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Bears a pencil inscription ‘G. de Chirico’ at the lower right and a further pencil inscription at the lower left. The inscription has not been verified as the artist’s own signature: this is a reproduction after de Chirico, and the inscription is not offered as, and should not be read as, a signature by Giorgio de Chirico. Framer’s stamp ‘Arte Cuadro, Alicante’ on the reverse.
Sizes:
Frame: 27 × 21 cm | 10.6 × 8.3 in
Artwork: 24 × 18 cm | 9.4 × 7.1 in
Three gladiators fight in a bare, box-like room while a fourth lies fallen in the foreground; through an opening at the back, other figures look on. The composition, the deliberately archaic anatomy and the theatrical, airless setting all belong to the gladiator cycle that Giorgio de Chirico painted and drew between 1927 and the mid-1930s for the collector Léonce Rosenberg and for his own increasingly classical programme.
The print is offered after Giorgio de Chirico’s etching ‘Combattimento di Gladiatori,’ one of the plates he made for Jean Cocteau’s Le Mystère Laïc (Paris, 1928), reproducing that composition rather than being from the artist’s own hand. It bears a pencil inscription ‘G. de Chirico’ at the lower right and a further pencil inscription at the lower left, and on the reverse the stamp of a framer in Alicante. The inscription has not been verified as de Chirico’s own signature and is not offered as one: the work is catalogued as after de Chirico, and the inscription is recorded only as a mark found on the sheet.
Framed under glass.
Private Collection, Spain.
Cf. Giorgio de Chirico, ‘Combattimento di Gladiatori,’ etching, from Jean Cocteau, Le Mystère Laïc, Paris, 1928 (the original composition this print reproduces).
Very good condition: the sheet evenly toned, with a crisp plate mark and clear linework; two small, isolated spots of foxing in the lower part of the image; a pencil inscription ‘G. de Chirico’ (not verified as the artist’s signature) and the number 5/100; no tears, losses or restoration; not examined out of the frame. Please contact us to request a detailed Condition Report.
Packed as size XS (up to 40 × 30 cm) · 27 × 21 cm framed
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Giorgio de Chirico was born in Volos, Greece, in 1888 to Italian parents, and studied in Athens and at the Munich Academy, where Böcklin and Nietzsche shaped his imagination. In Paris from 1911 he painted the empty piazzas, long shadows, mannequins and towers of Pittura Metafisica — pictures that Apollinaire championed and that the Surrealists later claimed as their founding revelation.
After the First World War he turned to the Old Masters, provoking a lasting quarrel with Breton; the 1920s and 1930s brought the horses on the shore, the archaeologists and the gladiators painted for Léonce Rosenberg.
From 1944 de Chirico lived in Rome, in the house on Piazza di Spagna that is now his museum, painting neo-Baroque self-portraits and still lifes, remaking his own metaphysical pictures and, in his last decade, the ‘neo-metaphysical’ works. He also made prints and lithographs throughout his career.
He died in Rome in 1978. His work is in every major museum of modern art, from MoMA to the Centre Pompidou and the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna.
Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978), founder of Metaphysical painting: Volos, Munich and Paris, the classical turn, the gladiator cycle of the late 1920s, and an engraving after him at Aurora & Athena.
Highlights of the Aurora & Athena autumn sale on 17 October 2026: Bridget Tichenor, Nicholas Roerich, Konstantin Korovin, Gerard Sekoto, Jan Zrzavý, Pan Yuliang, a Miró lithograph and the painters of the École de Paris.
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