An eclectic artist with many talents—music, writing, painting—Alberto Savinio fully inhaled the avant-garde climate of the early twentieth century. Born Andrea de Chirico in Athens in 1891, he studied music in Munich, then arrived in Paris in 1910. Adopting the name Alberto Savinio, he made his debut in 1914 with Les chants de la mi-mort (Songs of the Half-Dead), a dramatic poem and a suite for piano. For Guillaume Apollinaire, he was a “poet, painter, and playwright, similar to the versatile geniuses of the Renaissance.” One of Savinio’s most intimate paintings, Le rêve du poète (The Poet’s