancholic foreboding that lurks beneath the surface of “activist” intellectual
exuberance, while at the same time reemphasizing, as Borges, the possibility of
multifarious movement embodied in myths of circular time.xix
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Similarly in seeking release from materiality De Chirico, like many pre and postwar artists turned to cosmogony, mysticism and the occult to differentiate between the
realms of the universal and mundane as prelude to transcendent abstraction. Stimulated
in part by scientific research, esoterica and artistic explorations of natural light by such
precursors as Corot and the Impressionists, as well as by the more visionary aspects of
Romanticism and Symbolism, an interest in heavenly bodies accompanied greater
experimentation in cosmic correspondence, especially among poets and painters in the
circle of Apollinaire. Fueled by intensified astrological, hermetic and theosophical
research, cosmic analogies came to embody literal translations of a metaphysical position
shared among many artists of the day corresponding to a higher, enlightened zone of
“astral” realization. Ideas germinating in the chrysalis of Apollinaire’s pre-war circle,
largely inherited from revivals of mysticism and occultism of the later nineteenth
century,xx would hold major significance for artistic explorations from Dada to
Surrealism, including numerous De Chirico citations in Calligrammes.
Cult of Genius
Even in his lifetime, the figure of Apollinaire assumed mythic proportions among
members of the Parisian avant-garde where he was honored, as his namesake, “Golden
Apollo” as patron deity of lyrical poetry.xxi He was hailed allegorically, as the “Voice of
Light,” for he used light as his primary poetic metaphor for flashing genius.xxii He was
also closely linked to Apollo’s son Orpheus,xxiii le voyant, the mysterious dreamer and the
lover of music whose mother, Calliope (Poetry’s Muse) inspired the title of
Calligrammes. In Calligrammes, Apollinaire takes the form of the Mythical Sun, the
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eternally youthful Phoebus, symbol of that intelligence and luminous intellect for which
he was highly praised. In the early modern period Apollo was considered the very
conjunction of East and West, “the solar Logos” who united the Asiatic esoterism of
Vishnu, Mithras and Horus with plastic beauty and human consciousness. By extension
Apollinaire became synonymous with idealism itself, with L’Age D’Or, and the Arcadian
tradition of lyric poetry, as well as the Golden Dawn of the hermetic tradition.
Because he was the eye of the sky, Apollo was also considered the god of
divination, one who sees all and reveals secrets, a sign of omnipotence. As the
Philosopher’s Sun the god of Poetry was also emblematic of philosopher’s gold in the
alchemical tradition, reconciling opposing principles of fire and water, dryness and
wetness. In Orphism and Pythagorism he symbolized the divine creative spirit, with
Orpheus the very image of artistic creation, the origin of Orphic poetry, the oracular
voice of poets as prophets charged with the elevation of the soul to its celestial origins.xxiv
Orpheus’ song, a song that survived death, was believed to hold the power of
illumination, to tame the wild discordant universe, to give meaning to the mystery of life.
To the extent that the Sun as a divine principle and instrument of creation became
identified with Orpheus and Apollo, the daily journey of the solar eye became a metaphor
for writing.xxv
De Chirico claimed as his own namesake relationship to the messenger god
Hermesxxvi “marshall of dreams,” according to Homer. (Figure 3) (Figure 4) This
association (documented by Fagiolo) is based in the fact that the word “Chirico” in Greek
signifies “herald” or “announcer,” which explains numerous self-portraits that identify
the artist with Hermes accompanied by multiple references in De Chirico’s
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autobiography, Hebdomeros and other writings.xxvii Overtly self-conscious while at the
same time self-deprecatory, suggestive of conflicted post-structural relationships to
mythic archetypes, De Chirico’s brother, Alberto Savinio, kept a small, tourist-variety
plaster bust of Praxiteles’ Hermes on his desk. Hermes is customarily associated with the
Moon and with the hermeneutic tradition of Toth, god of the afterlife, guide of souls
through the Underworld, periodically changing and renewing as the phases of the lunar
cycle. The word “hermetic” stems from a conflation of the name of the legendary
Egyptian philosopher Hermes Trismegistus with the Greek god Hermes (the Roman
Mercury). xxviii One of Mercury’s many roles was as patron of musicians because of his
invention of the lyre (the constellation Lyra), the attribute of both Apollo and Orpheus,
symbolic of lyric poetry. In keeping with Ptolemy’s Harmonics it is the taut string of the
lyre, in turn, that produces sounds that relate our souls to music, relationships that reveal
an affinity between cosmic and psychic harmony. Thus Mercury too was regarded a
patron deity of music and creativity, ruler of astronomers and celestial globes, bound to
mercurial properties of metamorphic transformation. Appropriately, the original French
text of Calligrammes appeared in 1918 in the journal Mercure de France, while Savinio
published a story titled Introduction à une vie de Mercure in the journal Bifur in the same
year as De Chirico’s lithograph edition of Calligrammes.xxix
Together the sun and the moon were considered the astral sources of life, diurnal
forces of movement and renewal, complementary aspects of reality corresponding to the
conscious and intuitive centers of the psyche. Each ray of fire, each solar flare was said
to embody the principal of creative action, light refracted by the moon during the hours of
the night when it emanates moisture. Thus night represented the repose of nature, a
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suspension of heat generating flux: “…with each rotation, light passes into shadow, its
fiery substance absorbed by an aura that generates lunar flux; this mysterious path of
worlds and beings. For this reason the Sun and the Moon are the principles of existence”
claimed Bouchet in his 1917 Cosmogonie Humaine.xxx
Mystical Light
In Parisian art circles in the decade preceding World War I, Apollinaire had much
to do with convergences between Greek classicism and Oriental mysticismxxxi primarily
through the energies of Orphism, a movement in painting inspired by cosmic imagery,
typified by richly colored, translucent, cyclically mobile, work at its height in 1914. In
many ways Orphism represented the crystallization of converging interests in Eastern
religion and cosmogony, astrology, philosophy and science that flourished during the
later nineteenth century in France, especially among Symbolist poets and artists,
intensifying through the first quarter of the twentieth century to culminate among Dada
and Surrealist artists in the period of Calligrammes’ production.xxxii Apollinaire’s own
interests in the vast array of esoterica to saturate the Parisian avant-garde centered on
certain mystic currents: an interest in light as symbol of poetic and artistic inspiration
expressed also in metaphors of immateriality and infinity stimulated by speculation
surrounding the fourth dimension; a cosmic and astrological model of transcendence
(essentially Pythagorean) as a macrocosmic-microcosmic paradigm of genesis; the
potentiality of “astral vision” and its corresponding “celestial” (supernatural) movement,
the “Music of the Spheres,” in the imagination of the artist voyant, Fulcanelli’s “children
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of the sun;” and an interest in Oriental (especially Egyptian) religion and cosmogony as a
source of “initiated” mystery, suggested in the cults of Isis, Dionysus and Orpheus.
Light fascinated modern painters, providing the primary inspiration for the birth
of abstraction. It was championed by Apollinaire, who boasted “I love the arts of the
young painters because I love light above all else…”xxxiii Extending these mystical
allusions to the realm of painting by the imagery of “flame,” Apollinaire equated poetic
visualization to inspiration. Flame is the symbol of painting… it has the sublime and
incontestable truth of its own light, he wrote in 1913.xxxiv
For Apollinaire, the image of light represented inner coherence and the act of
creation—the “momentary spark flying up from the friction of real action against possible
actions” according to Henri Bergson’s then popular Creative Evolutionxxxv—expressed by
light as an aura of poetic inner consciousness and continuity in the face of the dead past
and the fragmented present. As one of the major themes of Mystic Orphism, light was
considered a primordial form from which all other forms emerged, imbued with
circularity and universal affinity, an emanation of the spirit and expression of the
ineffable l’anima mundi. To the extent that he sought a sense of poetic wholeness with
the past, his use of light as a poetic metaphor for intrinsic totality sought to express
primordial union as “an aspiration of the soul to be reunited with light,” the essence of
immortality.xxxvi Thus Calligrammes replicates Apollinaire’s poetry in adopting images
of light and flame to transform the dead past into timeless revelation.
Apollinaire inherited ideas of light as diffusions of a spiritual universe from
nineteenth century poets such as Baudelaire and Mallarmé. As his predecessors, his
libraries reveal him similarly interested in astrology, magic, the occult and the cabala, for
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he collected the works of hermetic philosophers, illuminists and alchemists. Theosophy
under the leadership of Helen Blavatsky and anthroposophy as formulated by Rudolf
Steiner (along with revivals of Rosicrucianism in France) in the last two decades of the
nineteenth century provided extensive fonts of arcania for Symbolist and abstract artists.
In this period many popular publications on Eastern mysticism appeared. Blavatsky’s
Isis Unveiled of 1877 and The Secret Doctrine of 1888, assimilated beliefs in universal
dualism, the cosmic generative process, and the preeminence of Eastern religions
especially esoteric Buddhism, expressed syncretically through perfect completion in the
divine unity of the circle.xxxvii
Linda Dalrymple-Henderson noted significant relationships between Blavatsky’s
publications and the wording of Apollinaire’s statements concerning the Fourth
Dimension, an idealist philosophical dimension of higher reality beyond threedimensional visual perception, in his Les peintres cubistes of 1913.xxxviii To the extent
that his descriptions emphasize space as dimensions of the infinite as well as
microcosmic-macrocosmic correspondence, she inferred that Blavatsky’s books supplied
Apollinaire with one connection to the mystical-occult tradition, though there were
certainly many others, especially Edouard Schuré’s Les Grands Initiés: Esquisse de
l’histoire secrete des religions of 1889, which contained chapters on both Hermes and
Orpheus along with others on esoteric teachings, mystery cults and the religions of India
and Egypt. There was also Éliphas Lévi’s Dogme et rituel de la haute magie (1856)
popular in Paris during the 1890’s that included chapters on mysticism and Oriental
mystics; and C. W. Leadbeater’s The Astral Plane of 1895, Clairvoyance of 1899 and
The Other Side of Death of 1903, which were published in French translation in Paris in
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1910.xxxix Furthermore, throughout this period the literary journal Mercure de France
included a section titled “Ésotérisme et spiritisme” that contained information ranging
from Paracelsus to Jakob Böhme. Many of these interests would have been shared in
1908 among Symbolist poets and artists at Puteaux (including the mystical Orphist
Frantisek Kupka) along with artists who exhibited together in the Salon de la Section
d’Or, October 10-30 of 1912 (including Marcel Duchamp), the last collective exhibition
of the avant-garde prior to World War I. The vast collection of speculative literature
surrounding ideas generated at Puteaux among related areas of hermetic studies,
philosophy, religion, science and the occult was disseminated widely in Apollinaire’s
circle, and references in De Chirico’s writings to a “Golden Age” of heroes certainly
embrace the gestational aspects of this period. Further, Apollinaire’s interest in such
subjects as the Fourth Dimension and infinity as psychic movement released from
chronologies of time and history is significant in that it is linked to an incipient idealism,
Romanticist aspirations to the Sublime, and a desire for spiritual transcendence that
anticipates disintegrative aspects of modern consciousness.xl
Virginia Spate considered these allusions to be representative of a fundamental
shift in modern artistic consciousness, expressed by means of language, a shift away from
the nineteenth century belief in a spiritual reality behind the material world, to an early
twentieth century search for meaning within the individual consciousness. According to
this interpretation, Apollinaire “appropriated” the revelations of mystics and their mythic
archetypes in order for his poetry “to create form from the formless, meaning from chaos,
and (metaphorically) light from darkness…as aspiration to overcome temporality through
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the act of creation, an act which depended on an equally strong sense of the reality of the
world which is subject to time.”xli
In keeping with a concern for historical age and temporality expressed through the
language of “remote time”, De Chirico may have assimilated various antiquated
seventeenth century engravings as sources of mystical imagery for the Calligrammes
lithographs.xlii Reflecting spiritual associations, Maurizio Calvesi attributed
Calligrammes’ refracted solar imagery, developed later as Il sole nella stanza, to
engravings by the Jesuit mystic Athansius Kircher (1602-1680), in Ars Magna Lucis et
Umbrae (1646). Kircher is significant in that he was known for his early attention to
oriental and Asiatic systems of religion and was considered the founder of Egyptology
for he was long credited with the decipherment of hieroglyphs. His research also
provided a basis for theosophical syncretism of the late nineteenth century.
Calvesi
cites engravings by Robert Fludd (1574-1637) in Utriusque Cosmi Historia (1619) as a
model for human silhouettes and circles that appear in De Chirico’s “Portrait of
Apollinaire” of 1914.xliii He notes that according to his Memoirs, De Chirico may have
examined these works in research he conducted in Paris to study “old treatises on
painting technique” at the Bibliothéque Richelieu in 1920. But evidence of De Chirico’s
familiarity with Fludd’s imagery appears much earlier in his work, during the
Metaphysical Period evidenced by such paintings as Le Rêve de Tobie of 1917 (Figure 6).
Further, Fludd’s Utriusque Cosmi was widely known among members of Apollinaire’s
circle such as Kupka and Kandinsky for theosophically inspired concepts concerning
l’anima mundi, infinity and cosmic models of the universe, ideas that also link
Calligrammes to fonts of Eastern mysticism. It is also likely that De Chirico examined
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many of Fludd’s engravings as reproductions in Grillot de Givry’s Le Musée des
Sorciers: Mages et Alchimistes, published in Paris in 1929, the year in which
Calligrammes was produced. The author was very popular in Paris among modern
artists such as Max Ernst during the 1920’s and a copy of this work, which also contained
illustrated chapters on astrology, cartomancy and chiromancy, was in Breton’s library.
Fludd’s engravings are thus more likely to have provided other critical relationships to
Calligrammes not noted by Calvesi, especially self-referential imagery that informs the
wider body of De Chirico’s oeuvre. Specifically, the frontispiece of the Calligrammes
series is framed along its border by a geometric solid resembling a similar image in Le
Réve de Tobie that has been interpreted by Fagiolo as a meteorological thermometer, a
metonym for De Chirico’s self-identification with Mercury. (Figure 5) (Figure 6) While
this interpretation is certainly valid and significant for the self-referential aspects of this
work, it should be added that the form in toto conforms to the Fludd engraving of the
neck and scroll of a stringed instrument contained in the chapter De Musica Mundana.
(Figure 7) As such it reiterates in Calligrammes an ironic temporal-atemporal dichotomy
that links the microcosmic aesthetic of the terrestrial realm to the greater harmony of the
celestial, Fludd’s Cosmi majoris et minoris.
Calligrammes’ emphasis on cosmic bodies and principals of duality related
Apollinaire’s poetic universes to theories of harmonic correspondence embraced among
literati as Pythagoras’ “Music of the Spheres,” ideas revived by Böhme as multifaceted
consonances existing in the cosmic movements of the universe. Especially among
painters who had trained in the 1890’s such as Kupka, Kandinsky and Mondrian,
analogies between music and painting suggested Pythagorian correspondences between
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the inner world of artistic subjectivity and planetary orbit.xliv But Pythagorean referents
in Calligrammes may reflect a more pervasive influence concurrent in the work of Max
Ernst.xlv Pythagoras was popular among modern artists because he was considered an
astronomer as well as a hermetic philosopher with connections to both alchemy and
“celestial” music with accompanying metaphoric relationships to art. In Greek religion,
the muse Calliope protected all who loved music. Pythagoras was believed to have also
traveled to Egypt early in his life and to have absorbed its ancient mysteries. On his
return to Greece and later Italy, legend holds that he established a cult incorporating
ancient Egyptian initiation rites that by some accounts made secrecy a condition of
membership.xlvi Pythagoras also believed in the transmigration of souls and reincarnation,
ideas central to Calligrammes meaning.
Alchemy & Metamorphosis
Connected to the mythology of Orpheus as an embodiment of music and mystic
poetry inherited from nineteenth century Romanticism, Apollinaire in Le Bestiare:
Cortége d’Orphée, (written about 1906 but published in 1910), has Orpheus proclaim:
Admire the awful strength! The noble lines: His the speaking voice of light/ As Hermes
Trismegistus said in his Pimander,xlvii a reference to the legendary Egyptian author of the
Corpus Hermeticum, the father of alchemical lore. Apollinaire, whose library contained
many works of hermetic philosophy such as F. Ch. Barlet’s L’Occultisme of 1909 and
several 1910 editions of Les Nouveaux Horizons de la Science et de la Pensée (Revue
mensuelle d’avant-garde scientifique et philosophique: L’Hyperchimie—Rosa
Alchemica), was known to be both superstitious and intensely interested in hermetic
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arts.xlviii His book of poetry, titled Alcools of 1913 may reflect in fact a seventeenth
century alchemical connotation contained in Rulandus’ Lexikon of Alchemy of 1612, a
copy of which is listed in Breton’s library. In it, Alcool is described as “alcool of
wine…used for rectified Aqua Fortis.” It is “the purer and cleaner part [of any
bodies]…separated from the impure” by fire and heat as dictated by Paracelsus’s Alcool
of Antimony.xlix
Stressing radiant, “Unanimist” solar energy, Apollinaire in a lecture titled
“L’Esprit Nouveau” of 1917 described Orphist painting as poetic “universes which
palpitate ineffably…which gravitate about the same point of infinity as that which we
bear within ourselves,”l a reference to the microcosmic-macrocosmic correspondence that
inspired the cyclical alchemical maxim “As above, so below.” In the following year, in
1918, Apollinaire gave another talk in which he compared poetic creation to alchemy, an
anticipation of dream poetry among Surrealists as an “oneiric heuristic” according to
Poggioli, the dream as the hermeneutics of art.li These poetic aspirations were closely
linked in turn to notions of Dionysian ecstasy, dream, automatism and initiation among
Surrealists, along with Freud and Jung’s theories of the unconscious, projection and
psychoanalysis and an increasing concern with individuation and self-realization, the
psychic introspection of the artist.lii
Apollinaire’s interest in the creative process and in the divinatory powers of the
artist-initiate came to prominence after World War I especially among artists in the circle
of André Breton, many of whom considered themselves successors in the line of hermetic
poets descending from Baudelaire to Apollinaire.liii Since the later nineteenth century
Paris was seen among the international avant-garde to be “saturated” with esoterica. By
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the late 1920’s when De Chirico’s lithographs were produced and he was residing in
Paris in close interaction with Breton, Ernst and others, a great deal of evidence exists
that links the Surrealists (as well as the Italian Futurists) to a post-war revival of
theosophy, Eastern mysticism and the occult from the Cabala to the Tarot.liv
Alchemical symbolism is well documented in the work of leading artists of the period
such as Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst, with whom De Chirico interacted.lv We have
only to look to Breton’s library which contained more than one hundred works on
esoterism and the occult, and to his “Alchemy of the Word” described at length in his
Second Surrealist Manifesto of 1929 for such evidence, along with De Chirico’s accounts
of séances he attended at Breton’s apartment.lvi Allusions to alchemy are contained in the
Surrealist novels of both De Chirico and Savinio of the 1920’s. In Hebdomeros, De
Chirico’s autobiography of 1929, De Chirico describes a serpent biting its own tail, the
Uroboros a symbol of cyclicality and resurrection.lvii In form it recalls the mandala-like
wheel motif, a sign of alchemical gold and rebirth equated with the sun, a constant factor
in hermetic imagery.
Alchemy refers to a ritual operation that combines the ancient science of
metallurgy with Egyptian beliefs concerning life after death and Hellenistic views of
cosmic unity, hence a quintessential model of historical and spiritual fusion. As an
integrative process of “cerebral consciousness” originating in Egyptian esoterism, the
path to “fusion” was described by allusions to alchemy, myth and the cabala by R. A.
Schwaller de Lubicz in Esoterism and Symbol, published in 1927, a copy contained in
Breton’s library. Based in dualistic principles of male-female, light-dark, heaven-earth,
the process of refining base material (Primal Matter) through successive stages of
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transformation and metamorphosis was seen among artists as replicating the creative
process. Alchemists often considered themselves “philosophers,” a distinction familiar in
De Chirico’s paintings, along with a conception of art derived from Aristotle’s téchne, a
skill both theoretical and practical, an interest that inspired De Chirico’s research into
artistic technique throughout his long career. In this connection aspects of alchemy that
invoke transformational processes are most clearly linked to modern artistic practice in
Conceptual and Fluxus art.
In Calligrammes, there are many references to alchemical processes as well as to
other hermetic arts, societies and esoteric sources. Symbols such as walls, with their
connotations of Freemasonry and rosettes with Rosicrucianism; or scallop motifs and
shells (used to scoop up baptisimal waters) that evoke the Coquille St. Jacques, a popular
allusion to Christian pilgrimages to the shrine of St. James in the Spanish city of Santiago
de Campostella among Surrealists in Paris during the late 1920’s, all point to elusive
alchemical models.lviii (Figure 8) According to Fulcanelli’s Les mystéres des cathédrales,
widely popular in Paris following its publication in 1925 and also listed in Breton’s
library, Campostella was considered the point of origination for all alchemists intent on
embarking upon a “pilgrimage” to obtain the “star” of mystical enlightenment. For this
purpose, the scallop shell was also equated with philosophical mercury in that it
identified the house of Jacques Coeur, a silversmith during the reign of Charles VIII,
known as a “philosopher by fire” who had the power of transmuting common metals into
silver. Thus the shell also represented another allusion to De Chirico’s hermetic selfidentification.lix
19
The process of lithography itself, whereby an inscription on stone presented
obvious parallels to the Philosopher’s Stone, reinforces this reference. Further, the
slipcase, binding and printing inks of Calligrammes were confined to black, white and
red, the three colors linked to the alchemical processes of Dissolution; Purification; and
Redness, the “fire” of the Philosopher’s Stone, allusions favored by Ernst and Eluard in
the same period. (Figure 9) Thus the alchemical process itself, known as solve et coagula,
separatio et conjunctio, presented one paradigm for Calligrammes’ imagery,
corresponding to a repeated cycle of dissolutions and coagulations of base material (the
Primal Matter of Paracelsus) into a new and more beautiful form, the rubedo.
Obscurity
At the beginning of the twentieth century, Salomon Reinach associated the figure
Orpheus with orphnos, a Greek adjective meaning obscure, linking Orpheus with the
mystery cults of Dionysus. Apollinaire’s deliberately obscure pronouncements on art
pointed up poetic nuances of visual imagery, the suggestive mystery of creation,
accompanied by an interest in profound “occult” secrets of the hermetic arts, notions of
clandestine societies, initiation and hidden language. These same interests enjoyed
revived popularity among Surrealists during the 1920’s due to their psychoanalytic
connection to the unfathomable depths of the unconscious as to automatist devices to
bring them forth. Fulcanelli’s Le Mystére des cathedrals of 1926 and Grillot de Givry’s
Le Musée des sorciers, mages et alchimistes of 1929 shared particular influence among
artists of Breton’s circle. Fulcanelli’s emphasis on linguistic correlations is relevant to
Calligrammes as it is to the larger context of De Chirico’s oeuvre. Fulcanelli, whose true
20
identity was questioned during the twenties, was known among Surrealists by his
alchemical pseudonym constructed from a combination of “Vulcan” and “Helios.” His
writings offered an “obscure reason” for the origin of Gothic art which he attributed to
the cabalistic or phonetic root of the word gothic, a corruption of the word argotique
meaning “cant,” a poetic term Savinio used to laud Apollinaire (see below). “Moreover,”
he added, “dictionaries define argot as ‘a language peculiar to all individuals who wish to
communicate their thoughts without being understood by outsiders. Thus it certainly is a
spoken cabala.” Importantly, Fulcanelli described the argotiers, those who use this
language, as “the hermetic descendents of the Argonauts, who manned the ship
Argo…who spoke the langue argotique—our langue verte (‘green language’ or slang)-while sailing towards the felicitous shores of Colchos to win the famous Golden Fleece.”
De Chirico’s art often depicts the subject of the Argonauts as it also organizes paintings
around the Veronese green familiar in his “Portrait of Apollinaire.” These features help
us identify aspects of le langue sacrée described by Émile Soldi as le mouvement
intelligent, communicated among initiates by means of esoteric devices. One such
linguistic puzzle is presented in De Chirico’s explorations of chir-omancy and “Kir-cheriana,” cryptic extensions of selfhood by the “initial” X, the Greek letter Chi in some of
his paintings that correspond to the letters of his name.lx These allusions would have
echoed Fulcanelli’s description of “cant” as “the language of a minority of individuals
living outside accepted laws, conventions, customs and etiquette. The term voyous
(street-arabs) that is to say voyants (seers) was applied to them as the even more
expressive term sons or children of the sun, related to Calligrammes solar metaphor. If
Gothic art was for Fulcanelli the art got or cot (xo)—the art of light or of the spirit,” then
21
Calligrammes represented its De “Chi”richean emanation.lxi To emphasize the cultic
aspects of this artists’ society, it is striking to note that on one of the pages of the
Calligrammes volume in the Beinecke Library of Yale University there is a “crossword”
disposition of the words Le Culte de Apollinaire, alluding to this confraternity. Not
coincidentally perhaps, by 1927 Édouard Schuré’s Les Grands Initiés reached the one
hundredth edition.
Though in his Memoirs De Chirico derided Breton’s initiates as esoteric
pompiers, his own Greek philosophical heritage was intricately intertwined with secret
societies, cults and the mystical currents of the day by means of a self-professed biomythology, noted by Paolo Baldacci and Giovanni Lista,lxii that traced his lineage based
on the family name, KÉRKYES, to the pre-Socratic philosopher/cosmologist, Heraclitus
of Ephesus, known throughout history as “the Obscure,” and considered by some to be
the most subjective and modern poet of antiquity. Heraclitus, whose maxim “nature
loves to hide,” aptly characterized De Chirico’s penchant for enigmatic codings. As a
Pre-Socratic Ionian who chose to speak in tones of prophecy evocative of the Delphic
Oracle, Heraclitus shared with the alchemists a propensity for wordplay, syntactic
ambiguity and riddles structured around a cyclical, transformational model. “For the
ancient Heraclitus the Ephesian was called clever through the obscurity of his words,”
records Fragment #126,lxiii reflecting Heraclitus’ predilection for intuitive association
rather than linear argument. Baldacci has shown that De Chirico’s belief in his own
divinatory powers, his gift of epopteia, reflects the “superior vision” that is the final step
of the cultic initiate in the worship of Heraclitus, a typically Greek (Platonic) mental
process that accompanies intuition and revelation, one that establishes an opposition
22
between “visible things” (phanerá) and “invisible things”(ádela), a quest for essence that
Baldacci equated with mysticism. It is for this reason that Baldacci identified De Chirico
with Heraclitus, for he considered his activity as an artist to be synonymous with an
ecstatic reenactment of “the spectacle of a rite of initiation as practiced by the mystery
cults. Analogously, the artist conducts himself according to the same procedures used by
the ancient sages and earliest philosophers.”lxiv This interpretation of De Chirico cum
Heraclitus is further supported by the broader iconography of the geometric solid
appearing in the Calligrammes series (cited earlier) as an allusion to De Chirico’s selfidentification with the god Mercury. For the letters AIDEL in the painting Le Rêve de
Tobie of 1917 refer to cabbalistic shadow, hermetic and invisible truths and parallel
Surrealist introspection. Thus this semblance of a temple pylon signifies initiation and
obscurity.lxv These allusions accompany other themes in De Chirico’s broader oeuvre
such as representations of the mythic Dioscuri (the obscure gods), concurrent signs for
DeChirico and his alter ego.
Fire and Flux
Heraclitus over the ages influenced numerous writers and philosophers from Plato
to T.S. Eliot, Hegel and Nietzsche.lxvi Compared as a poet to Orpheus, he was known to
De Chirico’s generation as a Pre-Socratic philosopher, one of a group of early Greek
thinkers from the sixth century B. C. E. who pre-dated the scientific (empirical) tradition
that had begun to spread from Miletus to other cities in Asia Minor.lxvii This scientific
culture was something quite new in Heraclitus’ day, still restricted to a small group of
proponents within a wider culture of popular customs, mysticism and Homeric poets. An
23
Italian edition of Heraclitus’ Cosmic Fragments published in 1910 that may have been
known to De Chirico contained an essay by Emilio Bodrero that identified the
philosopher as one who reconciled mystic doctrines, such as the worship of the sun in
Egyptian religion with Western philosophy to achieve greater universality.lxviii Bodrero
described this period as one of virgin consciousness and spontaneity, representing a fresh
field of liberal pre-scientific speculation that predated the intellectual tradition of
superimposed philosophies, arguments, adhesions and canons. Heraclitus’ originality can
only be fully appreciated in light of a distinction, clear to De Chirico’s generation but less
so to Heraclitus,’ between the scientific and the pre-empirical traditions.
The radical difference between the two traditions accounts for Heraclitus’
ideological position between two opposing cultures, where his role as a sage was
considered a bridge between two antithetical belief systems. This position is reiterated in
the geographical setting of Ephesus, located at the juncture of the East and the West. De
Chirico, who was born in Volos, Thessaly in 1888, may have identified with a similar
point of origin situated at the border between Greece and the Ottoman Empire.
Heraclitus’ association with the Turkish city of Ephesus, a great seaport, the largest in the
Aegean in late antiquity and the most fertile, would have also been significant to artists as
the center of the cult of Artemis. An ancient port, Ephesus’ harbor near the Temple of
Artemis gradually became unusable due to alluvial silt deposits, creating marshes that
contributed over time to malarial conditions and the decline of the city under the
Ottomans.lxix
In De Chirico’s writings of the 1920’s references to Heraclitus are especially
numerous (as well as accounts of frequent illnesses and intestinal disturbances). In the
24
first issue of Valori Plastici the Italian art journal published between 1918 and 1921 coedited by De Chirico, he quotes Heraclitus’ admonition to “discover the demon in every
house,” a charge repeated in an article of 1922 on the painter Giorgio Morandi; in 1926 in
the Preface to a Catalogue for an exhibit in Paris by Filippo de Pisis (significant in light
of other iconographic relationships discussed below); and again in 1927 in the Bulletin de
l’Effort Moderne in an article titled Statues, Meubles, Generaux. These references also
reinforce De Chirico’s post-war allusions to historicity through the house metaphor to
represent mental structures haunted by the ghosts of past occupants, reflected also in his
brother’s novel La casa ispirata (The Haunted House) of 1925.lxx
Heraclitus’ suggestive style, comprised of disconnected poetic fragments that
comment on natural phenomena, divinity, the spirit and the celestial firmament unfolding
in the manner of a great truth “where the sense of what has gone before is continually
enriched by its echo in what follows” was regarded even among classicists as an artistic
design of interlocking imagery and ideas.lxxi In it Heraclitus’ penchant for enigmatic
phrases, quotations, word play, phonetic resonance and syntactical ambiguity presented
supple challenges, punctuated by sarcasm and irony.
These effects, consisting of
fragmentary aphorisms and passages combined within the meandering (temporal) yet
disjointed structure of a tone poem, a succession of “partial” and transitory utterances to
approximate visual phenomena, inspired De Chirico’s conception of Calligrammes in
both form and content. For De Chirico, etymological correspondences accompanied
emissions of the Greek root etymos as a quest for “truth,” coupled with the stem meta
standing for “changed” or “altered” in form as in the term “metamorphosis;” and
“beyond” and “higher” as in De Chirico’s Metaphysical painting.
25
For Heraclitus, fire signified the vital flow of movement, the forward spark to link
the interchange of elements comprising his notion of universal flux. (Figure 10) An
essentially metaphysical principle, Heraclitus interpreted phenomenal fire as cosmic fire,
universal being which formed the source and substance of all things, the combustion of
eternity. De Chirico described the significance of fire in Hebdomeros as vitally
connected to artistic transformation:
Constructions […] took the form of mountains, for like mountains they
had been born of an inner fire, and once they had passed through the upheaval of
creation, their contorted yet balanced forms bore witness to the burst of fire that
had brought them into being; by this very fact they were pyrophiles; which is to
say that, like salamanders, they loved fire; they were immortal for they knew
neither dawn nor dusk, only eternal noon.lxxii
Fire generated that heat or exhalation that spurred successive mutations from
fire to sun, sun to moon, moon to lightning, lightning to wind, earth to water, water to
clouds, clouds to rain, etc. In Heraclitus’ conception, the sun and other heavenly bodies
resembled bowls filled with fire, with the Sun the “overseer and sentinel of
cycles…which bring all things to birth;” [XLII] He believed the soul to participate in the
unifying structure of the universe (Sophia) as an elemental transformation of water to
earth, and earth to water, “a way down” and “a way up,” with birth and death comprising
a mystical cycle of rebirth. “The beginning and end are shared in the circumference of a
circle.” [XCIX]lxxiii In this model, the psyche is identified with fire and ultimately “air”
(as figurations of the soul) whose “vital breath” steams up or is “exhaled” from
moisture.lxxiv
Heraclitus’s exhalations of the universe, evidence of his doctrine of flux and
cosmic change, appear in Calligrammes as downpours and evaporations of moisture that
suggest processes analogous to alchemical transmutation. (Figure 11) In Aristotle’s
26
account of Heraclitus, meteorological cycles of rising evaporation, condensation and
precipitation were suggested by the allegory of the ancient river Oceanus put forward by
Plato, who also connected it to Heraclitus’ universal flux.lxxv With the Ocean appearing
in Calligrammes as the horizon and the source of cosmic imagery, it is likely that
allegorical associations with Heraclitus’ river Oceanus were also intended. By an analogy
to the cyclical return of the seasons each year, Heraclitus believed that death was to be
conceived as a change of state within a continuous fluid cycle (a river-of-flux) in which
something old gives way to something new. Thus envisioned as a hermeneutic circle,
Heraclitus subscribed to the essential Oriental harmony or union of opposing dualities,
life alternating with death as renewable psychic continuities of relative identity. De
Chirico’s invocation of Heraclitus’ doctrine of immortality is historically significant, for
such beliefs denied the despair and skepticism of Pliny in favor of the Oriental mystics
who infiltrated Rome in the period of its decline.lxxvi
Further, in the years surrounding World War I, the widely noted Belgian
archaeologist Franz Cumont delivered lectures at the Sorbonne in Paris in which he
invoked Heraclitus on the subject of Greek Astrology. He spoke of beliefs inherited from
Egyptian and Chaldean sources that linked Heraclitus to certain Orphic and Pythagorean
sects of mystics and believers in future life. In one lecture of 1912 on astral mysticism,
Cumont described the spirits of the dead as departing to inhabit the moon or the sun,
accompanied by Hermes, where essence as ether is one with “the soul of the
universe.”lxxvii Thus allusions to infinite nether regions, suffused with divinatory spirits
may have further aligned Heraclitean cosmology and eschatology with the theoretical
underpinnings of the Fourth Dimension and transcendent abstraction.
27
In Calligrammes, effusions of the spirit appear as recurrent and wind-born spirals,
to evoke air and breath itself, as well as circulatory aspiration. (Figure 12) Reflecting
once again the “Harmonics” of astral and animate correspondence, the spirals serve to
illustrate Ptolemy’s own axiom:
EPIGRAM
I know that I am by nature mortal and ephemeral.
But surrounded by celestial bodies,
When I track their ever-rushing spirals,
My feet no longer touch earth.
I stand before Zeus himself and take my fill
Of ambrosia, divine fare.lxxviii
De Chirico may also have associated spiral patterns with diverse contemporary sources,
many owned by Breton. There was Emil Soldi’s (1897) illustrations of spiral symbols in
archaic art from Assyria to the Maya with connotations of both transfiguration and
union;lxxix or Eliphas Levi’s diagram of the rotations of the winds in Les mystéres de la
Kabbale (originally published in 1861 but reissued in 1920) that illustrated the motor
principal originating in the North wind as an infusion of energy. But there was, in
addition, a publication of considerable influence to early modern artists, Matila Ghyka’s
Il esthétique des proportions dans la nature et dans les arts, released in Paris by
Gallimard in 1927. This work contained a lengthy section on radial logarithmic spirals, a
proportion harmonieuse par excellence.lxxx Apparent in recurrent rhythmic pulsations of
nature, their proportions were illustrated by an assortment of marine shells, the
coquillages so closely associated with alchemical contexts. (Figure 13) (Figure 14) In this
text the forms are presented as fleurs and their numeric proportions were related to a wide
28
spectrum of mathematical and artistic models from the mystic numbers of Pythagoras to
the symbolism of cathedrals.
Heraclitus’ Mystic Doctrine of the Soul [XCIII], a belief in the essential unity of
mortality and immortality surely provided the template for Calligrammes’ cosmic and
cyclical ontology for it honored Apollinaire’s living memory among surviving members
of the Parisian avant-garde.lxxxi In an essay of November of 1918 written shortly after
Apollinaire’s death, De Chirico implies a belief in Apollinaire’s spiritual survival by
referring to him as the revenant, a word that signifies “ghost,” or revisiting spirit, as well
as “dreamer.” To the extent that the dream itself became synonymous with artistic vision
among Surrealists, such a reference seemed to further prophecy Apollinaire’s
beatification among contemporaries. De Chirico wrote in Ars Nova: “Painter friends of
bright destiny, we who loved him, shall sustain his fame usque ad finem. That which he
gave to us we shall render in return. The ranks have not broken…” and he goes on to
recount a vision of Apollinaire “returned:” “I see, as one sees in a dream…And here, like
under the luminous rays of a magic lantern the profile of the sad centurion. It is
Apollinaire, [Apollinaire the revenant]; it is the poet and friend who defended me in a
foreign land who I will never see again.”lxxxii
Fragmentation and Parody
Yet true to history, De Chirico disrupted myths of cosmic order and hierarchy by
spatio-temporal involutions. Broken columns combine with effects of fragmentation and
dislocation to suggest the alchemical Magnum Chaos, Kristeva’s “sense and non-sense of
revolt.” (Figure 15) Perhaps referencing well-documented eclipses that accompanied the
29
aftermath of World War I in combination with a waning moon and corroded lunar
crescent, the halving and debasement of these symbols, depicted in a colorless graphic
medium mirror something of the reductio ad absurdio, the diminished horizon of l’Effort
moderne, as well as Nietzsche’s degenerative aspects of historicism. For the alchemists,
the sol niger (the black sun) appearing in several of the lithographs signified death and
putrefaction, the dissolution of matter to be resurrected in a new and purified form.lxxxiii
In Calligrammes, symbols of luminosity alternate with others of shadow evoked
frequently by darkened lunar crescents and setting suns. It is a darkness that recalls
passages in De Chirico’s fiction that speak of his preference for ghostly projections
pertaining to an Afterlife and Underworld which allow the outline of form to be more
clearly perceived as in Plato’s “Parable of the Cave.”
Notice how people and objects all look more mysterious in this dim light.
It’s the phantoms of people and things that we see, phantoms which, once light
arrives, disappear into their unknown kingdom. The outlines of things lose their
hardness as they did in the periods when the art of painting reached its highest
point of perfection. I am talking to you as an artist sir, and I can assure you that I
have often stayed in my studio, without lighting the lamps, as night began to fall
over the town. At such times I lose myself in strange reveries as I watch my
paintings sinking into a fog ever thicker and darker, as though they were entering
another world, another sphere where I could never reach them…I love the
shadows of twilight…and they make me daydream…lxxxiv
The reference points up De Chirico’s basis in Platonic Metaphysics as a concern for clear
distinctions between appearances and realities. It considers form as meaning itself,
altogether separate from screens of shifting and unclear projections, spectacles of
deception and change marked by instability and apprehension.
30
In a particularly vivid passage from De Chirico’s Hebdomeros he describes a
“seismic disturbance” a military confrontation that recalls Calligrammes wartime
context:
And he yielded to the delight of reliving a bygone hour, an hour of
twilight, with gardens draped in the evening mist; was it the artillery at the
barracks or was it an earthquake, a ‘seismic disturbance,’ as the newspapers put
it? …Some said that a comet was coming and with it the end of the world, as
predicted in the books of astrology. Years of one’s youth, of serenades by the
foot of those necropolises, so white in the moonlight—and those truly prodigious
nights when flowers thrown into the air fell thick and fast, and countless offerings
had been laid on the deserted shores of a sea whose every wave bore thousands
and thousands of roses.lxxxv
Indeed roses appear to proliferate beyond number in the lithographs, transforming the
solar disk into dozens of floral patterns. (Figure 16) Now sunflowers, now daisies, now
rosettes such radiating motifs originated in archaic Eastern religions where roses, as
projections du disque solaire, signified rebirth and eternity and were contemplated as
mystic centers.lxxxvi Especially in Persia and Egypt, rosettes had ancient fertility
connotations. In alchemy, the red rose is synonymous with the Philosopher’s Stone
itself. It represents the central image of the Rosicrucian Brotherhood, known as the RoseCroix in France where the sect was revived in the latter nineteenth century. Some of De
Chirico’s roses appear to reproduce the specific form of the rose dictated by Rosicrucian
manuals such as one produced in an edition belonging to Yeats. (Figure 17) (Figure 18)
In Calligrammes, roses that originate as solar discs are also bound to a language
of architectural ornamentation that De Chirico, in Il senso architettonico nella pittura
antica associated with time and mysticism:
In Giotto too an architectonic sensibility attains lofty metaphysical spaces.
All of the openings (doors, arches, windows) that accompany his figures leave the
presentiment of cosmic mystery. The square of the sky limited by the lines of a
window represents another spectacle superimposed amid the persons…And the
31
perspective lines of the constructions rise full of mystery and presentiment, angles
conceal secrets…the scene is limited by the actions of persons but it is a vital,
cosmic drama that envelops humanity, containing it within its spirals, in which the
past and the future become confused…lxxxvii
Linked to delimiting parameters of the frame, architectural motifs comprise the
vocabulary of a visual language, a pastiche in the manner of a Cubist collage, suggestive
of spatial and perspectival boundaries traditionally defined by means of historic ornament
and stylization. But contemporaneously, in Calligrammes De Chirico strives to
demystify the same architectural metaphor, the houses and their embellishments that
divide or protect, adorn or encumber the artist’s own interior space. These architectural
metaphors appear frequently in his fiction as in a passage from Hebdomeros in which the
protagonist sits in an armchair smoking a pipe “dreamily contemplating the ornamental
molding on the ceiling.”lxxxviii
Many of Calligrammes’ compositions consist of decorative moldings that
animate the entire series, their patterns corresponding to an eruption of “volutes” and
“emotives” in tribute to the poet’s memory. They signal disequilibrium and convolution
as randomly dispersed motifs released across the sky, detached from their frames and
architecture as freely as the vers libre of Pound and Elliott. The images form
autonomous abstract phrases to accompany Dada sound-poems or Marinetti’s mots en
liberté. Indeed some resemble the gears of mechanical rotation favored among Dadaists
such as Picabia whose Machine tournez vite in the National Gallery of Art, Washington
D.C. was produced from 1916 to 1918, the years corresponding to World War I. For his
purposes De Chirico borrowed motifs from high and low—from the ceiling patera of
Greek domestic architecture, repeated frequently with variations, to random artifacts from
the Temple of Apollo in Circo in Rome and the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus. (Figure
32
19) (Figure 20) (Figure 21) (Figure 22) (De Chirico may even have wished to call
attention to the temple of Sol Indiges in the Circus Maximus as a relationship between the
sun god and the games.) lxxxix He invoked these motives as elevated ornaments
suggesting affinities to inverted hierarchies of Dada and neo-Dada iconoclasm, the
“strange compensatory decorative exhilaration” of Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes (to
coin a phrase of Jameson’s).xc In like manner, the loose stylization of the insignia, its
vulgarization and hyperbole seem to restate De Chirico’s observations in an article titled
“Lassitude,”xci in which he was critical of the declining energies of contemporary art,
which may be likened to a distended pantomime and Barthian prefiguration. He
reemphasized the theatricality of the imagery in stage sets and costumes he designed for
Dhiaghilev’s Ballets Russes of the same period. Overtly redundant over time, he returned
to the same solar and lunar imagery much later in his career, as tired tropes of creativity
and demise characteristic of the entirety of his post-Metaphysical oeuvre.
Indeed the flatness and depthlessness of his “simulacrum” not only call to mind
the ubiquity of Kitsch variants in the Venetian popular theatre (with kitsch an important
aspect of De Chirico’s oeuvre elucidated by Emily Braun)xcii but other early pop cultural
expressions, in particular caricature, through comic strips gaining increased popularity in
Europe during the decade of the twenties.xciii The simple shorthand of a medium
consisting of a series of episodic frames whose shifting perspectives, radical viewpoints
and rapid movement accompany sudden disruptions may have precipitated De Chirico’s
conception. Zig et Puce for example could have reminded the artist of his own fellowship
with Apollinaire as voyager in the territory of modernity. (Figure 23) (Figure 24) With
33
assured irony he may have adopted an allusion to La bande desinée, the term for comic
strips in France.xciv
Phonetic irony along with a propensity for chaotic, constantly changing idioms
offered rich amusements to the artist in the form of wordplay and homophony of both the
oracular and auricular variety. Apollinaire’s architectural “medallion” may be read as a
commemorative medal or trophy for the wartime service of “artist-soldiers.”xcv This
recalls the poet’s own medal for valor awarded in 1916 as a result of being wounded in
the head. But both the medallion and the solar emblem appear in the Tarot deck, played
regularly across Europe in the early twentieth century as a card game in which the Sun
card and the Moon card held the highest value. (Figure 25) (Figure 26) Since at least the
fifteenth century, traditions surrounding the Tarot were intricately interwoven with
alchemy, esotericism and Jewish mysticism, and many publications throughout the
nineteenth and twentieth century included chapters on divination by means of the Major
Arcana (the twenty two image cards) of the Tarot. Papus’ Le Tarot des Bohémiens of
1889 provided the most expansive collection of ancient Eastern lore, along with
theosophical and occult perspectives on the subject, including chapters on astronomical
and initiatory aspects of Tarot practices. Some legends attributed Tarot origins to ancient
Egypt (identified with the fabled Book of Toth) others proposed a Cabalistic Tarot that
assimilated signs and symbols of the Hebrew alphabet (Éliphas Lévi).xcvi Such legends
proliferated out of eighteenth century France where Egyptomanie was fashionable.
Tarotism was absorbed into England in the later nineteenth century as part of the Order of
the Golden Dawn, with the French school of Lévi and Papus spreading eastward into
Russia during the first decade of the twentieth century through channels of Orthodox
34
mysticism associated with figures such as P.D. Ouspensky, whose ideas surrounding the
Fourth Dimension were known to the circle of artists and poets that included Apollinaire
at Puteaux.xcvii In connection with the production of Calligrammes, two works that
reflected pre-war ideology were published in French, both owned by Breton: Oswald
Wirth’s Les Tarot des imagiers du moyen age of 1927 and Le musée des sorciers: Mages
et alchimistes by Grillot de Givry of 1929 (which contained a lengthy chapter on
cartomancy and the Tarot).xcviii Both works based their discussions of the Tarot on
Éliphas Lévi’s Chapter XVI of Gérard Encausse Papus’ Le Tarot des Bohémiens “Essay
on the Astronomical Tarot” that appeared in 1889. As late as 1949, the widely noted
author and Editor of the prestigious Nouvelle Revue Francais, Jean Paulhan, wrote the
Preface for Paul Marteau’s Le Tarot de Marseilles, also owned by Breton, in which he
described the Tarot’s persistent relationship to metaphysical speculation and alchemy, its
fascination to moderns as a mysterious set of “hieroglyphs” of disorder and
metamorphosis, representing a game that he felt paralleled humanity’s evolution.xcix Yet
the suggestion has been offered that the Tarot both originated as a set of Neo-Platonic
Renaissance prints, fifty finely executed engravings of emblematic figures that include
Apollo and the nine Muses, the Heavenly Spheres and other symbols; and that its inner
meaning is closer to a philosophical book than to a card game.c
Many aspects of the Tarot appealed to both pre- and post- war artists such as
Duchamp and Ernst, with Surrealists stimulated by their free association relationships to
psychic automatism and chance in the manner of parapsychology, mesmerism and
séance. (Breton also owned several of Ernst’s designs for Le Jeu de Marseille of 1940
depicting the auger flame of the occult.)ci For De Chirico, references to the Tarot would
35
have conveyed such associations as well as ideas and images bound up with Apollinaire’s
artistic milieu: divination, astral vision, planetary correspondence, secrecy, arcane
symbolism and enigma. Imagistically De Chirico’s renderings of the sun and the moon
closely parallel the graphic woodcuts of the Tarot set distributed widely in France and
Italy known as the Tarot de Marseilles.cii Significantly, a painting by De Chirico’s
Ferrara protégé Filippo De Pisis titled Natura morta con i tarocchi dated 1926, just a few
years before the Calligrammes series reproduces images from hand painted Tarot de
Marseilles imagery. (Figure 27) Extending well beyond De Pisis’ frequent interpolations
and paraphrases of the Metaphysical paintings and writings of De Chirico, Savinio and
Carrà, this particular iconographic coincidence is worth noting for several reasons. De
Pisis’ liason with both De Chirico and Savinio during this period in Paris is well
documented in De Pisis’ writings, an association that originated during the war, in
Ferrara where De Chirico and Carrà were deferred to a military hospital. In one letter to
Ardengo Soffici dated 21 November 1916 he recounts his camaraderie with Savinio and
De Chirico and their days spent together in each others’ studios where he speaks of
Apollinaire as being with them in spirito.ciii The De Pisis painting in question was
produced both on the heels of De Chirico’s residence in Italy precipitated by World War I
and in the year following De Chirico’s and De Pisis’ transfer to Paris where both artists
resided for a time on Rue Bonaparte. In Paris, De Pisis supplemented his activity as a
painter by giving “artistic tours” of the city that certainly familiarized him with the
alchemical itineraries surrounding St. Sulpice described by Fulcanelli and conducted by
Breton among Surrealists. One of the entries in his collection of reminiscences, Le
memorie del marchesino pittore, is a piece titled “Gamba di aragosta” (Claw of a
36
Lobster—a reference to the lobster appearing in La Lune, the moon card of the Tarot of
Marseilles). Written in 1928, the selection is filled with esoteric allusions that include
references to St. Sulpice, to alchemical colorations, and to a variety of marine shells,
walls and roses.civ
Allusions to the Tarot in Calligrammes certainly point up many poetic
resonances connected to spiritualist affinities. Disposition of the Tarot cards may take
two forms: in a circle, as a Wheel of Fortune related to ROTA or “wheel” as the Latin
stem of the word Ta-rot; and as a series of paired “contraries” that face each other in two
linear rows.cv Both compositions embody notions of destiny and fatality as well as
principles of dualism on which the Calligrammes iconography is based. Ouspensky
interpreted the cyclical disposition as representing fundamental laws of recurrence linked
to Indian beliefs in reincarnation and Eastern theories surrounding the transmigration of
souls as reflections on time and eternity.cvi Through other more circuitous routes that may
have involved Ouspensky and other “spiritualists” who circulated internationally between
Russia, England, France, Germany and the United States, De Chirico’s invocation of
Tarot imagery in Calligrammes may also relate to theories of “intuitionism” and Cubist
“simultaneity” promulgated by Henri Bergson, ideas current among the Parisian avantgarde and members of Apollinaire’s circle in the early twentieth century.cvii These are
ideas that emphasize underlying issues of temporality in the Calligrammes series.
Apollinaire’s solar identification may also bear some relationship to the Hermetic
Order of the Golden Dawn as a tributary of the esoteric interests of Romantic poets such
as Yeats, which flourished during the last decade of the nineteenth century.cviii
Apollinaire regarded himself a Symbolist poet on his arrival in Paris and maintained
37
close relations with such figures as Paul Fort, one of the most highly praised poets of
symbolist descent in pre-war Paris. Fort was also Editor of the Mercure de France’s
prestigious rival Vers et Prose where he collaborated with Apollinaire from 1906-1914—
and it was to the editorial board of Vers et Prose that W. B. Yeats was named as the
representative of English Symbolism.cix Samuel Liddell Mathers, one of the founders of
the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn society published The Tarot: Its Occult
Signification in Fortune-Telling and Method of Play in London in 1888 and in it
reproduced the Tarot of Marseilles images. In 1890, Mathers married Mina (Moina)
Bergson, the daughter of the famous French philosopher Henri Bergson, who in 1892 left
her husband in London and moved alone to Paris, supervising the Golden Dawn from
afar and making periodic visits to London.cx While there is no direct evidence of
Apollinaire’s association with this sect, his Cubist art criticism assimilated Bergsonian
ideas on duration and simultaneity. Following the release of L’Evolution créatrice in
1907, Bergson became very popular in Paris among artists and writers, where his lectures
at the Collége de France were open to all.cxi Bergson’s emphasis on intuition over
analysis as a fundamental means of knowing reality favored approaches derived from
Symbolism based in a personal vision linked to revelation and dream (not the
contemporaneous scientific inquiry of Freud) that led many of his followers to study
parapsychology, mysticism and the occult. In addition, Apollinaire’s largely literary
library contained sixteen issues of the journal Light: A Journal of Psychical Occult and
Mystical Research dating from May to November of 1907.cxii
A variation of the Tarot of Marseilles imagery found in Mathers’ The Tarot is said
to illustrate an idea of “astral light” (attributed to Éliphas Lévi but also appearing in
38
Blavatsky and Leadbeater) “an all-pervading fluid resembling electricity” connecting
thought to thought with rapidity as a “magnetised electricity” a reference frequent in
Lévi’s writings.cxiii One passage appears to explicate the inspiration for the
Calligrammes’ lithographic series as a whole:
Men are things magnetized by light like the suns, and, by means of
electro-magnetic chains whose tension is caused by sympathies and affinities, are
able to communicate with each other from one end of the world to the other, to
caress or strike, wound or heal, in a manner doubtless natural, but invisible, and of
the nature of prodigy.cxiv
The magnetic fluid is illustrated in Mathers’ with two medallion-like circular
emblems connected by an S-shaped scroll. The fluid is refigured in Calligrammes as an
electric current connecting two cosmic polarities.cxv The medallions represent the suit
known as Coins from common European playing cards still in use today, with further
implications for Calligrammes’ iconography. (Figure 28) (Figure 29) For played as a
card game, the Tarot, or tarrochi relate to the verb tarrochiare in Italian, which means to
play with a stronger suit, the golden deniers, the trump suit of French playing cards, the
triomphes, to apotheosize in the vulgar. Thus the cluster of associations springing from
the triomphes, the golden discs and the deniers (whose literal meaning is currency)
combines with the gamesmanship, le gran jeucxvi of Jean Paulhan, of playing a trump card
and the production of images on paper to suggest the activity of the artist itself, to which
René Magritte’s Donas, Jeux de cartes, also of 1926 may be compared.cxvii
39
Conjunctio
Despite De Chirico’s critiques, he committed himself in Calligrammes to
renascent imagery meant to reflect a rebirth of creativity that accompanied the artist’s
return to Paris in 1925 after an absence of over a decade necessitated by World War I.
The closing image presents the sun and moon seated together in an interior space,
suggesting bonds of fraternity that unite two forces, light and dark, life and death over
time. (Figure 30) It prefigures some of De Chirico’s late works on solar themes in which
the lunar crescent is rendered in the tonality of the celestial ruby, corresponding to
conjunctio and spiritual union. This interpretation is confirmed by a member of De
Chirico’s inner circle in Paris, the artist Massimo Campigli, in a letter discovered in the
Gabinetto Vieusseux describing an orientation in painting in which concave and convex
visual forms are meant to suggest coitus so as to replicate creation.cxviii The image calls
to mind Savinio’s eloquent praises for the poet:
The only poet of our time worthy of standing beside Sappho, Anacrontes
and Alceus for his lightness and depth of inspiration, naturalness and limpidity of
expression, for adhering to natural, supernatural and sub-natural elements, for
sentiments of earthly immortality, for familiarity with the mysteries of the earth,
the sky and the soul, for the length of his vision, his sight beyond, for Olympic
melancholy of mind, for overcoming all greed of knowledge, discovery, victory
over nature and men, for detachment in life, for life beyond the sobriety of
ornaments, for the beauty of his canto.cxix
Through syncretic Occidental and Oriental mythical allusions embedded in
Calligrammes’ imagery, De Chirico combined an essentially crepuscular, demystified
historicism with idealistic mysticism. He did so by creating a polarizing field in which
stylistic appropriation and iconographic metonymy confronted self-referential allegory.
(Figure 31) Akin to a mythic voyage of the imagination, a Joycean stream of
40
consciousness commemorated by the release of Ulysses in Paris during the same year,
Calligrammes’ leaps of association reflect a tempered and mercurial lyricism. It is in this
way that De Chirico succeeded in liberating myth from history to transcend time in the
manner of a Rauschenburgian combine.
_____________
In 1905 Albert Einstein proposed that light could exist in the form of a particle, a
small atomic piece of a photon. Through an intricate network of metaphoric
correspondences Calligrammes captured particles of the sky (parte-cieli as Cosmic
Fragments) whose celestial rotation paraphrased the creative process as incessant
movements that in their mobility constituted a suspension of time. To artists of the early
modern era, these were images emerging from the shadows of a transitory world that yet
held the capacity for truth. The sentiment was expressed almost prophetically in
Apollinaire’s lovely Calligrammes poem SHADOW:
SHADOW
Here you are near me once more
Memories of my comrades dead in battle
Olive of time
Memories composing now a single memory
As a hundred furs make only one coat
As those thousands of wounds make only one newspaper article
Impalpable dark appearance you have assumed
The changing form of my shadow
An Indian hiding in wait throughout eternity
Shadow you creep near me
But you no longer hear me
You will no longer know the divine poems I sing
41
But I hear you I see you still
Destinies
Multiple shadow may the sun watch over you
You who love me so much you will never leave me
You who dance in the sun without stirring the dust
Shadow solar ink
Handwriting of my light
Caisson of regrets
A god humbling himselfcxx
“How then shall I sing of you who are in every way lauded?” asked Homer in his
Hymn to Delian Apollo. Through a current of amor sacro e profano De Chirico may
well have answered, flowing mythically from the Ocean of their collective reverie:
OCEAN
For G. de Chirico
I have built a house in the middle of the Ocean
Its windows are the rivers flowing from my eyes…
Humid house
Blazing house
Swift season
Singing season
…Around the house lies the ocean you know so well
The ocean that is never still
—Guillaume Apollinairecxxi
42
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i
The author would like to dedicate this study to her mentor Horst Uhr in thanks for his
high excellence.
ii
Copyright 1956 by Editions Gallimard, Trans. by Gerald Fitzgerald as quoted in Renato
Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde (Cambridge, Mass.,: Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, 1968)., frontispiece.
iii
La stanchezza di una grande epoca che si andava esaurendo per vecchiaia dopo
diciannove secoli di complicatissima vita… “Spazio e tempo” January, 1928, Massimo
Bontempelli, L'aventura Novecentista (Florence: Vallechi, 1974)., p. 26. Unless
otherwise indicated, translations are mine.
iv
Theodor Adorno, Metaphysics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000).p. 111.
v
The edition containing the Picasso frontispiece is Guillaume Apollinaire, Calligrammes,
Paris: Gallimard, 1925, 8th ed. (NRF) inspected in the Fagiolo Archive, Rome. Baldacci
reports that Pierre Roy’s woodcut copy of De Chirico’s “Portrait of Guillaume
Apollinaire” [Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris] of 1914 was supposed to have
accompanied the first edition of Calligrammes to be printed in an edition of 200 copies in
1914. Because of the war, the book was not published, with the new edition issued in
1917 with Picasso’s portrait of a wounded Apollinaire. Paolo Baldacci, De Chirico : The
Metaphysical Period, 1888-1919, 1st North American ed. (Boston: Little Brown, 1997).,
p. 267, n. 78.
vi
The original edition of Calligrammes: Poems of Peace and War, 269 pages, containing
the 66 lithographs (65 unique images since one is repeated for the cover) by De Chirico
48
was published by the Nouvelle Revue Francais and Librairie Gallimard in 1930 (printed
on March 30, 1930 by Maurice Darantière in Italic type) in an edition of 131 signed and
numbered volumes, variously bound and slipcased. The lithographs that are inserted
within the text of the poetry measure approximately 17 x 20 centimeters and appear
interspersed among title pages and specific poems with no precise association of text to
image. (Six on antique white J. Whatman paper; six on Japanese mother-of-pearl rice
paper with two reserved for De Chirico; the remaining volumes on Chinese rice paper,
with some sets accompanied by separate folios of the lithographs and artists’ proofs,
certain images retouched with aquarelle and with titles hand-written below such as “Il
Diluvio” and “Sole spento riaccende le fiamme della città,” according to a pencil
inscription. In a sale conducted by the Galleria Ciranna, Milano on the 6th of June, 1968
at the Hotel Drouot in Paris, the IV edition is reported to contain the inscription Toutes
les lithographies de ce volume ont été retouchées par moi à l’aquarelle G. de Chirico.
Milano 9 Janvier 1932.) See Antonio Vastano, Giorgio De Chirico: Catalogo
Dell'opera Grafica 1921-1969 (Roma: Edizioni Bora, 1996)., p. 66. Volume number 3
(Whatman) with two suites of lithographs owned by the Spencer Collection of the New
York Public Library; Volume number V (Japon) is owned by the Beinecke Collection of
Yale University; another copy is owned by the Bertoli Collection of the Biblioteca
Nazionale di Firenze. The New York Public library edition provided the source for this
analysis.
vii
See Ciranna, A., Giorgio de Chirico: Catalogo delle Opere Grafiche (Incisioni e
Litografie) 1921-1969, Intro. By C. Vivaldi, Milano-Roma: La Medusa, 1969; Giorgio
de Chirico 1888-1978, Il catalogo, Galeria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Roma: DeLuca
49
Editore, 1981, p. 157; Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco, Il Tempo di Apollinaire à Parigi¨,
Rome, 1981, p. 53, n. 35; Giorgio De Chirico et al., Giorgio De Chirico : Pictor Optimus
(Roma: Edizioni Carte segrete, 1992)., pp. 30-31; Paolo Baldacci, Giorgio De Chirico,
Betraying the Muses: DeChirico and the Surrealists, NY: 1994, p. 117-20; Maurizio
Fagiolo dell’Arco, Giorgio de Chirico, Altri Enigmi 2, San Paolo di Reggio Emilia: La
Scaletta, 1996, pp. 57-65 and 140-145; Antonio Vastano, Giorgio de Chirico: Catalogo
dell’Opera Grafica 1921-1969, Rome: Edizioni Bora, 1996, pp. 66ff; Paola Cassinelli,
De Chirico alla Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, Firenze: Edizioni Polistampa,
1999, p. 30; Gerd Roos and A. Morasette, Omaggio à De Chirico, Rome: Studio d’arte
Compaola, 2002, pp. 42-47 and Maurizio and Cavallo Fagiolo dell'Arco, Luigi, De
Chirico: Disegni Inediti (1929) (Milan: Edizioni Tega, 1985)..
viii
Stephen Jay Gould, Time's Arrow Time's Cycle (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1987)., pp. 10-16; C. G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, trans. R. F. C.
Hull (New York: Bollingen Series XX, 1953)., pp. 91ff.
ix
x
Jung, Psychology and Alchemy., pp. 41ff.
Mircea Eliade, The Myth of Eternal Return (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991
(1st ed. 1954))., pp. 86-92.
xi
Ibid., pp. 141ff. It is for this reason that Nietzsche’s reinvocation of the Myth of
Eternal Recurrence, problematic in its interpretations though invoked among De Chirico
scholars as a point of departure for enigmatic anamnestic juxtapositions in his
Metaphysical painting, deserves further scrutiny. See for example Maurizio Fagiolo
dell'Arco and Paolo Baldacci, ed., Giorgio De Chirico: Parigi 1924-1929 (Milan:
Mondadori, 1982)., pp. 25-27; Baldacci, De Chirico : The Metaphysical Period, 1888-
50
1919.; Companion to Literary Myths, Heroes and Archetypes, ed. Pierre Brunuel
(London: Routledge, 1996)., pp. 420-423; G. W. Trompf, The Idea of Historical
Recurrence in Western Thought : From Antiquity to the Reformation (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1979)., pp. 84ff and 116ff.
xii
Sylviane Agacinski, Time Passing : Modernity and Nostalgia, European Perspectives
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2003)., p. 12.
xiii
Ibid.
xiv
J. T. Fraser, The Voices of Time (New York,: G. Braziller, 1966)., pp. 6ff.
xv
Giorgio De Chirico, Il Meccanismo Del Pensiero (Torino: Giulio Einaudi, 1985)., p.
45.
xvi
George, Waldemar, Chirico avec des fragments littéraire de l’artiste, Paris:
Chroniques du Jour, 1928.
xvii
Christopher Gray, Cubist Aesthetic Theories (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1953).,
p. 11.
xviii
Giorgio De Chirico, The Memoirs of Giorgio De Chirico (New York: Da Capo Press,
1994)., p. 28.
xix
See Jorge Luis Borges, “Circular Time” in Eliot Weinberger, ed., Jorge Luis Borges:
Selected Non-Fiction (New York: Penguin, 1999)., pp. 225-228.
xx
Maurice Tuchman, "Hidden Meanings in Abstract Art," in The Spiritual in Art:
Abstract Painting 1890-1985, ed. Edward Weisberger (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County
Museum of Art and Abbeville Press, 1986)., pp. 17-61; Robert P. Welsh, "Sacred
Geometry: French Symbolism and Early Abstraction," in The Spiritual in Art: Abstract
51
Painting 1890-1985, ed. Edward Weisberger (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County
Museum of Art and Abbeville Press, 1986)., pp. 63-87.
xxi
As a poet, Apollinaire is ranked with Baudelaire as one of the major early modern
poet-critics of France, located in the literary tradition between Rimbaud and Eluard. See
Wieland Schmied, Giorgio De Chirico : The Endless Journey (Munich ; New York:
Prestel, 2002)., p. 25.
xxii
On Apollinaire’s reputation among the Italian avant-garde see Hertz, Henri,
“Cronaca: Guillaume Apollinaire” in Valori Plastici, I, no. IV-V, Rome, April-May,
1919, pp. 20-23. On the dating of De Chirico’s initial meeting with Apollinaire see
Maurizio Calvesi, "L'incontro Di De Chirico Con Apollinaire," Storia dell'Arte 103
(2002)..
xxiii
The myth of Orpheus remained important to the French avant-garde throughout the
first half of the twentieth century, especially favored by De Chirico’s friend Jean Cocteau
in his films Le Sang d’un Poéte (1930), Orphée (1950) and Le testament d’Orphée
(1959).
xxiv
On Orpheus in literature see Walter A. Strauss, Descent and Return: The Orphic
Theme in Modern Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971)., Eva
Kushner, Le Mythe D'orphée Dans La Littérature Française Contemporaine (Paris,: A.
G. Nizet, 1961). and Cornelia A. Tsakiridou, ed., Reviewing Orpheus: Essays on the
Cinema and Art of Jean Cocteau (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1997).. On the
association of Orpheus and Dionysus with mysteries of initiation and prophecy see
Édouard Schuré, The Great Initiates (London: William Rider & Son, Ltd., 1920)., p; 34
and C. G. Jung, Man and His Symbols (New York: Dell, 1964)., pp. 134ff.
52
xxv
Companion to Literary Myths, Heroes and Archetypes., p. 107.
xxvi
Fagiolo, Le Rêve de Tobias, 1980, pp. 11-25 and Baldacci, De Chirico : The
Metaphysical Period, 1888-1919., p. 362.
xxvii
Giorgio de Chirico, “Le fils de l’ingénieur” in Waldemar George, opcit., 1928 and
Giorgio De Chirico, Hebdomeros, Reprint of 1929 Ed. ed. (Cambridge: Exact Change,
1992)., p. 73. On the “cult of genius” characteristic of the early modern avant-garde, see
Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde., p. 20.
xxviii
This association persists in the title of De Chirico’s brother Alberto Savinio’s
autobiography Hermaphrodite of 1920.
xxix
Savinio, Alberto. “Introduction à une vie de Mercure,” in Bifur, 31 December 1929,
pp. 72-90.
xxx
“…à son tour la partie éclairée passera dans les ténèbres et le feu substantial qu’elle
aura absorbé genera dans l’ombre sous l’influx lunaire cette vie mystérieuse des mondes
et des ètres. C’est pourquoi le Soleil et la Lune sont les principes de toute
existence…”G. Bouchet, Cosmogonie Humaine: Essai De Synthése Des Sciences
Diviniatoires (Vichy: Bouchet-Dreyfus, 1917)., pp. 123-124.
xxxi
On Apollinaire’s involvement with the mystical tradition see Linda Dalrymple-
Henderson, "Mysticism, Romanticism, and the Fourth Dimension," in The Spiritual in
Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985, ed. Edward Weisberger (Los Angeles: Los Angeles
County Museum of Art and Abbeville Press, 1986)., pp. 219-237.
xxxii
On the later nineteenth century tradition of mysticism see Tuchman, "Hidden
Meanings in Abstract Art.".
53
xxxiii
Guillaume Apollinaire and LeRoy C. Breunig, Apollinaire on Art: Essays and
Reviews, 1902-1918 (New York,: Viking Press, 1972)., p. 271.
xxxiv
Guillaume Apollinaire, The Cubist Painters: Aesthetic Meditations, trans. Lionel
Abel, Reprint Edition 1944 ed. (New York: Wittenborn and Co., 1913)., p. 9. See also
Apollinaire and Breunig, Apollinaire on Art: Essays and Reviews, 1902-1918., “The
Three Plastic Virtues” (1908), p. 47.
xxxv
Henri Bergson and Arthur Mitchell, Creative Evolution (New York,: H. Holt and
company, 1911).
xxxvi
Virginia Spate, Orphism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979)., p. 63. Such language
reflects poetry’s elevated status at the turn of the twentieth century, its power to reveal
the totality of nature expressed in Ballanche’s Orphée of 1827-29: I seemed to see a
great light which eneveloped the immensity of nature…I had a real but obscure and
indefinable sense of the essence and unity of all that exists. I then heard a sound, but a
mental sound, and it seemed to be the voice of light.
xxxvii
On occult symbolism in nineteenth century France see Robert Pincus-Witten, Occult
Symbolism in France (New York: Garland, 1976)., Welsh, "Sacred Geometry: French
Symbolism and Early Abstraction.", pp. 63-87. On Eastern currents of theosophy see
Sixten Ringbom, "Transcending the Visible: The Generation of the Abstract Pioneers,"
in The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985, ed. Edward Weisberger (Los
Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Abbeville Press, 1986)., p. 134-5.
xxxviii
Apollinaire, The Cubist Painters: Aesthetic Meditations., p. 12; Dalrymple-
Henderson, "Mysticism, Romanticism, and the Fourth Dimension.", pp. 219-237; Tom
Gibbons, "Cubism and 'the Fourth Dimension' in the Context of the Late Nineteenth
54
Century and Early Twentieth Century Revival of Occult Idealism," Journal of the
Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 44 (1981).
xxxix
These works in turn contained discussions of C. H. Hinton’s writings on the Fourth
Dimension which argue that the Transcendentalism of Plato, Parmenides and ‘the Eastern
philosophers’ was reborn in the nineteenth century in the metageometry of Bolyai and
Lobachevsky. See Gibbons, "Cubism and 'the Fourth Dimension' in the Context of the
Late Nineteenth Century and Early Twentieth Century Revival of Occult Idealism.". On
late nineteenth to early twentieth century alchemical sources in France, see M. E.
Warlick, Max Ernst and Alchemy : A Magician in Search of Myth, 1st ed., The Surrealist
Revolution Series (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001)., pp. 18-33.
xl
Dalrymple-Henderson, "Mysticism, Romanticism, and the Fourth Dimension.", pp.
219-237; Ringbom, "Transcending the Visible: The Generation of the Abstract
Pioneers.", pp. 131-153. See also Linda Dalrymple Henderson, Duchamp in Context :
Science and Technology in the Large Glass and Related Works (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1998)., pp. 4, 24.
xli
Spate, Orphism., p. 66.
xlii
It is interesting to note that Gino Severini also recounts visiting Parisian libraries
during the post-war period to study ancient treatises on painting. Gino Severini, The Life
of a Painter : The Autobiography of Gino Severini (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 1995)., p. 209.
xliii
Maurizio Calvesi, "L'universo Nella Stanza," in Giorgio De Chirico: Pictor Optimus
(Rome: Carte Segrete, 1992). pp. 28-33.
55
xliv
Schuré, The Great Initiates., pp. 32ff. and Harriet Watts, "Arp, Kandinsky, and the
Legacy of Jakob Bohme," in The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985, ed.
Edward Weisberger (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Musum of Art and Abbeville
Press, 1986)., p. 253.
xlv
Warlick, Max Ernst and Alchemy : A Magician in Search of Myth., p. 56.
xlvi
Leonard Shlain, Art and Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time and Light (New
York: Quill, 1991)., p. 65.
xlvii
Admirez le pouvoir insigne/Et la noblesse de la ligne:/ Elle est la voix que la lumière
fit entendre/Et dont parle Hermès Trismégiste en son Pimandre. Guillaume Apollinaire,
Bestiary (Boston: David R. Godine, 1910; reprint, 1980)., p. 2.
xlviii
Gilbert Boudar and Michel Décaudin, Catalogue De La Bibliothèque De Guillaume
Apollinaire (Paris: Editions du Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1983)., p. 55;
Dalrymple-Henderson, "Mysticism, Romanticism, and the Fourth Dimension.", p. 228;
and Cecily Mackworth, Guillaume Apollinaire and the Cubist Life, 1st American ed.
(New York: Horizon Press, 1963)., pp. 124-127.
xlix
l
Martinus Rulandus, A Lexicon of Alchemy (Frankfurt: 1612)., p. 20.
L’Esprit Nouveau et les Poètes (Paris), 1917 cited inMargaret Davies, Apollinaire
(London: Oliver and Boyd, 1964).p. 154.
li
Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde., p. 205.
lii
Jung, Man and His Symbols., pp. 135 and 146.
liii
Henderson also noted that interests in infinity, monism and evolving consciousness as
manifestations of mysticism and Romanticism were conveyed to Breton and the
56
Surrealists by means of Russian Futurists and Malevich who drew upon Ouspensky’s
“sensation of infinity” in his Tertium Organum of 1911.
liv
Warlick, Max Ernst and Alchemy : A Magician in Search of Myth., pp. 18-33; Simona
Cigliana, Futurismo Esoterico : Contributi Per Una Storia Dell'irrazionalismo Italiano
Tra Otto E Novecento, Critica E Letteratura ; 33 (Napoli: Liguori, 2002).. On occultism
in Russia see Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, ed., The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997)..
lv
John F. Moffitt, "Marcel Duchamp: Alchemist of the Avant-Garde," in The Spiritual in
Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985, ed. Edward Weisberger (Los Angeles: Los Angeles
County Museum of Art and Abbeville Press, 1986).; Henderson, Duchamp in Context :
Science and Technology in the Large Glass and Related Works.;Maurizio Calvesi,
Duchamp Invisibile: La Costruzione Del Simbolo (Rome: Officina Edizioni (Viale delle
Milizie, 12), 1975).; Warlick, Max Ernst and Alchemy : A Magician in Search of Myth.;
Marcel Duchamp, Abécédaire (Paris: Musée National d'Art Moderne, 1977)..
lvi
André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism ([Ann Arbor]: University of Michigan Press,
1972)., pp. 173ff. Mary Ann Caws, Surrealist Painters and Poets : An Anthology
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001)., pp. 30-31.
lvii
G. Apollinaire “L’Esprit Nouveau et les poètes”, Mercure de France, December,
1918, p. 394. De Chirico, Hebdomeros. p. 36.
lviii
The scallop shell was also popular among Surrealists for its relationship to Botticelli’s
“Birth of Venus” as an image of the female genitalia and the feminine principle in art.
lix
Fulcanelli, Le Mystère des Cathédrales, Reprint Edition 1979 ed. (Paris: Société
Nouvelle des Éditions Pauvert, 1925) pp. 140-1, and p. 158. This St. James legend along
57
with scallop shell symbols is also referenced alchemically in the work of other Surrealists
during the 1920’s such as Max Ernst. See Warlick, Max Ernst and Alchemy : A Magician
in Search of Myth., p. 99.
lx
See for example his “Metaphysical Composition,” of 1914 reproduced in Baldacci, ed.,
Giorgio De Chirico: Parigi 1924-1929. Plate 61, p. 239. On evidence of chiromancy in
De Chirico’s painting see Maurizio Calvesi, “De Chirico e le metamorfosi del destino”in
De Chirico Nel Centenario Della Nascita, (Milano/Roma: Mondadori/De Luca, 1988).,
pp. 16-18.
lxi
Fulcanelli, Le Mystère Des Cathédrales, Reprint Edition 1979 ed. (Paris: Société
Nouvelle des Éditions Pauvert, 1925)., pp. 42-43.
lxii
Baldacci, De Chirico : The Metaphysical Period, 1888-1919., p. 291 and Giorgio De
Chirico, L'art Métaphysique: Textes Réunis Et Présentés Par Giovanni Lista (Paris:
L'Echoppe, 1994)., pp. 7-11.
lxiii
Heraclitus and G. S. Kirk, The Cosmic Fragments (Cambridge,: University Press,
1970)., p. 149.
lxiv
Baldacci, De Chirico : The Metaphysical Period, 1888-1919., pp. 287-9.
lxv
Ibid. and Maurizio Fagiolo dell'Arco, Le Rêve De Tobie, 1917: Un Interno Ferrarese
E Le Origini Del Surrealismo (Rome: De Luca, 1980).
lxvi
David Schur, The Way of Oblivion: Heraclitus and Kafka (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1998)., pp. 15ff.
lxvii
Breton possessed two works on Heraclitus, a 1948 edition of Heraclite d’Ephese
inscribed by its translator, Yves Battistini and a 1955 edition of Heraclite, Barnedide,
Empedocle published by Gallimard.
58
lxviii
Heraclitus, Eraclito, ed. Bodrero Emilio, 1978 Reprint ed., vol. 3, Philologica
(Roma: Giorgio Bretschneider, 1910)., pp. 30-33. On the history of Heraclitus editions
and translations see Richard Walzer, Eraclito (Firenze,: G.C. Sansoni, 1939)., pp. v-vii.
lxix
Clive Foss, Ephesus after Antiquity: A Late Antique, Byzantine and Turkish City
(Cambridege, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 1979)., pp. 185-6.
lxx
De Chirico, Il Meccanismo Del Pensiero., pp. 81, 237, 273, 277 and 319; Alberto
Savinio, Hermaphrodito E Altri Romanzi (Milano: Adelphi, 1995)., pp. 195ff. De Chirico
also invoked Heraclitus in a letter to Ardengo Soffici. See Baldacci, De Chirico : The
Metaphysical Period, 1888-1919., p. 311.
lxxi
Charles H. Kahn, The Art and Thought of Heraclitus : An Edition of the Fragments
with Translation and Commentary (Cambridge, [Eng.] ; New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1979)., p. 7.
lxxii
De Chirico, Hebdomeros., p. 38.
lxxiii
Kahn, The Art and Thought of Heraclitus : An Edition of the Fragments with
Translation and Commentary., p. 235. See also M. L. West, Early Greek Philosophy and
the Orient (Oxford,: Clarendon Press, 1971)., pp. 122-123.
lxxiv
To some this “way up and down” referred to purifying changes of fire that ultimately
linked Heraclitus to Persian religion. West, Early Greek Philosophy and the Orient., p.
121 and Chapter 6, “Heraclitus and Persian Religion,” pp. 165ff.
lxxv
Ibid., pp. 121-123.
lxxvi
Gaston H. Halsberghe, The Cult of Sol Invictus, ed. M. J. Vermaseren, Études
Préliminaires Aux Religions Orientales Dans L'empire Romain, T 23 (Leiden,: Brill,
1972)., pp. 36-7.
59
lxxvii
Franz Cumont, Astrology and Religion among the Greeks and Romans (Montana:
Kessenger, n.d.; reprint, Reprint of lectures of 1912 on the History of Religions)., pp.
175, 194. See also Eugénie Sellers Strong, Apotheosis and after Life; Three Lectures on
Certain Phases of Art and Religion in the Roman Empire (Freeport, N.Y.,: Books for
Libraries Press, 1969)., pp. 138ff.
lxxviii
lxxix
See Franz Boll, “Das Epigram des Claudius Ptolemaus,” Socrates 9 (1921) 2-12.
Émile Soldi, La Langue Sacrée: La Cosmoglyphie, Le Mystére De La Création
(Paris: Librairie Achille Heymann, 1897)., pp. 381-473.
lxxx
Matila C. Ghyka, Esthétique Des Proportions Dans La Nature Et Dans Les Arts, 3.
ed. (Paris,: Gallimard, 1927)., pp. 76ff. The spiral’s radial proportionate ratios are
demonstrated to correspond numerically to the Fibonacci sequence, p. 198.
lxxxi
G. S. Kirk, Heraclitus: The Cosmic Fragments (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1954).; Kahn, The Art and Thought of Heraclitus : An Edition of the Fragments
with Translation and Commentary., pp. 220ff. On Heraclitus’ cyclical ontology see
Kahn, The Art and Thought of Heraclitus : An Edition of the Fragments with Translation
and Commentary., pp. 147ff.
lxxxii
Reprinted in Baldacci, De Chirico : The Metaphysical Period, 1888-1919., p. 402.
lxxxiii
Lyndy Abraham, A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery (Cambridge, UK ; New York,
NY: Cambridge University Press, 1998)., p. 186.
lxxxiv
De Chirico, Hebdomeros., pp. 86-7.
lxxxv
Ibid., p. 12.
lxxxvi
Soldi, La Langue Sacrée: La Cosmoglyphie, Le Mystére De La Création., pp. 165ff.
60
lxxxvii
De Chirico, Giorgio, “Il senso architettonico nella pittura antica,” Valori Plastici
pp. 59-60.
lxxxviii
De Chirico, Hebdomeros., p. 83.
lxxxix
Halsberghe, The Cult of Sol Invictus., pp. 32ff.
xc
Frederic Jameson, “The Deconstruction of Expression,” New Left Review, London,
146, July/August 1984, pp. 53-92, excerpted in Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, Art in
Theory 1900-2000, London: Blackwell, 2003, p. 1048.
xci
Giorgio De Chirico, Lassitude in Cahier 8, Antwerp: Editions Sélection, 1929, pp. 27-
29
xcii
See Emily Braun, “A New View of De Chirico,” in Emily Braun, ed., Giorgio De
Chirico and America, vol. Ex. Cat. Sept. 10-Oct. 26, 1996 (New York: Hunter College of
the City University of New York, 1996)., pp. 13-24.
xciii
Severini recounts the importance of caricature among the artists of Apollinaire’s
circle in Severini, The Life of a Painter : The Autobiography of Gino Severini., p. 35.
xciv
Bibliothèque nationale de France., Thierry Groensteen, and Centre national de la
bande dessinée et de l'image (France), Maîtres De La Bande Dessinée Européenne
([Paris]: Bibliothèque nationale de France : Seuil, 2000).; Patrick Gaumer and Claude
Moliterni, Dictionnaire Mondial De La Bande Dessinée (Paris: Larousse, 1997).; and
Karin Heller, La Bande Dessinée Fantastique à La Lumière De L'anthropologie
Religieuse (Paris, France: L'Harmattan, 1998)..
xcv
He uses the term in a letter to Ardengo Soffici Jan. 19, 1916 quoted in Baldacci, De
Chirico : The Metaphysical Period, 1888-1919., p. 311.
61
xcvi
Gerard d'Encausse Papus, Le Tarot Des Bohémiens, 2nd. ed. (Paris: Hector et Henri
Durville, 1889).; Emile Grillot de Givry, Le Musée Des Sorciers: Mages Et Alchimistes
(Paris: Librairie de France, 1929)., pp. 305-327; Ronald and Dummett Decker, Michael,
A History of the Occult Tarot 1870-1970 (London: Duckworth, 2002). p. 177f.
xcvii
P.D. Ouspensky, The Symbolism of the Tarot (St. Petersburg (Russia): 1913).; P.D.
Ouspensky, A New Model of the Universe (London: Kegan Paul, 1931).pp. 207ff.; on
Ouspensky and the Fourth Dimension as it related to the circle of Apollinaire and Cubism
see Linda Dalrymple-Henderson, The Fourth Dimension., pp. 76-78 and DalrympleHenderson, "Mysticism, Romanticism, and the Fourth Dimension.".
xcviii
Grillot de Givry, Le Musée Des Sorciers: Mages Et Alchimistes. and Oswald Wirth,
Le Tarot Des Imagiers Du Moyen Age (Paris: Le Symbolisme/Emile Nourry, 1927).
xcix
Paul Marteau, Le Tarot De Marseille (Paris: Arts et Métiers Graphiques, 1949)., pp.
vii-xii.
c
McLean, Adam, “An Hermetic Origin of the Tarot Cards? A consideration of the
Tarocchi of Mantegna,” first published in the Hermetic Journal, 1983.
ci
Martica Sawin, Surrealism in Exile and the Beginning of the New York School
(Cambridge: MIT, 1995)., rep. p. 134.
cii
On the Tarot of Marseilles see Marteau, Le Tarot De Marseille. and Ronald Decker
and Michael A. E. Dummett, A History of the Occult Tarot, 1870-1970 (London:
Duckworth, 2002)., p. 302.
ciii
Luigi Cavallo, Filippo De Pisis: Didascalie per un pittore, Exhibition Catalogue,
Milano: Galleria Brerarte, 1983, p. 28.
62
civ
See “Gamba di aragosta,” reprinted in Filippo De Pisis, Licisco Magagnato, and
Verona (Italy), Mostra Dell'opera Pittorica E Grafica Di Filippo De Pisis (Verona:
Mondadori, 1969). Pp. 77-78.
cv
Papus, Le Tarot Des Bohémiens., i.e. fig. 4; Wirth, Le Tarot Des Imagiers Du Moyen
Age., pp. 35-36.
cvi
Ouspensky, A New Model of the Universe., pp. 464ff.
cvii
Mark Antliff, Inventing Bergson : Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant-Garde
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993).
cviii
Kathleen Raine, Yeats, the Tarot, and the Golden Dawn, 2nd , rev. ed., New Yeats
Papers ; 2 (Dublin
Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Dolmen Press ;
distributed by Humanities Press, 1976).
cix
Mackworth, Guillaume Apollinaire and the Cubist Life., pp. 92ff.
cx
Decker, A History of the Occult Tarot 1870-1970., pp. 91-95.
cxi
Tancréde de Visan, “La Philosophie de M. Henri Bergson et l’estheetique
contemporain, in La vie de letters, Vol. I, Paris, April, 1913, pp. 124-127; and Spate,
Orphism., pp. 19-22. Gino Severini also describes Bergson’s influence among the avantgarde in his autobiography Severini, The Life of a Painter : The Autobiography of Gino
Severini., p. 42.
cxii
Boudar and Décaudin, Catalogue De La Bibliothèque De Guillaume Apollinaire., Vol.
2, p. 158.
cxiii
Magnétisme as an aspect of nineteenth century spiritualism was the subject of
considerable occult speculation reflected in the Journal du Magnetisme et du Psychisme
63
Experimental published in Paris throughout the nineteenth century. See Eliphas Levi,
The Key of the Mysteries (New York: Samuel Weiser, Reprint 1971)., p. 147; Helen
Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled, Reprint Edition 1972 (Pasadena, CA: Theosophical University
Press) ed. (New York: Theosophical Society, 1877)., p. xxv; and C. W. Leadbeater, The
Astral Plane, Reprint of 1895 ed. (Adyar, Madras, India: Theosophical Publishing House,
1963).. Blavatsky equates astral light with the sidereal light of Paracelsus and the
Hermetic philosophers, the spiritual, sidereal ether of alchemy.
cxiv
Éliphas Lévi, The Key of the Mysteries, trans. Aleister Crowley (New York: 1970)., p.
144; See also Eliphas Levi, Histoire De La Magie (Paris: Germer Bailliére, 1860)., p.
203.
cxv
Decker, A History of the Occult Tarot 1870-1970., plate 1.
cxvi
Marteau, Le Tarot De Marseille., p. viii.
cxvii
See L’avant-garde en Belgique, 1917-1929, Bruxelles: Musée d’Art moderne, 1992,
Fig. 55, p. 193.
cxviii
“…rapporti tra i vari elementi plastici, rapporti sui quail si é insistito e che sono
plasticamente suggestive solo quando corrono fra un oggetto concavo e uno
convesso…suscettibilitá di contanere e essere contenuto, di combaciare…un
simbolismo…del coito; nelle ultime gli organi sessuali.” Massimo Campigli, Letter to
Emilio Cecchi, Dec. 19, 1922, Paris.
cxix
Savinio, Hermaphrodito E Altri Romanzi., p. LII.
cxx
Guillaume Apollinaire, Calligrammes., P. 135.
cxxi
Ibid., P. 253.