It is not only one of de Chirico’s most famous paintings, but also perhaps the most beautiful painting in contemporary art. Absolute loneliness reigns in “Songs of Love” in which, as the title tells us, there are signs that speak, or rather sing. But there is absolute dissonance between them. Indeed, the massive chalk head of Apollo of Belvedere is attached to the outer wall of a building almost half its size. The other half of the wall is occupied by a rubber glove suspended on nails. Why was this combination invented? There is a nail hanging below the head that holds nothing. Why this particular nail? Underneath the chalk head and rubber glove is a green sphere on a black cube. This sphere has dotted circular lines on it that look like a tennis ball or balloon and seem to represent the meridians of the Earth.
What binds these symbols together, what is their meaning?
The cast of the Belvedere Apollo, unlike the glove, is a symbol of beauty projected onto the harsh reality of the wall, of its very existence. In the ecstatic expression on the face of Apollo, the god of prophecy, we see the dreamy gaze of revelation, which for de Chirico is the secret of metaphysical art. But Apollo was also the god of form, whose greatest expression in Greece was in sculpture. The green ball is the third object in the painting, symbolizing cosmic play. For Plato, the cube is a symbol of earth, one of the four elements of the universe after water, air, and fire. In the form of the cube, the earth is the metaphysical force that sustains itself; in the form of the ball supported by the cube, it is the cosmic force of play, which, like child’s play, has no purpose other than the joy of play.
This joy is the same cosmic force as the love of life and beauty of which art is the song.
The midwife’s glove is the force of fate that brought the artist to earth, nailing him to an empty point in time and space. This is the logic of the metaphysical artist. When Magritte saw this painting in an art magazine, he cried, saying his thoughts were represented. The power of this divination of the artist is the same as that of Heraclitus, whom de Chirico often quotes.He says: “ The child at play is time (history), which sets milestones here and there, and the child is (all) control.”