The Minneapolis Institute of Fine Arts, home to Red Grooms’ 1980 3D colour lithograph “Dali Salad II”, boasts “Portrait of Juan de Pareja, the Assistant to Velazquez” from 1960, sometimes referred to as “Portrait of Juan de Pareja Adjusting a String on His Mandolin”, as well as a copy of the “Aphrodisiac Telephone”.

“Portrait of Juan de Pareja” transports Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velazquez (1599-1660) straight from the elaborately casual setting of “Las Meninas” into the hustle and bustle of the 20th century. Dali had usurped the Spanish master’s moustache and now wanted to show him around his own times.

Rendered in 1656 and now at Madrid’s Museo del Prado, “Las Meninas” is dubbed “the world’s best painting” by Michael Atlee on Mark Harden’s Artchive website, which also has Kenneth Clark’s enthusiastic appraisal from “Looking at Pictures”.

The masterpiece is, as Clarke and others have found, a complex composition full of the kind of surprises that must have thrilled Dali.

The viewpoint is exactly beside that of Spain’s king and queen, whose reflections appear in a distant mirror. They gaze across the chamber, which is hung with works by Rubens as copied for them by Juan Bautista Martínez del Mazo (Velazquez’s son-in-law), as their five-year-old daughter, the Infanta Dona Margarita, is coaxed into posing for yet another painting by Velazquez, this one a full family portrait.

“Her ladies-in-waiting, known by the Portuguese name of meninas, are doing their best to cajole her, and have brought her dwarfs, Maribarbola and Nicolasito, to amuse her,” Clarke wrote. “But in fact they alarm her almost as much as they alarm us, and it will be some time before the sitting can take place. So far as we know, the huge official portrait was never painted.”

Clarke shows how “the world of appearances has been politely put in its place”.

“The canvas has been divided into quarters horizontally and sevenths vertically. The meninas and the dwarfs form a triangle of which the base is one-seventh of the way up, and the apex is four-sevenths; and within the large triangle are three subsidiary ones, of which the little Infanta is the centre …

“These and other devices were commonplaces of workshop tradition. Any Italian hack of the 17th century could have done the same, and the result would not have interested us. The extraordinary thing is that these calculations are subordinate to an absolute sense of truth. Nothing is emphasised, nothing forced. Instead of showing us with a whoop of joy how clever, how perceptive or how resourceful he is, Velazquez leaves us to make all these discoveries for ourselves.”

The analysis could easily be applied to most of Dali’s paintings, though only marginally to the 58 cubist variations of “Las Meninas” that Picasso rattled off in 1957, one of which is shown here.

Dali went to the Velazquez well often and always returned fully if temporarily, quenched.

“Portrait of Juan de Pareja Fixing a String of his Mandolin” is sometimes referred to as “Maelstrom”, although, suspiciously, only by the online poster shops. It’s typical of the whirlpool that Dali’s output has become that you’ll come across reproductions of the painting in three or four different hues, with the get-cheap-prints-here websites favouring Hallowe’en orange.

The homage to Velazquez this time borrows the palace-official-in-a-doorway from “Meninas” to keep an eye on the commotion Dali perceived in Velazquez’s “Portrait of Juan Pareja” from 1650, shown below. Pareja’s hand is at the lower centre, with a tack in the thumb. His head is in profile, with Velazquez’s quartered easel forming the bridge of the nose and the princess and her attendants his goatee.

Juan de Pareja, a Seville native of Moorish descent, was Velazquez’s slave and studio assistant, and the portrait a warm-up for Velazquez’s next project, a commissioned portrait of Pope Innocent X.

According to early biography of the painter, he had Juan de Pareja tote the completed picture around Rome, showing it to selected patrons and friends. “They stood staring at the painted canvas, and then at the original, with admiration and amazement, not knowing which they should address and which would answer them.”

It’s the sort of theatrical panache that Dali parlayed so well in promoting his own art.

Above left is a detail from the 1960 gouache “The Maids-in-Waiting (Las Meninas)”, with a photo of Dali working on the 1958 oil seen below, “Velazquez Painting the Infanta Margarita With the Lights and Shadows of His Own Glory”.

Like Picasso, Dali had decided the great art of his homeland deserved to be seen anew from a modern perspective, in the case above, through the filter of his patented “nuclear mysticism”.

Seen here is another variation from 1960, also called “The Maids-in-Waiting (Las Meninas)”, brings mathematics into the equation. I’ve yet to come across an explanation of the numerology, but there are some hints in this post.

And finally, “The Pearl”, a 1981 painting that Dali donated to the Spanish government.

The Huntington Hartford Gallery was on Columbus Circle in Manhattan (later to become the Gallery of Modern Art) in 1959 when it commissioned “The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus”, the most famous of the monumental paintings that Dali was at this stage creating annually during his summers in Port-Lligat.

Shown here is a detail; click for the whole image.

Now at the Dali Museum in St Petersburg, Florida, “Discovery of America” is more than 14 feet tall, features Gala in full Madonna mode and someone who looks a lot like Dali planting the banner, and borrows heavily from Velasquez.

Columbus, Dali insists here, was a fellow Catalonian.

“The Virgin of Guadalupe”, from 1959.

Here’s how Popular Mechanics presented the ovocipede in April 1960. It quoted Dali as saying the “vehicle” could be rolled over land, water, ice or snow with the operator holding onto a pair of hand bars on the axis and steering by shifting the weight along the axis in the direction of the turn.

I’ve read, too, that in the 1970s Dali had a Volkswagen Beetle that was completely covered in grass. Whether it was mobile or not I haven’t heard.

For more about Dali’s “intra-uterine fantasies”, read this post.

Inset into “Paranoiac-Critical Solitude” from 1935 are details from the 1939 “Mad Tristan” stage backdrop and 1982’s “Double Victory of Gaudi”.

Set above “Apparition of the Town of Delft” from 1936 are close-ups from “The Sphere Attacks the Pyramid”, Dali’s cover of the catalogue for one of his Levy Gallery shows, and “Puzzle of Autumn”, both from 1935.

Here’s the full “Car Clothing (Clothed Automobile)” from 1941.

The 1960s, which began with this painting, “Birth of a Divinity”, were a decade seemingly made for someone like Dali, and he didn’t disappoint.

He began by embracing videotape, making “Chaos and Creation” with Philippe Halsman — piglets, motorcycles, a pair of models and Dali explaing on the phone to a museum curator why he was such a better painter than Piet Mondrian.

The Beatles’ “A Hard Day’s Night” was not long in following his lead.

At the Ecole Polytechnique in December 1961, wearing his “Dioscures Helmet”, Dali lectured the studious and the curious on the legend of Castor and Pollux, a story he took to heart as a mirror image of himself and his own brother, who died before he was born, and extended the fable to his relationship with Gala.

Dali defended his flamboyance by saying, “I wish to prove that I am not the dead brother, but the living one. As in the myth of Castor and Pollux, in killing my brother, I have gained immortality for myself.”

The subject is first broached on Dali Planet in the post on Dali’s birth, but it is indeed a recurring fixation.

In their 1993 biography “Salvador Dali, Or The Art of Spitting on Your Mother’s Portrait”, Carlos Rojas and Alma Amell made a convincing case that a great deal of Dali’s career involved coming to terms with his brother’s death, absence and influence.

The psychological impact on his art, they showed, cannot be underestimated.

Basing their conclusion on what Dali himself said and painted specifically pertaining to the sibling who died before he was born, and extrapolating from other paintings and events in Dali’s life, Rojas and Amell provide a case study in psychological transference so extensive that it affected all of Dali’s relationships as well as his behaviour in public.

Seeing his own name on a gravestone — since his parents gave him his dead brother’s name — was an experience Dali shared with Vincent Van Gogh, whose parents “had also lost a son before he was born, also called Vincent. On his way to school every day Vincent had to pass a tombstone with his name on it,” the authors noted.

The effect of this, and seeing his brother’s photo in a small shrine on his parents’ bedroom dresser, might be seen in the violence Dali exhibited in childhood, they said.

When he pushed another boy off a bridge, he was subconsciously trying to eradicate his brother once and for all. When he kicked his little sister in the head, perhaps he was lashing out at the passing comet that had seized everyone’s attention, in his mind regarding it as his brother, stealing the limelight.

Both of these incidents are discussed in this post.

In his 1934 painting “Meditation on the Harp” are clues to what may be the real reason for Dali’s devotion to Millet’s “Angelus” (see this post): Is it in fact Dali on his knees before his parents, “appearing as a grasshopper with the deformed head of the alleged sufferer of meningitis and the resilient, slippery aspect of the phantom”?

Rojas and Amell: “Dali begs his parents’ forgiveness for not being born when his older brother was, instead of taking his place on earth and in the Dali Domenech family nine months and nine days after his brother’s death.

“The parents bow their heads, as the peasants do in Millet’s ‘Angelus’, but we do not know if their attitude is one of horror or desolation. The way the father holds his hat could be interpreted as a symbol of his own, voluntary castration. He may be trying to deny the organ that helped conceive this monster in the naked woman who is embracing him.”

At the “surrealist ball” in New York in 1935 (described in this post), perhaps Dali had actually intended the doll on Gala’s head to resemble the murdered Lindbergh baby, another lost firstborn son.

The technique used in creating “Portrait of My Dead Brother” is discussed in this post, with a larger image of the painting.

“Two Adolescents”, 1954