Dali’s return to Spain in 1948, after spending the war overseas, had little of the warmth normally accorded a prodigal son, even though he went out of the way to smooth his repatriation.

Enrique Granell, an architect at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, wrote an account of the homecoming for the Barcelona website BCN, which can be downloaded in Pdf format here. What follows derives from that article.

Dali had left his homeland on poor terms, remembered first as a republican who’s spoken out in defence of Franco’s fascism and secondly as an eccentric and not very important artist. He had upset his fellow Catalonians by mocking tradition, the church and family ties and running off with a married Russian of questionable repute.

So when he came home, he set out to demonstrate at least a measure of orthodoxy, beginning with a visit to his father and sister in Cadaqués — with the press in tow. He and Dali Senior were pictured in the weekly Destino alongside headlines welcoming the now-famous artist back. (Salvador Dali Cusi, pictured here with his son, died in 1950.)

Dali told reporters he was returning to Spain for good, albeit not right away, and planned to have Emilio Puignau get busy on his house in Port Lligat. His artistic focus, he added, had shifted to classicism and, if not precisely religious themes, then at least mysticism.

He spent parts of 1948 writing and illustrating “50 Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship”, a pastiche of a Renaissance artist’s manual, and designing the sets and costumes for a Rome production of Shakespeare’s “As You Like It”.

And in 1949, while still in Rome, he met Pope Pius XII. Dali had decided to abandon his atheist cynicism in favour of Catholicism. The pontiff accepted his sincerity and blessed the painting that Dali had brought for him, the first of two versions he would do of “Madonna of Port Lligat” (detail here, click for the complete image).

In a lecture the following year, Dali tried to explain “Why I was Sacrilegious”, and in 1950 published an article on “The Decadence of Modern Art”. To Ian Gibson, author of a no-punches-pulled biography of the artist, it was “the most outrageous self-publicity campaign of his life”.

If it was a scam, Dali kept it up for a long time. A decade later he was back in the papal chambers, this time to meet Pope John XXIII.

It has been claimed, however, that althought there is full documentation of Dali’s November 1949 audience with Pope Pius, the only account of his May 1959 papal visit appeared in the French daily newspaper Paris Match that month. The Vatican did not dispute the report, it was noted, but neither the papal agenda nor the official Vatican newspaper The Roman Observer took notice of Dali’s presence.

He also made a point of visiting Eugeni d’Ors in Puigcerdà, the man who had alerted his father about his shameful pre-war shenanigans.

Picasso had long ago left Spain too, but was never anything else but Spanish in the world’s eyes. Joan Miró had returned after the Germans seized Paris and still occupied a pedestal in his countrymen’s eyes. He’d been asked about Dali’s imminent return and said as much as, “Oh, you mean the guy who paints neckties.”

Dali’s claimed to find the remark funny, but didn’t restrain his counterpunch: “The art of Miró, like all abstract painting, derives from decorative, or pseudo-decorative painting: they’re the ones who paint neckties, or furniture.” But he pointed out that he admired and always defended Miró abroad.

Dali spoke about Picasso in two public lectures on art, in October 1950 in Barcelona and in November 1951 in Madrid, at the inaugural Hispano-American Biennial Exhibition of Art.

“Picasso is a genius, but a genius of destruction,” he said on the first occasion. “His painting has a purely negative character, although in certain way this same character is the unique virtue of Picasso.” He compared him to an anarchist who cleans out the deadwood.

In Madrid, Dali delivered his oft-quoted comparison: “Picasso is Spanish; I am too. Picasso is a genius; I am too. Picasso is known in all the countries of the world; I am too. Picasso is not a communist; neither am I.”

Meanwhile he had eight new paintings on view at the exhibition, and the crowds queued to see them alone: “The Madonna of Port Lligat”, “The Piece of Cork”, “The Spectre of Sex Appeal”, “Basket of Bread”, “Leda Atomica”, “Dali as a Boy Raising the Skin of the Water to See a Sleeping Dog in the Shadow of the Sea, “The Ear of Wheat” and “Christ of Saint John of the Cross”.

Gaya Nuño was among critics who trashed Dali’s show in print, though, saying he had “weakened his legend” with his forays into the mystic and now seemed “more eager for reputation” than anything else.

In late 1948 a writer using the name Oriol Anguera (Golden Oriole) published a psychiatric analysis of Dali, producing many of the now-familiar explanations for his quirks and concluding with a quote from “Hamlet” — “Though this be madness, yet there is method in it.”

The issues raised — without benefit of Dali’s own excuses in “The Secret Life”, his autobiography that wasn’t released in Spain for many years — helped create a “love him or hate him” rift in public opinion about the artist. Ana-Maria Dali’s own book about her brother, published in 1949, didn’t improve attitudes toward him, especially when she revealed that the previous year’s family reconciliation had been a con.

Dali responded sullenly to these books and a third, gallery director Juan Antonio Gaya Nuño’s 1950 biography, by agreeing to an official version written by the nationally known interviewer Del Arco. It was disarmingly called “Dali in the Nude” and had a photo on the cover to prove its intent to hide nothing.

Between the cover and Dali’s bombastic pronouncements about his fellow Spanish artists, the book caused a scandal, and he kept a low profile for the next year.

Not until 1956 did Dali receive anything resembling a general public embrace in Spain, but with the help of the spirit of the late Antoni Gaudi, it was an event worth waiting for, as described in this post.

“The Trinity”, a 1960 study for “The Ecumenical Council”, still hangs in the Vatican Museums, although it doesn’t get a lot of promotion on the official website.

In fact none of the modern artists whose canvases were donated to the Holy See are mentioned, among them Gaugin, Chagall, Klee and Kandinsky. The paintings are on display at the gallery, however, jolting visitors from a romantic reverie awash with the expected Renaissance masters’ pious works, including murals by Michelangelo.

In the Borgia Rooms they stumble onto “The Trinity”. One tourist reports online seeing “a crucifixion by Dali that’s absolutely mesmerising”, though it’s not clear whether he means this painting, which is obviously not a crucifixion.

Other visitors have posted photos they took at the Vatican of this painting, without mentioning the title. I haven’t been able to find out any details about it. UPDATE: Karl Heinz Klumpner has kindly identified the painting. See comment #1 below the post.

Below are two Google Earth views of the Vatican Museums, seen at top left in the upper image and up close in the lower.

The Borgia Apartments were a private wing built for Alexander VI (Rodrigo Borgia, pope from 1492-1503) and being decorated by Bernardo di Betto, known as il Pinturicchio, at the time of the pontiff’s death. His mission was to depict the Borgia family’s self-proclaimed divine origins.

They were opened to the public at the end of the 19th century, and in 1973 Paul VI dedicated most of the rooms to the Vatican’s collection of 600 modern “religious” paintings, sculptures and graphics. The Pinacoteca itself dates to 1932, constructed specifically as an art gallery for Pius XI.

“The Ecumenical Council”, for which “The Trinity” was a preparation, features a less sexual Supreme Being within a Roman alcove (the baroque Vatican basilica that has been credited to the brush of Isidor Bea — see this post), flanked by a pair of saints whose faces are unrecognisable but, at a glance, might suggest Dali and Gala. Yet Salvador and Gala are both clearly portrayed beneath these figures.

The Holy Spirit hovers, completing a “trinity” of four, and across the centre of the scene gather the bishops and cardinals of the Ecumenical Council, rendered in such a dissolute way that some interpret their procession as signifying humanity’s adherence to meaningless tradition, in contrast to the Dalis’ sharply defined characteristics.

It’s interesting that Dali shows himself at a blank canvas, gazing at the viewer. It’s very much open to interpretation: Is he saying, “Now watch what I’m about to do”, or is he genuinely stumped as to how to depict the great mystery of the Holy Trinity?

Below is a sketch from the same time, also titled “The Ecumenical Council”.

The Church seemed to fuel Dali’s penchant for the enigmatic. He once hosted a two-hour press conference in Rome speaking entirely in Latin, a language he didn’t understand, apart from the root constructs it gave French and Spanish and whatever he might have recalled from mass.

On another occasion the Vatican had to gently deny his request to let him be filmed as he was nailed to the Sistine Chapel floor — crucified, in a sense — and thus adding his own two pesetas to the tireless joke about why Michelangelo didn’t also paint the Sistine floor.

But when Dali leapt back into Catholicism’s embrace in 1960 he bequeathed upon it a shower of new iconography, the rest of the surrealists chortling the whole time — at least until it suddenly wasn’t funny anymore.

Sharing Marx’s disdain for religion as the opiate of the masses, André Breton hit his own ceiling when he discovered that Dali had submitted “The Sistine Madonna” for the December 1960 International Surrealism Exhibition at the D’Arcy Galleries in New York.

He whipped out another tirade in the form of a leaflet called “We Don’t Ear It That Way”, not only trashing Dali’s supposed “conversion” but attacking Gala as a blasphemous stand-in for the Madonna, given Mrs Dali’s scandalous sexual appetite.

Also known as “Ear with Madonna”, “The Sistine Madonna” has been duly recognised as a precursor to pop art and op art. Dali’s use of Benday dots was well ahead of Roy Lichtenstein’s famous comic-strip blow-ups, and in incorporating a newspaper photograph of Pope John XXIII’s ear, he was showing Warhol the merit in sampling “found” images.

Within the pontiff’s ear is Raphael’s own “Sistine Madonna” from the 16th century, a detail of which is shown below.

The inclusion of trompe l’oeil items — the sheet of paper and a cherry dangling from a string, both casting shadows — forecast an even later favourite of modern art, although this was a revival of a trick found in 17th-century still-lifes.

The use of half-tone “screen dots” does of course hark back to pointillism, but Dali added a paranoic-critical dimension to produce optical illusions. In 1963’s “Portrait of My Dead Brother” the dots form a stylised bird emerging from the head and soldiers mustered at the chin of the subject (the original Salvador Dali, who died in childhood).

In 2005 there was a flurry of news-media interest when art expert Armando Ginesi announced that Dali had done a sculpture of Jesus on the cross for an Italian priest — in thanks for exorcising a demon from him.

Italy’s Ansa news agency reported that Ginesi found the 60x30cm crucifix among the personal belongings of Gabriele Maria Berardi in a storeroom in Rome. The priest had died in 1984.

Ginesi said Berardi told friends and relatives he performed an exorcism on Dali in France in 1947 when the friar was on temporary suspension from his order over a financial blunder.

Two Spanish experts on Dali purportedly told Ginesi there were “sufficient stylistic reasons” to believe it was his work. The sculpture of Christ belonged to the charity Berardi founded in 1971, the Association of the Volunteers of Charity (AVC), which Ansa said intended to sell it to raise funds.

Although this tidbit was widely disseminated on the Net, no follow-up seems to have been reported online, but Father Berardi certainly lives on. He was indeed an exorcist, according to several sources, and “one of the most credited exorcists in the history of the Catholic Church”, according to promotions for the books that Gabriella Carlizzi has written about him, which allude to his canonisation, a rather dubious prospect.

Steeped in controversy, Carlizzi — who calls herself the priest’s “spiritual daughter” — is elsewhere credited as the founder of the AVC, but seems to claimed she was appointed its director by Berardi … the year after he died.

The Catholic Church has formally distanced itself from the AVC, no doubt because its members claim to have been receiving, since 1989, instructions from the priest “by direct thread from Heaven” (”filo diretto dal Paradiso“). Father Gabriel allegedly wanted these messages kept secret, but gave his blessing for their publication following the May 1992 murder of Judge Giovanni Falcone, Sicily’s anti-Mafia crusader.

From what I’ve been able to understand in Italian-language sources, Carlizzi appears to have offered police evidence in this and other high-profile crimes which she or her associates obtained through supernatural means. The police declined, and the truth of her claims is, needless to say, hotly debated.

According to the AVC, Christmas 1992 witnessed the rebirth of Christ, in Rome, under the name “Giusto”, returned to defeat satanic corruption and usher in a New Era.

Carlizzi’s busy website is here, and it has an offshoot site on Berardi here, though as of July 2008 the latter was “under construction”.

The website of the Provincia della Santissima Annunziata dell’Ordine dei Servi di Maria offers a biography of Father Gabriel — born in Carpegna, Pesaro e Urbino, in 1912, ordained 1935, parish priest in Saint Martino, a chaplain in World War II, devoted to the needy and the politically persecuted and, from 1957 until his death, attached to the convent of the Seven Founding Saints, where he launched his Volunteers Association to help the poor hospitalised in Rome.

When death came with heart failure in 1984, it says, he was much admired.

The site mentions “dramatic personal experiences” without elaborating, but there’s no mention of exorcism, canonisation or Salvador Dali.

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