St John of the Cross
Salvador Dali
Salvador Dali’s painting of 1951 was purchased by Glasgow Art Gallery amidst condemnation from art critics – ‘skilled sensationalist trickery’ and ‘calculated melodrama’. Despite this, the people of Glasgow flocked to see it – people of all faiths and none. Fifty thousand people saw it in the first two months and it’s now one of the most celebrated and reproduced religious paintings of the twentieth century.
Dali’s inspiration came from a drawing attributed to the sixteenth century Spanish mystic, St John of the Cross. Dali wrote; ‘The drawing so impressed me that a little while later in a dream I saw Christ from the same perspective but above the landscape of my native Port Llight, and I heard voices which told me, “Dali, you must paint this Christ”…my aesthetic ambition was the opposite of all the Christs painted before, which have interpreted him contorted with the aim of obtaining emotion through ugliness. What preoccupied me was that my Christ would be beautiful as the God that he is’.
This Christ hovers over the universe as the cosmic Christ and yet also hangs over the little harbour where Dali lived and worked.
