The Disquieting Muses
The Disquieting Muses (in Italian: Le Muse inquietanti, 1916, 1917 or 1918) is a painting by the Italian metaphysical painter Giorgio de Chirico.The Disquieting Muses was painted during World War I, when De Chirico was in Ferrara. The Castello Estense, near which de Chirico lived, is in the background, rust-red and among industrial buildings. At the front are the two Muses, dressed in classical clothing. One is standing and the other sitting, and they are placed among various objects, including a red mask and staff, an allusion to Melpomene and Thalia, the Muses of tragedy and comedy. The statue on a pedestal in the background is Apollo, leader of the Muses.Giorgio Castelfranco, an art collector and critic, described the painting in 1948:

The spaces are dominated and interpenetrated fantastically, to such an extent that, at times, the lyric simultaneity of different coordinate systems is reached; this clearly happens in Metaphysical Interior and also in The Disquieting Muse where the box in the foreground is seen through the sitting Muse's perspective, and therefore, for the onlooker, in reversed perspective... de Chirico's peculiar mindset and culture in those years, founded in a vein of art and thought that is definitely—broadly speaking—anti-impressionist: an idealistic critique on the categories of time and space, which had found pathetic, alluring terms in Schopenhauer's oneiric-critique, and also that of young Nietzsche with regard to the interpretation of Greek tragedy, as well as German illustration tending to classicism, which also took the enigmatic side of ancient myths into consideration.