Research Notes:
March 2020

De Chirico created The Mysterious Swan in 1934, about 20 years after celebrated early works such as The Rose Tower (BF597, 1913), on display on the same wall. In 1935, he exhibited The Mysterious Swan and related works at the Seconda Quadriennale in Rome; he sold the painting and Two Mysterious Cabins (BF266, 1934) directly to Dr. Albert Barnes in 1937, while working in the US.¹

How should we interpret a picture whose subject seems so straightforward yet is rendered in a style so strange? On one level, writings by de Chirico reveal that The Mysterious Swan was a pastiche of childhood memories of his seaside hometown of Volos, Greece.² The artist’s father, an engineer for Thessaly Railways, had supervised the building of a rail link between the beach and city center. Part of the project involved erecting long wood bridges over the water that supported private changing cabins, each with an interior ladder leading into the water. A squadron of white swans occupied the adjacent Anavros river, mythologized in The Argonauts.

We know, as well, that the artist’s impressions of the beach development shaped his depiction thereof; the changing cabins, for example, had fascinated him as sites of transition between civilized dress and primal nudity, and as portals into the oceanic abyss:

Complementing this sense of deep space and time, the polychromatic swan—“so metaphysical in its appearance”—brings to mind the illustration of a plesiosaur adorning the cover of Louis Figuier’s La terre avant le déluge (1888), a book de Chirico cherished as a boy.⁴ The zigzagging water, on the other hand, was prompted by a revelation in adulthood:

The painting’s angular water, antediluvian creature, mythic river, and very title suggest that de Chirico didn’t intend for the work to be understood just literally or personally. In fact, he stated in the Seconda Quadriennale exhibition catalogue: “I continue again in my research of inventions and fantasy. To this genre belong the paintings Mysterious Baths, The Swimmers, and The Mysterious Swan.”⁷

The painter had announced the nature of this research in a 1920 self-portrait, in which he holds a sign reading “Et quid amabo nisi quod rerum metaphysica est?” (What I will love if not the metaphysics of things?) Throughout his career, de Chirico sought new ways of depicting metaphysical principles: that is, the second aspect of things, not visible to our eyes. To this end, he voraciously adapted images and ideas from ancient Greek mythologists and philosophers, medieval and Renaissance artists such as Giotto, Cennino Cennini, Raphael, and Michelangelo, as well as Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Arnold Böcklin, Max Klinger, Arthur Schopenhauer, Otto Weininger, Guillaume Apollinaire, and, above all, the great existentialist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, with whom he personally identified.⁸

Of these sources, Greek mythology signals another level of interpretation for The Mysterious Swan. De Chirico's first iteration of the mysterious baths was a series of lithographs for the volume Mythologie (Paris, 1934, with poetry by Jean Cocteau), in which gods, giants, and galloping centaurs join the human bathers.⁹ In The Mysterious Swan properly, the bird in question probably heralds two related myths: the Argonauts, which commenced when the hero Jason lost a sandal in the turbulent waters of the Anavros, and Leda and the Swan, in which the human princess Leda was impregnated by the god Zeus disguised as a swan and gave birth to the twins Castor and Pollux (usually referred to as the Dioscuri), who became fabulously skilled horsemen as well as Argonauts. Within the scheme of de Chirico’s self-mythologizing, the Argonauts stood for his life journey, and the Dioscuri as alter egos for himself and his brother, the philosopher Alberto Savinio.¹⁰

The imagery in The Mysterious Swan, then, could be said to assert the power of mythmaking in shaping the phenomenal world (with phenomena being things as we perceive them, not how they might be, per se). This is at the heart of what de Chirico had meant when he wrote that his mysterious baths advanced his “research of inventions and fantasy” of his Mediterranean piazzas (e.g., The Rose Tower or BF377, The Arrival). From the 1910s, these paintings evoked Nietzschean metaphysics: the absence of meaning inherent to existence, offset by the power of individuals to make their own meaning and the “eternal return” of events and motifs (i.e., everything that has happened already will happen again).

Whereas the piazza paintings employed the geometries of classical architecture (and, later, the skyscrapers of New York¹¹) as thick curtains at the threshold of the material and immaterial worlds, the mysterious baths seem to have embedded metaphysics elementally in the water-parquet. They expressed the philosopher Heraclitus’s idea that “everything flows”—a precursor to the idea of eternal return, which he, Nietzsche, and de Chirico had all encountered in a bubbling fountain, aptly affirming that meanings can accumulate as events repeat. ¹²

With respect to repetition, de Chirico revisited these themes of the mysterious baths and the Mediterranean piazzas through the remainder of his career. He delivered the baths’ apotheosis in the monumental Mysterious Baths Fountain installed in Milan’s Sempione Park—a triumph of the immersion in the “strange swimming pools” of his original vision.¹³ But back in the 1930s, de Chirico occasionally fused the two scene types, most likely to express that personal and sociopolitical myths came into being on the same metaphysical continuum.

De Chirico specialist Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco remarked—briefly—of a potentially causal affinity between the baths and Horses of Tragedy (BF1178, 1935), also in Room 23: “The painting Horses of Tragedy that enters the Barnes collection—the stallion immersed in the trapezoidal pool—can also be considered a mysterious bath."¹⁴

More recently, the Barnes Foundation’s Kaelin Jewell gave further context for the relationship by linking the titular horses with those precipitating the apocalypse (Revelation 6). In effect, de Chirico’s colossal and chaotic horses indicted Mussolini’s crude exploitations of ancient history in the service of fascism, a narrative distressingly divergent from the artist’s discursive relationship with the cultural past (he reminisced in that in the early 1900s, “A great calamity was brewing: modern painting.... And about a quarter of a century later there was to be another calamity, much worse than the former: Nazism”).¹⁵ The violent-yet-generative myth Leda and the Swan recommended the swan as a convention, among post-Nietzschean thinkers, to illustrate the dualistic terms of Heraclitan strife that drive historical progression—of rebirth in the water-parquet, or on the other side of the apocalyptic veil.¹⁶

The display of de Chirico’s paintings in the Barnes galleries likewise contributes to new meanings. For example, the pairing of Horses of Tragedy with the 15th-century panel Sienese Government Officials Receive an Embassy (BF868) colors our understanding of gothic artistic production as much as de Chirico’s own. Further, Dr. Barnes acquired The Mysterious Swan and Horses of Tragedy at the same time he was expanding his foundation’s commitment to aesthetic experience and social justice as reciprocal goals.¹⁷ It’s therefore fortunate, for the sake of appreciating the ethical dimension of repetition, that the paintings engage each other in persistent conversation on the walls of Room 23. Their placement appears especially serendipitous in light of de Chirico’s account, published in 1938, of his 1936 visit to the Barnes.

He proclaimed that that "nothing is more difficult" than trying to visit the museum of Dr. Barnes (“a mysterious American whose face few can claim to have seen,” and “a mystic of painting in general, and modern painting in particular”) in Merion, Pennsylvania (“a wooded and tranquil place where American billionaires have erected villas and sumptuous castles”), partly because it was guarded by “the biggest and most ferocious dogs that exist in the world.”¹⁸ De Chirico continued:

The Barnes did not, thank heavens, vanish following the death of Dr. Barnes in 1951. Visitors in the intervening decades have continued to experience de Chirico’s recurrent mysterious baths and Mediterranean monuments—and their visual statements within the Barnes collection—as agents in a cycle of constant change. This cycle is ultimately life-affirming, as the images’ meanings—past and present, global and personal—reverberate in our minds.