Giorgio de Chirico (or simply "De Chirico") was a Greek-Italian Surrealist painter who founded the scuola metafisica art movement. While he is not quite the same sort of famous as his later contemporaries Salvador Dali or Rene Magritte, his work as a pre-Surrealist was critical to the development of the Dada and Surrealist periods in art.
The majority of work that De Chirico is known for was created during his metaphysical period, which lasted from 1909 to 1919. These works are characterized by their sense of utter solitude and silence, and for the use of various Italian plazas as their subject. De Chirico often distorted the perspective of his work by using multiple and conflicting vanishing points with otherwise well-executed illustrations of Italian architechture. The effect on the eye is strange and alien in a way that his contemporaries never managed to capture.
Around 1939, De Chirico experienced a change of heart and adopted a Baroque style heavily influenced by Sir Peter Paul Rubens. Unfortunately, this was during the heyday of a few different non-Realist movements, and so most of his work went ignored or disregarded by critics. De Chirico then turned to self-forgery, both as a sort of intellectual revenge and in order to pay his bills.
His work influenced many different people. Aside from almost the entire Surrealist movement who attributed an influence to De Chirico at one point or another, there were also notables such as Sylvia Plath and Michelangelo Antonioni. Most recently, the video game Ico was heavily influenced by De Chirico's work: the European and Japanese boxart is a direct homage to De Chirico's "The Nostalgia of the Infinite".
De Chirico lived to be 90, and died in 1978 in Rome.
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