Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978)

This work is sold with a photo-certificate from Claudio Bruni Sakraischik.

`This painting, is it perhaps the memory of a past life that, now, in the eternal present, is connected to my life? I remember what I was and I await what will be...’ (The character of Duron in de Chirico's novel, Il signor Dudron)

Painted circa 1957 Cavalli antichi revists one of de Chirico's favourite and most enduring themes: two classical horses standing alone by the sea and amidst the ruins of ancient Mediterranean civilization. Ever since his early childhood in Volos, Greece, Giorgio de Chirico was surrounded by images of the antique world. De Chirico's Italian parents had moved abroad for his father’s work as an engineer, a profession that was to deeply influence his son’s style in the years to come. Classical mythology, history and architecture provided another endless source of inspiration and de Chirico regularly combined such subjects with contemporary settings and anecdotes.

For de Chirico the horse was an animal mysteriously associated with the sea and what he once described as the 'enigma and infinite nostalgia of the deep.' An ancient and iconic creature that symbolically somehow bridges the two worlds of classical antiquity and the sea, the horse for de Chirico became one of the key evocative images of his art, appearing in numerous paintings throughout his career. As John Cocteau once remarked, Giorgio de Chirico 'no longer needs to paint Pegasus. A horse by the sea - with its colour, its eyes and its mouth - assumes the importance of the myth' (Jean Cocteau, 1928, quoted in Jole de Sanna, (ed.) De Chirico and the Mediterranean, 1998, p. 247).