The Dream of Tobias, dated 1917, the year in which De Chirico founded the metaphysical school, represents one of the six canvases that the painter produced in the period he spent with Carlo Carrà during the First World War.
The painting was purchased in 1922 by Paul Guillaume and the following year by Paul Eluard and has a very rich exhibition history: from the 1922 exhibition at Guillaume's gallery at the Center Georges Pompidou in Paris to the MoMA in New York in 1982.
The work, a manifesto of the metaphysical current, contains the summa of the iconography of the artist's Ferrara period and according to the critic Paolo Baldacci it could represent a metaphor for revelation.
Any object inside the room, while being perfectly recognizable, becomes a source of mystery, of enigma: thus, a colonnade, a chimney, a fish, a thermometer.
They are objects that seem to be placed in a dimension that transcends the sensible, placing themselves in a properly "meta-physical" dimension.
Just a thermometer stands out in the center of the composition - probably an ironic allusion to the god Mercury - monumental like a Hellenic column, a land particularly dear to the painter. An engraving on it bears the inscription “Aidel”, a further symbol referring to classicism and a new allusion to Hades and invisibility.
A fish, Tobit's "attributive object", in the left lateral register, is represented as a metal bait in one of the "pictures within a picture", behind which the stylized staff appears, an object used by the shepherd to guide the flock, a symbolic element with clear religious reference.
It is a masterpiece of absolute importance for the history of modern art, the result of a revolutionary poetics, to the point that the iconographic and iconological studies of the painter di Volo will be decisive pillars in the evolution of the Surrealist movement in the following decade.
The painting will be sold in the upcoming SOTHEBY'S New York auction dedicated to Modern and Impressionist Art, together with works by Picasso, Schiele, Degas, Giacometti and Moore.
