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"The future's uncertain and the end is always near."

Jim Morrison

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In business, it’s not what you know but who you know. The young Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico, having just arrived in Paris in 1911, made a point to get in with the right crowd.

He started following the well-known poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who helped him sell his first painting. To show his gratitude, Chirico offered the poet a special piece with an unusual power: the ability to predict the future.

Portrait of Giorgio de Chirico (1907).

The piece Chirico painted for Apollinaire in 1914, originally titled Human Target, is typical of his Metaphysical style. It has a dream-like, eerie quality that blurs the boundaries between reality and imagination.

Many objects in the spooky scene are symbolic. In the foreground, a statue of the Greek mythological figure Orpheus is a reference to "Orphism," Apollinaire’s term for avant-garde painting. The statue’s dark shades suggest that he is blind, a sign of wisdom.

Behind the bespectacled statue, a man’s silhouette is visible. A white ring circles his head like the bullseye of a target. The meaning? No one knows for sure, but Apollinaire always maintained that he was the shadowy figure depicted in the painting, perhaps because the silhouette’s profile closely resembled his own.

His claim turned out to be right on the mark.

Detail of Premonitory Portrait of Guillaume Apollinaire.

Two years later, while serving during World War I in 1916, Apollinaire was wounded by a piece of shrapnel and died shortly after. Point of entry? His left temple, smack inside the circle Chirico had painted on his silhouette.

In honor of his friend and the painting’s predictive powers, Chirico eventually renamed the piece Premonitory Portrait of Guillaume Apollinaire.