Giorgio de Chirico / Serious. Giorgio de Chirico ((July 10, 1888 – November 20, 1978) was an Italian artist. He was born in Volos, Greece to a Genovese mother and a Sicilian father. 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 neo-Baroque style. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giorgio_de_Chirico