(Volos, Greece 1888–1978 Rome)
Raisins (Uva con drappeggio), 1926, signed; signed and titled on the reverse, oil on canvas, 46 x 38 cm, framed

Provenance:
Galerie André-François Petit, Paris
Collection of Luigi Cartuccio (1911–1981), Turin
European Private Collection

Literature:
C. B. Sakraischick (ed.), Catalogo Generale Giorgio De Chirico: Opere dal 1908 al 1930, Electa Editrice, Milan, 1971, vol. II, no. 146 with ill.
M. F. dell’Arco, P. Baldacci (ed.), Giorgio de Chirico, Parigi 1924–1929: dalla nascita del Surrealismo al crollo di Wall Street, Edizioni Philippe Daverio, Milan 1982, p. 494, no. 54 with ill.
Paolo Baldacci, Gerd Roos (ed.), Studi Online-Biannual Magazine, Archivio dell’Arte Metafisica, Year nn. 9–10, 1 January – 31 December 2018, p. 47, no. 12 with ill.

Giorgio de Chirico’s still life Raisins (Uva con drappeggio) dates from 1926, i.e. from that particularly fertile period of de Chirico’s production in the second half of the 1920s. Those years were characterised by a phase of research in which he no longer looked at antiquity as individual archaeological elements to be included in a metaphysical composition, but as a revival of classical painting in a broader sense – from the choice of subject to style and technique – and which distinguishes it from earlier and later phases.
The works of that period – including the present painting – display a number of references to accounts of classical painters found in Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis historia. As critic Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco pointed out in Giorgio de Chirico. Parigi 1924–1929 (Milan 1982), the artist became aware during those years of the competition (reported by Pliny) that took place between the painters Zeuxis and Parrhasius to create the best trompe-l’oeil. The former had painted a bunch of grapes so realistic that it fooled the birds, who tried to peck at it; the latter had depicted a curtain so realistic that it made his challenger believe it was covering the work, rather than being the work itself. De Chirico follows in their wake, trying to put into practice the lesson learned from both artists.
He depicts here two bunches of grapes and a strip of fabric (probably a napkin or tea towel), which seems to hang from something outside the image frame. The setting is very minimal: it is the interior of a bare space immersed in a timeless atmosphere; one can see the corner of a surface, on which the grapes lie, resting against a wall.
The painting, finally, is almost monochrome: the grapes – rendered in tones that hint at green – barely emerge from the background, while the cloth is a non-optical white, whose shadows recall the predominant colour in the rest of the painting