Giorgio de Chirico's 'Jewish Hour': Metaphysical Painting in Ferrara, 1915–18.

It has long formed an art-historical truism that Ferrara’s notable Jewish history reinvigorated Giorgio de Chirico’s Metaphysical painting after 1915, when he settled there to serve during World War I. ‘It was not simply the workshops, the streets, or the people which drew [him] to it’, wrote the art historian Paolo Fossati on de Chirico’s time in the city’s former ghetto, ‘but a certain culture and a precise intelligence’. How, precisely, did such an intelligence manifest itself? What formed the extant dimensions of such a culture? What, in short, is actually ‘Jewish’ about de Chirico’s painted Jewish Angel, or his professed pictorial ‘evangelism’, or the increasingly involuted spaces of his painting after 1915? To reduce the question of Jewishness solely to its symbolic content is to miss a vital facet of Metaphysical imagery; for de Chirico’s avowed ‘Israelite system’ distills ostensibly Jewish moral and cultural tendencies not simply to an arcane iconography, but – more ambitiously and ineffably – to an ‘ascetic’ economy of painted form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]