Dali and the beauty of science

Salvador Dali was thrust deep into scientific mysteries. For instance, with regards this Crucifixion, he stated:

In the first place, in 1950, I had a ‘cosmic dream’ in which I saw this image in color and which in my dream represented the ‘nucleus of the atom’. This nucleus later took on a metaphysical sense; I considered it ‘the very unity of the universe’, the Christ! In the second place, when thanks to the instructions of Father Bruno, a Carmelite, I saw the Christ drawn by Saint John of the Cross, I worked out geometrically a triangle and a circle, which ‘aesthetically’ summarized all my previous experiments, and I inscribed my Christ in this triangle.

Dali named his 1951 work Christ of Saint John of the Cross. The sketch below is that by St John of the Cross from the 1570s made after a mystical experience.

The effect of the bowed Christ that Dali conceptualised in a optical or scientific manner continues to have an impact on those who visit the Glasgow Art Gallery to see it. When the gallery bought the work in 1952:

It was met with considerable criticism from the art press for its price (£8,200 was considered exorbitant) as well as its quality.  It was derided as ‘skilled sensationalist trickery’ and ‘calculated melodrama’, but despite this, the people of Glasgow flocked to see the picture.  Fifty thousand visitors saw it in the first two months, and it was reported that ‘Men entering the room where the picture is hung instinctively take off their hats.  Crowds of chattering, high-spirited school children are hushed into awed silence when they see it.’  Even now, it is still the most celebrated painting in the gallery’s collection.

When it was painted, Dali explained, ‘My aesthetic ambition… was completely the opposite of all the Christs painted by most of the modern painters, who have all interpreted him in the expressionistic and contortionistic sense, thus obtaining emotion through ugliness. My principal preoccupation was that my Christ would be beautiful as the God that he is.’ 

The comment continues:

The power of the picture rests in part in the paradoxes it presents to the viewer.  The monumental figure of the crucified Christ hovers above the world, yet we look down on him.  In the detail of Christ’s body and his closeness to the picture surface – he really does appear to project beyond it – Christ is immediately and physically present and yet he is distant, above the clouds, his face hidden.

The scientific element in Dali's work is particularly clear in another striking crucifixion. Here are some worthwhile comments on this point:

By the 1950s, Dali had abandoned his atheism in favor of the religion of his birth and baptism, Catholicism. Combining this with his beliefs in so-called "nuclear mysticism" he created paintings such as the Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus) [see below]. Christ is suspended on an eight sided dodecahedron - an octahedral hypercube or a cube in the fourth dimension. Dali's critics often stated that his use of these mathematical symbols as "visual opportunism" and that the artist knew nothing of the meanings and mathematical principles behind them.

However, Thomas Banchoff, a Brown University professor who did pioneering work using computer graphics to illustrate geometry beyond the third dimension in the 1970s, insists that this assumption about Dali is untrue. "Dali wanted to be treated seriously by scientists," Banchoff said of the artist. "He knew what he was talking about he was not just using the symbols." Banchoff and Dali became friends after a 1975 article in the Washington Post about Banchoff's work caught Dali's eye. Banchoff stated that Dali had specific mathematical questions and sought the professor's help to solve optical problems in some of his more extreme works.

We can't leave this topic of Dali's struggle to make us aware of beauty through science without delving into his work, Cena or The Sacrament of the Last Supper.

One commentator makes these important observations:

 Believing that the number “12” was “paranoiacly sublime,” Dali painted the backdrop as a dodecahedron – a 12-sided figure. The number 12 figures in as Christ’s 12 apostles, the 12 signs of the zodiac, the 12 months of the year, etc. Dali believed that the Communion must be symmetrical, thus giving rise to the strict symmetry of the work, with each apostle on the left a virtual mirror image of his counterpart on the right.

The overall feeling of spirituality and mysticism is achieved through the transparency of the Christ figure, appearing as if he could be rising from the sea, and of the dodecahedron. Dali’s blond, beardless and otherwise unconventional depiction of Jesus set skeptical fingers wagging when the large painting was unveiled on Easter, 1955. Some presumed – in shock, but erroneously – that Gala (his wife) posed for Christ! In fact, a male model sat for the artist.

The large male torso at the top of this canvas may be interpreted at least three ways: as the Holy Spirit; the ascension of Christ; or perhaps God the Father, watching over all, his face not to be seen.

In like manner, enjoy this last work - The Ascension. That same commentator wonders here if we are witnessing the splitting of an atom or activity of a human cell:

Dali – master of illusion and of manipulating space and time – throws us off some by the oddly juxtaposed perspectives and points of view in Ascension. The Christ figure is seen emerging either backwards or upwards – we don’t know. Meanwhile, it’s less than clear just what [the woman, perhaps mother] would be standing on in relation to the angle of the rising Christ. What’s more, we have a more normal and natural field of vision in the landscape shown at the bottom, below the large yellow circle, further confounding our perspective here.

And just what is that brilliant golden sphere? Is it a splitting atom or human cell? Is it the sun? Does it represent the circle of life? Could it be a sea urchin? What we do know is that directly behind the ascending Christ figure are the florets of a sunflower – a natural design by which Dali was intrigued, because its continuous circular pattern follows the laws of a logarithmic spiral – a naturally occurring phenomenon he also found in the horn of a rhinoceros and the morphology of a cauliflower.