Dalí/Raphael. A prolonged Revery

A PROLONGED REVERY

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‘Who knows if some without intending it the Raphael of my pe

Salvador Dalí, 50 Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship, Dial Press, 1948

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day I shall not be considered eriod?’

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Directora dels Museus Dalí

Dalí / RaphAEl. An Introduction*

* We recommend visiting the landing page https:// exhibitions.salvador-dali. org/en/dalirafael-prolongedrevery/, the monographic website Actualitats https:// www.salvador-dali.org/en/ breaking-news/monographicdali-raphael/, and the audiovisual materials on the website of the Fundació Gala-Salvador for a fuller overview of the project.

The Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí is presenting for the first time a show that is developed in two phases. Dalí/ Raphael, a Prolonged Revery has been conceived around the temporary loan of Raphael’s Madonna of the Rose as part of the On Tour through Spain initiative celebrating the bicentenary of the Museo Nacional del Prado.

The Centre for Dalinian Studies and the Department of Restoration and Conservation have carried out an in-depth study of the relationship between the two painters, and the great admiration for Raphael that began in Dalí’s teenage years and continued almost to the end of his artistic career. Dalí knew and loved the Italian Renaissance and Raphael, and this identification is reflected in his pictorial and written work, in his thinking. He compares his own time with that of the great Renaissance painter, as for example in the interview that Manuel del Arco published in Dalí al desnudo in 1952: ‘If Raphael painted a virgin according to the cosmogony of the Renaissance, that cosmogony has varied today. The same subject that Raphael painted, if Raphael were to paint it today, because he would have other knowledge (nuclear physics, psychoanalysis, for example), he would paint as well as then, but it would respond to today’s cosmogony. And the religious subject is, for me, the oldest and the most current; but it must be treated according to scientific knowledge.’

The starting point of this show is Raphael, a mystic Raphael, as represented by two major works: one, Madonna of the Rose (ca. 1517), is physically present; the other, implicit work, Saint Catherine of Alexandria (ca. 1507), acts as a link between and point of reference for the two phases of the exhibition.

dalí / raphael. an introduction

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Dalí kept reproductions of Raphael’s Saint Catherine in his studio at Portlligat, where the picture served him as inspiration and as a model in his creative process. Specifically, Dalí intervened in a book plate of Raphael’s Saint Catherine by marking out a grid on the page and then transferring the scaled-up contents of each square to the canvas in two oil paintings, The Ascension of Saint Cecilia and Untitled. Saint Peter’s Basilica. Explosion of Mystical Faith in the Midst of a Cathedral. These two works, very different in size, were started in the same decade, the 1950s, characterised by the beginning of Dalí’s mysticalnuclear phase, which was triggered, according to the artist, by the seismic convulsion produced in him by the exploding of the atomic bomb in 1945.

The presence of the oil painting The Ascension of Saint Cecilia (ca. 1955) in the first stage of the exhibition, from November 26, 2018 to January 6, 2019, along with Raphael’s Madonna of the Rose, accompanied by drawings, books, photographs and an audio-visual screening of excerpts from various interviews with Dalí, allowed us to enter more deeply into a relationship framed in the history of art – or, at least, in the history of art as Dalí understood it.

For the second stage of the exhibition, from January 15 until December 2019, following the return of Madonna of the Rose to the Prado, the Raphael painting has been replaced

by Dalí’s Explosion of Mystical Faith in the Midst of a Cathedral, a little-known, almost hidden work that cannot usually be seen in its entirety, since it is part of an installation, the altar of the Twisted Christ, under the dome of the Dalí Theatre-Museum in Figueres, where we can only glimpse the reflection of the painting in a mirror.

Now, as privileged witnesses, we can contemplate Explosion of Mystical Faith directly, in full, and at close quarters. In this work we encounter once again the image of Saint Catherine / Saint Cecilia, as a recurring key figure in the show and a connecting thread between Dalí and Raphael, depicted here as a nebulous apparition in the Basilica of Saint Peter in the Vatican.

Close study of this oil painting has enabled us to establish that the background setting is almost certainly based on a manipulated drawing by Dalí, inspired by Louis Jean Desprez, who collaborated with Francesco Piranesi, son of Giovanni Battista Piranesi, on a series of views of the Papal Basilica of Saint Peter at the end of the 1770s. Here again, as so often with Dalí, we are not dealing with chance or accident: it was Dalí’s express wish that the engravings of the series Carceri d’Invenzione by the elder Piranesi were to appear on the walls of the main stairway of the Theatre-Museum. Dalí’s knowing gesture reminds us that his theatre is an invitation to participation, to attentive looking: in it, we are in the realms of the oneiric and the recondite.

The exhibition Dalí/Raphael can thus be seen as an Ariadne’s thread, helping us to understand Dalí the thinking machine and to approach his last great work, his museum, with different readings, informed by research, which help enrich it.

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THE ASCENsion OF SAiNT CECiLIA, ca. 1955

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Untitled. Saint Peter’s Basilica. Explosion of Mystical Faith in the Midst of a Cathedral, 1959 -1974

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iN DALÍ’S STUDIO. On the Working Method in The Ascension of Saint Cecilia

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Centre for Dalinian Studies, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí

Dalí: to become classic! now or never dalí and the great tradition: the importance of the trips to italy

‘Begin by drawing and painting like the old masters. After that do as you see fit – you will always be respected.’1

Raphael, Self-portrait, 1506. Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence

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Salvador Dalí decided that the catalogue of his first solo exhibition, at the Galeries Dalmau in Barcelona, in November 1925, should end with a quote from Élie Faure: ‘A great painter has the right to take up the tradition only once he has passed through revolution, which is the search for his own reality.’2 The words of the French art historian and essayist evidently had a special resonance for Dalí. In his pursuit of a language of his own the young painter, in his early twenties, was experimenting with the most diverse styles (Impressionism, Cubism, Pointillism, Art Nouveau, Fauvism, Italian Metaphysical painting), in the understanding that his art would first have to live through a revolution if it was to establish a direct dialogue with the tradition.

At this early stage in his personal and artistic development Dalí paid close attention to everything that was going on around him and to the influences he was absorbing, always with one eye on the past. His interest in tradition was evident even in his physical appearance. This is already perceived in the twenties, when Dalí begins to paint his first self-portraits. In Self-Portrait with Raphaelesque Neck, probably from 1921,3 the artist portrays himself in the foreground, with long hair and sideburns. Dalí’s

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words about his appearance in that period show the admiration for Raphael and the Renaissance painters: ‘I had let my hair grow as long as a girl’s, and looking at myself in the mirror I would often adopt the pose and the melancholy look which so fascinated me in Raphael’s self-portrait, and whom I should have liked to resemble as much as possible. I was also waiting impatiently for the down on my face to grow, so that I could shave and have long side-whiskers. As soon as possible I wanted to make myself “look unusual”, to compose a masterpiece with my head.’4 Dalí was aware of his potential from an early age and was very clear about his goals. He was eager to finish his studies in Figueres and move to Madrid to enrol in the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando. In 1920, when he was just sixteen years old, he wrote in his diary about the path he intended to take to become an artist after his time at the San Fernando: ‘Then I shall win the scholarship to go to Rome for four years; and when I return from Rome I shall be a genius, and the world will admire me. Perhaps I will be despised and misunderstood, but I shall be a genius, a great genius, because I am sure of it.’5 As we can see, Dalí felt that a prerequisite to becoming a genius was to spend some time in Italy, as he was to do so a few years later.

In the nineteen thirties, at a time when he was being acclaimed as an artist of note by the members of the Surrealist group, Dalí felt a renewed interest in Classicism and a rekindled desire to visit Italy. He wanted to follow in the footsteps of his old drawing master in Figueres, Juan Núñez, who had been awarded an engraving scholarship to study at the Real Academia de España in Rome. Dalí sought to emulate the Grand Tour undertaken by so many eighteenth-century intellectuals and artists to refine their taste, as part of their cultural education, and here Gala seems to have had a fundamental role, as the artist made clear in his autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí: ‘Gala was beginning to interest me in a voyage to Italy. The architecture of the Renaissance, Palladio

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Each of the works by Salvador Dalí referred to in this publication is accompanied by the number with which it is listed in the Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings by Salvador Dalí, which is available for consultation on the website of the Fundació: https://www.salvador-dali. org/en/artwork/catalogueraisonne/.

1 Salvador Dalí, Diary of a Genius, Doubleday, New York, 1965, p. 84.

2 Translated from: Exposició S. Dalí, exhibition catalogue, Galeries Dalmau, Barcelona, 1925.

3 Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings by Salvador Dalí, cat. no. 103.

4 Salvador Dalí, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, Dial Press, New York, 1942, p. 124.

5 Translated from: Salvador Dalí, Un diario: 1919-1920, in Obra completa, vol. I, Textos autobiográficos 1, Destino, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Sociedad Estatal de Conmemoraciones Culturales, Barcelona, Figueres, Madrid, 2003, p. 118.

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Salvador Dalí, Self-Portrait with Raphaelesque Neck, ca. 1921. Fundació GalaSalvador Dalí, Figueres

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fig. 3 Gala, Dalí and Edward James in Rome, 1935. Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Figueres

Salvador Dalí, “Comparative Table of the Values After Dalinian Analysis Elaborated During Ten Years” for the book 50 Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship, ca. 1947.

Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Figueres >

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and Bramante impressed me more and more as being the startling and perfect achievement of the human spirit in the realm of esthetics, and I was beginning to feel the desire to go and see and touch these unique phenomena, these products of materialized intelligence that were concrete, measurable and supremely nonnecessary. […] From day to day Gala was reviving my faith in myself.’6 As he had written a few pages before: ‘My surrealist glory was worthless. I must incorporate surrealism in tradition. My imagination must become classic again. I had before me a work to accomplish for which the rest of my life would not suffice. Gala made me believe in this mission. Instead of stagnating in the anecdotic mirage of my success, I had now to begin to fight for a thing that was “important”. This important thing was to render the experience of my life “classic”, to endow it with a form, a cosmogony, a synthesis, an architecture of eternity.’7 In October 1935, Dalí finally made his first visit to Italy with Gala and the young British poet and patron of the arts Edward James. They travelled from Barcelona to Ravello, near Amalfi, where James was renting Villa Cimbrone.

Thrilled with the experience, Dalí enthusiastically recounted it in letters to his friend J. V. Foix, the Catalan poet, journalist and essayist, describing their journey down through Italy by car, a means of transport that allowed them to discover unsuspected delights and all the ‘Surrealist corners’ unknown to tourists.8 After that first trip, Dalí and his wife would make many more visits to Italy, travelling in the next few years to Florence, Lucca, Rome, Sicily, Vicenza and Venice.

dalí, renaissance artist In August 1940, Dalí and Gala disembarked in the United States, where they were to remain for the next eight years without once returning to Europe. For the first few months they were guests of Caresse Crosby at her Hampton Manor estate in Virginia,9 where Dalí made

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several paintings, which he exhibited at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York in April 1941. The catalogue of the exhibition included a text entitled The Last Scandal of Salvador Dali, in which the artist set out a declaration of intentions and revealed the direction in which his destiny was heading: ‘TO BECOME CLASSIC! […] Now or never!’10 A couple of years later Dalí made the following comment on his prolific artistic output since his arrival in the United States: ‘America has only developed, to the extent of paroxysm, one of the most characteristic and almost monstrous “secrets” of my personality – my capacity for work.’11 To this quality we must add Dalí’s transformation into a total artist, a process that was consummated at this time. Like the great artists of the Renaissance, here is a creator who refuses to be limited to a single medium or means of expression: Dalí’s activity diversified – he was a painter, an illustrator, a writer, a set designer, a scriptwriter, a creator of jewellery… and, in everything he did, he never ceased to be Dalí.

Dalí became a character, a persona who loved to appear in public and make himself the centre of attention.

But while he adored being surrounded by glamorous people and leading a very active social life, we should not forget that there was another Dalí, whose great aspiration was to be like the Renaissance artists he so admired. Dalí the painter was aware of the importance of constant, methodical, solitary work: ‘I do not go to bed until very late. I don’t take very seriously the artist who continually says he has to get “inspired”. One must work, work, work. Painters worked very hard in the Renaissance. I can only work when my life is methodic. The maximum inspiration is the maximum of method.’12 It is worth bearing in mind here that Dalí saw the Renaissance as ‘that moment in which the apogee of the means of expression was attained’,13 and this idea is also reflected in his commitment to reviving another Renaissance tradition – that of writing technical treatises on painting. When he came to write his book 50 Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship (1948)14, Dalí drew

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6 Salvador Dalí, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, op. cit., p. 352.

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Ibídem, p. 350.

8 Letters from Salvador Dalí to J. V. Foix, from Modena, 4 October 1935, and from Rome, 7 October 1935, in S. Dalí, R. Santos Torroella, Salvador Dalí corresponsal de J. V. Foix, 1932-1936, Mediterrània, Barcelona, 1986, pp. 148-151.

9 Caresse Crosby, who had been married to the poet and publisher Harry Crosby, with whom she had founded the prestigious Black Sun Press, was one of the Zodiac group, whose members regularly bought works by Dalí after 1932, and she accompanied Gala and Dalí on their first trip to the United States in 1934.

10 Salvador Dalí, ‘The Last Scandal of Salvador Dali’, exhibition catalogue, Julien Levy Gallery, New York, 1941.

11 Salvador Dalí, ‘Dali to the Reader’, catalogue of the exhibition Dalí, Galleries of M. Knoedler, New York, 1943.

12 ‘Dalí, Himself, Is Mystified

By His Art (?)’, The VirginianPilot, Norfolk (Virginia), 14/3/1941.

13 Translated from: Mostra di quadri disegni ed oreficerie di Salvador Dalí, exhibition catalogue, Sale dell’Aurora Pallavicini, Rome, 1954.

14 Salvador Dalí, 50 Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship, Dial Press, New York, 1948.

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Salvador Dalí, 50 secretos mágicos para pintar, Luis de Caralt, Barcelona, 1951.

Book from Salvador Dalí’s personal library. Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Figueres

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inspiration from, among others, Il libro dell’arte by Cennino Cennini. One of the most important early Renaissance treatises on the art of painting, Il libro dell’arte gives information and advice about pigments, brushes, and canvas, board and fresco painting techniques, as well as passing on tricks of the trade. Dalí applied the same approach to his 50 Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship: ‘It is a technical and at the same time a philosophical book. In it I analyse and summarize all my ideas, theories, principles and comments on pictorial art.’15 It is a treatise on painting ‘for professionals, purely pedagogical.’16 50 Secrets includes a comparative table in which Dalí assigns numerical values to painters ancient and modern for a range of qualities such as technique, inspiration, colour, theme, genius, composition, originality, mystery and authenticity. Inevitably, in this ranking, Raphael receives one of the highest scores.

dalí / raphael, a prolonged revery

‘If I look toward the past, beings like Raphael appear to me as true gods.’17

The young Dalí’s passion for Raphael was apparent from an early age. His sister Anna Maria recalled that he would become ‘literally ecstatic’ when he contemplated the works of the Renaissance artist.18 Dalí claimed that his extensive knowledge of the Italian painter and his lack of due deference were the cause of his definitive expulsion from the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in 1926, after he dared to inform the three professors on the board of examiners that they were not fit to assess him because he knew a great deal more about Raphael than all of them combined.19 Given Dalí’s firm belief that painterly technique attained its maximum of experience and perfection in the

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Renaissance,20 it was inevitable that he should focus his attention on Raphael, to whom he attributed divine qualities. Dalí felt that he had to interrogate Raphael and ‘with fervour turn [his] gaze towards Olympus’.21 Indeed, in 1941, in the catalogue of his exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery he remarked that his most recent canvases ‘seem painted under the complaisant gaze of Raphael’,22 and a few years later he declared that his great desire was to recreate Raphael ‘for beauty is one and indivisible’.23 A considerable number of Dalí’s paintings were inspired by the work of the Renaissance artist.24 Dalí was interested not only in the themes of Raphael’s pictures but also and especially in the drawing, and sought to perfect his own technique by rediscovering the tradition of the old masters: ‘that technique, so complete, which permitted them to use, in ultra-limited and contiguous spaces, the coexistence of descriptive varieties […].’25 Gala shared Dalí’s fascination with Raphael. In fact it was she, as early as the nineteen thirties, who first turned his attention towards Classicism and Italy: ‘We were consumed with admiration over reproductions of Raphael. There one could find everything – everything that we surrealists have invented constituted in Raphael only a tiny fragment of his latent but conscious content of unsuspected, hidden and manifest things.’26 For the most part, Dalí’s access to Raphael was by way of reproductions in the many books in his library and prints of individual works.27 In the photographs that document the different spaces in which he worked we very often see prints, mounted on the easel or directly on the canvas of the work in progress, and framed reproductions can also be seen on the walls of his library and his studios.

The Madonna of the Goldfinch, the Sistine Madonna and The Deposition are the three principal works by Raphael that Dalí kept close to him throughout his life, and in contexts as different as his studio in Monterey and his workshop in Portlligat.

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15 Translated from: Armando Rivera, ‘Hablando con Salvador Dali’, Ecos, New York, 28/12/1947, p. 30.

16 Translated from: “Dalí visita el museo del Prado”, La Tarde, Madrid, 14/12/1948.

17 Salvador Dalí, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, op. cit., p. 4.

18 Translated from: Anna Maria Dalí, Salvador Dalí visto por su hermana, Juventud, Barcelona, 1949, p. 118.

19 Joaquín Soler Serrano, televised interview with Salvador Dalí, A Fondo, RTVE, 1977.

20 Salvador Dalí, ‘Dali to the Reader’, op. cit.

21 Translated from: Salvador Dalí, What I Mean [1945], in Obra completa, vol. IV, Ensayos 1, Destino, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Sociedad Estatal de Conmemoraciones Culturales, Barcelona, Figueres, Madrid, 2005, p. 525.

22 Salvador Dalí, ‘The Last Scandal of Salvador Dali’, op. cit.

23 Salvador Dalí, ‘Appendix.

History of Art, Short but Clear’, catalogue of the exhibition New Paintings by Salvador Dali, Bignou Gallery, New York, 1947-1948.

24 See the itinerary ‘Dalí and Raphael in the Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings’ in Breaking News. Salvador DalíRaphael Monographic, https:// www.salvador-dali.org/en/ breaking-news/monographicdali-raphael/educationalitinerary-dali-rafael [consulted 29/11/2018].

25 Salvador Dalí, ‘Dali to the Reader’, op. cit.

26 Salvador Dalí, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, op. cit., p. 353.

27 See the text ‘In Dalí’s Studio. On the Working Method of The Ascension of Saint Cecilia’ by Irene Civil, p. 44-49.

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fig. 6 Reproduction of Raphael’s Madonna of the Goldfinch, which Dalí used for the paintings Maximum Speed of Raphael’s Madonna and Microphysical Madonna, ca. 1954. Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Figueres fig. 7 Reproduction of Raphael’s Sistine Madonna, which Dalí used for the paintings Quasi-grey picture which, closely seen, is an abstract one; seen from two metres is the Sistine Madonna of Raphael; and from fifteen metres is the ear of an angel measuring one metre and a half; which is painted with anti-matter; therefore with pure energy, The cut end of Van Gogh’s ear dematerializing itself from its frightful existentialism and pi-mesonically exploding in the dazzlement of Raphael’s Sistine Madonna and Virgin of Guadalupe. Patron Saint of Mexico, ca. 1958. Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Figueres

Raphael, The Deposition or Deposizione Borghese, ca. 1507. Galleria Borghese, Rome

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Salvador Dalí, The cut end of Van Gogh’s ear dematerializing itself from its frightful existentialism and pi-mesonically exploding in the dazzlement of Raphael’s Sistine Madonna or Cosmic madonna, ca. 1958

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Salvador Dalí, Quasi-grey picture which, closely seen, is an abstract one; seen from two metres is the Sistine Madonna of Raphael; and from fifteen metres is the ear of an angel measuring one metre and a half; which is painted with anti-matter; therefore with pure energy or Antimatter Ear or Madonna, 1958. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

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fig. 11 Salvador Dalí, Virgin of Guadalupe. Patron Saint of Mexico, 1958. Private collection >

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It is fascinating to see how Dalí interacted with the books on Raphael in his library, which are now in the Centre for Dalinian Studies. It is as if he were seeking to engage in an unmediated relationship with the works of the Italian master. There are many places where pages are missing, probably removed by the artist for closer study, and others where Dalí has sketched and drawn directly on the pages of the book, tracing a grid over the details that most interested him as a first step towards reproducing them on a larger scale in his paintings.

One of the most illuminating examples of this for an understanding of Dalí’s working process is The Ascension of Saint Cecilia,28 which was inspired by Raphael’s Saint Catherine of Alexandria.29 Dalí set up a print of the Raphael painting next to his own canvas, and also drew grids directly on the reproduction of the painting in one of his books on the Italian painter’s work.

Raphael, Hyperion, New York, 1941. From Salvador Dalí’s personal library.

Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Figueres

Dalí also made reference to other paintings by Raphael.

For his Galarina (1945),30 inspired by the Ritratto di giovane donna (La Fornarina), Dalí replaced Raphael’s model with Gala, ‘because Gala is to me what his Fornarina was to Raphael’31 while Madonna of the Goldfinch served as the basis for works such as Maximum Speed of Raphael’s Madonna and Microphysical Madonna (both ca. 1954),32 while the Sistine Madonna was the starting point for paintings such as Antimatter Ear, Cosmic Madonna and The Virgin of Guadalupe, all from 1958.33

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fig. 13 Salvador Dalí, page of the book Raphael, Hyperion, New York, 1941, with intervention by the artist

Raphael continued to be a key reference for Dalí in his later years. The 1979 painting In Search of the Fourth Dimension features details of works by the Renaissance master,34 such as the group of figures from the fresco The School of Athens, and drawings by Raphael that Dalí took from his books.35 Salvador Dalí, in keeping with his baptismal name, set out to do ‘nothing less than to rescue painting from the void of modern art’,36 and he did so by turning his gaze towards Classical artists such as Raphael. According to Dalí, ‘modern artists have a horror of the dazzling

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perfection of the masters of the Renaissance’,37 while he, in contrast, was prepared to swim against the tide and enter into direct dialogue with the great tradition and the painting of Raphael, always with absolute creative freedom. Dalí strove to be classic, Classical, and with his characteristic irony and spirit of provocation he asked: ‘who knows if some day I shall not without intending it be considered the Raphael of my period?’38

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28 See the text ‘The Ascension of Saint Cecilia, ca. 1955’ by Montse Aguer i Teixidor. Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings by Salvador Dalí, cat. no. 706.

29 See https://www. nationalgallery.org.uk/ paintings/raphael-saintcatherine-of-alexandria [consulted: 29/11/2018] 30 Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings by Salvador Dalí, cat. no. 597.

31 Recent paintings by Salvador Dali, exhibition catalogue, Bignou Gallery, New York, 1945.

32 Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings by Salvador Dalí, cat. no. 683 and 685.

33 Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings by Salvador Dalí, cat. no. 734, 746 and 748.

34 Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings by Salvador Dalí, cat. no. 908.

35 In the case of the painting In Search of the Fourth Dimension we can be sure that the reference was A Battle of Nude Warriors with Captives (Oxford, The Ashmolean Museum, Western Art Drawings Collection, WA1846.179), reproduced in the book by U. Middeldorf, Raphael’s Drawings, H. Bitter, New York, 1945.

36 Salvador Dalí, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, op. cit., p. 4.

37 Salvador Dalí, “The Decadence of Modern Art”, Herald American, Syracuse, New York, 20/08/1950.

38 Salvador Dalí, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, op. cit., p. 17.

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Director of the Dalí Museums

THE ASCENsion of saint CECiLIA, ca. 1955

The loan from the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid to the Dalí Theatre-Museum of the Raphael painting Madonna of the Rose as part of the exhibition project On Tour through Spain, organized by the Prado in commemoration of the museum’s bicentenary was the starting point of the exhibition Dalí/Raphael, a prolonged revery. The title comes from a statement by Dalí in his treatise on painting, 50 Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship, published in 1948, in which – like Cennino Cennini or Leonardo da Vinci, among others – he pays tribute to the technique and art of painting, and also, significantly, to the distinction of the artist.

Raphael, The Holy Family with the Infant Saint John the Baptist or Madonna of the Rose, ca. 1517. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid

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Salvador Dalí, one of the most renowned artists of his century and of ours, affords us a new reading of the work of Raphael and the theme of the ascension in this innovative exhibition in which the two paintings, Raphael’s Madonna of the Rose and Dalí’s The Ascension of Saint Cecilia1 – together with drawings, photographs and other material from the artist’s studio that shed light on his creative process – enable us to trace some of the ways in which the great Renaissance painter influenced

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Dalí in his approach to harmony, perspective, perfection, colour, the presence of a particular landscape, and also in the engagement with an ideal of beauty, mysticism and spirituality, all intimately connected, for Dalí, with science and more specifically with nuclear physics and the discontinuity of matter.

In an interview, Dalí, very significantly, declared: ‘What is important is that we must paint the subjects in a way that corresponds to the time we live in, 1951; this means that if Raphael painted a virgin according to the cosmogony of the Renaissance, today this cosmogony has varied. The same subject that Raphael painted, if Raphael painted it today, because he would have other knowledge (nuclear physics, psychoanalysis, for example), he would paint as well as then, but he would respond to today’s cosmogony. And the religious theme is, for me, the oldest and the most current; but it must be treated according to the scientific knowledge of our time […].’2 From a very early age Dalí expressed ​​ a deep admiration for Raphael, an admiration that also manifested itself in significant aspects of his development, such as the creation of a persona or character: ‘I had let my hair grow as long as a girl’s, and looking at myself in the mirror I would often adopt the pose and the melancholy look which so fascinated me in Raphael’s self-portrait, and whom I should have liked to resemble as much as possible.’3 Also worthy of note is the Italian painter’s influence on Dalí’s overall artistic evolution, from Self-Portrait with Raphaelesque Neck,4 ca. 1921, to the stereoscopic set The School of Athens and The Fire in the Borgo,5 or the oil painting Raphaelesque Hallucination,6 ca. 1979. We should bear in mind here that the comparative table in Dalí’s treatise 50 Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship ranks Raphael immediately after Vermeer among the greatest painters of all time. Dalí rated Raphael’s drawing, genius, composition, originality and mystery especially highly.

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1 Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings by Salvador Dalí, cat. no. 706.

2 Translated from: Manuel del Arco, Salvador Dalí, Dalí al desnudo, Barcelona, José Janés, 1952, p. 89-90.

3 Salvador Dalí, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, Dial Press, New York, 1942, p. 124.

4 Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings by Salvador Dalí, cat. no. 103.

5 Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings by Salvador Dalí, cat. no. 896.

6 Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings by Salvador Dalí, cat. no. 911.

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< fig. 3 Gala and Salvador Dalí at the Del Monte Lodge, Pebble Beach, California, at the time when the painter was writing 50 Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship, 1947. Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Figueres < fig. 2

Les Waldman, Portrait of Salvador Dalí, n.d. Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Figueres

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Raphael, Saint Catherine of Alexandria, ca. 1507. The National Gallery, London

fig. 4

dalí / raphael

a prolonged revery

Dalí’s work abounds in references to Raphael and the Renaissance, which allow him to class himself as a good artist in relation to his contemporaries (‘I am a bad painter. If I compare my canvases with those of the Renaissance, with those of Raphael, for example, I realize the total disaster of all my work. But that does not prevent me, thanks to my style, from being one of the best contemporary artists.’7) and at the same time to associate the Renaissance with both mysticism and science. In the work that concerns us here, Dalí took a painting by Raphael, and its central element, Saint Catherine of Alexandria, and interpreted them in a new light at a particular turning point in his career: this was the mystical-nuclear stage, in which he expressed himself in new languages grounded in the legacy of the great masters of painting, because his declared goal now was to become classic.

Dalí became interested in the innovations of contemporary American painters and their visual experiments in the mid nineteen forties, and combined this with his appreciation of the classic works of the great tradition in his quest to represent both external and internal reality in order to ‘shake up’ the viewer. Dalí appeals to our subconscious, our desire and our memory and to our ability to interpret the world in a polysemous way. He sought to apprehend the reality beyond the human eye, concerned as he was to engage with the viewer’s mind.

The Ascension of Saint Cecilia, painted in his studio at Portlligat in or around 1955, is one of a series of works in which classicism is very much in evidence and in which Dalí at the same time invokes both nuclear physics and the discontinuity of matter. The picture is a focal composition in which the chromaticism is centred on the discontinuous figure of the saint, exploded into particles intermingled with forms based on the rhinoceros horn, a key symbol in Dalí’s work.

7 Translated from: Salvador Dalí, ‘Une interview exceptionnelle: Dali se confesse’, Arts, Paris, 11/06/1958, n. p.

The painter was drawn to the symbolism of the rhinoceros horn, especially in the nineteen fifties, as a traditional emblem of purity and chastity and at the same time for

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fig. 5

Salvador Dalí, The Ascension of Saint Cecilia, ca. 1955. Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Figueres

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the ascension of saint cecilia

montse aguer

33

its sexual connotations, because it has been supposed to be a potent aphrodisiac; he was also interested in the horn as constituting a logarithmic curve and a perfect form. In the lecture he gave at the Sorbonne in Paris on December 17, 1955, entitled ‘Phenomenological aspects of the paranoid-critical method’, Dalí drew attention to the relationship he had established between a painting by his admired Vermeer, The Lacemaker, and the rhinoceros horn. Significantly, Dalí declared: ‘Raphael painted only with profiles of forms very similar to the logarithmic curves that are present in the horn of the rhinoceros.’8

8 Translated from: Salvador Dalí, ‘Aspectes fenomenològics del mètode paranoicocrític’, in Obra Completa, vol. IV, Assaigs 1, Destino, Fundació GalaSalvador Dalí, Barcelona, Figueres, 2005, pp. 671-683.

9 Salvador Dalí, Hidden Faces, Dial Press, New York, 1944, p. 113.

Regarding the figure of the saint, in 1944, in an almost premonitory passage in his novel Hidden Faces, Dalí observes of one of his characters, Betka. That ‘she was a Saint Cecilia’, and specifically that this was because she felt ‘so weakened […] so disembodied and as if held up by the absence of weight which the almost absolute unconsciousness of her own movements imparted to her. She had the curious sensation, which she had never yet experienced, of perceiving the effect of her own movements only a few seconds after she had made them.’9 Once again here we are struck by the close connection between the artist’s literary and pictorial work and reminded that he liked to refer to himself as a thinking machine.

It is also interesting to bear in mind here Dalí’s working process, which is very graphically captured in a photograph that can be seen in the exhibition. The painter has placed at the top of his easel, as a model, a print of Raphael’s Saint Catherine of Alexandria, and has drawn a grid on the reproduction of the painting in a book containing works by the Italian master, currently conserved in the library of the Centre for Dalinian Studies. The numerous photographs in the exhibition document Dalí’s various studios, and especially his only really continuous workplace, at Portlligat, where we see prints affixed to the easel or mounted directly on the canvas of the current work in progress, or framed and hung on the walls of his library or his various studios.

< fig. 6 Publifoto, Dalí’s oil painting The Ascencion of Saint Cecilia with the reproduction of Raphael’s Saint Catherine of Alexandria in his studio at Portlligat, ca. 1955. Fundació GalaSalvador Dalí, Figueres

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dalí / raphael

10 Translated from: José María Massip, ‘Dalí hoy’, Destino no. 660, Barcelona, 01/04/1950, pp. 3-5.

Dalí’s ideal landscape of Portlligat and Cadaqués is another constant in his work, and in this regard, too, he was very close to Raphael, the painter from and of Urbino. Both artists drew on an ultra-local landscape that they made universal. In the words of the Empordà painter: ‘I need the localism of Portlligat just as Raphael needed the landscape of Urbino, to arrive at the universal by the path of what is particular.’10 Dalí depicts that landscape in the lower half of The Ascension of Saint Cecilia, with the geology of the rocks and a sea that becomes a sky or a sky that becomes sea, in an intended confusion.

11 Salvador Dalí, 50 Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship, Dial Press, New York, 1948, p. 75.

a prolonged revery

With regard to chromaticism, Dalí goes straight to the essential in his experimentation with the contrast between the basic colours concentrated around and oriented towards the figure of the saint and the grey that presides over the painting. Dalí frequently referred to the optical grey of Velázquez, another major influence, which effectively reinforces the rest of the palette and especially the white and the luminous yellow of the discontinuous particles surrounding the figure of the saint, which call to mind another recurring Dalinian symbol, that of phosphenes as allusions to a lost intrauterine paradise. fig. 7 Brassaï, Salvador Dalí painting The Ascension of Saint Cecilia in his studio at Portlligat, 1955. Private collection >

With this exhibition we have the satisfaction of fulfilling one of Salvador Dalí’s wishes, that of having one of his paintings hang next to a Raphael, in the present instance in a show that, in Dalí’s own poetic expression, is the result of a ‘prolonged revery’, as he explains to us in more detail in his treatise on painting, 50 Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship: ‘And I shall assume that your picture has resisted all these tests, and still others, like the fascinating one of representing it to yourself in imagination, in the course of a prolonged revery, hanging in a museum next to one of your preferred Raphaels.’11

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dalí / raphael

a prolonged revery

centre for dalinian studies

Conservation and Restoration Department

Untitled. Saint Peter’s Basilica. Explosion of Mystical Faith in the Midst of a Cathedral, 1959 -1974

Untitled. Saint Peter’s Basilica. Explosion of Mystical Faith in the Midst of a Cathedral is one of the most hidden-away, little-known works in the Dalí Theatre-Museum, situated as it is under the dome. Dalí presented it in or around 1974, when the museum first opened its doors to the public, by which time it had been in his studio at Portlligat for almost fifteen years.

Enrique Sabater, Salvador Dalí in front of the painting Untitled. Saint Peter’s Basilica. Explosion of Mystical Faith in the Midst of a Cathedral in his studio in Portlligat, ca. 1974

fig. 1

The painting, which is part of the installation created by Dalí for the Twisted Christ altar, is placed so that it cannot be seen directly, but only reflected in a mirror. The very large canvas depicts the basilica of St. Peter’s in the Vatican, in which hovers the nebulous figure of a virgin saint that is essentially the same as the central figure in The Ascension of Saint Cecilia (ca. 1955).1 Explosion of Mystical Faith in the Midst of a Cathedral is yet another instance of Dalí taking inspiration from a Renaissance masterpiece – in this case, Raphael’s Saint Catherine of Alexandria,2 painted around 1506. The fact is that during the 1950s Dalí was inspired by a number of other works by the Master of Urbino: in addition to the figure of Saint Catherine, Raphael’s Madonna of the Goldfinch3 is present in Dalí’s The Maximum Speed of Raphael’s Madonna, just as the Sistine Madonna4 was the starting point for his The Virgin of Guadalupe.

untitled. saint peter’s basilica

ced

The composition of Explosion of Mystical Faith is harmonious and balanced, with an aerial perspective of considerable depth emphasized by the light of the central nave of the basilica, in which the basic colours of the figure – red, blue, green and yellow – are reminiscent of those of Dalí’s Saint Cecilia and of Raphael’s Saint Catherine. What stands out above all, even viewed in the mirror concealed behind the altar under the dome of the Theatre-Museum, is the central explosion of whites and yellows, the point that attracts our attention.

Here once again we are dealing with a work with multiple meanings. Dalí placed the saint at the epicentre of Catholicism, the basilica of St. Peter’s in the Vatican. The artist’s chosen perspective allows us to see the crossing of the church over which the cupola is raised and a somewhat sketchily depicted ceremonial communion, which includes a bishop in the right foreground and the figure of Gala, ascending towards the centre and clearly identified by the ribbon in her hair. The other figures are lost in a mist that allows us to make out no more than incomplete profiles. Dalí probably borrowed this throng of people from two sources that were of particular interest to him at the time, but who are these figures hidden by the mist and what do they represent?

By way of answer we have on the one hand the testimony of Andreu-Avel·lí Artís, who published under the nom de plume Sempronio: the journalist interviewed Dalí at Portlligat while he was working on The Ecumenical Council (ca. 1960), one of his great paintings on a religious theme, which also, interestingly, features the vaulted crossing of the basilica of St. Peter’s. Sempronio observes that ‘Dalí copies furiously from illustrated magazines, preferably from Life, which has printed photographs of ceremonies held in St. Peter’s in the Vatican’.5 On the other hand we have the study for Explosion of Mystical Faith in the Midst of a Cathedral in the collection of the Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, which affords valuable insights into the artist’s working method. He took an anonymous gouache, on paper mounted on cardboard, representing the interior of St. Peter’s, and drew on top of this in chalk the figure of Saint Catherine, with drapery in chalk and

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1 Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings by Salvador Dalí, cat. no. 706.

2 In the National Gallery in London, https://www. nationalgallery.org.uk/ paintings/raphael-saintcatherine-of-alexandria [Consulted: 22/01/2019].

3 In the Galleria degli Uffizi, https://www.uffizi.it/opere/ madonna-col-bambino-e-sangiovannino-detta-madonnadel-cardellino [Consulted: 22/01/2019].

4 In the Gemälde Galerie Alte Meister of the Staatliche Kunstsammlung Dresden (Dresden State Art Collections), https://gemaeldegalerie. skd.museum/ausstellungen/ sixtinische-madonna/ [Consulted: 22/01/2019].

5 Sempronio [Andreu-Avel·lí Artís i Tomàs], ‘Lo que Dalí se trae entre manos’, Revista Gran Via de actualidades, artes y letras, 20/08/1960, Barcelona, p. 4.

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Louis-Jean Desprez, Interior of Saint Peter’s Illuminated, 1776-1784.

Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, New York.

fig. 2

fig. 3 Salvador Dalí, Preparatory study with enlargement grid for Untitled.

Saint Peter’s Basilica.

Explosion of Mystical Faith in the Midst of a Cathedral, ca. 1958. Fundació GalaSalvador Dalí, Figueres.

Salvador Dalí, Preparatory study without enlargement grid for Untitled.

Saint Peter’s Basilica.

Explosion of Mystical Faith in the Midst of a Cathedral, ca. 1958. Fundació GalaSalvador Dalí, Figueres.

fig. 4

dalí / raphael

a prolonged revery

untitled. saint peter’s basilica

ced

gouache, also adding the censer smoke and the light playing on the crowd. He then stuck a sheet of transparent plastic onto this picture, marked off in squares forming a grid that enabled him to enlarge the image. The gouache that Dalí used as a basis would seem to date from the late nineteenth or early twentieth century and to derive from a series of engravings and drawings attributed to the painter and architect Louis-Jean Desprez (ca. 1743-1804), possibly made in collaboration with Francesco Piranesi (ca. 17581810)6, of views of the interior of the Holy See. Francesco Piranesi was the son of the great Giambattista Piranesi, whose famous series of engravings, Carceri d’Invenzione, from 1749/1750, are displayed in the Theatre-Museum in Figueres.

Both Desprez and the younger Piranesi were active in Rome at a time of transition, as Neoclassicism began to make way for the incipient Romantic movement. This was a period in which a wider public was coming to know and admire Europe’s architectural heritage by means of engravings of vistas and interiors, and this was especially true of the city of Rome. It was also the heyday of the Grand Tour,7 an extended journey through southern and central Europe that necessarily included a prolonged stay in the Eternal City.

Dalí went back to one of these Neoclassical interiors and adapted it to the new language he had been evolving for some time, culminating in the Explosion of Mystical Faith in the Midst of a Cathedral. In The Ascension of Saint Cecilia and in the draft study for Explosion of Mystical Faith we are in the presence of Dalí’s nuclear mysticism, that reflection of the artist’s overlapping interest in nuclear physics and in Catholicism.8 With his mystical-nuclear painting, Dalí returned to the themes of Renaissance and Classical art in a modern style, bringing to them a dynamic of progress similar to that offered by the latest scientific knowledge.9 The figure of the saint disintegrates into rhinocerontic forms, recurrent features of Dalí’s painting of the Fifties, which he used to represent the perfect logarithmic curve.

These forms are repeated in the sketch for the Explosion of Mystical Faith in the Midst of a Cathedral (ca. 1958). The painter was embracing new ideas and advances in science and evolving, as he believed a good artist must do.

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6 In the Cooper Hewitt Smitshsonian Design Museum, New York. http://cprhw. tt/o/2DU5T/ [Consulted: 22/01/2019].

7 The Grand Tour, a 17th- and 18th-century rite of passage for young gentlemen, was a guided educational trip around continental Europe, often lasting several years and usually including a long stay in Italy, since Rome was regarded as the most culturally important destination on the itinerary.

8 Carme Ruiz González, ‘Más allá de Leda. El arte de conjugar religión y ciencia’, in Dalí atómico, Fundació Bancària ”la Caixa”, Barcelona, 2018, p. 145.

9 Lucia Moni, ‘Dalí e il classicismo’, in Dalí il sogno del classico, Skira, Milano, 2016, p. 27-45. This is reflected in Dalí’s Mystical Manifesto, published in 1951, which affords a clear understanding of the artist’s commitment to uniting art and science in his painting, somethinghe felt to be necessary for the progress of art.

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dalí / raphael

10 Tachisme, a movement in painting that developed in France during the 1950s, consists in the application of taches or touches of colour to the canvas in a spontaneous and dynamic manner..

The explosion we see in the heart of the saint in Explosion of Mystical Faith in the Midst of a Cathedral is expressed by a rapid energetic handling of the brush that has moved on from nuclear mysticism and is now closer to European Tachisme10. It is worth noting here Dalí’s friendship with the French painter Georges Mathieu, whose actions and appearances influenced the evolution of the Dalinian image, as Juan José Lahuerta has pointed out.11

11 Salvador Dalí, Manifest místic, in Obra Completa, Vol. IV, Assaigs 1, Destino, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Barcelona, Figueres, 2005, p. 1145-1146.

a prolonged revery

Explosion of Mystical Faith in the Midst of a Cathedral marks the next step forward from that period of pictorial evolution in Dalí’s work which corresponds to his mystical-nuclear period. The picture can be seen as a modern reading of the spiritual, but also of the masters of Classical painting in whom Dalí was increasingly interested, conjugating the past with his own age in a single composition whose exceptional interest is due in no small measure to the story behind it and the light it sheds on the Dalí Theatre-Museum of which it is part.

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Salvador Dalí, Untitled. Saint Peter’s Basilica. Explosion of Mystical Faith in the Midst of a Cathedral, 1959-1974. Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Figueres

fig. 5

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dalĂ­ / raphael

a prolonged revery

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dalí / raphael

a prolonged revery

IRENE CIVIL

Head of Conservation, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí

IN DALÍ’S STUDIO. On the Working Method in The Ascension of Saint Cecilia The large number of photographs of the various studios in which Salvador Dalí worked in the course of his creative career, preserved in the photographic archive of the Centre for Dalinian Studies at the Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, enable us to enter into some of the secrets of the artist’s studio. If we look at the photographs from the 1940s of his studios on the Monterey peninsula in California, or those from the 1950s of Portlligat (Dalí’s studio par excellence), we are immediately struck by the close confines and feverish environment in which Dalí worked.

Detail of the face of Saint Catherine of Alexandria on which Dalí has drawn a grid in pencil, from a page of Raphael (1948). Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Figueres

fig. 1

The artist’s easel is surrounded by small tables covered with all kinds of tools and materials, such as tubes of pigment, spatulas and brushes and small pots of oil and varnish. We can see that Dalí liked to work on several paintings at once: these are set up on easels or leaning against the furniture, between the spotlight and the multitude of objects that the artist collected and painted. There are also several preparatory drawings and inspirational photographs hung on the wall or on the easel itself: an example of this is the persistent presence of reproductions of such paintings by Raffaello Sanzio – Raphael – as the Madonna of the Goldfinch, the Sistine Madonna or the Deposizione Borghese. In addition, the various art books we see propped open at some significant illustration show us the extent to which such images were a key element in the artist’s creative process and method of work.

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Drawing of the face of The Ascension of Santa Cecilia, ca. 1955, with grid on transparent sheet. Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Figueres

fig. 2

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dalĂ­ / raphael

a prolonged revery

in dalí’s studio

irene civil

At the present time most of these books are preserved in the Centre for Dalinian Studies, together with the rest of Dalí’s library and his personal archive. In particular, the Centre has a set of magnificent volumes on the art of Raphael, whose pages bear witness to how often they were consulted and worked on by the painter. It is not uncommon to find whole leaves torn out; pages daubed with paint; illustrations cut out, with square grids drawn on them, and even the occasional Raphaelesque pencil sketch by Dalí. The great Renaissance artist was one of Dalí’s crucial references throughout his artistic career, and in the case of The Ascension of Saint Cecilia,1 the oil painting we present in the exhibition Dalí/Raphael, a Prolonged Revery, Dalí was inspired by Raphael’s painting Saint Catherine of Alexandria. What is more, we can see that from his surrealist period on Dalí used a variety of reproductions and photographs from diverse sources not only as inspiration but also as elements to be incorporated into the composition of his paintings. These images include, as we have seen, plates of illustrations from art books and magazines, as well as photographs of the artist’s models, such as Gala, taken in Dalí’s studio by the photographers with whom he worked. This set of images used as preparatory material are of enormous value in understanding one of the working methods used most extensively by the artist in his creative process from the 1930s on.

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Reproduction of Saint Catherine of Alexandria by Raphael. Preparatory material for the painting The Ascension of Saint Cecilia, ca. 1955.

Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Figueres

fig. 4

< fig. 3 Detail of the painting The Ascension of Saint Cecilia, ca. 1955. Fundació GalaSalvador Dalí, Figueres

the working process In this way, the Catalan painter took the figure of Saint Catherine as a preparatory material in the technical process of executing his painting. Once Dalí had chosen​​ the image he wanted to incorporate into his composition – in this case, the reproduction of Raphael’s painting – he copied, traced and transferred it to the canvas. But, how did he do this? What was his working process? Here Dalí used the grid method, one of several traditional means of transferring an image from one support to another and enlarging or decreasing the dimensions of the figure. The drawing of a regular grid on the plate

1 Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings by Salvador Dalí, cat. no. 706.

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dalí / raphael

Julian P. Graham, Salvador Dalí with his painting Dematerialization Near the Nose of Nero in his studio in Monterey, California, ca. 1947. Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí. On the easel is a reproduction of Raphael’s Madonna of the Goldfinch

fig. 5

Ulrich Middeldorf, Raphael’s Drawings, H. Bittner, New York, 1945. Book from Salvador Dalí’s personal library. Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Figueres >

fig. 6

Raphael, Phaidon, London, 1948. Book from Salvador Dalí’s personal library.

Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Figueres >

fig. 7

a prolonged revery

in dalí’s studio

irene civil

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reproducing the image of the saint made it easier to scale up the figure when it was copied in pencil on a sheet of tracing paper as a prelude to transferring it to the canvas by means of the transparent sheet.

The selection of the preparatory materials that Dalí used for The Ascension of Saint Cecilia, on exhibition at the Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí for the first time, includes the black and white print of Raphael’s Saint Catherine of Alexandria cut from a book, featuring the grid of pencil lines over the face, and the colour plate of the same work, also with a grid drawn in pencil on the area of the face, with rips in the paper and a strip of masking tape on the upper edge, probably to hold the tracing paper in place. The Fundació also has the pencil drawing of the face of Saint Cecilia on a sheet of transparent plastic, on which the grid and the scaled-up dimensions indicate that the painter went on to use this preparatory drawing for his painting Explosion of Mystical Faith in the Midst of a Cathedral,2 ca. 1959-1974 – yet another instance of the artist’s recurring tendency to reuse images in his works. Here again we see the extent of Dalí’s command of technical resources and delight in playing with them. Since the 1940s, Dalí had ​​been proclaiming himself a follower of the Renaissance classical tradition and developing his interest in technique, to the point of writing a book to guide aspiring painters, 50 Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship, in which, among other technical tips and insights, he explains his own working method step by step,3 although his tireless creative activity went far beyond matters of technique. Dalí attached little or no importance to whether the figures and other elements in his paintings were copied, and pointed out that even Raphael had copied from Perugino’s works4. Dalí regarded technical resources as means to achieving his ultimate objective, which entailed the integration of several images into a singular composition conceived in accordance with the cosmogony of the moment, which in the case of The Ascension of Saint Cecilia is his mystical-nuclear phase.

So it is that in this painting Salvador Dalí presents the image of the saint as fragmented and floating.

2 Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings by Salvador Dalí, cat. no. 752.

3 Salvador Dalí, 50 Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship, Dial Press, New York, 1948.

4 Translated from: Alain Bosquet, Conversaciones con Salvador Dalí, in Obra completa, vol. VII, Entrevistas, Destino, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Sociedad Estatal de Conmemoraciones Culturales, Barcelona, Figueres, Madrid, 2006, p. 1074.

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dalí / raphael

a prolonged revery

‘I need the localism o Raphael needed the l to arrive at the unive what is particular.’

Salvador Dalí, ‘Dalí, hoy’, Destino, 1/4/1950

a prolonged revery

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of Portlligat just as landscape of Urbino, ersal by the path of

dalí / raPHael

a prolonged revery

exhibition

publication

curator

editing

Montse Aguer i Teixidor, director of the Dalí Museums

Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí

coordination and documentation

editorial coordination

Fiona Mata, Centre for Dalinian Studies Lucia Moni, Centre for Dalinian Studies

Nuri Aldeguer, Educational Service Fiona Mata, Centre for Dalinian Studies With the support of: Bea Crespo, Centre for Dalinian Studies

centre for dalinian studies

Laura Bartolomé Bea Crespo Rosa M. Maurell Cuca R. Costa Carme Ruiz Clara Silvestre

texts

Montse Aguer Irene Civil Fiona Mata Lucia Moni

design

rights management

Pep Canaleta

Mercedes Aznar

graphic design

design

Alex Gifreu

Alex Gifreu

preventive conservation

revision and translation

Elisenda Aragonès Irene Civil Laura Feliz Josep M. Guillamet

Graham Thomson

registrar

acknowledgements

Rosa Aguer image archive

Rosa M. Maurell audiovisual archive

Lucia Moni communication

Imma Parada digital area

Cinzia Azzini website

Dalí/Raphael Monographic

All of us at the Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí would like to thank the institutions and individuals who have very kindly provided their support for this publication: Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid; Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence; Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica - Palazzo Barberini, Rome; Musei Vaticani, Vatican City; The National Gallery, London; Photographic Archive of the Historic Archives of the City of Barcelona; Estate Brassaï and RMN-Grand Palais; Antoni Vidal; EFE; the family of Enrique Sabater.

copyrights

From the works of Salvador Dalí: © Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Figueres, 2019 Images of works from other institutions: Gallerie degli Uffizi, Firenze - Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali (p. 10) Galleria Borghese, Roma - Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali (p. 20) © Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid (p. 26) © The National Gallery, London (p. 30) From the image of Gala and Salvador Dalí: Image rights of Gala and Salvador Dalí reserved.

Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Figueres, 2019

Photographs: © Melitó Casals “Meli”/Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Figueres, 2019 (p. 24-25) Photo: Les Waldman (p. 28) Publifoto (p. 32) © Estate Brassaï - RMN-Grand Palais (p. 35) Photo: Enrique Sabater © Eduard Sabater (p. 36) © 2019. Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum/ Art Resource, NY/Photo SCALA, Florence (p. 38) © Toni Vidal, VEGAP, Girona, 2019 (p. 42-43) Photo: Julian P. Graham (p. 48)