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surrealism:

Sunday Dalí: The Madonna of Port Lligat (first version), 1949. Oil on canvas, 18½ x 15⅛ inches. The Patrick and Beatrice Haggerty Museum of Art, Marquette University, Milwaukee, WI.

Dalí’s turn towards Catholicism and interest in reusing the iconography of the Italian Renaissance are inextricably married to his reaction to the United States’s detonation of the Atomic Bomb in Hiroshima in 1945. Subsequent paintings depict the atomic properties of objects through dematerialization and by suspending the objects in space, demonstrating the divisibility of matter.¹

This work is clearly influenced by Piero della Francesca’s Madonna and Child with Angels and Six Saints (1470-75) [image link]. Both Madonnas have their hands folded over the infant Jesus. Both paintings also have the iconography of an egg hanging from a seashell although Dalí inverted his shell in the manner of Carlo Crivelli. The shell is a reference to the god Venus, who Mary replaced with the rise of Christianity as the dominant religion in western Europe. The egg is symbolic of new life.²

It is striking to see that what appears to be Freudian iconography in Dalí’s work actually be directly lifted from the Renaissance masters. Further investifation of the Francesca work leads to more questions. Namely, why is Saint Francis (the man to the right of Mary) holding his ripped tunic open? And why is Saint Peter’s head bleeding?³ It all looks so fresh in Dalí’s painting, and yet, the ideas are centuries old.

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1. Michael R. Taylor, Dalí, (Venice: Rizzoli, 2004), 346. ↩

2. Ibid. ↩

3. A quick google search revealed that Peter of Verona was assassinated with an axe blow to the head. He was canonized shortly thereafter. ↩