The Disquieting Muses was painted in Ferrara Italy in 1918. A renaissance city of great artistic and cultural heritage, de Chirico’s arrival here was a product of fate not choice. While it is important to appreciate the impact Chirico’s newly anointed Metaphysical paintings had on the circle of artists and writers that gathered around Apollinaire when he lived in Paris from 1911 to 1914, it is here, as a wartime conscript in Ferrara under the shadow of the imposing fortress Castello Estense that he developed upon a novel vocabulary to augment the hauntingly perplexing settings, new techniques of light and shadows and startling, enigmatic perspectives. Here, he would embellish those attributes with flattened spaces, geometric boxes or frames, and a variety of new motifs including the most conspicuous of all: the mannequin-like figures characterized by art historian Roberto Longhi as Frankenstein-like monstrosities. From a contemporary perspective, these figures might seem far more robotic characters in a science fiction story. But some have speculated that the faceless figures recall the prosthetics built to hide the grotesque deformities brought on by trench warfare along the western front. For certain, in 1917, de Chirico’s fragile state of mind had compelled influential friends to see that he was relived of official duties and admitted to Villa del Seminario, a military hospital near Ferrara where the chief of the institution assigned him a room he could use as a studio. It is here, in this room that this version of Le Muse Inquietanti (The Disquieting Muses) was likely painted. And it is here, that de Chirico embarked upon this, and other extraordinary depictions of prophetic mannequin figures dressed in classical clothing; often of one standing, another sitting and placed amongst various objects including a red mask and staff, an allusion to Melpomene and Thalia, the muses of tragedy and comedy.