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.”
Lomas points out how Dalí — in his 1948 book “50 Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship” — reconfigured Leonardo’s sketches of a mammoth equestrian monument, showing himself “naked astride the mighty battle horse of craftsmanship about to make his triumphal return to post-war Europe”, where he was ready, quixotically, Lomas notes, “to rescue painting from the mire into which it had sunk”.
The artful skill of art was to be Dalí’s weapon of choice in his assault on the decrepit windmills, and to this end he had exhibited “Leda Atomica” (detail shown here) in New York before it was even finished, reasoning that people could still marvel at his painting technique.
More to the point, this work was an announcement of Dalí’s new strategy, his embrace of “nuclear mysticism” by the glow of the A-bomb’s fire-clouds. In the cellular microcosm and the shattered atom, he believed, lay the path to an idyllic future.
Dalí studied Leonardo carefully, and Lomas observes amusingly how he tracked the old master’s thinking with a blue pencil in the margins of his well-thumbed copy of “Trattato della pittura”.
“Dalí listens in as Leonardo advises on the nobility of painting and the necessary universality of the painter. When it reaches the famous passage about seeking inspiration from stains on walls, his pencil reacts like a seismograph excitedly screeching up and down, before moving on.”
Though Leonardo’s painting of Leda and the Swan (shown here, a detail from a copy attributed to Cesare da Sesto) slowly rotted away in Fontainebleau (by one account; by another the owner’s prudish wife shredded it), there are surviving pen-and-ink studies, from which Freud extrapolated that Leonardo’s illegitimate birth led him to subconsciously explain his existence through the Immaculate Conception and to identify with the infant Jesus in his Madonna and Child paintings. Leonardo recorded a childhood memory in which a vulture descended upon his cradle and waved its tail near his mouth.
Freud then pointed out that the ancient Egyptians believed all vultures were female, and they were impregnated by the wind in mid-flight, a myth the early church fathers relied upon to support the fact of the Immaculate Conception.
Dalí’s original “Leda Atomica” was wrecked too, the paint cracking on his wooden panel. The next effort, on canvas, doesn’t resemble Leonardo, Lomas says, but the linkage is confirmed by 1954’s “Dalí Nude, in Contemplation Before the Five Regular Bodies Metamorphosed into Corpuscles, in Which Suddenly Appear the Leda of Leonardo Chromosomatised by the Visage of Gala” (detail shown). Here Leonardo’s Leda at last appears, and from here Lomas charts a direct course to “The Madonna of Port Lligat”, Gala evolving from “bride” to Virgin. Both versions of this painting are shown at the bottom of this post.
Meanwhile, however, does the swan of “Leda Atomica” make the picture “a veiled annunciation”, the bird representing “the angel Gabriel, announcing possibly the miraculous rebirth of painting”?
“Leda Atomica” marked the first collaboration between Dalí and Matila Ghyka, the Romanian-born numbers mystic who fed the painter wisdom on the Golden Section. Ghyka told him that Leonardo had a mathematician of his own who taught him about optics and proportion — Luca Pacioli, whose book on geometry, “De divina proportione”, Leonardo illustrated. Dan Brown notwithstanding, its never been established that Leonardo ever utilised the golden ratio in his art.
Ghyka’s forays into the fourth dimension evidently captivated Dalí, and in particular the “hypercube”, atop a diagram of which Dalí drew a crucifixion pose, “possibly the first sketch of an idea for ‘The Corpus Hypercubicus’ of 1953-54″, Lomas writes.
As seen in the dual image at the top of this post, “Head Bombarded with Grains of Wheat” from 1954 comes directly from sketches by Leonardo, “copied with such precision that Dalí must have had an opened book in front of him as he worked”. Leonardo was preparing to paint his Leda, and volumes have been written about her hairstyling. In the plaiting, Lomas suggests, Dalí perhaps spotted an ear of wheat, and this he allowed to mutate “into motile spermatozoa that invade and fecundate via the ear, provoking an explosion that is voluptuous, ecstatic, and corpuscular”.
Then, in 1955, came “The Last Supper”, seen below, a direct evocation of Leonardo, even though Dalí chose to instead depict the sacrament of communion, Jesus mystically appearing above the table of the last supper with its otherwise familiar grouping of apostles. From there it’s full charge ahead into the divine proportions, the supplicants’ robes forming a line of regular pentagons, “and the overall dimensions of the canvas reputedly are those of a Golden Rectangle”.
Across the top, a vast dodecahedron with the harbour of Port Lligat beyond, the architecture drawn according to Ghyka’s instructions.
“As unexpected as the chance meeting of an umbrella and a sewing machine on a dissection table,” Lomas writes, “the combination of discordant elements within Dalí’s image, though they are all derived from Leonardo, is not something that Leonardo himself ever would have attempted. While there is an element of overkill in Dalí’s excessively rigidapplication of a priori geometric principles, one is left in little doubt he understood the theological implications of Pacioli’s divina proportione.”
Lomas continues, quite brilliantly:
“One gets the sense that Dalí was aware that a technical bag of tricks on its own would not suffice to bring about a renaissance of painting and was casting about for a subject big enough to replace surrealism which in his opinion was no longer viable. Religion plus nuclear science must have sounded a pretty heady mix. With an optimism that is utterly disproportional to the difficulty of the task, Dalí declares grandiosely: ‘It is with pi-mesons and the most gelatinous and indeterminate neutrinos that I want to paint the beauty of the angels … I will very soon succeed in doing so.’”
“The Madonna of Port Lligat” (first version), 1949. See the Dali Planet entries here and here.
“The Madonna of Port Lligat (second version), 1950. See the Dali Planet entry here.
