Baby Salvador was baptised at Sant Pere’s Church on Plaza l’Esglesia in Figueras, a structure built in the 14th century atop a far more ancient church.
Three blocks from the house where he was born, this was also where he had his first communion — and his funeral. The dome of his Theatre-Museum can be glimpsed right behind it in the photo.
The painting here is “Freud’s Perverse Polymorph (Bulgarian Child Eating a Rat)” from 1939. In his first autobiography, Dali wrote about coming across, when he was five years old, a dying bat being eaten by ants.
He put it in his mouth, ants and all, and bit it almost in half. Ants showed up in his artwork for the rest of his life.
Other episodes of his childhood are addressed elsewhere at Dali Planet, but it’s interesting to note that a profound sexual curiosity seized him at an early age.
He was only six when he painted a landscape and fancied himself an artist, but by the following year he’d decided he wanted to be Napoleon instead.
“On the third floor of our house lived an Argentine family named Matas, one of whose daughters, Ursulita, was a renowned beauty. It was whispered in the Catalonian oral mythology of 1900 that she had been selected by Eugenio d’Ors as the archetype of Catalonian womanhood, in his book ‘La Ben Plantada’ (’The Well-Planted One’).
“Shortly after I reached the age of seven, the all-powerful social-libidinal attraction of the third floor began to exercise its sway over me. In the sultry twilights of early summer I would sometimes abruptly interrupt the supreme pleasure of drinking from the terrace faucet (delightfully thirsty, my heart beating fast) when the almost imperceptible creaking of the third-floor balcony door made me hope it would perhaps open.
“On the third floor I was worshiped as I was at home. There, every day at about six, around a monumental table in a drawing room with a stuffed stork, a group of fascinating creatures with the hair and the Argentine accent of angels would sit and take mate [an Argentinian tea], served in a silver sipper which was passed from mouth to mouth.
“This oral promiscuity troubled me peculiarly and engendered in me whirls of moral uneasiness in which the blue flashes of the diamonds of jealousy already shone. I would in turn sip the tepid liquid, which to me was sweeter than honey, that honey which, as is known, is sweeter than blood itself — for my mother, my blood, was always present.
“My social fixation was sealed by the triumphal and sure road of the erogenous zone of my own mouth. I wished to sip Napoleon’s liquid!
“For Napoleon too was there, in the third-floor drawing room; there was a picture of him in the centre of the circle of glorious polychromes that adorned one end of a tin keg; this little keg was painted to look like wood and contained the voluptuous substance of the mate.”
Below, in “The Spectre of Sex Appeal”, from 1934, Dali portrays himself as a child with a hoop gazing curiously at the strange pleasures that life promises.
