Dali Planet #9: Sant Pere’s Church
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.
In his autobiography, Dali wrote of flinging another little boy off a suspension bridge when he was just five years old, and that same year watching a dying bat being eaten by ants (one source says the bat was his pet). 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. The painting here is “Freud’s Perverse Polymorph (Bulgarian Child Eating a Rat)” from 1939.
At age six, Dali painted a landscape and fancied himself an artist, but by the following year he’d decided he wanted to be Napoleon instead. In the drawing room of the family home was a small keg of tea that bore the emperor’s image. The picture, Dali wrote in his autobiography, “meant everything to me. I wished to sip Napoleon’s liquid!”
