The artist thanked the wizard for his compliments and then confessed that she had borrowed the idea of that silhouette from a 101 year-old painting by Giorgio de Chirico called, “Melancholy and Mystery of a Street.”
De Chirico painted this scene in 1914 during a visit to Versailles, the private city built by Louis XIV – the self proclaimed “Sun King” of France – as a monument to himself.
The painter looked at Versailles and said, “Everything gazed at me with mysterious, questioning eyes. And then I realised that every corner of the palace, every column, every window possessed a spirit, an impenetrable soul.”
Realitybitesartblog says, “In this unsettling, haunting work, Giorgio De Chirico, a founder of the Pittura Metafisica (Metaphysical Painting) style, a forerunner to Surrealism, presents the very concept of the street as it being dense in history and in possibility, in melancholy and in mystery. Any banal empty street, in this light, could be seen as sinister and yet disturbingly beautiful.”