The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Giorgio de Chirico · Mistero e malinconia di una strada · oil on canvas, upright, about 87 by 71.5 cm · a street seen from above and at a slant: a lit arcade at the left, a building in shadow at the right, an empty wagon with its doors open, a girl running with a hoop, and ahead of her the long shadow of a figure not seen · painted in Paris, 1914 · the single canvas, scored as it stands; the other Italian piazzas of 1912 to 1915 are context
Mode
A figurative painting that keeps perspective, the arcade and the legible object and turns them against order; the dream image made by exact means
Mythos
Innocence in light running toward a dark and unseen power; the classical past present only as a statue’s shadow; departure, and the end of the day
Phase
Painted in Paris in 1914, within the run of Italian piazzas begun in Florence about 1910; when in 1914 it was painted is not established
Presentation
Oil on canvas, upright, about 87 by 71.5 cm; one figure, one cast shadow of an unseen figure, one vehicle, two architectural masses and a sky; at least two perspective systems that do not agree
Register
Dread, quiet and complete: a cold stillness held at one pitch across the field, under the long shadows of a late afternoon
Scale
Under a metre high: one street, one hour, one child
Governing Proposition
A street is seen from above and at a slant, an arcade in raking light on one side and a building in shadow on the other, their lines receding to points that do not agree. A small girl in silhouette runs up it bowling a hoop, the only moving thing in the picture, and ahead of her, from beyond the dark building, falls the long shadow of a figure the canvas never shows. The wager is that the instruments of rational order, linear perspective, the arcade and the legible object, can be turned against themselves, and that a familiar street, changed in nothing but light, angle and emptiness, can be made to hold dread.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The canvas is oil, upright, about 87 by 71.5 centimetres, a little higher than it is wide, and it shows a street seen from above and at a slant. At the left a long arcade stands in full light, its arches receding steeply. At the right a building stands in deep shadow, its own arcade receding on another line. At the lower right is an empty box wagon, a furniture or freight van, its doors open and its interior black. In the street a small girl in silhouette runs from the lower left toward the upper right, bowling a hoop. Ahead of her, where the street opens beyond the dark building, falls the long shadow of a figure the canvas does not show, commonly read as a statue on a plinth, carrying what reads as a staff or a spear. The sky darkens toward the top.
Giorgio de Chirico painted it in Paris in 1914. The work scored here is that one canvas, Mistero e malinconia di una strada, as it stands; no version and no series is scored, and the other Italian piazzas he painted from 1912 to 1915 are context. Its elements can be counted: one figure, one cast shadow of an unseen figure, one vehicle, two architectural masses and a sky. There is no second figure. The light is of two opposed kinds, the left arcade in a raking yellow light, the right building and the van in shadow, and the shadows are the long shadows of a late afternoon. The finer particulars, the count of the arches, the exact colour of the sky, any flag or inscription, are not given here.
Few pictures so plain are so hard to reduce. Take away the girl and the street is only empty, a stage set waiting for an action; she is the only motion in it, the life that runs toward whatever the street holds. Take away the shadow and her run has no end and no threat. The shadow is the picture’s event, and it is made of absence. Take away the van and the picture loses its second absence, a container standing open, something that has arrived or is about to take something away. Take away either arcade and the contradiction of space that makes the street unsafe disappears with it. What could change is degree, not part: the length of the lit arcade, the number of its arches, the height of the sky. And the same parts, arcades, statues, wagons, recur across the run of piazzas from which this canvas comes.
Movement II
The inheritance in Paris in 1914 was Cubism and its offshoots, and behind them Impressionism. Their advance had a direction: perspective dissolved, the object broken into facets or into light, the surface made primary. A young painter in that city in those years was expected to take the next step along that line, and the line led away from the deep space, the legible object and the vanishing point that painting had trusted since the fifteenth century.
De Chirico went the other way. He returned to linear perspective, to the piazza and the arcade, to objects that can be named and a space that can be walked into, and then he turned those very means against themselves. Perspective, the instrument of rational order, became the instrument of unease. The left arcade and the dark building do not share a vanishing point, and the van stands on a ground that agrees cleanly with neither; the street is built with the old exactness and does not hold together. The manner began in Florence about 1910 and was carried through 1913 and 1914, and this canvas is one of its most concentrated statements, not its first. In a self-portrait of 1911 he had inscribed his programme: “Et quid amabo nisi quod aenigma est?”, and what shall I love, if not the enigma?
The stake was real. An Italian in Paris, painting against the movement the city was proud of, risked being read as provincial or as reactionary, a painter who had not understood what had happened. Apollinaire’s support was the measure of his few allies. Nothing in the canvas argues the case. It is made with the plainness of a draughtsman’s construction, and its departure lies wholly in what that construction is made to do.
Movement III
Two things can be said of the picture, and both hold. The familiar can be made strange without being changed: an arcade, a van and a child at play are made menacing by nothing but light, angle and emptiness, and the canvas shows that the uncanny is a property of how a place is seen, not of what is in it. And innocence runs toward what it cannot see: the child is in light and in motion, the shadow is still and waiting, and the disposition states something about childhood and fate that holds outside 1914. These are plain before the canvas. But most of what it gives is a state, and its title names two of them. Melancholy is a mood; mystery is a question it declines to answer. Its meaning is thinner than its mood.
The encounter is built, not alluded to. The child’s circle of a hoop is set against the statue’s stillness, the living against the stone, light against dark, and the composition’s diagonal takes the girl straight to the shadow’s edge. It is the oldest pattern of fate, the meeting one runs toward. The statue, if it is one, is present only as its shadow, so that the classical past enters the modern street as a darkness on the ground, an absent god. The empty van with its open door and the hour of long shadows add the departure and the end of the day. The particulars stay particular, a hoop, a wagon, a girl’s skirt, and the painter’s Nietzschean frame, the Italian afternoon and the enigma, supplies much of the depth as atmosphere, while the canvas names no story of its own.
The dread comes at once. The shadow falls into the street before its maker can be seen; the van’s black interior opens onto nothing; the street slopes away too steeply, so that the ground itself seems to tip the child forward. It is not placed at one point but held across the field, the long shadows, the darkening sky and the silent arcade keeping the same pitch everywhere. There is no grandeur in it and no transport by size or splendour; the canvas is under a metre high and keeps to one register. Its terror is quiet, and complete.
Movement IV
The form is what the picture knows. Drawn to one vanishing point, the street would be a stage set; the canvas knows the instability of the familiar only because its ground will not agree with itself. The cut between light and shadow is a plot: the child runs from the lit half toward the dark half, and the event of the picture is a passage across a boundary of light. The cast shadow is a thing only painting can hold, a shadow shown without its cause, the threat kept unseen and fixed. The upright format pitches the street upward and makes the run a climb. A photograph could approach the stillness, but not the impossible space. The elements, though, are a vocabulary shared with a dozen canvases, and some of what this form knows it knows as a system, not as this picture.
One law governs the field. Every object in the street is a container of light or of dark: the arcade is an order of openings filled with shadow, the van an opening filled with dark, the statue’s shadow a dark without a container, the girl a dark shape in light. The broken perspective is applied everywhere, and its disagreement is uniform; nothing stands outside it. The making serves that law exactly. The perspective is broken by design and controlled in its breaking; light and shadow are laid as two flat regimes with a hard boundary; a few dark shapes carry the whole motion of a running child. The paint is thin and the handling plain, the edges drawn rather than modelled, the arcades laid in with little inflection, the figure a sign rather than a body. The plainness is chosen, and nothing in the canvas is unintended, but the range of command on show is narrow.
The picture holds more than its size suggests and less than its fame. Childhood and play are in the girl and her hoop; the city and its architecture in the arcades; history and the classical past in a statue that is only a shadow; commerce or departure in the van; time in the hour of long shadows; and consciousness in the dream logic of the whole, a mind’s image of a place, with death or fate as the shadow’s meaning. The diagonal of the run makes most of them one event. What is absent is the rest: no family, no labour beyond the empty wagon, no state, no sacred order but a statue’s shadow, no natural world but a sky. It is one small canvas of one figure, one street and one hour.
Movement V
The reach began at once and near at hand. Carrà and Morandi took up metaphysical painting at Ferrara. The Surrealists reproduced and collected de Chirico’s early canvases and took them as scripture, and for them this image of the girl with the hoop became an emblem. Ernst’s collages and painted spaces of the early 1920s follow from the manner; Tanguy is recorded as turning to painting on seeing a de Chirico in a dealer’s window; Magritte’s displaced ordinary objects and Dalí’s long shadows and tilted plains descend from it; and the stilled cities of the Neue Sachlichkeit and the Italian Novecento carry it on. The reach belongs to the whole Paris body of 1911 to 1917, about forty canvases, and the most quoted encounters attach to other pictures or to the manner; this canvas is one of the two or three strongest carriers of it.
Return has not closed the questions. The psychoanalytic readings of the interwar years, the scholarship on metaphysical painting, on Nietzsche and Turin, and on the painter’s own later repudiation of the manner have each come back to it. Whose shadow it is, a statue’s or a man’s; whether the girl is pursued or pursuing; what the van holds, or has emptied; whether the canvas is the memory of an Italian town, a dream image or a constructed enigma: these stay open. So does the reading that its menace foreshadows the war of that summer, which is brought to the canvas and not shown by it, since nothing in the image refers to war and the date of painting within 1914 is not established. The surface is plain, and return goes to the relations rather than the detail.
After 112 years the canvas is whole, one canvas with no known cut or alteration, and the image is the image made. As an image its presence is very wide: it is reproduced in every account of modern painting and of Surrealism and has never been eclipsed. As an object it is not known to be on continuous public view, and its condition is not argued here. The painter’s later copying and backdating of his own metaphysical works has clouded the field of his early images, and the canvas stands in that field. In it the girl is still running up the slope with her hoop, in the last of the light, toward a shadow whose cause has not come into the street.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged element by element, the canvas is nearly irreducible. Take away the girl and the street is only empty, a stage set; she is the only motion in it, the life that runs toward what the street holds. Take away the shadow and her run has no end and no threat: the shadow is the picture’s event, and it is made of absence. Take away the van and the second absence goes, an empty container with its doors open. Take away either arcade and the contradiction of space that makes the street unsafe disappears. What yields is degree, not part: the length of the lit arcade, the height of the sky. And the canvas belongs to a run of piazzas built from the same parts, which tells against compulsion in its vocabulary.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Something can be stated, through image, and it holds. The familiar can be made strange without being changed: an arcade, a van and a child at play are made menacing only by light, angle and emptiness, and the uncanny is shown to be a property of how a place is seen, not of what is in it. And innocence runs toward what it cannot see: the child is in light and in motion, the shadow still and waiting, a truth about childhood and fate that holds outside 1914. Both are credited fully. Held below the gate because most of what the canvas gives is a state, melancholy and mystery, as its title says, and the disclosure of a mood ranks below that of a meaning.
Score: 7.9 / 10
The elevation is of one kind, and real: dread, a cold sublime of stillness and threat in an ordinary place. It comes at once, in the shadow that falls into the street before its maker can be seen; in the van’s black interior, an opening onto nothing; in a street that slopes away too steeply, so that the ground seems to tip the child forward. It is sustained across the field rather than placed at one point: the long shadows, the darkening sky and the silent arcade hold one pitch everywhere. What holds it is scale and range: no grandeur, no transport by size or splendour, one register. Below The Starry Night (9.2), whose sky rises to several summits; above Broadway Boogie Woogie (8.0), its single register the more intense.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Here the archetype is built, not only evoked. The encounter of the child and the shadow bears load: innocence in light running toward a dark and unseen power, the hoop’s circle against the statue’s stillness, the living against the stone. It is the oldest pattern of fate, the meeting one runs toward, carried not by allusion but by the diagonal that takes the girl straight to the shadow’s edge. A statue present only as its shadow, as the shadow is commonly read, brings the classical past into the modern street as a darkness on the ground; the empty van and the hour of long shadows add departure and the end of day. Held at the gate, not above it: much of the depth is supplied as atmosphere by the painter’s Nietzschean frame, and the canvas names no story it builds.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The inheritance in Paris in 1914 was Cubism and its offshoots, and before them Impressionism: perspective dissolved, the object fragmented, the surface made primary. The departure is a wager against the whole advance: a return to linear perspective, the piazza, the arcade, legible objects and deep space, and then the turning of those means against themselves, so that perspective, the instrument of rational order since the fifteenth century, becomes the instrument of unease. The stake was real: a young Italian in Paris, painting against the movement the city was proud of, risked being read as provincial or reactionary, and Apollinaire’s support was the measure of his few allies. Held below the top because the swerve belongs to the body of piazzas begun about 1910; this canvas is one of its most concentrated statements, not its first.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Would a different form change what the work knows? Very largely. The contradictory perspective is the knowledge: a street drawn to one vanishing point would be a stage set, and the canvas knows the instability of the familiar only because its ground will not agree with itself. The cut between light and shadow is the knowledge: the child runs from the lit half toward the dark, and the plot of the picture is a passage across a boundary of light. The cast shadow is the knowledge: only painting can show a shadow without its cause and hold the threat unseen and fixed. The upright format pitches the street upward and makes the run a climb. Held below the top because the elements are a vocabulary shared with a dozen canvases, and some of what the form knows it knows as a system.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Evidence over promise: more than a century of return, through the Surrealists, who took the painter’s early work as scripture, through the psychoanalytic readings of the interwar years, to the scholarship on metaphysical painting, on Nietzsche and Turin, and on the painter’s own later repudiation of the manner. The questions stay open: whose shadow it is, a statue’s or a man’s; whether the girl is pursued or pursuing; what the van holds or has emptied; whether the canvas is memory, dream or constructed enigma; whether its menace foreshadows the war of that summer, a reading brought to it and not proved. Held below the top because the surface is plain and return goes to relations rather than detail, and because much of the literature treats the canvas as one of a series.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Published, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: a reorganisation of what a figurative painting could be in the decade of Cubism and abstraction, showing that perspective and the legible object could carry the irrational without distortion of the object, and opening the dream image as a mode of painting. The discount: the reach belongs to the whole Paris body of 1911 to 1917, and the most famous testimony attaches to other canvases. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the metaphysical painting of Carrà and Morandi at Ferrara; the Surrealists, who reproduced and collected the early canvases and made this girl with her hoop an emblem; Ernst’s painted spaces of the early 1920s; Tanguy; Magritte’s displaced objects; Dalí’s long shadows and tilted plains; the stilled cities of the Neue Sachlichkeit and the Italian Novecento.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at 112 years. Form: one canvas, whole; no cut or alteration is known, and the image is the image made. Presence: as an image, very wide, reproduced in every account of modern painting and of Surrealism, never eclipsed; as an object, narrower, since the canvas is not known to be on continuous public view, and presence is charged a tenth for that. Fame lifts nothing beyond presence. Fabric: oil on canvas, thinly painted in the manner of the period; no damage is known, and none is charged beyond the ordinary. A further small charge: the painter’s later copying and backdating of his own metaphysical works has clouded the field of his early images, and this canvas stands in that field.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Judged as command of oil on canvas, to the same anchors as every medium. The making bears load where it matters: a perspective construction deliberately broken and controlled in its breaking; light and shadow placed as two flat regimes with a hard boundary; the girl’s silhouette, a few dark shapes that carry the whole motion of a run; the van’s black opening. Nothing in the canvas is unintended. The costs are charged: the paint is thin and the handling plain, the edges drawn rather than modelled, the arcades laid in with little inflection, the figure a sign rather than a body. The plainness is chosen, but the range of command is narrow beside Las Meninas (9.8) or The Starry Night (9.0); above Fountain (7.3), because a great deal is made here, and made exactly.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the lit arcade at the upper left and the van’s black interior at the lower right. One law holds them: every object in the street is a container of light or of dark, and the space between them is unreliable. The arcade is an order of openings filled with shadow; the van is an opening filled with dark; the statue’s shadow is dark without a container; the girl is a dark shape in light. The broken perspective is itself the law, applied everywhere, and its disagreement is uniform: nothing in the canvas stands outside it. But the range is narrow by design, one street, one hour, one register, and narrowness is not coherence: a law held completely over a small territory, a shade below Broadway Boogie Woogie (8.9), whose territory is larger.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The orders held: childhood and play, in the girl and her hoop; the city and its architecture, in the arcades; history and the classical past, in a statue present only as a shadow; commerce or departure, in the van; time, in the hour of long shadows; consciousness, in the dream logic of the whole, a mind’s image of a place; and death or fate, as the shadow’s meaning. The diagonal of the run integrates most of them: child, street, shadow and hour are one event. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no family, no labour beyond the empty wagon, no state, no sacred order but a statue’s shadow, no natural world but a sky. It is a single small canvas of a single figure. The figure describes the form.
Score: 6.7 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.4 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Swerve and The Imperishable at 8.9, then Pressure on Tradition at 8.8 and The Living Form at 8.7. A wager against the whole advance of painting in Paris, with perspective and the legible object turned into instruments of unease; an image whole as made and reproduced in every account of modern painting; a manner that passed to Carrà and Morandi, to the Surrealists and beyond them, with this girl and her hoop for an emblem; and a form whose broken perspective, hard boundary of light and shadow without a cause are themselves what the canvas knows.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 6.7: childhood, the city, the classical past, departure, time and consciousness are held in one event, and family, labour, the state, the sacred and the natural world are absent; a single small canvas of a single figure. Next above it, The Unconcealment at 7.9: the uncanny of the familiar and innocence running toward the unseen are stated and hold, but most of what the canvas gives is a state, melancholy and mystery, and its meaning is thinner than its mood.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.4 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.7, The Made at 8.0, The Inner Law at 8.5, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Swerve at 8.9, The Imperishable at 8.9 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.8 clear the bar of 8.5, and The Archetypal Deep meets it exactly at 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 7.9 falls short, a disclosure more of mood than of meaning. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below 7.9, against 7.5), and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 6.7. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The twelve sum to 100.3, an average of 8.36 that displays 8.4, in the band of Tier IV, six tenths short of the 9.0 the summit requires; the summit is held off by the gate and by the aggregate both.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the canvas as an image, from long acquaintance in reproduction and with the literature on metaphysical painting; known less well as a surface, and without sure knowledge of its present condition. No image or written source was consulted. The work scored is the single canvas: Giorgio de Chirico, Mistero e malinconia di una strada, oil on canvas, painted in Paris in 1914, about 87 by 71.5 cm, upright. No version or series is scored; the other Italian piazzas of 1912 to 1915 and the Paris body of 1911 to 1917 are context and evidence of reach. The proportion, about 1.22 to 1, is computed from the dimensions. The only words quoted are the Latin line the painter inscribed on a self-portrait of 1911, which is documented; it is context for his programme and not part of this canvas. The statue is the common reading of the shadow, and the war of 1914 is a reading brought to the picture, not shown by it. Facts that could not be verified are not given or are stated as open, among them the canvas’s owners and present collection, how often it has been on public view, its condition and any repair, when in 1914 it was painted, the count of the arches, the exact colour of the sky, any flag or inscription in the field, and whether the painter’s later copying and backdating touches this canvas.