Photo By Gail

The thin stretchers and measuring devices in Giorgio de Chirico’s elaborate composition, The Jewish Angel (1916), combine references to his own profession and to that of his father, who was a railroad engineer. De Chirico lived in Paris from 1911 to 1915, creating melancholy cityscapes that became exemplary for the surrealist movement. When he returned to Italy at the beginning of World War I, he began making paintings of interiors filled with strange objects, such as The Jewish Angel.

Photographed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.