Giorgio de Chirico “The Gentle Afternoon” at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice

Painting - Oil on Canvas (65.3 x 58.3 cm) 1916

The Gentle Afternoon Cookies and a barley sugar bar are the main elements of this “Gentle Afternoon”.

Elements perfectly aligned, like hanging in the air on a dense azure-blue background.

In this painting, apart from the sugar bar, the cookies look to be the only objects truly embossed in a less preeminent way.

They lay on a platter presented almost vertically, in the window of a pastry shop in Ferrara, where Chirico lived when he painted this picture.

There is a terrace in the sun behind the platter, where you can enjoy the cakes and suck the barley sugar in the flat calm of the afternoon suggested by Chirico's painting.

It is interesting to note that lines and diagonals repeated both at the bottom of the tray and behind it.

As in most other pictures of that era painted by de Chirico, the time has stopped.

Everything is frozen, motionless and bland; the human has disappeared, only suggested in the cakes and sugar bar intended for him.

The Gentle Afternoon