Furniture in the Valley

by

de Chirico

"My series of paintings called Funiture in the Valley was engendered by an idea that came to me one afternoon in Paris, as I was walking down Saint-Germain between Rue du Dragon and Rue du Vieux-Colombier.

On the sidewalk, in front of a used furniture shop, I saw sofas, chairs, wardrobes, tables, and a coat rack displayed right there on the street.  By finding themselves so removed from the sacred place in which man has always sought repose, the place that each of us call home, these objects - the mere sight of which arouses feelings and sentiments that delve back to our earliest childhood -- suddenly appeared solemn, tragic, even mysterious.  In the midst of the street noise, the comings-and-goings of a major capital's passions and fevers, these solitary items of furniture formed a kind of guarded enclave, a loculus, an impregnable zone aginst which the ambient hubbub and commotion broke like waves dying on a strand." 

~de Chirico

(definition of loculus -- 1.  Ecclesiastical. a compartment in an altar, in which relics are kept.
2.  a recess in an ancient catacomb or tomb, where a body or cinerary urn was placed)