186 RES 57/58 SPRING/AUTUMN 2010

Figure 1. Giorgio de Chirico, The Evil Genius of a King, spring–summer 1914. Oil on canvas, 61 x 50.2 cm; 24 x 19¾ in.
© Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, New York.
 Untimely objects
Giorgio de Chirico’s The Evil Genius of a King (1914) between
the antediluvian and the posthuman
ARA H. MERJIAN
What a time experiences as evil is usually an untimely echo
of what was formerly experienced as good—the atavism of a
more ancient ideal.
—Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil1
To see everything, even man, in its quality of thing.
This is the Nietzschean method. Applied to painting it
might produce extraordinary results. This is what I try to
demonstrate in my pictures.
—Giorgio de Chirico, “What the Painting of the Future
Might Be,” Parisian Notebooks, ca. 1911–19132
A gnarled orange barb pokes up out of its slate-
blue base, notched with indecipherable markings and
huddled in the shadow of a lopsided red frame; an
orb of emerald green perches miraculously on a tilted
plank, showing off the measured loops of its intersecting
parabolas; a hexagonal tube or container or incantatory
object, marked—like its neighboring, flattened
arrow—with strange ciphers, inches upward against
a vertiginously tipped plane. Bounded by a wedge of
ink-black shadow at right and a swatch of brick wall
and flushed horizon at left, this narrow space appears
close, yet strains upward and away. The ginger-colored
ledge rears up at an angle oblique to the picture plane,
climbing like a drawbridge toward a steep vanishing
point, the edge of which spills over into an unseen,
For their perceptive comments and criticisms, I wish to thank
Emily Braun, T. J. Clark, Jennifer Marshall, Francesco Pellizzi, Barbara
Spackman, Anne Wagner, and the two anonymous RES peer reviewers.
Any errors or oversights that remain are my own. Thanks also to Valerie
McGuire for her indispensable help with images, and to Ester Coen
for her moral support. Research for this essay was supported by a
Fulbright Full Grant to Italy, the Paul Mellon Fellowship of the Center
for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, and the Stanford Humanities
Postdoctoral Fellows program. Unless otherwise noted, all translations
from the French and Italian are my own. Where possible I have cited
from extant English translations.
1. F. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, “Epigrams and Interludes,”
#149, Basic Writings of Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufman (New
York: Modern Library, 2000 [1967]), p. 280.
2. G. de Chirico, “Meditations of a Painter/What the Painting of the
Future Might Be,” Paulhan MSS, reprinted in Hebdomeros and Other
Writings, ed. J. Ashbery (Cambridge: Exact Change, 1992), p. 205.
yawning space, abutted by the corner of a poker-faced
arcade (fig. 1).
What does this strange constellation of objects—
pinned with gravity-defying immobility to a sharply
tilted plane—propose? Does it imagine what modern
commodities in a shop window would look like to an
uncultured “primitive”? Or, conversely, how exotic
fetishes appear to the urbane European? Do these shapes
and colors suggest elaborate drafting implements, seen
by a wide-eyed infant who lacks a language to describe
them? Or do they instead utter some neoteric language,
shared only by elect members? Does this space represent
a prehistoric Greek or Roman altar, strewn with
eviscerated organs, awaiting an augur? Or else pastries
glimpsed in a store front, da sotto in sù, by a child
passing by? Do they allude to a museum display case of
artifacts, of ancient utensils, or jewels? Or, conversely,
to the most modish gadgets and devices in a modern
European appliance shop?
This swell of uncertainties unfurls in the wake of a
decidedly reticent painting, The Evil Genius of a King.
Giorgio de Chirico completed this canvas in Paris during
the spring and summer of 1914, along with a cluster of
closely related paintings, all of which share the same
basic compositional premise: Still Life: Turin 1888 (spring
1914), The Sailors’ Barracks (fig. 2) The General’s Illness
(spring–summer 1914), and Metaphysical Composition
with Toys and Metaphysical Composition (summer–
autumn, 1914).3 These six canvases, which I shall
hereforth refer to as the Evil Genius series (since this is
the best known and most reproduced of the group), all
figure objects with purposes that vacillate—in the shape
3. As this article was going to press, the Fondazione Giorgio e Isa
de Chirico, Rome, challenged the authenticity of three canvases from
the Evil Genius series—all of which are included in Paolo Baldacci’s
1997 catalogue raisonné—and denied permission to reproduce
the images herein: Still Life: Turin 1888 (Spring 1914; cat. no. 62)
Metaphysical Composition with Toys (summer–autumn, 1914; cat.
no. 66), and Metaphysical Composition (summer–autumn, 1914;
cat. no. 67). The documentation and forensic evidence leading to the
Fondazione’s verdict regarding these three pictures have not yet been
made public.
188 RES 57/58 SPRING/AUTUMN 2010

Figure 2. Giorgio de Chirico, The Sailors’ Barracks, spring–summer 1914. Oil on canvas, 81.2 x 65 cm. The Norton
Gallery of Art, West Palm Beach.

of balls and rods, checkered grids and colored scraps—
between the ostensibly practical and the seemingly
meaningless. If some of these objects resemble
instruments of science and calculation, others appear
useless. A few of the objects possess each of these
qualities in equal measure. In a letter to his dealer from
the fall of 1915, soon after he had left Paris for service in
the Italian army, de Chirico describes these canvases
simply as containing “objets indéterminés”—a laconicism
matched by the modest place of these paintings in the
reception of Metaphysical art.4 In the entire body of
scholarship on de Chirico, this group of canvases has
received scant attention, despite the subsequent
prominence of The Evil Genius of a King in both Dadaist
and Surrealist circles between the World Wars.
One consistent element of writing on the Evil Genius
pictures, when they are mentioned at all, is an insistence
upon their incomprehensibility. The art historian
Paolo Baldacci recently remarked that the series’
“iconographical elements pose formidable interpretive
problems” in the form of “strange and brightly-colored
objects that are extremely difficult to interpret.”5 James
Thrall Soby, the author of the first major monograph
on de Chirico, notes the paintings’ “curious objects of
omen, not easily described but strangely disquieting.”6
But what, exactly, is “strange” or “curious” about the
objects in the Evil Genius paintings? Of what, more
precisely, might they constitute omens? Indeed, is it not
tautological to call these objects strange or ominous in
the context of de Chirico’s Metaphysical aesthetic, which
expressly conjures up a world of enigma, of non-sense,
of menacing disquiet?
Scholars rarely, if ever, discuss de Chirico’s
Metaphysical paintings in connection with early
twentieth-century primitivism. This is due to the
widespread notion that these works, which he completed
mostly in Paris in the early 1910s, evoke only classical,
Greco-Roman themes and settings. Indeed, de Chirico’s
canvases make no overt formal references to the
Polynesian and African objects that so preoccupied his
colleagues in avant-garde Montparnasse. Yet certain
early critics discussed de Chirico’s painting precisely
4. G. de Chirico, letter to Paul Guillaume, undated, ca. autumn
1915; reprinted in La pittura metafisica (Venice: Palazzo Grassi, 1979),
p. 118.
5. P. Baldacci, Giorgio de Chirico: The Metaphysical Period, 1888–
1919, trans. J. Jennings (New York: Bullfinch, 1997), pp. 240, 237.
6. J. T. Soby, “Giorgio de Chirico, Toys of a Prince [sic]” wall text
for ”Picture of the Month,” Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute, Utica,
N.Y., Oct. 1–29, 1944; archives of the Museum of Modern Art, New
York.
Merjian: Untimely objects 189
in this vein. Maurice Raynal—one of the artist’s earliest
critics and a prominent voice in French avant-garde
circles—ascribed de Chirico’s architecture, shadows, and
“unusual objects” not to Mediterranean classicism, but
rather to “mythical monsters, ancient oriental divinities,
negroes, characters out of fairy-tales or English novels
from the nineteenth century.”7 Writing in 1920, the
French critic Tokine quipped acidly about de Chirico’s
“attempted neoprimitive constructions.” He added:
“But if Cubism is a discipline and not an aesthetic, this
neoprimitivism—a kind of ‘quasi art nègre’ [espèce de
‘petit nègre’ de l’art]—leaves even more to be desired.”8
The art historian Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco rightly
notes that de Chirico’s work consistently “avoids the
topic of art nègre.”9 But avoidance does not, in this
instance, constitute unconcern. De Chirico’s stance
vis-à-vis avant-garde primitivism and art nègre was not
one of mere indifference, but rather of calculated and
subtle distancing, particularly after his arrival in France,
where he could not have escaped an encounter with
these artifacts. While he claimed a divergence between
his work and his peers’ primitivist tendencies, the era’s
criticism suggests that this constituted a narcissism of
small difference—or, to invoke Tokine’s patronizing
terminology, a “petit nègre” of art, rather than its full-
fledged version. Classical and primitive themes are not,
as has long been assumed, mutually exclusive in de
Chirico’s early Metaphysical painting; rather these form
two sides of the same coin, particularly with regard to de
Chirico’s evocation of objects as sources of revelatory,
mythical, and divinatory power. More specifically, de
Chirico used ancient and prehistoric ritual practices
as the model for his depiction of objects. I hope to
shed some light on how de Chirico pursued these
strategies, particularly with the Evil Genius, mining the
Greco-Roman tradition for its own origins in mystery
and irrationality. To this end he turned—quite self-
consciously and declaratively—to the writings of his
imagined mentor, Friedrich Nietzsche.
7. M. Raynal, La Peinture en France de 1906 à nos jours (Paris:
Éditions Montaigne, 1927), p. 100.
8. B. Tokine [sic], “Lettres Italiennes: Futuristes e Néoprimitivistes,”
Action I, no. 4 (July 1920): 54–57.
9. M. Fagiolo dell’Arco was the first to document extensively
de Chirico and Savinio’s interactions with the avant-gardes. See,
in particular, Fagiolo dell’Arco, Giorgio de Chirico. Il Tempo di
Apollinaire. Paris 1911–1915 (Rome: De Luca, 1981). In his editorial
notes to de Chirico’s essay, “Noi Metafisici,” Fagiolo briefly mentions
the painter’s likely familiarity with Paul Guillaume’s collection of
African objects. See Il meccanismo del pensiero: Critica, polemica,
autobiografia, ed. M. Fagiolo dell’Arco (Turin: Einaudi, 1985), p. 444.
 190 RES 57/58 SPRING/AUTUMN 2010
Nietzsche attempted to resurrect the forgotten
strangeness of the classical tradition: a strangeness
tantamount, despite its ostensible familiarity, to the
most extrinsic of avant-garde orientalisms. Or, rather,
it was precisely the ostensible familiarity of this
world—of its instruments and objects, its architecture
and commonplaces—that afforded a covert fetishizing
by the philosopher-genius. It is this Greece, Ernst
Bertram writes, that represented for Nietzsche “a secret,
interior Orient.”10 As a Greek-born Italian, de Chirico
believed himself to possess a privileged relationship
to the classical past and felt directly interpellated by
Nietzsche’s call for the “perversion” of antiquarian
studies.11 As is now patent in scholarship, from Soby’s
first monograph up through Paolo Baldacci’s more
comprehensive studies, de Chirico’s early encounter with
the works of Nietzsche informs the entire trajectory of
his Metaphysical project.12 Despite mounting recognition
of de Chirico’s debts to Nietzsche, we lack a close
reading of precisely how de Chirico applied Nietzsche’s
philosophy to painting. Along these lines, I argue here
for certain aspects of form, composition, and even color
in the Evil Genius paintings as deriving from Nietzsche’s
writings on pre-Socratic Hellenism, myth, and ritual.
De Chirico and avant-garde Primitivism: Affinities
and resistances
“Intellectual appetites glutted themselves on little
specialized menus: I even recall the drunkenness of art
Page range correct?
nègre that seized—ante bellum—Parisian moderns after
copious mythical meals.”13 Definitively settled in Italy
10. E. Bertram, Nietzsche: Essai de mythologie, trans. Robert Pitrou
(Paris: Éditions du Félin, 1990 [1932]), pp. 330, 334. Importantly,
Bertram discusses how Turin served for Nietzsche as a kind of
“transition” back to this “internal Orient.”
11. F. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, in Basic Writings of
Nietzsche, trans. and ed. W. Kauffmann (New York: The Modern
Library, 1968), pp. 15–144, p. 21.
12. On de Chirico’s uses of Nietzsche, see Baldacci (note 5) and
“The Function of Nietzsche’s Thought in de Chirico’s Art,” in Nietzsche
and ‘An Architecture of Our Minds’ (Los Angeles: Getty Research
Institute, 1999), pp. 91–113; A. H. Merjian, “Urban Untimely: Giorgio
de Chirico and the Metaphysical City,” Ph.D. diss., University of
California, Berkeley, 2006. Baldacci’s monograph is a model of both
historical diligence and theoretical sophistication, and he is the first
scholar to pay sustained attention to de Chirico’s reading of Nietzsche
(and to a lesser extent, Schopenhauer and Heraclitus). Baldacci’s book
serves as both a comprehensive monograph and a catalogue raisonnée
of the Metaphysical period. Throughout this essay, I have adopted
Baldacci’s scrupulous documentation of dates and titles.
13. A. Savinio, Hermafrodito (1914–1918), reprinted in his
Hermaphrodito e altri romanzi (Milan: Adelphi, 1995), p. 37; italics in
the original.
after serving in the Italian army abroad, de Chirico’s
brother and collaborator, Alberto Savinio (né Andrea
de Chirico), eagerly downplayed his and Giorgio’s
participation in the more fashionable aspects of French
modernism before the Great War. De Chirico’s later
attempts to disassociate his work from the prewar,
Parisian avant-gardes—and their uses of primitivist
sculpture—were no less emphatic than his brother’s. It is
telling, however, that de Chirico’s young art dealer was
none other than Paul Guillaume.
As early as 1912, Guillaume had amassed a large
collection of African sculpture and founded the Société
des Mélanophiles in 1913 to further its study and
promulgation. In Guillaume’s own words, by 1918 his
gallery boasted “la collection la plus importante, la plus
riche et la plus belle des statues nègres” in Paris, and
perhaps all of Europe.14 De Chirico’s close confidant, the
prominent poet and critic Guillaume Apollinaire, was
himself an early collector and enthusiast of primitive
sculpture, even penning essays such as Mélanophilie
ou mélanomanie, and the volume Sculptures nègres in
1917, partly to promote Guillaume’s enterprise in this
area. As the Gallérie Guillaume gained prominence
in the mid-1910s, de Chirico’s work was frequently
displayed there alongside African and Oceanic artifacts,
in addition to paintings by André Derain, Amadeo
Modigliani, and Pablo Picasso—artists who expressly
engaged with the aesthetics of primitivism.15 Guillaume
even sent de Chirico’s The General’s Illness (one of
the Evil Genius series) and four other Metaphysical
works to Alfred Stieglitz’s 291 gallery for inclusion
in the landmark exhibition, Statuary in Wood by
African Savages: The Root of Modern Art (November
3–December 8, 1914). Savinio, too, participated in
absentia, recording on Pathé disc a lecture on art nègre,
which was played in conjunction with the exhibition
(fig. 3).16
Throughout the 1910s and 1920s, Guillaume made
pronouncements such as: “It will be the glory of a few
men endowed with certain prophetic vision to have
14. See P. Guillaume, “Actualités . . . A propos d’art nègre” (signed
“Paracelse”) in Les Arts à Paris no. 1 (March 1918): 4.
15. A 1914 exhibition poster for Guillaume’s Rue Miromesnil
atelier announces the display of “Tableaux Modernes,” including
works by Pierre Roy, Francis Picabia, and de Chirico, in addition to
“Sculptures Nègres.”
16. On Savinio’s contacts with Marius de Zayas, as well as the
“conferenza di Savinio sull’arte negra” at 291, see Fagiolo dell’Arco,
Giorgio de Chirico (see note 9), p. 46. See also A. Savinio, “Di mensa
in mensa,” Souvenirs (Palermo: Salerio, 1976), p. 152, fn. 3.

Figure 3. Alfred Stieglitz’s 291 gallery, “Statuary in Wood by African Savages: The
Root of Modern Art,” November 3–December 8, 1914, Library of Congress
[LC-USZ62-100177].
inscribed in the history of the beginning of the Twentieth
Century the revelation of the primitive statues of the
African black race.”17 Such declarations, by Guillaume
and others, violated de Chirico’s own conceptions
of revelation and of primitivism—conceptions at
once more recondite than the fad for art nègre, and
stubbornly endemic to the Western tradition. Recent
archival discoveries now afford a closer consideration
of these conceptions, of their etiology and implications.
Gerd Roos’s unearthing of a note written by de Chirico
in January 1911 has brought to light previously
undisclosed aspects of de Chirico’s “primitivist” interests,
which manifested themselves from the very start of
his Metaphysical pursuits, during his student days in
Munich from 1906–1909.18 On the back of a musical
program by Savinio—which de Chirico translated from
Italian to German and sent to his friend Fritz Gartz in
Munich—de Chirico has scribbled the names of various
scholars of non-European cultures and anthropologists
17. P. Guillaume, “African Art at the Barnes Foundation” (written in
English), Les Arts à Paris, no. 8 (October 1923): 9.
18. See G. Roos, De Chirico e Alberto Savinio: Ricordi e
documenti (Monaco, Milano, Firenze, 1906–11) (Rome: Edizioni Bora,
1999).
Merjian: Untimely objects 191
of religion, as well as various related words, including
“mythical history . . . Zend—Avesta / Zarathustra.”19
Roos suggests that this list—dashed off without clear
order—was probably not intended for Gartz, but was
written by de Chirico for himself, though it remains
unclear to what end. Listing, among others, the Scottish
theologian and scholar of Hebrew William Robertson
Smith (1846–1894), the Indologist Hermann Oldenberg
(1854–1920), and the Egyptologist and author of Histoire
ancienne de peuples de l’orient (1875) Gaston Camille
Charles Maspero (1846–1916), de Chirico’s note forms
a veritable inventory of contemporary scholarship on
Semitic and non-Western philology and anthropology.20
19. The note, written in German and illegible in places, reads
as follows: “Comparative mythology / Manhard / Robertson Smith;
Salomon Reinach; Ancient India—Oldenburg / Maspero; Pencan [?]
—mythical history; Tower / Horse / Courier [?] / queen [?] / all of them
[?] not [?]; Zend—Avesta / Zarathustra; Ernst Renan / Christian [?] and
Hebrew History.” A photocopy of this note is reproduced in Roos
(ibid.), between pages 16 and 17.
20. Baldacci rightly notes the importance of such a document in
comprehending de Chirico’s early intellectual formation. De Chirico’s
burgeoning interest in Nietzsche and Schopenhauer seems to have
extended also to include some of the Eastern theories of myth and
religion that informed these philosophers’ antirationalist imperatives
192 RES 57/58 SPRING/AUTUMN 2010
As I will discuss in detail, de Chirico’s main
“primitivist” sympathies remained with the more rarefied
realm of Nietzschean and pre-Socratic texts. Rather
than a prefiguration of certain discourses on primitivism
and non-Western cultures, de Chirico’s familiarity
with these trends evidences his work’s contiguity with
avant-garde experiments and undermines the received
notion of de Chirico’s paintings as rooted in a matrix
of straightforward classicism. I would contend that
this aspect of de Chirico’s cultural formation, at once
parallel to and bound up with his readings of Nietzsche,
locates de Chirico more fixedly in the intellectual
climate of his time, rather than signals his distance from
or anticipation of it. If de Chirico resisted the vogue of
Parisian primitivism, his canvases from this period are
no less concerned with enlisting a kind of atavism in the
service of modern painting—however self-consciously
untoward and untimely. Just as his oeuvre at large argues
for strangeness and enigma as immanent to the ordinary
physical environment, these pictures insist upon the non-
sense at the heart of the—seemingly familiar—Greco-
Roman tradition. It is precisely due to its superficial
familiarity—its embeddedness in a presumably classical
world—that de Chirico’s Nietzschean primitivism has
gone largely unaddressed.
Nietzsche, Heraclitus, and the language of oracle
Speculating on the genealogy of the Evil Genius
paintings, James Thrall Soby remarks: “In 1914 [de
Chirico] added cryptic objects [to his paintings], seen
or imagined on his solitary walks through the streets
of Paris.”21 Yet as Wieland Schmied and Paolo Baldacci
(The “Zend—Avesta / Zarathustra” pairing is a case in point). But I
think Baldacci slightly overstates the consequence of de Chirico’s list
of scrawled names, claiming that it prefigures later avant-garde trends
and reveals “that Metaphysical art anticipated many of the discoveries
of linguistics and semiology, sociology and structuralism, and the
philosophy of symbolic form. Only an extremely small number of
European thinkers had arrived at the point of being able to completely
overturn basic cultural assumptions, still mired during those years
in the conflict between idealism and positivism” (Baldacci [see note
5], p. 90). Whatever de Chirico’s level of familiarity with the authors
mentioned—which appears to have been quite superficial—his
application of their work cannot have constituted an overturning of
“basic cultural assumptions,” much less linguistic or semiotic ones.
More fundamentally, we do not even know, as Gerd Roos notes, if
this impromptu list names books “already read or to be read,” though
de Chirico likely consulted at least some of the books in subsequent
years and was certainly familiar with Reinach’s work. See Roos (note
18), p. 372.
21. J. T. Soby, Giorgio de Chirico (New York: Museum of Modern
Art, 1966), p. 99.
have demonstrated in separate studies, de Chirico’s
paintings from 1914 expressly conjure up Nietzsche’s
sojourns in Turin—a presence that de Chirico famously
interpreted as a fated prefiguration of his own later
presence in that city.22 He came increasingly to
identify with Nietzsche in ways both intellectual and
psychopathological, even half-jokingly claiming to be
the philosopher’s metempsychotic reincarnation—a
notion that their similar stomach illnesses and migraines,
along with their elective exiles in various lands, seemed
to confirm. Already in 1910, writing from Florence to
his friend Fritz Gartz in Munich, de Chirico declares: “I
will now whisper something in your ear: I am the only
man to have truly understood Nietsche [sic]—all of
my work demonstrates this.”23 Subsequent declarations
confirmed—along with his burgeoning iconographical
changes—that such an affinity was not merely a passing
diversion, but the source of a wholesale aesthetic
and existential conversion. “It is only with Nietzsche
that I can say I have begun a real life,” he writes in
a later letter.24 Even by 1914 this initiation had done
anything but subside. De Chirico’s poster for the Paul
Guillaume Gallery—since titled The Enigma of the Horse
(1914)—depicts a rearing horse in the shadow of one of
his trademark arcades. Completed just months before the
Evil Genius canvases, the image alludes to the famous
episode in which Nietzsche clutched a horse in the
streets of Turin as it was beaten by its master.
22. W. Schmied, “Turin als Metaphor für Tod und Geburt,” in De
Chirico und seine Schatten (Munich: Prestel-Verlag, 1989); Baldacci
(see note 5).
23. G. de Chirico, letter to Fritz Gartz, December 26, 1910 (dated
“Florence 26 [24 Juillet crossed out] Januarii 1910), Via Lorenzo il
Magnifico 20 Florence”; reprinted and translated in Paolo Picozza,
“Giorgio de Chirico and the Birth of Metaphysical Art in Florence in
1910,” Metafisica: Quaderni della Fondazione Giorgio e Isa de Chirico
no. 7/8 (2007–2008): p. 63–64. The date of this letter has become the
subject of profound, ongoing polemics within de Chirico scholarship.
While I do not have room to discuss the origins and implications of this
controvery here, it is likely that the letter indeed dates to December
26, 1910, as recently adduced by Paolo Picozza in the light of new
analyses. In another vein, from de Chirico’s extant letters to Gartz,
originally brought to light by Gerd Roos, we know for certain that
by the summer of 1909 Giorgio and his brother Alberto had read at
least Ecce Homo and Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in addition to French
translations of The Birth of Tragedy, The Case of Wagner, and probably
The Gay Science. See G. Roos, De Chirico e Alberto Savinio: Ricordi e
documenti, as well as Baldacci’s discussion of Roos’s findings and of de
Chirico’s early readings of Nietzsche, in Baldacci (note 5), especially
pp. 67–74.
24. G. de Chirico, letter to Fritz Gartz, undated (January 5, 1911),
reprinted and translated in Paolo Picozza, “Giorgio de Chirico and the
Birth of Metaphysical Art in Florence in 1910,” Metafisica: Quaderni
della Fondazione Giorgio e Isa de Chirico no. 7/8 (2007–2008): p. 66.

Figure 4. Giorgio de Chirico, The Enigma of the Oracle, summer–autumn 1909. Oil on canvas,
42 x 61 cm. Private collection. © Cameraphoto Arte, Venice / Art Resource, N.Y.
But iconographic and biographic cues get us only so
far in reading these images. As with the Metaphysical
images at large, a close reading of the Evil Genius works
reveals that de Chirico does not translate Nietzsche’s
philosophy into some esoteric iconography, but
rather into a pictorial language that is itself esoteric.
Only months after he had completed the Evil Genius
paintings,—de Chirico wrote to his dealer in Paris:
In order to thrill to such metaphysical things, so to speak,
you must, my dear friend, possess a rare intelligence, very
rare—for, the more people I meet, the more I realize that
this God-given gift is an uncommon thing; I even think
that intelligence as we others understand it—Nietzschean
intelligence [l’intelligence nietzschienne]—the intelligence
of God and of the acrobat, of the hero and the beast, is so
rare as to be nearly unobtainable, and we who have been
entranced by the gleam of the sky, we who see—we can be
proud and happy, since joy, sweet and divine joy, is our due,
whatever the destiny of our lives. So be it.25
What de Chirico deems “l’intelligence nietzschienne” is
not a set of objects or images, anecdotes or events. It is a
way of seeing—or re-seeing—the world. The Evil Genius
25. G. de Chirico, letter to Paul Guillaume, undated (ca. November
1915), reprinted in La Pittura Metafisica (Venice: Neri Pozza Editore,
1979).
Merjian: Untimely objects 193
paintings propose the merging of de Chirico’s own
subjectivity not only with Nietzsche’s, but also with that
of Nietzsche’s own imagined mentor, the pre-Socratic
philosopher, Heraclitus.
De Chirico’s first truly Metaphysical painting, The
Enigma of the Oracle (summer–autumn, 1909), as well
as an early drawing by Savinio, both allude to the image
of Heraclitus, wrapped in a chlamys and framed by
architecture against the sky (fig. 4). Like his paintings, de
Chirico’s earliest writings reveal a profound interest in
aspects of preclassical Hellenism, sparked by Nietzsche’s
extensive references to Heraclitus and other pre-Socratic
philosophers. In his first Parisian manuscript, de Chirico
figures the world of enigmatic, preclassical antiquity as a
realm tantamount to the solemnity and silence of earth’s
prehistory. He imagines “those soothsayers tending to
the voice of the waves receding from that ancient land.
I have pictured them head and body wrapped in a
chlamys, waiting for the mysterious revealing oracle. So I
also once imagined the Ephesian [Heraclitus] meditating
in the first light of dawn under the peristyle of the Temple
of Artemis of the hundred breasts.”26 De Chirico’s interest
26. G. de Chirico, “Paulhan MSS” (ca. 1911–1913), in Ashbery (see
note 2), p. 192.
194 RES 57/58 SPRING/AUTUMN 2010
in Heraclitus was sparked by Nietzsche’s own affinity
for the “Ephesian,” particularly his embodiment of a
Hellenic world prior to Socratic reason and dialectics.
Heraclitus’s enigmatic, terse fragments—which praised
silence and enigma over pedantic garrulity—attracted
Nietzsche and de Chirico in turn.27 Ancient accounts
of Heraclitus’s elitism, anti-social behavior, and willful
estrangement from his contemporaries further enhanced
his appeal.
While The Evil Genius of a King aspires to evoke a
solemnity and solitude similar to that in The Enigma of
the Oracle—a world of mystery, ritual, and revelation—
the dimensions of the scene have shifted: from a
demonstrably ancient scene, to one less transparent in its
temporality. The Evil Genius of a King evokes not (only)
a remote and secret oracle, but (also) the contents of a
shop window. With—quite literally—pedestrian aplomb,
the Evil Genius paintings take the language of oracular
painting to new heights, even as it brings it down to
the level of the street. De Chirico’s entire Metaphysical
corpus is bound up with tropes of prophecy, augury, and
divination: from the “oracles” of his earliest paintings,
to his depictions of Roman augurs’ staffs in several
canvases, to his evocation of “Soothsayers” and “Seers”
in later works. With the Evil Genius series, these tropes
become focused in and on ambiguous objects: vaguely
grounded in ancient vatic ritual, but impossible to tell
apart from modern commodities.
Toys and templums
The Metaphysical Composition with Toys (summer–
autumn 1914) and The General’s Illness offer a number
of parallels with The Evil Genius of a King in this
regard—parallels that bear upon the series as a whole.
The objects in the former two pictures represent the most
biomorphic, oddly shaped figures to appear in de
Chirico’s oeuvre. Until this point in his corpus, de
Chirico had evoked a sense of strangeness only by setting
familiar objects in jarring juxtaposition—whether a bust
of Jupiter alongside a cluster of bananas, or a cannon
and two artichokes, or a modern clock face in the same
space as an ancient galley. In The General’s Illness and
Metaphysical Composition with Toys, however, not only
the objects’ relationships to one another appear
incongruous or unfathomable, but their very identity
27. “And are not those who indicate by signs, without a word,
what must be done, very much praised and admired?” Plutarch, De
garrulitate 17, on Heraclitus, in Heraclitus, Fragments, trans. and ed.
T. M. Robinson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987).
and purpose is also indecipherable, vacillating between
the status of playthings and more ceremonious objects,
such as the entrails read by ancient augurs.28 As
Maurizio Calvesi has demonstrated, de Chirico’s
curiosity for the rituals of augury was sharpened by the
contemporary novel La fin de Babylone (1914), penned
by his early champion and confidant Apollinaire. Some
of Apollinaire’s references to the arcane objects of
ancient divination appear in de Chirico’s canvases from
this same period, such as the “divinatory arrow” in
the Evil Genius of a King and other strange objects in
The General’s Illness and Metaphysical Composition
with Toys.29
The isolated objects in these works seem to
further derive from the second-century-B.C. Etruscan
bronze sculpture of a sheep liver (“The Piacenza
Liver”), a teaching tool, which Etruscan augurs used
to demonstrate their procedures to initiates (fig. 5).
The lumpy shape at left, in particular, is notched with
markings similar to those that appear on the barbed
and bulbous “Piacenza Liver,” which de Chirico likely
saw in reproduction.30 Like The General’s Illness, The
Evil Genius of a King contains objects with similar
markings, inscribed on flattened shapes. The Piacenza
bronze liver is divided into quadrants corresponding
to the movements of celestial bodies. That the Etruscan
example was preceded by Babylonian practices likely
attracted de Chirico’s attention even more (fig. 6); his
28. De Chirico and Savinio took a particular interest in this
practice, as well as related ancient Mediterranean practices of
divination and prophecy. One of Savinio’s musical compositions dated
December 29, 1914, is titled Les viscères oeuillés [sic]. A line from his
contemporary Hermafrodito reads: “My entrails need a haruspex” [“Il
faut un aruspice pour mes entrails”]. See Savinio (note 13), p. 6.
29. M. Calvesi, “L’incontro di de Chirico con Apollinaire,” Storia
dell’arte no. 102 (May/August 2002). Calvesi argues convincingly for
Apollinaire’s Le Roi de Babylone as an inspiration for the title, the
content, and the generally “vatic” atmosphere of The Evil Genius of
a King. As I argue below, however, de Chirico’s Evil Genius series
cannot be ascribed solely to a visual transcription of Apollinaire’s text.
It is equally bound up with de Chirico’s other interests in Nietzsche,
European pre- and proto-history, and even the work of his brother,
Savinio.
30. My thanks to Vincent Jolivet, Etruscologist at the Académie de
France in Rome for sharing with me his knowledge of the Piacenza
bronze in 2004. After submitting my dissertation in May of 2006 and
having proposed the Piacenza sculpture as a potential source of the
Evil Genius series, I was alerted to Calvesi’s essay, which sets forth a
similar proposal regarding the Piacenza bronze. Calvesi relates the
object only to The Evil Genius; while this general assimilation seems
certain, certain objects in The General’s Illness and Metaphysical
Composition with Toys echo more pointedly the forms and markings of
the Piacenza bronze.

Figure 5. The “Piacenza Liver,” late second century B.C., Etruria; front and top views. ©
Museo Civico, Piacenza.
writings and paintings frequently evoke Babylonia
and Chaldea as admirable manifestations of pre-
Hellenic tradition. Like its Babylonian, Hittite, and
Chaldean precedents and like its Greek and Roman
contemporaries, Etruscan religion viewed the body’s
organs as condensations and reflections of cosmological
order.31 Various objects extant in Etruscan and Roman
archaeology depict priests in the act of augury, bent over
an altar or slab on which viscerae have been placed.
A bronze mirror from the Vatican Museums’ Etruscan
collection, for example, reveals Calchus—a winged
priest of Apollo—engaged in this act of extispicy (the
examination of animal entrails), or hepatoscopy, or
hepatomancy (divination using the liver of sacrificial
animals.)32
De Chirico and Savinio’s interest in the Etruscans—
like their attraction to Babylonian, Chaldean and, later,
Jewish cultures—was rather dilettantish. But the affinities
between these cultures and “Greek prehistory” led to
31. See M. Cristofani, Dizionario della Civiltà Etrusca (Florence:
Giunti Martello, 1985), pp. 27–28.
32. See R.E. Kuttner, “Protohistoric Hepatomancy: An Oracular
Form of Pathology,” Proc Inst Med Chic 35, no. 1 (Jan–March 1982):
14; L. B. van der Meer, The Bronze Liver of Piacenza: Analysis of a
Polytheistic Structure (Amsterdam: J. C. Gieben, 1987).
Please spell out complete name.
Merjian: Untimely objects 195
occasional invocation in their paintings and writings,
specifically in the context of de Chirico’s decidedly
urban revelations. A poem from his early Parisian
manuscripts (1911–1913) reads: “One day I too will
be a man-statue / widowed husband on an Etruscan
sarcophagus / that day in your great grip of stone /
hug me, O mother city.”33 In his later meditation on
the funerary tumuli of Etrurian cities such as Cerveteri
and Tarquinia, Savinio writes of the Etruscans as “[g]
reat psychologists of death.”34 He also likens the
disparity between Rome and Etruria to the difference
“between logicians and metaphysicians”35—a contrast
that, by the 1940s, aims to favor Roman logic (written
at the height of Fascism, Savinio’s text makes various
rhetorical concessions to the regime’s chauvinism). Still,
his description of Etrurian religion in terms of “cruelty
and malignity . . . a taste for the absurd, distortion of
reality, reversal of values,”36 suggests why it would have
appealed to de Chirico’s pursuit of “evil genius” in the
33. G. de Chirico, “Epode” (1917), reprinted in Filippo de Pisis,
Futurismo, Dadaismo, Metafisica (Milan: Scheiwiller, 1981).
34. A. Savinio, Speaking to Clio (Marlboro, Vermont: Marlboro
Press, 1987 [1946]), p. 92.
35. Ibid., p. 89.
36. Ibid.
196 RES 57/58 SPRING/AUTUMN 2010
Figure 6. Sheep’s liver in clay, 14.6 cm across. Old Babylonian, ca.
1900–1600 B.C. British Museum, London, Western Asia Collection #
ME 92668. © The Trustees of the British Museum.
1910s, particularly as an ancient alternative to reason
(Roman or otherwise), without seeming demonstrably
exogenous.
That Savinio rehearses Etrurian culture in decidedly
Nietzschean terms—the flaunting of logic, the
transvaluation of values, a kind of “evil”—is by no means
coincidental. From his earliest published works, such as
The Birth of Tragedy, up through his last anti-Wagnerian
polemics, Nietzsche championed the “underbelly” of
Hellenism: “the good, severe will of the older Greeks
to pessimism, to the tragic myth, to the image of
everything underlying existence that is frightful, evil, a
riddle, destructive, fatal?”37 The confluence of evil and a
riddling fatality in Nietzsche’s rhetoric underscores the
extent to which such language appealed to de Chirico’s
burgeoning conceptions of an alternative Hellenism.
The Evil Genius of a King surely resonates expressly
with Nietzsche’s notion of “evil” as the domain of the
übermenschian artist-philosopher—a notion threaded
insistently throughout Nietzsche’s entire oeuvre. In
37. F, Nietzsche, “Attempt at Self-Criticism,” The Birth of Tragedy,
in Basic Writings of Nietzsche (see note 1), p. 21.
Zarathustra alone it rears up on nearly every other page
as the benchmark of the transvaluation of values:
“[T]here is yet a future for evil too.”38
Even aside from these more abstract concepts,
Nietzsche specifically discusses—and esteems —the
sacrificial and mystical practices of Greek and Roman
societies. Daybreak, for example, addresses the framing
and isolating of religious objects by the Greeks, while
Truth and Lies in an Nonmoral Sense discusses the
practices bound up with objects such as the Piacenza
liver: “the Romans and the Etruscans cut up the heavens
with rigid mathematical lines and confined a god within
each of these spaces thereby delimited, as within a
templum.”39 In the same vein, in a passage titled “On
38. F. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in The Portable
Nietzsche, trans. and ed. Walter Kauffmann (New York: Viking, 1954),
p. 256.
39. F. Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality,
trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1997), # 130, p. 80. F. Nietzsche, “Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral
Sense,” reprinted in Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s
Notebooks of the 1870s, trans. and ed. D. Breazeale (Atlantic
Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press International, 1990 [1979]), p. 85.
Though de Chirico would not have had access to the latter text (which

viewing certain ancient sacrificial utensils,” he laments
that “[t]he combination of farce, even obscenity,
with religious feeling, show us how some feelings
are disappearing; the sensibility that this is a possible
mixture is vanishing . . . this a later age will perhaps no
longer understand.”40 That Nietzsche used these objects
as instantiations and metaphors of his concepts of time,
myth, and history bear significantly on de Chirico’s
work—particularly his pursuit of what he called “the
metaphysicality discovered in objects.”41
De Chirico’s Greeks from the Pelasgians to
the pre-Socratics
In an autobiographical text, published in Belgium
in 1929 under the pseudonym “Angelo Bardi,” de
Chirico makes plain what kind of Greco-Latin world
he sought to evoke in his early work. Bardi/de Chirico
declares that during his Metaphysical period, “he had
discovered an enigmatic Greece quite different from the
Greece illustrated in schoolbooks, just as, after reading
Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo, [he] set about discovering the
‘mystery of Italy’ [‘le mystère italien’].”42 De Chirico’s
early paintings, completed during his residencies in
Munich and Milan, had pictured a Mediterranean
world of savage, mythical battles. His Battle of Centaurs
(1909) treats a theme from the annals of his native
Thessaly, namely that of the clash between the Centaurs
and Lapiths (fig. 7).43 To Arnold Böcklin’s mythological
subject matter and brooding style, de Chirico has added
even more frenzied brushwork and placed the grim
detail of skulls at the left corner of the skirmish. His
earlier Sphinx (1908–1909) depicts a seashore littered
with skulls and bones, awash in the wake of a plainly
unforgiving riddler, whose profile juts proudly from
the cliff walls. Taking up the thread of Thessalian myth,
specifically that of his birthplace, Volos, Greece—
was published posthumously), numerous other writings by Nietzsche
allude to rituals of ancient Greek sacrifice, astronomy, and Heraclitus—
all of which, as I will discuss, de Chirico noted and incorporated in his
writings and paintings.
40. F. Nietzsche, “On Viewing Certain Ancient Sacrificial Utensils,”
#112, Human, All Too Human, trans. M. Faber and S. Lehmann
(London: Penguin, 1994), p. 84.
41. G. de Chirico, “Arte metafisica e scienze occulte,” in
Meccanismo (see note 9), p. 64.
42. Angelo Bardi (pseudonym of Giorgio de Chirico), “La vie de
Giorgio de Chirico,” in Séléction: Chronique de la vie artistique, cahier
no. 8, Éditions Séléction (Antwerp, 1929), p. 23.
43. On the precise Böcklinian sources of this image, see Baldacci
(see note 5), p. 58.
Merjian: Untimely objects 197
ancient Iolchos, from which Jason and the Argonauts
set sail in search of the Golden Fleece—de Chirico’s
Departure of the Argonauts (summer 1909) reveals a
slaughtered lamb or goat laid at the feet of a statue of
Athena, a propitiatory sacrifice to the goddess in advance
of the Argos’s departure. As “Bardi”’s account attests, de
Chirico’s interest in these aspects of Hellenic mythology
deepened as he and Savinio moved across Europe—from
Munich, to Milan, to Florence, to Paris—and as their
readings of Nietzsche came to inform their work more
comprehensively. The brothers eventually coauthored
a musical score entitled The Most Profound Music Ever
Written: Revelations on the ”Enigma of the Eternal
Return” (This concert, scheduled for a performance in
Florence on January 9, 1911, was never held.44) One
subtitle of this work is “The Passage of the Pelasgians”—
referring to the mythical inhabitants of the pre-Hellenic
Aegean.
To be sure, de Chirico’s imaginings of the ancient
Greco-Roman world as “énigmatique,” mysterious, and
violent must have derived, in part, from sources other
than Ecce Homo.45 We know for certain that de Chirico
consulted Salomon Reinach’s manuals, including Apollo:
An Illustrated Manual of the History of Art through
the Ages, for reproductions. De Chirico seems to have
gleaned from Reinach’s books not only a model for his
Ariadne figures, but also references to xoana (proto-
Archaic statues), Etruscan sarcophagi, and prehistoric
grottoes, as well as the Chaldean sculpture of The
Architect with the Rule (which appears, slightly altered,
in The Disquieting Muses). I do not argue that de Chirico
set out to isolate any of these sources as the exclusive
basis for a self-consciously primitivist modernism. More
interesting and important, I think, is the way in which he
weaves them into generic tropes of “Greek prehistory”
and “strangely Roman poetry”—terms that appear in
his earliest Parisian notebooks and which form the
44. See Roos (see note 18), pp. 315–320.
45. Between 1911 and 1915, James George Frazer’s 1890 work
The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, for example, was
reedited in twelve volumes. Frazer gives equal treatment to descriptions
of Greek sacrifices and their Yakut, Javan, and Indian counterparts. His
comparative method discerns “a striking resemblance between the
rude oracles of the Polynesians, and those of the celebrated nations
of ancient Greece.” In his scrutiny of “savage” beliefs about death,
superstition, healing, and taboos, Frazer treats the Roman augur’s
staff, the Athenian Dionysian festivals, and the funerary rights of the
Pidhireanes in the same breath. It is uncertain whether or not de
Chirico read Frazer’s books. See J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough: A
Study in Magic and Religion, vol. 1, The Magic Art and the Evolution of
Kings (New York: Macmillan, 1922 [1911–1915]), p. 377.
198 RES 57/58 SPRING/AUTUMN 2010
Figure 7. Giorgio de Chirico, Battle of the Centaurs, spring 1909. Oil on canvas, 75 x 110 cm. Galleria
Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome. Photo: Art Resource, N.Y.
philosophical-aesthetic umbrella for a range of images,
reaching a kind of synthetic climax in the Evil Genius
images. Nietzsche’s writings encouraged de Chirico’s
evocation of Greek myth as something that haunts the
modern world to its very marrow, though visible only to
those endowed with the vision to see it.46
Ridendo dicere severum: Color, form, and affect in the
Evil Genius paintings
“Why should we attribute to the ancient Greeks an
immunity from ‘primitive’ modes of thought?” asks
E. R. Dodds in The Greeks and the Irrational (1951).
Dodds’s query had, of course, long been anticipated
by Nietzsche’s philosophy. From his very first writings,
Nietzsche assailed the prevalent notion of Greek
culture as the birthplace of rationalism. “[A]s if there
had never been a sixth century with its birth of tragedy,
its mysteries, its Pythagoras and Heraclitus, as if the
46. “This book belongs to the very few,” noted Nietzsche in the
preface to The Antichrist, subtitled “The Transvaluation of All Values,”
which he penned in Turin in 1888.
works of art of the great period simply did not exist,” he
sneers in The Birth of Tragedy (1872).47 It was just these
abjured origins that Nietzsche’s works reclaimed. “The
best German cultural figures,” he adds, have “learned
best to come to terms with the Greeks . . . by skeptically
abandoning the Hellenic ideal and completely perverting
the true purpose of antiquarian studies.”48 “We are not
afraid of the reverse side of ‘good things’ . . . e.g. of
Hellenism, of morality, of reason” he later vows in The
Will to Power.49 Such pronouncements echoed similar
recuperations of the long-abjured “underbelly” of
classicism that took place in the realm of art history and
archaeology. The early nineteenth-century rediscovery
of the paint that once adorned classical temples formed
a physical counterpart and forerunner of Nietzsche’s
philological diggings. The recuperation of this
architecture’s, and sculpture’s, original, vivid coloration
47. Nietzsche (see note 11), section 11, p. 78.
48. Ibid., section 20, p. 122; emphasis mine.
49. F. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and
R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1967), p. 524, #1015;
emphasis in the original.

seemed to unveil a repressed, Dionysian element:
one that literally flushed the pristine, white face of J. J.
Winckelmann’s Greek ideal.
But de Chirico’s Metaphysical paintings held out
against eccentric coloration and formal distortion as
the means to suggest enigma and mystery. He viewed
this as too facile a strategy, equivalent, for example,
to Gabriele D’Annunzio’s florid and rhetorical
neoclassicism. As the Metaphysical aesthetic evolved
into a clear, architectonic construction of crisp forms
and lines, the loose, “Dionysian” strokes of de Chirico’s
first Centaur and Sphinx canvases became more tame
and dry. The Enigma of the Oracle, his first categorically
Metaphysical work, reveals a decidedly muted palette
and architectural solidity. Though Delacroix’s throbbing
surfaces and rich coloration would return as a model
for de Chirico’s painting during the 1940s, the young
de Chirico condemned both Delacroix’s “disregard for
[linear] construction” [negligenza del disegno] and his
“oriental influences” as late as 1920.50 Like Nietzsche,
de Chirico sought to exploit Romanticism’s affect
(solemnity, wildly vacillating emotions, pathos, gravitas),
while rejecting the Romantics’ effects (vague mistiness,
lachrymose histrionics, the evocation of indeterminacy
as a condition of surface).
De Chirico avoided vibrant colors so much, in
fact, that Apollinaire gently rebuked him in the French
press, in October of 1913: “I must add that Monsieur
de Chirico’s color is too somber, evoking the hue of
ponds covered in dead leaves, and these enigmas would
gain much from being rendered in happier colors.”51
It is surely no coincidence that with the Evil Genius
canvases, which he completed soon after, de Chirico
moves decidedly away from the drab tones of his
previous works—from The Sphinx and The Procession
up a Mountain (summer–autumn 1909), up through
The Enigma of Arrival (winter 1911–1912). Early in
1914—just months after Apollinaire’s critique—de
Chirico’s The Philosopher’s Conquest emerged as his
most vibrant image to date, with a ground of gingery
orange set off against a red silo and brick tower, and
a sky of “Veronese green” that had already become a
staple of the Metaphysical canvas. The Evil Genius of a
King surpasses even The Philosopher’s Conquest in its
use of bright tones. In fact, almost all of the small objects
in the Evil Genius series are vividly tinted. Apollinaire’s
50. G. de Chirico, “Augusto Renoir” (1920) and “Max Klinger”
(1920), in Meccanismo (see note 9), pp. 150, 183.
51. G. Apollinaire, “Giorgio de Chirico,” L’Intransigeant, October
30, 1913.
Merjian: Untimely objects 199
suggestion may have influenced him. But de Chirico’s
study of Nietzsche also surely informed the increased
vibrancy of The Evil Genius—a vibrancy subtly coded in
its applications and evocations.
In a 1935 essay de Chirico discusses the debt of his
1912–1915 paintings “to Friedrich Nietzsche, whom I
read passionately at the time”:
His Ecce Homo, written in Turin shortly before he
succumbed to madness, greatly helped me to understand
the city’s peculiar beauty. The best season for Turin, the
one that lets its metaphysical charm show through most
clearly, is autumn. This autumn has nothing in common
with the autumn of the Romantics, with cloud-laden skies
and dead leaves and departing swallows. . . . Autumn, as
it revealed Turin to me and as Turin revealed it to me, is
joyful, although certainly not in a gaudy, dazzling way.
It is something huge, at once near and distant; a great
peacefulness, great purity, rather closely related to the joy
felt by a convalescent finally cured of a long and painful
illness.52
Joyful, but not gaudy; charming, but not dazzling. De
Chirico has internalized Apollinaire’s disapproval of
“dead leaves” and suggests that his Metaphysical works
avoided just such an evocation. The cloud-laden skies of
his own earliest paintings evaporate to reveal sun-baked,
limpid lines. In the Evil Genius works, Turin’s autumnal
Stimmung—a season of death, of Nietzsche’s madness
falling like twilight—appears instead bright and jubilant,
at least to the discerning observer: “This [Turin’s] autumn
is made for the ‘happy few,’” de Chirico writes.53
Nietzsche had famously turned Heraclitus—long
deemed “The Crying Philosopher” for his supposedly
nihilistic observations—into a different kind of prophet,
whose solitary pain could be transmuted into the
delectation of individual genius. In their mounting
insanity, Nietzsche’s own late writings conjure up
aspects of the pre-Socratic world that so long held him
in thrall: an ecstasy and exhilaration in the embrace of
tragedy. Numerous writers, from Pierre Klossowski to R.
J. Hollingdale, have characterized Nietzsche’s growing
psychosis as a “pathological euphoria.”54 Already in the
epigraph to “The Case of Wagner”—“Ridendo dice[re]
severum” [“Through what is laughable say what is
52. G. de Chirico, “Some Perspectives on My Art” (1935), in
Ashbery (see note 2), p. 252.
53. Ibid.
54. See P. Klossowski, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, trans. D.
W. Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997 [1969]), and
R. J. Hollingdale, Introduction to Dithyrambs of Dionysus, trans. R. J.
Hollingdale (Redding Ridge, CT: Black Swan Books, 1984).
200 RES 57/58 SPRING/AUTUMN 2010
somber”]55—Nietzsche tersely adduced his disdain for
Romanticism’s moroseness. Of course, in his earliest
works, Nietzsche intoned against the (Goethian and
Winckelmannian) notion of “Greek cheerfulness.” But
after his break with Wagner and Schopenhauerian
thought, he came to increasingly campaign against the
dour portentousness of Romanticism, insisting that art
must be “cheerful,” “gay,” and “frivolous” in order to be
profound. For Nietzsche as for de Chirico after him, the
profundity of myth was inseparable from its (apparent)
opposite: joy and joyfulness, a will to form, an exultance
in life.56 The Evil Genius canvases incorporate this
paradoxical affect in various ways. The “pessimism” and
“shock” that de Chirico claims to have withstood during
these years become mixed, in the Evil Genius pictures,
with their respective opposites: a certain frivolity, on the
one hand, and a blasé, protracted stillness on the other.
Human, All Too Human argues that the ancient
world’s admixture of opposite ideals would escape
the comprehension of most modern subjects—“the
sensibility that this is a possible mixture is vanishing,”
he writes. Only Heraclitus, Nietzsche, and their ilk now
possess the acumen to recognize the “combination
of farce, even obscenity, with religious feeling . . . the
sublime in league with the burlesque, the sentimental
blended with the ludicrous.”57 That such an argument
arises from Nietzsche’s reflections “on viewing certain
ancient sacrificial utensils” reveals again the proximity
of de Chirico’s project to Nietzsche’s—especially the
attempt to resuscitate a vanished sensibility as the tool
of an elite few. The funereal gravitas of the Evil Genius
paintings is bound inseparably to their affective obverse.
If de Chirico sought to avoid the “Greek cheerfulness” of
so much insipid neoclassicism, so too did his paintings
increasingly shun the morbid bathos of Romantic and
55. This is Walter Kaufmann’s translation; see Nietzsche, The
Case of Wagner, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche (note 1), p. 609, fn. 1.
Kaufmann further notes that this is a variation of a dictum by Horace
(whom de Chirico invokes in his earliest manuscripts): “ridentem dicere
verum, quid vetat” (“What forbids us to tell the truth, laughing?”) from
Satires I.24.
56. “I know an Italian spirit,” de Chirico writes, “that is sad, even
in its joy, and more profound in its joy than in its sadness, I know a
classical Italian nature which is languid and adventurous, and in which
I find elements of every country of the world: from the clear, immobile
beauty of ancient Greece to the demons of Africa and of the North.”
G. de Chirico, “Seventeenth-century Mania” (1921) reprinted in
Metaphysical Art, ed. M. Carrà (New York: Praeger, 1971), p.148.
57. F. Nietzsche, “On Viewing Certain Ancient Sacrificial Utensils,”
in Human, All Too Human, trans. M. Faber and S. Lehmann (London:
Penguin, 1994), #112.
Symbolist histrionics. His early Battle of Centaurs is
unabashed in its inclusion of lumps of flesh, pools
of blood. By the time of Metaphysical Composition
with Toys and The Evil Genius of a King, however,
the horrible image of flesh and limbs torn out during
Dionysian mysteries is only implicit. Furthermore, this
dour reference is now visually embedded within its
opposite: toys, playthings.
Painting inhumanism, spring–autumn 1914
Not only early works like The Birth of Tragedy and
Human, All Too Human, but even Nietzsche’s later,
anti-Wagnerian texts propose a return to long-obscured
aspects of Hellenic antiquity as the only way forward—a
trajectory that rounds back on itself with the stubborn
circularity of the Eternal Return: “the digging up of
ancient philosophy, above all the pre-Socratics—the
most deeply buried of all Greek temples! . . . Today
we are getting close to all those fundamental forms of
world interpretation devised by the Greek spirit through
Anaximander, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Empedocles,
Democritus, and Anaxagoras . . . at first, as is only fair,
in concepts and evaluations, as Hellenizing ghosts, as
it were: but one day, let us hope, also in our bodies!”58
It is significant that Nietzsche figures his reclamation of
pre-Socratic philosophy—here and in other writings—as
both the excavation of a buried temple and a corporeal
transmutation. For, particularly after Winckelmann and
the rise of Neoclassicism, the principles of classicism
had come to be visually metaphorized and idealized
in Greek and Roman architecture and sculpture.
Furthermore, this twin ideal perpetuated itself through
the notion of an architecture whose scale both derived
from and epitomized the canons of the human form. By
one early twentieth-century account: “The architecture of
humanism rose in Greece; and of the Greeks it has been
said that they first made man ‘at home in the world.’
Their thought was anthropocentric: so also was their
architecture.”59
This passage, from Geoffrey Scott’s The Architecture
of Humanism: A Study in the History of Taste
(1914)—published the year that de Chirico painted
the Evil Genius series—illustrates a prevalent strain
of contemporary European thought, one that took for
granted a wholesome correspondence between physical
proportion and moral rectitude, between the body and
58. Nietzsche (see note 47), #419 (1885).
59. G. Scott, The Architecture of Humanism: A Study in the History
of Taste (London, 1914), p. 242.

the spaces that the body inhabits.60 Seeking to shatter this
comforting reciprocity, Nietzsche assailed precisely the
metaphor of the human body as the origin and emblem
of reason. Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks sets
its sights against “our era, infected with the biographical
plague . . . indulging in a highly anthropomorphic
metaphor.”61 The Gay Science intones against the drive
to “naturalize” humanity, against “order, arrangement,
form, beauty, wisdom, and whatever other names there
are for our aesthetic anthropomorphisms.”62 Whereas
humanist logic argues that beauty inheres naturally to
classical architecture, such that architecture stands as
the canon of aesthetics, Nietzsche deflates this reasoning
with withering corporeal (and misogynist) metaphors:
“What does the beauty of a building mean to us now?
The same as the beautiful face of a mindless woman:
something mask-like.”63
De Chirico’s writings from 1911–1919 assail
anthropomorphism as one of the most egregious
philosophical and aesthetic commonplaces—one that
Metaphysical painting endeavors to undermine. “Thus
religion and philosophy are like two symbols of what
we call the universe in general,” de Chirico writes in
his Parisian manuscripts. “We believe in religion, we
believe in philosophy, but we don’t believe in these
two eternal nemeses having a human crust [croûte
humaine].”64 Again and again, de Chirico seeks to pry
apart painting from its parasitical codependence upon
the commonplaces of humanism and its corporeal
counterparts. In fact, nearly all of de Chirico’s earliest
writings assimilate Nietzsche’s call to “overcome man”
as one of their main leitmotifs. De Chirico writes in these
same Paris notebooks that after reading Nietzsche and
traveling to Rome, “My imagination no longer bore any
subjects.”65 He insists upon painting’s new vocation as
the stripping “of everything routine and accepted, and
of all subject matter . . . to suppress completely man
as guide, or as a means to express symbol, sensation
or thought.”66 This stripping of “subjects”—whether
60. “Architecture is a humanized pattern of the world, a scheme of
forms on which our life reflects its clarified image” ibid, p. 240.
61. F. Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, trans.
and ed. Marianne Cowan. Washington, D.C.: Regnery Gateway, 1991
[1962], p. 46; emphasis mine.
62. F. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kauffmann (New
York: Vintage, 1974), book 3, #109, p. 168.
63. Ibid.
64. G. de Chirico, “Eluard MSS,” in Ashbery (see note 2), p. 178.
65. Ibid., section 10, translation slightly altered.
66. G. de Chirico, “Meditations of a Painter/What the Painting of
the Future Might Be,” Paulhan MSS, reprinted in ibid., p. 205.
Merjian: Untimely objects 201
in the anecdotal sense of subject matter, or the sense
of human individuality—occurs increasingly as de
Chirico’s painting progresses away from Böcklin’s
example. The deliberate eviction of the human from
his scenes after 1912—as the Metaphysical venture
gathered momentum—seems to have sprung in equal
parts from a close study of Nietzsche, and, as we shall
see, some particular strains in the history of painting and
archaeology.
Antediluvian/posthuman: Edouard Riou and Hans
Holbein the Younger’s Portrait of Nicolas Kratzer
In his essay “On Metaphysical Art,” de Chirico
recalls being impressed as a child by Louis Figuier’s
book, La terre avant le déluge, illustrated by Edouard
Riou (fig. 8). Figuier’s books, from La terre avant le
déluge to Merveilles de la Science, documented a range
of landscapes, objects, and technologies, illustrated
in ways similar to Jules Verne’s popular narratives
(particular favorites of de Chirico’s). This affinity is
not coincidental given the fact that Riou (a student of
Daubigny and Gustave Doré) also provided the plates
for Verne’s Cinq Semaines en Ballon (Hetzel, 1863)
and Voyage de la terre à la lune (Hetzel, 1867), among
other books. Reedited several times throughout the
end of the nineteenth century, La terre avant le déluge
features various plates of “vues idéales”: brachiopods
hauling themselves ashore out of the primal slough;
amphibian ancestors poking their noses out of swamps
draped with giant ferns; skies split with lightning, roiled
with billowing storm clouds. The plate that de Chirico
remembers in particular “represented a landscape of
the Tertiary period. Man was not yet present. I have
often meditated upon the strange phenomenon of this
absence of human beings in its metaphysical aspect.”67
As de Chirico’s comments indicate, Riou’s pictures make centuries-old art?
possible a figurative world without human figures. De
Chirico’s proposed return “back along the railway line
of century’s old art” thus revisits not only Trecento and
Quattrocento “primitives,” not only the caves of the pre-
verbal troglodyte, but even a geological primitivism—a
world prior to human inhabitation.68
In this same essay, de Chirico links Figuier and Riou’s
antediluvian histories to landscapes of a different sort.
“There are paintings by Böcklin, Claude Lorrain, and
67. G. de Chirico, “On Metaphysical Art,” see Carrà, ed. (note 56),
p. 89.
68. G. de Chirico, “We Metaphysicians,” in Meccanismo (see note
9), p. 67.
202 RES 57/58 SPRING/AUTUMN 2010
Figure 8. Edouard Riou, illustration for Louis Figuier’s La terre avant le deluge (Devonian period).
(Paris: L. Hachette, 1863). Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, N.Y.
Poussin which are inhabited by human figures but
which, in spite of this, bear a close relationship with the
landscape of the Tertiary. Absence of humanity in man.”69
Indeed, the formal and compositional fundaments of
Riou’s landscapes bear striking similarities to Poussin and
Claude’s works, for instance, in the framing of a central
scene by coulisse-like trees, or a prominent foreground
that gives way to a meandering spatial recession
reminiscent of Baroque landscapes—a fact not altogether
surprising given Riou’s formation in French Salons. In
Poussin’s Landscape with Pyramus and Thisbe (1651)
or Winter: The Flood (1660–1664; Louvre), even the
lightning that tears silver seams in the sky resonates later
in Riou’s stormy rendering of Permian prehistory (fig.
9). Though Poussin’s foregrounds proffer human forms
instead of primeval ones, his originary flood conveys its
Biblical solemnity through an austere economy of space.
The human body in these landscapes is wholly subjected
to—or prostrated before, dwarfed by—the physical
environment. The sight of Poussin and Claude’s canvases,
which de Chirico studied closely at the Louvre during his
years in Paris, must have resonated with his childhood
recollections of La terre avant le déluge.
69. Ibid.
Another picture from the Louvre seems to have
informed the making of The Evil Genius of a King
even more pointedly: Hans Holbein the Younger’s
Portrait of Nicolas Kratzer (1528) (fig. 10). De Chirico
briefly mentions this work in his essay “Reflections on
Ancient Painting” in which he expounds at length on
the architectonic nature of Poussin and Claude’s works.
The essay was published in Il Convegno, in 1921, by
the time de Chirico was back in Italy, suggesting that
he had seen and studied Holbein’s painting during his
1911–1915 residency in Paris. Holbein’s portrait of
Kratzer, de Chirico writes, has “pushed [sentiment] to
its limits with architectural detail . . . in which the figure
surrounded by the lines of the walls and the shelf, by
the geometric precision of the T-squares, compasses,
rulers and sextants, assumes the fantastic aspect of an
apparition.”70 This compositional formula—of an invasive
foreground set off against a neatly framed recession
into the distance—characterizes many of de Chirico’s
experiments in self-portraiture from the early 1920s. We
find a partial anticipation of this spatial construction not
only in The Child’s Brain (winter–summer 1914) , but
also in the contemporary Evil Genius. In the latter image
70. G. de Chirico, “Riflessioni sulla pittura antica” (1921), reprinted
in ibid., pp. 196–200.

Figure 9. Nicolas Poussin, Winter, The Flood, 1660-1664. Oil on canvas, 118 x 160 cm. Louvre, Paris.
© Erich Lessing/Art Resource, N.Y.
and its related works, however, even the human aspect
of spectrality—whether that of Nicolas Kratzer, Dürer, or
the looming, ashen body of the artist’s deceased father—
is conspicuously absent. The apparition of Kratzer’s body
has been eclipsed by the tools of his trade. The sole
subject of these paintings is a group of inanimate objects.
Look at Evil Genius’s long, hexagonal object,
just above the green ball. Its shape clearly echoes
the ten-sided sundial that Kratzer grips with his left
hand. (A similar sundial also appears in Holbein’s The
Ambassadors [1533; fig. 11]). The nearest surface of The
Evil Genius’s tapered object is similarly marked in the
center. Its sides are likewise striated with various ciphers,
albeit more cryptic than Kratzer’s numbered integers.
If one looks at this object along with its two small,
neighboring balls and antennaed head, The Evil Genius’s
object can also be seen as a caterpillar-like creature.
This droll (and perhaps awkwardly erotic) transformation
seems almost to defuse the solemnity of the ciphers
that cover the surface of these objects. They may be
simultaneously read, in other words, as nonsensical
Merjian: Untimely objects 203
gizmos as much as scientific contraptions. The barbed
object at the canvas’s bottom left similarly vacillates
between a child’s spinning top and something more
serious—even sinister—lurking in a crook of shadow, yet
clearly illuminated. This object might be partly derived
from an Egyptian sun clock, perhaps seen in illustrated
histories of Pharaonic religion, again relating to de
Chirico’s interest in Near Eastern astrology. The General’s
Illness and The Sailors’ Barracks also reveal objects that
are indistinguishable as either toys or tools: a pointed,
egg-like thing; a miniature checkerboard; a piece of
paper folded into a diminutive tent; balls and wands;
a scroll or stone volute; and other items that elude
definition or description.
That de Chirico’s father, Evaristo, studied engineering
in Turin adds a further layer of meaning to the Evil
Genius series. The objects in The Evil Genius of a King,
like those in de Chirico’s “Ferrarese interiors” that
follow shortly after, conjure the tools that lay around his
father’s workshops in Athens and Volos—just as they are
sprawled across Nicolas Kratzer’s workspace in Holbein’s
204 RES 57/58 SPRING/AUTUMN 2010
Figure 10. Hans Holbein the Younger, Nicolas Kratzer,
astronomer to King Henry VIII, 1528. Oil on wood panel, 83
x 67 cm. Louvre, Paris, France. © Erich Lessing / Art Resource,
N.Y.
picture. In the Evil Genius pictures, instruments are
bound up not with exacting measurements, but rather an
aura of magic and marvel. If Nicholas Kratzer suddenly
left his post on Holbein’s canvas, we would be left with
something akin to what we find in The Evil Genius of a
King: mere things, solitary and isolated. In the absence
of their users, these tools seem to utter a new language,
more like poetry than the workaday practicality to which
human presence submits them.
The Gnomon, gnosis, and metaphysical time
The Evil Genius of a King’s central red slab (which
stands slightly inclined to the left, attached laterally
to some kind of frame) prefigures a thin, tilted plane
that reappears in the four subsequent canvases. In The
General’s Illness, The Sailors’ Barracks, Metaphysical
Composition with Toys, and Metaphysical Composition,
this central plane is not clunky and corpulent, as in
The Evil Genius, but rather sleek. The partition may be
identified as a gnomon—a primitive form of sundial,
introduced to the Egyptians by Chaldean and Babylonian
astronomers and brought from Babylonia to Greece by
the pre-Socratic philosopher Anaximander (fig. 12). The
gnomon was not, despite its exotic origins, foreign to
the Renaissance interest in geometry and perspective.
The allegorical plates accompanying Girard Desargues’s
prominent treatise, Manière Universelle de Monsieur
Desargues pour pratiquer la perspective, for example,
depict both perspective and “La Gnomonique” in kind
(fig. 13 a, b). The gnomon particularly evinces the
rapport between the practice of linear perspective and
the phenomena of geometry and shadows—aspects
prominent in de Chirico’s entire oeuvre.
Of course, these gnoma are not the first time-
telling devices to appear in de Chirico’s cityscapes.
They represent ancient, primitive counterparts to the
clocks that appear in The Enigma of the Hour, Gare
Montparnasse, and The Philosopher’s Conquest.
It is tempting to read the sundial plane as a literal
partition of eras or epochs.71 They form part of de
Chirico’s invocation of ancient mathematical, nautical,
astronomical, and horological practices, which—in both
ancient Mesopotamia and Hellenic antiquity, and even
Renaissance Europe—were interrelated enterprises. But
as I have been arguing, the Evil Genius paintings seek to
confuse time more generally, rather than separate epochs
or eons into discrete pictorial metaphors. In de Chirico’s
images, surface never betrays time, but rather purposely
dissembles or effaces its trace. A Metaphysical space
as painted by de Chirico never, I think, encloses pure
time, “in itself.” Even if the gnoma in The Evil Genius
of a King, The Sailors’ Barracks, and Metaphysical
Composition with Toys separate their contents into
two distinct sides, for instance, none of these objects
transparently denotes a specific age or history.
Interestingly, the gnoma in the remaining four
canvases of the Evil Genius series—The General’s Illness,
The Sailors’ Barracks, Metaphysical Composition with
Toys, and Metaphysical Composition—cannot carry out
their pruported function as sundials, for the platform
on which they have been erected is pitch black. We
cannot make out where these gnoma cast their shadows.
But the word gnomon itself contains a multiplicity
of meaning and uses, and the object’s presence here
71. Paolo Baldacci suggests, for example, that the division of space
in the Evil Genius paintings forms a “geometric metaphor of the two
principle ‘zones’ of time, the past and the future, lying on either side of
the ‘eternal present’” Baldacci (see note 4), p. 240.
 Merjian: Untimely objects 205

Figure 11. Hans Holbein the Younger, The Ambassadors. Oil on oak panel, 207 x 209 cm.
National Gallery, London/Art Resource, N.Y.

may perform a role less practical, than semantic and itself, as well as its philological versatility. Like the
literary. The etymology of gnomon attests to its status etymological condensation of various meanings into this
as both a scientific and mathematical instrument and one word, de Chirico’s painted gnoma strive to conflate
a metaphor for knowledge, wisdom, and revelation. scientific knowledge with celestial intuition, to confound
The Latin and Greek root for gnomon denotes (at least) geometric and temporal exactitude with a sense of
three meanings at once: “the index of a sundial,” “a intuitive, aphoristic insight. In short, the Evil Genius
carpenter’s square,” and “one that knows.”72 The Indo- series invokes instruments of science and mathematics
European root “gno-” signifies “knowledge” in its various
manifestations and applications. The Greek gnẃmnw
literally means “one who discerns”; in some contexts,
the word means, more broadly, “indicator,” or something
that points. For example, gnomon can refer either to the
rod, which casts a shadow and thus measures time, or
to a cipher or geometric figure (such as a parallelogram)
used by mathematicians.73 Accordingly, Heraclitus’s
fragments are widely described as “gnomic.” The extent
to which de Chirico paid attention to the semantics of
“gnomonics” is uncertain. But he seems to have been
well attuned to the multilayered meanings of the object

72. “Gnomon,” Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the

English Language (Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster, 2002); see also
Oxford English Dictionary, 3d ed.
73. P. Zellini, Gnomon: Una indagine sul numero (Milan: Adelphi,
1999); The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Figure 12. A modern gnomon. Photo by Valerie McGuire;
ed. (Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000). reproduced with permission.
206 RES 57/58 SPRING/AUTUMN 2010

as touchstones for more rarefied notions. The tools
of Western astronomy become vectors of vaguely
“astrological” allusions.
Conclusion: Silence, signs, and untimely echoes
The Evil Genius paintings condense and layer various
references in singular objects, bounded by crisp outlines.
Different spatial and temporal registers continually
loop back upon themselves, overlapping, diverging,
and rejoining even in the most local (and immobile)
of physical details—a toy that might be a sophisticated
engineering instrument, a piece of candy that might
actually be a fossilized relic. We cannot read The Evil
Genius of a King’s objects unequivocally as artefactual
or newfangled, for they confuse these dimensions
beyond discernment—even if that confusion is not
flaunted as a formal, plastic element on the objects’
surfaces. To wit, in Carl Einstein’s book, Die Kunst des
20 Jarhunderts, published in 1931, The Evil Genius of
a King appears with the title Ruinen (Ruins). In Soby’s
original monograph on the artist, however, it was listed—
also mistakenly—as Toys of a Prince. The painting has
thus kept playing out the ambivalences between fossil
and futuristic commodity, between talisman and toy. To
tease apart the layers of autobiographical, philosophical,
topographical, and semiotic references in these
images—to treat them separately—is to disavow their

Figure 13 a) Frontispiece, Allegory of Girard Desargue’s Gnomonique, La Manière universelle de M. Desargues Lyonnois
pour poser l’essieu et placer les heures et autres choses aux cadrans du soleil, par A. Bosse, graveur en taille douce, en
l’Isle du Palais, devant la Megisserie, à la Roze Rouge, A Paris, De l’imprimerie de Pierre Des Hayes, rüe de la Harpe, à
la Roze Rouge, 1643, in-8°, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, Est. Ed 30, rés. Photo: Rare Books Division. Department of
Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library; b) Frontispiece to Manière Universelle de Monsieur
Desargues pour pratique la perspective (Paris, 1648). The British Library, London.

stubborn reconciliation of opposites. For each valence
doubles back onto its obverse: commodity fetishism and
the fetishism of the “prehistoric Hellenes”; the child’s
plaything and the engineer’s tool; droll punning and
dead-serious morbidity; a history of art and a navel-
gazing narrative of the self; duration and immediacy.
Into one framed point of view they distill various subject
positions: that of prehistoric man and the übermenschian
philosopher; the older, mad Nietzsche and the
young de Chirico; the ancient augur and the modern
Metaphysician.
This last conflation is perhaps the most dramatic.
More than any of de Chirico’s previous still lifes, the
Evil Genius paintings liken the picture plane to an
oracular space in its own right: a sheltered slab or shrine
upon which is strewn a constellation of objects whose
meaning seems to lie in the way the objects are staged
and framed, as much as what those objects are. If de
Chirico’s early The Enigma of the Oracle (fig. 4) captures
the moment of “waiting for the mysterious revealing
oracle”—a moment embedded into a larger pictorial
narrative—The Evil Genius of a King figures the very
canvas as a kind of sacred configuration. Whereas the
former painting’s sense of mystery hinges upon a veiling
curtain and an attendant officiant, The Evil Genius of a
King places the viewer himself before an exposed altar.
You are invited to read these objects as if you were
the priest of Apollo, the Etruscan hepatomancer, the
chlamys-draped soothsayer. You are invoked as the live
subject of the scene, in real time. Offered up in plain
day, in the most public of places, the Metaphysical still
life seems here to propose that the everyday objects
of the world are the stuff of collective poetry—like
architecture, a domain of workaday lyricism. This is
the general condition that de Chirico intends when he
aspires “to live in the world as if in an immense museum
of strangeness.”74
Not every viewer will grasp or heed such an
invocation, however. Only he who recognizes the
philosophical shibboleth that these images whisper—like
de Chirico in his friend’s Gartz’s ear—to the elect.
Despite the transparency of these images’ displays,
they do not propose any collective use. If the objects
in de Chirico’s still lifes appear to have broken
through museum walls into the public square, they are
nonetheless painted and framed with deliberation. I think
de Chirico chose to paint increasingly esoteric imagery
in the public space of the piazza as a foil to what he
74. G. de Chirico, “Eluard MSS,” X, in Ashbery (see note 2), p. 186.
Merjian: Untimely objects 207
calls in his Parisian notebooks “the triviality of crowds.”75
The peculiarity of De Chirico’s painting obtains, in
great part, from the tension created between their
exceedingly—indeed, uniquely—public presentation
and their increasingly esoteric appearance, between
their solicitous exposure and stubborn silence. George
Steiner writes: “This election of silence by the most
articulate is, I believe, historically recent. [But] the
strategic myth of the philosopher who chooses silence
because of the ineffable purity of his vision or because of
the unreadiness of his audience has antique precedent. It
contributes to the motif of Empodocles on Aetna and to
the gnomic aloofness of Heraclitus.”76 Like Heraclitus’s
aphorisms (some of them only a few words long), The
Evil Genius of a King points with gnomic economy. But
what it indicates is uncertain.
Like Nietzsche and Heraclitus, de Chirico leaves
behind terse gems of lyrical wisdom, to be passed over
by those in a hurry, or else seized upon by like-minded
initiates. Of course, Nietzsche’s writings and Heraclitus’s
gnomic aphorisms are not the only sources of the Evil
Genius configurations. But when de Chirico claims
consciously to evoke at once the somber wisdom of
both ancient Hellenic priests and earth’s first primitives;
when he strips plastic dimensions to their most basic
configuration in order to condense and conceal (to the
general public) a multitude of esoteric allusions, it is
undoubtedly to Nietzsche and Heraclitus’s precedents
that he turns. For, their aphoristic examples epitomized
the tension that could be established between the plain
presentation of language, and a recondite, abstruse
significance, one that alienates the mass of individuals
while attracting a select few. All of de Chirico’s early
Metaphysical paintings evince that paradox. But the
Evil Genius canvases especially rehearse the tension
between a visual offering and an intellectual absconding,
between a physical availability—even solicitation—and
a semantic, hermeneutic withholding.
In an ironic twist of art historical fate, The Evil Genius
of a King was reproduced for the first time in one of the
most radically antielitist, anti-Art forums in the history
of aesthetics: the second issue of the journal Dada,
published in Zurich in 1917 (fig. 14). The canvas sits
opposite Tristan Tzara’s “Poèmes Nègres” and is the
only figurative painting included (the other paintings
by Jean Arp, Wassily Kandinsky, Robert Delaunay, etc.,
75. Ibid., p. 202.
76. G. Steiner, “Silence and the Poet,” Language and Silence:
Essays on Language, Literature, and the Inhuman (New York:
Athaneum, 1967), pp. 46–47.
208 RES 57/58 SPRING/AUTUMN 2010
Figure 14. Dada 2, December 1917, Zurich, frontispiece; Tristan Tzara’s “Poèmes Nègres” facing de
Chirico’s The Evil Genius of a King.
are all decidedly abstract works). Something about this
painting, then, spoke to the Dadaists about the language
of abstraction—or at least the potential abstraction of
figurative language, whittled back down to a primal
utterance. The Evil Genius of a King approaches—
perhaps even caricatures—abstract painting, but never
fully renounces figurative contours. I think this is a
purposeful strategy on de Chirico’s part. He must have
relished the notion that the novelty of The Evil Genius
of a King be rooted in figurative forms, that it evince
the privileged nobility of silence without nihilistically
renouncing its purchase on physical sense. Rather than a
flight out of the discursive, these images would perform
an involution of ordinary representation, back to its
obscured core—a return to what Nietzsche calls the
“Sporadic-proverbial preliminary stage of philosophy”:
Homeric language . . . contains an indefinite number of
archaic formulations on which the genuine ancestry of the
language depends—formulations that would no longer
be grammatically understood by later singers and for this
reason would be imagined, by false analogies, to be new
expressions.77
77. F. Nietzsche, “Sporadic-Proverbial Preliminary Stage of
Philosophy,” The Pre-Platonic Philosophers, trans. and ed. G. Witlock
(Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001), p. 14;
emphasis mine.
In its hushed dumbness, The Evil Genius of a
King tempts us to fall into a similar misreading—to
mistake an untimely echo, an antiquarian atavism, for
something new. De Chirico would likely have scoffed
at the “false analogies” drawn from his paintings by his
contemporaries—the analogy, for example, that landed
The Evil Genius of a King alongside a series of abstract
works in a journal dedicated to eradicating art. For
the painting’s strangeness derives from archaisms and
anachronisms that his contemporaries duly mistook
for novelties. The image’s superlative philosophical
sophistication passes for naïve nonsense—even a
kind of primal grunt. The entire Evil Genius series
hinges on this rarefied combination of clarity and
confusion, ingenuousness and concealment, the
apodictic and the unsure. The paintings’ timed silences
ensure misrecognition by us citizens and, conversely,
identification by initiates into their Nietzschean
mysteries. Their true apprehension is meant, ultimately,
only for a happy few.