More about mystery in Dali’s art, an extension of this post.

In online blurbs and press releases, self-styled “Dalinean researcher” Roger Michel Erasmy continues to churn out “explanations” of Dali’s supposed magical or psychic precognition.

He earns his living writing books, though. “Le mystère de la gare de Perpignan” (1985), “Codex Dalianus” (1989) and “L’Apothéose du Dollar” (2004) present a more or less apocalyptic vision drawn from cryptic messages inferred from Dali’s canvases.

“Topical Abduction of Europe” (1983), from the elderly Dali’s “catastrophe series”, seems to be Erasmy’s launching pad, and Erasmy sees his oracle proved right in the politico-economic grappling of the European Union, with France’s May 2005 rejection of the European Constitution treaty being crucial evidence.

Dali, says Erasmy, foresaw the fall of the Nazism in “The Enigma of Hitler” (1939, detail here, with the Fuhrer circled) and the collapse of communism in both “The Enigma of William Tell” (1933, detail below), with Lenin knelt at his own coffin, and “Partial Hallucination — Six Apparitions of Lenin on a Grand Piano” (1931, shown further down).

Dali also predicted the 9/11 attacks (though I haven’t been able to identify in which artwork) and, as read in the “emblematic table” seen in “The Apotheosis of the Dollar” (1965, also further down), the disaster of the US-led war in Iraq.

Andrew Roberts, in “A History of the English-speaking Peoples Since 1900″, pointed out that the “newspaper” Dali once briefly circulated, the Dali News, had on November 25, 1947, published prophecies for the coming 10 years.

“The painter predicted such forthcoming occurrences as ‘The Summa Theologiae of St Thomas shall be revised by the atom cooked three times’ and ‘An American art critic of Irish blood shall win fame defending the Dalinian theory of painting.’

“He also predicted,” Roberts wrote, “that ‘Belgium shall know glory in legislation and finance’. Sure enough, 10 years later, that country became the focus for a new Great Power in the world.”

The European Economic Community came into being with a treaty signed in Rome on March 25, 1957, and the Belgian capital, Brussels, became the centre of the new European Union’s legislative and financial power.

Erasmy seems to believe that the figure sitting back from the piano keyboard in “Partial Hallucination” is Boris Yeltsin (it looks more like Max Ernst to me). The overall message is a warning about Russian aggression, he claims, drawing a line to Moscow’s 2008 invasion of Georgia and the intervention of French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who was then also heading the European Union. Ukraine, however, remains vulnerable, Erasmy has noted.

“The new geopolitical order described by Dali does not correspond at all to the hegemonic ideas of President Bush, nor to the futuristic designs of the eurocrats of Brussels,” Erasmy wrote in 2007.

“Tuna Fishing” (1967) evidently foresaw the European Union’s 2008 decision to shut down Mediterranean bluefin tuna fishing, which caused an uproar in France.

The interpretations that Erasmy has shared for free on his Dali Décodé website and blog haven’t always enjoyed the success he claims his three books have met with the reading public.

The Frenchman’s divinations of the prophetic meanings in Dali’s art failed signally in 2007 when French voters chose Sarkozy as president over Ségolène Royal.

What made Erasmy so sure that Royal would win the election?

Because the other Dali painting on which he’s built a career — “The Mystery of the Railway Station of Perpignan” — supposedly contains the “code” 229 CL 66.

This “message” Erasmy transcribes (by means I don’t understand). via the date of modern France’s founding, September 22, 1792, to Royal’s birthdate, September 22, 1953.

And then there was this postage stamp Dali designed in 1978, depicting Dante’s Béatrice, which Erasmy said presents the “myth-sign of Marianne”.

The stamp went on sale on November 17, 1979, he pointed out — and on the 27th anniversary of that date Royal was nominated as her Socialist Party’s candidate for the presidency. (Wikipedia says Royal was nominated on the 16th.)

Dali, Erasmy continued, produced no fewer than 64 variations on Millet’s popular painting “The Angelus” and insisted that the woman in the picture was a dominating “praying mantis” ready to crush the man. (Shown here are the left and right components of the stereoscopic “The Eye of the Angelus” from 1978.)

This woman, said Erasmy, is Ségolène Royal, who hails from and is president of the Poitou-Charentes region, where the repetition of the Angelus prayer was first introduced in 1318.

Dali Planet has much more about Dali and the Angelus in this post.

Finally, Erasmy noted, Cécilia Sarkozy — then still the wife of the eventual president — is the great-granddaughter of the celebrated Catalan composer Isaac Albéniz, for whom the city of Barcelona built a “palace” in 1929.

Forty years later Dali was asked to paint a fresco on the ceiling of the Palauet Albéniz (see this post), and did so with the coming reinvestiture of King Juan Carlos in mind. He called his mural “The Hour of the Monarchy” and this, in Erasmy’s mind, was a nod to Ségolène “Royal”.

Erasmy was surely on safer ground forecasting Barack Obama’s election on the basis of Dali’s “Poetry of America” (1943), which contains an acknowledged allusion to the evolving acceptance of racial equality.

Far less convincing is his claim that Obama’s effort to save the US auto industry was somehow foreshadowed in “The Appearance of the Town of Delft” (1936), with its vegetative car rotting from the roots.

And who has the energy to argue when he says the 2009 financial crisis was there for everyone to see in “Apotheosis of the Dollar”, and perhaps in “The Basket of Bread” as well?

The full title of the former painting is “Salvador Dali in the Act of Painting Gala in the Apotheosis of the Dollar in which You Can See on the Left Marcel Duchamp Masquerading as Louis XIV behind a Vermeerian Curtain which Is the Invisible Face, but Monumental, of Hermes by Praxiteles”.

Dali traced the moire patterns from an image projected on the canvas, just as the Old Masters had done in previous centuries to ensure precise measurements and perspective.

Although Erasmy didn’t specify which version of “Bread”, it’s a safe guess he was referring to the 1945 one (they’re quite similar anyway). The basket, he said, forms “a notation symbolic of the stock exchange” and the nub of a loaf suggests a severed penis. Thus the fiscal crisis marks the end of “a system built on phallic capacity, from now on threatened by the emancipation of women” (Erasmy champions Hillary Clinton and Angela Merkel as well as Royal).

Erasmy seems to have done Dali’s admirers a more palpable service in locating the railway coach that was depicted in “The Mystery of the Railway Station of Perpignan”.

He claims to have found the car in 1986, abandoned behind the station and occupied, suitably enough, by a “tramp”. He talked the local transport firm Raymondis, which owned it, into letting him convert it into a “cultural platform”.

By 1994 Erasmy had the railroad coach in the “Dali Triangle” and the following year publicly inaugurated it in front of the press with the help of television celebrity Marlène Mourreau, who Erasmy said was “selected as godmother” to the project on the basis of her physical assets, “in conformity with the erotic phantasms of Salvador Dali”.

When last heard of — there were no updates on the website about this the last time I looked — the “Dali Wagon” was headed for Wolnzach in Bavaria in October 2005 for an exhibition of the work of 10 Eastern European surrealist artists calling themselves the “Heirs to Dali”.

This collective had been assembled by a German painter who goes by the names Angerer-DER-Aeltere and Ludwig Angerer the Elder and also includes Frenchmen Jean-Pierre Alaux, Jean Bailly, Yo Coquelin, Lukás Kándl, Jacques Resch, Jean Reus and Eli Tiunine, Miguel Garcia-Diez of Spain and Michael Maschka, another German.

What exactly happened to the Heirs’ proposed exhibition in May 2005 at the Place du Pantheon in Paris’ fifth arrondissement isn’t quite clear from Erasmy’s website. The event appears to have been originally planned to coincide with the centenary of Dali’s birth in 2004 and, with the Dali Wagon included, was deemed part of a project called “Train of Fantastic Art” (TAF 2004).

Art dealer Stephan Gissinger and Yo Coquelin, one of the Heirs, made the arrangements with the Town Hall, but everything fell apart, Erasmy claimed, due to “jealousies and meanness” involving a “cabal” that opposed him. Nothing seems to have happened in 2005 either.

Architect and painter Angerer designed a logo for the project from a likeness of Dali. His striking painting shown alongside it below is titled “Moderne Schoenheit 2″.

The 10 Heirs did manage to hold a show in 2007, however, at the thermal springs in Mont-Dore, west of Lyon. Michael Maschka won a trophy called the “Apocalypse Dore” for his painting “Travels to the Crystal Mountains”.

“The Black Mass”, 1974

Getting back to Dali himself, and along the same spooky lines, the maestro’s superstitions are well documented, but there’s room for speculation as to just how much he delved into the supernatural, apart from its utility to any hard-working surrealist.

Amanda Lear has recorded that anything green meant bad luck to Dali, and he “hated” green parrots as a result. Ill fortune also came from peacock feathers and starting a journey and marrying on a Tuesday.

He always carried a wooden talisman “wrapped in a sock and secured with a rubber band”.

Gala, he wrote, “believes in my wood — a piece of wood that I found at the beginning of our acquaintance among the rocks of Cape Creus, under extraordinary circumstances. Since then we have never been without this ‘pure Dalinian fetish’, though we have lost it on several occasions.

“Once we lost it in Covent Garden in London, and found in again the next day. Another time it had been taken out with the bed sheets. It was necessary to go minutely over the whole laundry of the Hotel St Moritz, yet we finally found it.

“This piece of wood has assumed in my mind the form of a compulsive maniacal neurosis. When I get the idea that I ought to go and touch it, I cannot resist doing it. At this very moment I am forced to get up to go and touch it … There, I have just touched it, and with this my anxiety, which otherwise would only have grown agonizingly, has been calmed.”

Gala had a chunk of wood just the same, and when she died, Dali gave it to Lear.

On one occasion when Lear’s love life was in turmoil, Dali went hunting for a particular carbuncle that would put things right.

In a 1939 letter to Luis Bunuel, Dali wrote: “For three years now I’ve been occupying myself passionately with all matters relating to ‘objective chance’. Destiny, prophetic dreams, interpretation of the smallest events in daily life in order to act in consequence, chiromancy, astrology, etc etc.”

At the Dali Museum in Florida in 2008, lecturer Vickie Brunner focused on “Dali, Women and the Occult”. She began with Lydia (often spelled Lidia) Noguer, the so-called “last witch of Cape Creus” to whom Dali referred in his autobiography “The Secret Life” as the “Godmother of my madness”. Noguer told biographer Ian Gibson that she was “the witch responsible for the whole business of Dali and a whole lot more besides”.

“Lidia de Cadaques”, 1954

Pictured here is the cover of a local history about Lydia published in 1954 by the celebrated author Eugeni d’Ors, featuring illustrations by Dali including the one above.

Noguer, who died in an asylum, was the person Dali turned to in 1930 after his father disowned him. He needed a place to live, so she sold the 26-year-old a fisherman’s derelict hut in Port Lligat, and it became his and Gala’s home — and the basis for the house they always kept, now the Dali House-Museum.

Dali wrote sentimentally about Lydia in his 1942 autobiography, recalling his and Gala’s return home after their second pre-war trip to the US. He refers to her using Eugeni d’Ors’ compliment, “La Ben Plantada” — the “well-planted woman”. Earlier he’d attached the description to his beautiful childhood neighbour Ursula (see this post).

“We arrived in Port Lligat toward the end of a very bright December afternoon. Never had I understood so well how beautiful the landscape of Port Lligat was …

“Already from afar we perceived the figure of Lydia ‘La Ben Plantada’, dressed in black and seated on the threshold of the door to our house, awaiting our return.

“When we got close, Lydia got up and came to meet us. She was weeping. We went inside, and she confided to us that her life with her two sons had become unbearable.

“Her sons no longer went fishing; they spoke only of their [imagined] radium mines; they spent most of the time lying on their pallets. Sometimes they would weep; sometimes, taken with dreadful fits, they would beat her. She showed us a scar on her head, pulling aside two strands of her white hair, and let us see the blue marks all over her body. A week later her two sons were sent to the madhouse in Gerona.

“In the afternoons Lydia would come to the house and weep. Port Lligat was solitary. A violent and persistent wind prevented the fishermen from going out to fish, and only the famished cats would skulk around our little house.”

Lydia puts in an appearance in the post about the Lligat house as well.

Much has been written about Gala’s talent with the tarot deck. Dali believed she could read the future in the cards and, according to Tim McGirk and Meryle Seacrest’s book “The Wicked Lady”, she did indeed foretell the day the day Nazi Germany would invade France.

She would consult the oracle every evening under an olive tree in their garden (or every morning, according to another source), and Dali would decide accordingly whether it was appropriate to do some painting that day or the next.

Gala’s engagement in such things had early on piqued the interest of the surrealists, who sought to channel the subconscious through hypnosis, thought-transference, seances and automatic writing.

While she was still living with Paul Eluard, before Dali arrived from Spain, there were weekends of group experimentation, and they tried to interpret each other’s dreams. The poet Robert Desnos would writhe around in a trance and then begin automatic writing.

Rachel Pollack’s book Salvador Dali’s Tarot” claimed it was Gala who “nurtured his interest in mysticism”, and to repay her he produced a deck featuring original paintings. But Amanda Lear, in “My Life with Salvador Dali”, says Albert “Cubby” Broccoli, the producer of the James Bond films, commissioned the cards, and Dali in fact put her in charge of the designs.

Broccoli, wrote Lear, was making “Live and Let Die”, which had a black-magic theme, and Dali accepted the commission but soon bored of it, so he turned to her. She did the research and made collages from reproductions of Dali works in his books.

Pollack noted that the Dali Tarot, with Hebrew letters on the trump cards, drew on the Jewish Kabbalah. The 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet corresponded to the 22 trumps of tarot’s Major Arcana, four worlds of existence and 10 stations on the tree of life to the four suits of 10 numbered cards.

When Gala and Dali moved to Arcachon in the south of France in 1939, distancing themselves from the onslaught of war, their next-door neighbour was Leonore Fini, an artist even more eccentric than Salvador. She was involved in alchemy.

Amanda Lear described her at a restaurant outing in Paris as bringing “her own court” and wearing a full-length gown topped by a magician’s cape”.

“She had stars in her hair and carried a wand like a scepter.”

In 1939 Fini was a close friend of Leonora Carrington, Max Ernst’s partner, and the three of them shared an interest in alchemy and ritual magic. In answer to her question, Dali said he too believed in magic.

“It is the most primitive of all the religions,” he told her. “Man will always need magic. Superstition is simply the application of magic to everyday life.”

“I am not a mystic,” Dali was quoted as saying in Carlos Rojas’ book “Dali or the Art of Spitting on Your Mother’s Portrait”.

“I think I may be a pre-mystic, for since my childhood I have been in a state of pre-mysticism. I was impelled towards celestial things, even via evil [posession].”

On the other hand, it depends. In 1960 he told a New York Herald Tribunes reporter, “I am not only a mystic, I am also the reincarnation of one of the greatest of all Spanish mystics, St John of the Cross.”

He had vivid memories of being St John and could recall the experiences of the monkhood as well as “divine union”. He did indeed depict himself as a Franciscian monk in “Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus”.

An admirer of St Theresa of Avila and St John of the Cross, Dali felt that Christian mysticism might offer a door to the unknown.

Fleur Cowles, who wrote “The Case of Salvador Dali”, said he told her in 1957 that the “idea of an angel” stimulated him immensely, and he saw protons and neutrons as angelic elements. While he’d played a game called Seeing Angels as a child, which involved pressing against the eyeballs hard enough to produce phosphene images, he now believed in real angels, often embodied as people he loved and admired.

Amanda Lear recalled Dali spending an “entire winter researching old volumes regarding the study of odours. He theorised that the saintly odours of certain martyrs (such as the scent of violets) were directly related to the moral quality of the individual.” Only mystics were free of body odour, he speculated, and, since Lear didn’t perspire, she was “angelic”.

Dali’s long-time secretary Peter Moore pointed out that Salvador’s relationship with Gala got off to a start that was as rocky as Cap Creus, even if her husband Paul Eluard didn’t seem to mind (he and Dali remained friends).

The Dalis are seen here in a photo by Robert Descharnes with a collection of Faberge eggs they received as a wedding gift in 1958.

Not only did Dali’s father go berserk at the thought of him being in love with an older, married, Russian non-Catholic, his sister denounced Gala to the Guardia Civil as a whore. Dali, Moore claimed, never spoke to Anna again, although they did reconcile in the end, as we shall see.

Gala was, in Moore’s estimation, the reason Dali became greedy. He had to keep making lots of money to keep her happy, whereas Dali had little idea of its value.

She once gave him $100 because he was taking a taxi from their hotel to another, and when he got there he phoned Gala to say he had no money for the return trip. Evidently he’d looked at the taxi meter, which said “1.00 dollar”, and read it as 100.

Pictured above is “Portrait of Gala” from about 1977.

Meanwhile, Moore continued, Dali had to make up his mind about another woman in his life: a Dior model known as Nanita. Once, when Dali heard that Nanita was seriously ill, he went to Cadaques’ main church and prayed for three hours, proof enough, said Moore, that he never really forsook his religion.

Dali had exhibitions at Pierre Colle’s gallery at 29 Rue Cambaceres in Paris for three consecutive years beginning in 1931, the first two of them solo shows.

The initial exhibition, which was also Dali’s debut solo show in Paris, included “The Persistence of Memory” (discussed at length in other posts), and the Vicomte de Noailles bought “The Dream” (pictured in this post) and “Sleeping Woman-Horse-Invisible Lion” (see this post), which Dali called “the fruit of my contemplations of the rocks of Cape Creus”.

Jean Cocteau picked up “The Profanation of the Eucharistic Host”, seen above (”a painting of Catholic essence”), and Andre Breton went for “William Tell”, seen below, Dali’s first depiction of the legend, soon to become one of his recurring themes.

“The art critics began to be more seriously interested in my art,” Dali wrote in his 1942 autobiography, “but only the surrealists and society people seemed to be really touched to the quick.”

He and Gala started making the rounds of high-society dinners, where was greeted with a mix of fear and admiration. Dali reckoned the mix was right to draw the “elegant ladies” into his plan to found “a secret society of bread” that would bring about “the systematic cretinisation of the masses”.

He might have vaguely had in mind “The Conquest of Bread”, a political book popular among leftists, written by the Russian anarchist Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin, which Dali alluded to in “The Secret Life”, though he said he’d never read it.

In the atomic year 1945, referring to the version of “Basket of Bread” he did that year, Dali said he wanted to depict “the immobility of the pre-explosive object”. Above are both paintings with the same title, the 1926 edition on the right.

At right, using his loaf in November 1958.

“Bread has always been one of the oldest subjects of fetishism and obsession in my work, the first and the one to which I have remained the most faithful. I painted the same subject 19 years ago. By making a very careful comparison of the two pictures, everyone can study all the history of painting right there, from the linear charm of primitivism to stereoscopic hyper-aestheticism.”

To the Parisian socialites of 1931 Dali proposed baking a loaf 15 metres in length and then surreptitiously leaving it somewhere “not too conspicuous or too frequented” where its mysterious appearance would spark widespread public consternation.

“I suggested the inner gardens of the Palais Royal. The bread would be brought in two trucks and placed at the designated spot by a gang of members of the secret society disguised as workers, who would seem to be bringing a pipe to be laid down as a water main.” Then appointed spies would wait for the reaction.

“Ordinary French Loaf with Two Fried Eggs Riding Without a Plate” or, as the title is sometimes given, “Average French Bread with Two Fried Eggs without the Plate, on Horseback, Trying to Sodomise a Heel of Portugese Bread”, 1932

Dali predicted that the huge loaf would be examined carefully in case it held explosives or poison, and since it didn’t, people would be left to speculate endlessly. Deciding that it couldn’t be the work of a madman, suspicion would turn to some political motive, or possibly a student prank, or even a surrealist statement.

“But this supposition, I knew, would not fully have convinced anyone. Those who knew the disorganisation and the incapacity of the surrealist group to carry through anything requiring a minimum of practical effort directed to no matter what end knew them beforehand to be incapable seriously undertaking the building of the 15-metre oven indispensable for the baking of the bread.”

Just as interest was beginning to cool, Dali said, a 20-metre loaf would appear out of the blue at the court of Versailles.

Two 1932 paintings both called “Anthropomorphic Bread” with 1977’s “Fertility”, showing an ear of wheat.

“The existence of a secret society now became flagrant to everyone’s eyes,” and everyone would scan the newspapers for word of a third loaf, “so that these Dalinian loaves of bread were already beginning to ‘eat’ the other news, of politics, world events and sex, making these insipid and reducing them to a secondary rank of interest.

“But instead of the third loaf of bread which was expected, an event exceeding all the limits of plausibility would occur. On the same day, at the same hour, 30-metre loaves would appear in public places of the various capitals of Europe. The following day a cable from America would announce the apparition of a new loaf of French bread 45 metres long lying on the sidewalk and reaching from the Savoy Plaza to the end of the block where the Hotel St Moritz stands.”

Foreseeing “a state of confusion, of panic and of collective hysteria”, Dali believed it was possible to “ruin systematically the logical meaning of all the mechanisms of the rational practical world”.

The naked female profile from “Untitled — Female Figure with Catalonian Bread” from 1932 finds echoes in “The Signal of Anguish” of 1934, lower left, and “Fountain of Milk Spreading Itself Uselessly on Three Shoes”, 1945 (detail here).

The year before, 1930, Dali had been invited to give a lecture at the Ateneo Barcelones, a bastion of traditional intellectual thinking, and decided to stir people up. He launched into a defence of the Marquis de Sade, saying he was a far truer intellect than the late patriotic writer Angel Guimera, not knowing — or so he claimed — that Guimera was the founder of the society he was addressing.

When Dali denounced Guimera as “that great pederast, that immense hairy putrefaction”, mayhem ensued, with chairs flying at the stage. He had to be rushed outside and into a taxi by a phalanx of security guards.

“Untitled (Still Life with White Cloth)”, 1969

Soon after, a Barcelona anarchist group decided it would like to hear Dali speak and assured him he could say anything he wished. He asked them to have a loaf of bread ready for him on the night, “as long as possible, and straps to tie it with”.

Dali sprinkled his lecture to the group with obscenities, prompting an audience member to complain that there were women and children present.

“I answered him that an anarchist centre was not exactly a church,” and besides, his own wife was present. He started blaspheming as well, and his listeners’ fury mounted.

Then Dali gave the signal for the bread to be brought onstage and, as prearranged, had it strapped to the top of his head, horizontally.

“While the bread was being fastened to my head the tumult increased, showing all the preliminary symptoms of a general fracas.” In the chaos, with Dali shouting out the lines to his poem “Rotten Donkey”, an audience member went into an epileptic fit and upended everyone who tried to control his wild convulsions.

“The evening ended in an unimaginable general confusion,” Dali recalled, but the organisers “were well pleased. ‘You went a little far,’ they told me, ‘but it was very good.’”

With Gala and his sculpture “Retrospective Bust of a Woman” — missing its loaf chapeau.

Some years later, while staying in New York, Dali would roam the streets with a long French loaf under his arm. One day in front of the Waldorf Astoria the bread was so dry that it broke in two, and deciding to cross the street to dine in the Sert Room, Dali slipped and fell, the pieces of bread scooting away.

A policeman helped him up and Dali carried on, but then turned around to see about his loaf.

“They had simply disappeared without leaving the slightest trace, and the manner in which they were spirited away is still an enigma to me …

“I definitely had the bewildering and disquieting impression that this was a delirious and subjective phenomenon, and that the bread was there somewhere before my eyes, but that I did not see it for affective reasons that I would subsequently discover and that were connected with a whole long history involving the bread.

“This became the point of departure for a very important discovery which I decided to communicate to the Sorbonne in Paris under the evocative name of ‘The Invisible Bread’.

“The Invisible Man”, 1932

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More from the bakery

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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