Dali and the Divine Comedy

As Salvador Dali is one of my favorite artists--Surrealist or otherwise--it seemed fitting to study his work for this blog post. I was surprised, in the course of my studying, to find that Dali had in the course of his life created 101 watercolor paintings representing the 101 cantos of Dante's Divine Comedy. For this blog post I will be discussing the aspects of his Inferno paintings that are distinctly Surrealist or characteristically "Dali."

Dali is known in his work for representing people or objects in ways that are slightly off; in particular, he often toys with perspective and dimension, as he does with legs in paintings like The Temptation of St. Anthony or his sculpture Elephant With Long Legs. This extends to humans and humanoids in his watercolor paintings for Inferno, particularly with creatures like Minos, whose exaggerated shoulder blades, buttocks, and right leg all suggest a representation of something realistic (the human form) but at the same time defies reality in its dimensions. This continues in his Inferno paintings with images like the near-comically stretched skull used to depict The Blasphemers of Canto XIV and The Sodomites of Canto XIX. Both show the human body (or parts thereof) recast in ways that make them appear inhuman, alien. The Sodomites, for example, shows the human body in relatively realistic poses, but the dimensions of the bones themselves (such as the impossibly thin right calf of the man in the foreground) give this away as a Surrealist piece, and particularly one of Dali's.

The choice of color is important in discerning these watercolors as Surrealist pieces as well; every individual, human or humanoid, depicted in the 34 paintings of Inferno has a skin tone which is a different shade of olive or tan. However, these skin tones run the gamut from orange (In the Hands of Antaeus [Canto XVI]) to purple (The Furies [Canto IX]). Obviously, these skin tones can only exist in the world of a Surrealist artist, though it is particularly important to understand that Surrealist art did not try to be realistic, but rather tried to connect the subconscious to the conscious, and the use of color by Dali is almost certainly done to convey a specific emotion that he is trying to inspire in the audience (sorrow or fear in The Furies, agitation or excitement in In the Hands of Antaeus, etc).

All of the Divine Comedy paintings were taken from the Lockport Street Gallery website (http://www.lockportstreetgallery.com).