Giorgio de Chirico’s Gladiators: An Ambiguous Satire of Modernity
“Gladiators! This word contains an enigma.” So wrote Giorgio de Chirico, the Greek-born, German-educated, and Paris-based Italian artist, around the time he painted his Gladiators canvases, presented at Independent 20th Century by Nahmad Contemporary. And enigmatic these fighters are indeed: looking at them today it is difficult to imagine they could be interpreted, as they were in the 1930s, to be paeans to Italy’s Fascist regime, with its cult of an athletic, virile antiquity.
The Gladiators’ flabby musculature and inexpressive, or literally blank, faces resist association with militant action; rather they elicit a sense of apathy, impotence, and futility. Compressed into modern, domestic interiors, they misappropriate the expansive and idealized athletic male body of classical statues such as the Borghese Gladiator or romanticized academic depictions of the theme. De Chirico’s use of quick, swirling brushstrokes evokes the play of light on the surface of sculpted muscles as reproduced in photographs and plaster casts, emphasizing the inauthenticity of these figures’ classical pedigree.
Gladiators/The Futile Victory (1927) closely resembles the dead figure named Astivus in the mosaic.
Quo Vadis? (1913) and Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1925) that, similarly to the mosaic, have an unrealistic, cartoonish quality. These movies, together with their publicity posters, anchor the Gladiators series firmly to interwar popular entertainment and its Art Deco aesthetics.
Through clumsy bodies and dispassionate expressions, de Chirico presents the ancient gladiators as inept characters that are at odds with the contemporary “aestheticization of politics.” Ultimately, with his serious yet bizarre Gladiators, the ever polemical de Chirico seems to have depicted a veiled satire of modernity that most certainly included Mussolini’s politicized use of ancient Rome. But what, we may ask, was his immediate target?
De Chirico painted the series in Paris between 1927 and 1930. He had returned to the city after spending a period of ten years in Italy, where, despite his call for a “return to the craft” of Old Master painting, his work had encountered critical and commercial hostility. In Paris, by contrast, his earlier Metaphysical paintings (1911-19) and more traditional recent works were enjoying great success thanks to the interest of the newly formed Surrealist group and of two important avant-garde dealers, Paul Guillaume and Léonce Rosenberg. Guillaume championed de Chirico’s early work and supported the young Surrealists, who had already begun to challenge his turn to tradition.
Rosenberg attempted to synthesize the avant-garde and classicizing tendencies of modern art through his gallery, L’Effort Moderne.
The success of de Chirico’s solo show at Rosenberg’s gallery in May 1925 prompted his move back to Paris. Encouraged by the dealer, he started a period known as his “second Metaphysics”, in which
