At the Palauet Albéniz, which sits in the shadow of the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya and the Olympic Stadium and has the Joan Miro Museum as a neighbour, is a ceiling that Dali painted in 1969, a fresco entitled “The Hour of the Monarchy”.

With dizzying foreshortening indebted to Andrea Mantegna’s “Putti and Servants” on the ceiling of the Palazzo Ducale in Urbino, Italy, “The Hour” commemorates Spain’s reversion to monarchy in the wake of Franco’s republic.

Paul Chimera has on his website Meeting Dali noted the similarities to earlier Dali masterpieces including “The Ascension of Christ” of 1958, shown below, and details like the soft watch dangling to one side.

The Palauet Albéniz, colloquially called the “Little Palace” and, in English, the Albeniz Mansion, was designed in 1928 by Juan Moya as the official Barcelona residence of the royal family.

It’s named for the Catalan composer Isaac Albéniz (1860-1909), best known for his folk-oriented piano pieces and tributes to Spain and its royalty. The photo here is by Gemma Baulo, from NacioDigital.

Josep Playa, an authority on Dali’s life in Spain who gives lectures on behalf of the Dala-Salvador Dali Foundation, has said the figures in “The Hour of the Monarchy” are performing the sardana, the beloved Catalonian circle dance that appears in many of Dali’s paintings from early on.

Here, as in the ceiling decoration for the Palace of the Wind at the Dali Theatre-Museum in Figueras, shown below, can be seen some of the movements of the dance, in a “sardana of angels in the sky above the Empordà”.

Dali’s father was a great champion of the sardana, Playa says, often financing performances (one in honour of Federico García Lorca) and even helping edit the scores on occasion, as he did with a well-known piece called “For You I Cry”.

By 1921 the 17-year-old Dali was already acknowledged in his hometown as a talented artist, his skill having been lauded in the Barcelona newspaper La Tribuna. Salvador’s work was regularly on display at the Figueras festivals, for which he was invited to organise art exhibitions.

For a community tribute to teacher Enric Morera in October that year a periodical called The Empordà asked Dali illustrate its cover, from which a poster was also made. He depicted two couples dancing on “a kind of hill”. See this post about Dali’s early paintings of his hometown festivals.

Dali also did drawings of the dance for a biography of Pep Ventura, the musician and band leader who standardised the music for the sardana, and in 1928 he was commissioned to do a portrait of Ventura.

His 1921 watercolour “Sardana of the Witches”, now at the Dali Museum in Florida, is his best-known rendering of the dance, but his allegiance to the popular traditions of his homeland was faltering.

Dali biographer Dawn Ades has said that Dali was keen to learn the Charleston, the American dance craze, the better to distance himself from the provincialism of his native Catalonia.

Just the same, as late as 1979, Dali created “Pentagonal Sardana”, a stereoscopic work meant to be viewed with special glasses.

Here’s a view of the ceiling of the great hall at Gala’s chateau in Pubol, painted by her husband in 1971.

And in Madrid, for comparison’s sake, Goya’s ceiling fresco at the Hermitage of San Antonio de la Florida, which makes a peculiar appearance in this post about Dali’s student days.