Salvador the scientist:
Leda and the Swan
In a 2005 essay published online by Britain’s Surrealism Centre (Issue 4 winter 2005), David Lomas does a tremendous job of putting Salvador Dalí’s version of science in perspective, and the focus is all through the prism of Leonardo Da Vinci’s world.
Sigmund Freud’s “psychoanalytic novel”, “Leonardo da Vinci: A Memory of His Childhood”, was a must-read for the surrealists, not least because it delved into Leonardo’s dual career as an artist and a scientist. André Breton often urged artists to stay up to date on the latest scientific discoveries in biology and physics, the better to express reality, albeit surrealistically.
Both scientist and artist is how Dalí wished to be seen, especially later, in the wake of Hiroshima and its terrible revelations of power and ingenuity, when he actually turned his back on the speculative Freud and declared the exacting scientist Erwin Schrödinger his new mentor.
As Astrid Ruffa notes in another essay in the same issue of Papers of Surrealism, Henri Poincaré insisted that scientific truth appealed first to intuition, and then to reason, and Einstein deplored reliance on mere observation of the facts alone.
“Dalí, by associating surrealist activities and science,” Ruffa also wrly notes, “places himself in an ambiguous territory midway between the serious and the playful. He is out of step both with the scientific world (since his experiences are not very scientific due to the overestimation of what is anecdotal and subjective), and with the artistic world (since the imaginative Dalinian world is destined to be misunderstood by those unaware of the scientific issues involved). Dalí’s work is thus at all times met with a partial or complete lack of understanding.” See the rest.
