Salvador Dali and the beauty of science Part II

Salvador Dali produced breathtakingly original works of art. What makes him all the more interesting is how he combined his religious belief with care over scientific principles that he incorporated in his work.

See this blog’s examination of this fascinating aspect of Dali’s intention to reflect the wonder of the world through the mathematical design of a piece or the imagery deployed. For example, the complexity of juxtaposed images and the perspective shown is clear from this work, The Ascension:

Are we witnessing the splitting of an atom or activity of a human cell? One answer:

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.

That comment refers, of course, to Phi, the golden matrix, that figures in so much of the natural world. For more on that topic, refer to this book The Golden Ratio – The Divine Beauty of Mathematics, which is by Gary Meisner, creator of the Phi website .

Drawing for Crucifixion

However, the “divine beauty” of Dali’s works, based on his use of mathematics, receives attention in the United Kingdom’s Guardian website here. The article points out that:

"The study for Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus) shows how he explored a depiction of the cross as a tesseract, a hypercube with eight cubical cells, which is thought to have been inspired by the work of the 16th-century Spanish mathematician and architect Juan de Herrera."

A conclusion to be drawn from Dali’s practice is that art and science are embellished by religious belief, not diminished – and vice versa.