In La Musa Pomeridiana, or The Afternoon Muse, de Chirico presents a chromatic dreamscape, revisiting the iconic motifs of his Metaphysical period. Sun-bleached arches cast shadows and a figure stands front of stage against a deserted piazza, a theatrical scene distorted by the deliberate misapplication of the rules of linear perspective in which no rationally imposed order is apparent and multiple vanishing points appear. There is a sense that the laws of time and space have been suspended in a perpetual late afternoon. In the words of Jean-Paul Sartre, "de Chirico revealed to us a nature that was haunted and yet had nothing of the supernatural about it"; this is an artist who "painted the life and sufferings of stones" (Jean-Paul Sartre, Literary Essays, New York, 1957).

Most disquieting is de Chirico’s spectral hybrid figure at the center of the present composition: half Doric column, half mannequin. These caryatid figures feature in his earliest works of the 1910s and grew to become lonely symbols of otherworldliness in his work.

Sylvia Plath found the perfect locus of alienation in de Chirico’s mannequin figures, described as “mouthless, eyeless, with stitched bald head” in her 1957 poem, The Disquieting Muses, titled after de Chirico’s painting of the same name. 

“Day now, night now, at head, side, feet,

They stand their vigil in gowns of stone,

Faces blank as the day I was born,

Their shadows long in the setting sun

That never brightens or goes down.”

-Extract from Sylvia Plath’s The Disquieting Muses, 1957

Beside the figure lies a spiraled red-and-white carousel pole, reminiscent of the perspective-distorting lances of the The Hunt in the Forest by Paolo Uccello, one of the early Italian Primitivists whose pictorial techniques intrigued him; the brightly-colored object to the right resembling a candy box recalls de Chirico’s idea that “to become truly immortal a work of art must escape all human limits: logic and common sense interfere. But once these barriers are broken it will enter the regions of childhood vision and dream” (quoted in R. Friedenthal, Letters of the Great Artists – from Ghiberti to Gainsborough, London, 1963, p . 231).

De Chirico frequently revisited the metaphysical themes of his earlier work, returning to the iconography of his 1918 masterpiece Le Muse inquietante on more than twenty occasions. This practice of reimagining his work caught the attention of Andy Warhol, whose own repetition of imagery was central to his practice. Four years after de Chirico’s death, Warhol created his own silkscreen work inspired by The Disquieting Muses (fig. 1).