Metaphysical Painting is style of painting that flourished mainly between 1911 and 1920 in the works of the Italian artists Giorgio De Chirico, Carlo Carrà, and Giorgio Morandi. These painters' representational but bizarre and incongruous imagery produces strange, disquieting effects on the viewer. Juxtaposing disparate objects set intodeep perspectives, these works strongly influenced the Surrealists in the 1920s.

Metaphysical painting originated with De Chirico. In Munich, where he spent his youthful formative years, De Chirico was attracted to 19th-century German Romantic painting and to the works of the philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche. The latter's search for hidden meanings beyond surface appearances and his descriptions of empty squares surrounded by arcaded buildings in the Italian city of Turin made a particularly deep impression on De Chirico; his 1915 painting "Turin Melancholy" (Carlo Frua de Angeli Collection, Milan), for example, illustrates just such a square, with unnaturally sharp contrasts of light and shadow that lend an aura of poignant but vaguely threatening mystery to the scene. The arcades in this painting, as well as the deep perspectival space and dark-toned sky, are pictorial devices found in many of De Chirico's strange, evocative works. The enigmatic titles of his paintings contribute to their dreamlike effect: "The Nostalgia of the Infinite" (Museum of Modern Art, New York City), "The Philosopher's Conquest" (Art Institute of Chicago), and "The Soothsayer's Recompense" (Philadelphia Museum of Art).

Many of De Chirico's paintings depict mannequins, as do the works done around 1917-21 by the former Futurist Carlo Carrà, who came under his influence. The two artists met in 1917, in Ferrara where, together with De Chirico's younger brother--a poet, musician, and painter known as Alberto Savinio--they formulated the rather obscure principles of the scuola metafisica (Metaphysical school). De Chirico, however, had already arrived at his Metaphysical style several years before the movement came into existence and, by 1911, had shown paintings of this nature in Paris. Other adherents to Metaphysical painting were Filippo de Pisis and Mario Sironi. The Metaphysical school proved short-lived, however, and came to an end around 1920 because of dissension between De Chirico and Carrà over who had founded the group. De Chirico's work done after 1919 lost much of its mysterious power and eventually sank into a degraded and eccentric classicism.

In 1906 de Chirico entered the Munich Academy of Fine Arts. His early style was influenced by the painting of Arnold Böcklin, which juxtaposed the fantastic with the commonplace. In Florence he painted such works as "The Enigma of an Autumn Afternoon" (1910; private collection, Italy), in which long, sinister shadows contrast starkly with bright, clear light rendered in dull, flat colours.
Moving to Paris in 1911, he gained the admiration of Picasso and Guillaume Apollinaire with his ambiguously ominous scenes of deserted piazzas with classical statues, dark arcades, and small, isolated figures overpowered by their own shadows and by severe, oppressive architecture.
Such works are exemplified by "The Soothsayer's Recompense" (1913; Philadelphia Museum of Art) and "The Mystery and Melancholy of a Street" (1914; Stanley R. Resor Collection, New Canaan, Conn.).

At Ferrara, in 1915, de Chirico practiced a modification of his earlier manner, marked by a generally denser and more arbitrary arrangement of forms. In paintings of this period, such as the "Grand Metaphysical Interior" of 1917 and "The Seer" of 1915 (both in the J.T. Soby Collection, New Canaan, Conn.), the colours are brighter; dressmakers' mannequins, biscuits, and paintings on easels were among the images added to his repertory. By the mid-1920s he adopted a more realistic and romantic style that was less widely admired.

Carrà studied painting briefly at the Brera academy in Milan but was largely self-taught. In 1909 he met the poet Filippo Marinetti and the artist Umberto Boccioni, who converted him to Futurism, an aesthetic movement that exalted patriotism, modern technology, dynamism, and speed. Carrà's "The Funeral of the Anarchist Galli" (1911; Museum of Modern Art, New York City) shows the dynamic action, power, and violence characteristic of the Futurists.

With World War I the classic phase of Futurism ended and, although Carrà's collage "Patriotic Celebration, Free Word Painting" (1914; Gianni Mattioli Foundation, Milan) is based on Futurist concepts, he soon began to paint in a style of greatly simplified realism. "Lot's Daughters" (1915), for example, is an attempt to recapture the solidity of form and the stillness of the 13th-century painter Giotto. This new style was crystallized in 1917 when he met the painter Giorgio De Chirico, who taught him to convey in his paintings the unsettling sense of life in everyday objects. Carrà and De Chirico called their style pittura metafisica ("Metaphysical painting"), and their works of this period have a superficial similarity.

In 1918 Carrà broke with De Chirico and Metaphysical painting. Throughout the 1920s and '30s, he painted melancholy figurative works based on the monumental realism of the 15th-century Italian painter Masaccio. Through such moody but well-constructed works as "Morning by the Sea" (1928; Gianni Mattioli Foundation, Milan) and through his many years of teaching at the Milan Academy, he greatly influenced the course of Italian art between World Wars I and II.

Morandi cannot be closely identified with a particular school of painting. He first exhibited in 1914 in Bologna with the Futurist painters, and in 1918-19 he was associated with Giorgio De Chirico and Carlo Carrà, leaders of the Metaphysical school. He developed a contemplative approach to art that, directed by a highly refined formal sensibility, gave his quiet landscapes and disarmingly simple still-life compositions a characteristic delicacy of tone and extraordinary subtlety of design. His gentle, lyrical colours are subdued and limited to clay-toned whites, drab greens, and umber browns, with occasional highlights of terra-cotta. Morandi's paintings of bottles and jars convey a mood of contemplative repose reminiscent of the work of Piero della Francesca, an Italian Renaissance artist he admired.

As instructor of etching at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna from 1930 to 1956, Morandi had a profound influence on succeeding Italian graphic artists.