The Soothsayer's Recompense
The Soothsayer's Recompense is a 1913 painting by Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico. It is now in the Philadelphia [Museum of Art] as part of the permanent collection. It was accessioned in 1950 as one of the thousand items donated to the institution by Walter and Louise Arensberg. The piece was created in France, through a process of "squaring-up" in which Chirico drew a version of the piece divided into nine squares, and subsequently used this draft to quickly create the fleshed-out painting.
Subject matter
The piece depicts an empty city square, a recurring motif in works by Chirico. It also features a locomotive in the background, another recurring motif also found in The Transformed Dream and Gare Montparnasse (The Melancholy of Departure).The statue at the center of the painting is meant to represent Ariadne, who was the daughter of Minos, King of Crete. She assisted Theseus in his escape from the Labyrinth, but he later abandoned her on the island of Naxos. Like the locomotive and empty square, Ariadne appears in other paintings by Chirico.