Giorgio de Chirico

Giorgio de Chirico was an Italian artist. In the years before World War I, he founded the scuola metafisica art movement, which profoundly influenced the surrealists. After 1919, he became interested in traditional painting techniques, and worked in a neoclassical or neoBaroque style, while frequently revisiting the metaphysical themes of his earlier work.

De Chirico was born in Volos, Greece, to a Genoan mother and a Sicilian father. After studying art at Athens Polytechnic mainly under the guidance of the influential Greek painters Georgios Roilos and Georgios Jakobidesand Florence, he moved to Germany in 1906, following his fathers death in 1905. He entered the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, where he studied under Max Klinger and read the writings of the philosophers Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer and Otto Weininger. There, he also studied the works of Arnold Bcklin.

Source: Wikipedia