But that does not prevent me, thanks to my style, from being one of the best contemporary artists.' and at the same time to associate the Renaissance with both mysticism and science.
If I compare my canvases with those of the Renaissance, with those of Raphael, for example, I realize the total disaster of all my work. Dalí rated Raphael's drawing, genius, composition, originality and mystery especially highly.ĭalí's work abounds in references to Raphael and the Renaissance, which allow him to class himself as a good artist in relation to his contemporaries ('I am a bad painter. We should bear in mind here that the comparative table in Dalí's treatise 50 Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship ranks Raphael immediately after Vermeer among the greatest painters of all time. 1921) to the stereoscopic set The School of Athens and The Fire in the Borgo, or the oil painting Raphaelesque Hallucination, ( c. ' 3]įrom a very early age Dalí expressed a deep admiration for Raphael, an admiration that also manifested itself in significant aspects of his development, such as the creation of a persona or character: 'I had let my hair grow as long as a girl's, and looking at myself in the mirror I would often adopt the pose and the melancholy look which so fascinated me in Raphael's self-portrait, and whom I should have liked to resemble as much as possible.' Also worthy of note is the Italian painter's influence on Dalí's overall artistic evolution, from Self-Portrait with Raphaelesque Neck, ( c. And the religious theme is, for me, the oldest and the most current but it must be treated according to the scientific knowledge of our time. The same subject that Raphael painted, if Raphael painted it today, because he would have other knowledge (nuclear physics, psychoanalysis, for example), he would paint as well as then, but he would respond to today's cosmogony. In an interview, Dalí, very significantly, declared: 'What is important is that we must paint the subjects in a way that corresponds to the time we live in, 1951 this means that if Raphael painted a virgin according to the cosmogony of the Renaissance, today this cosmogony has varied. Salvador Dalí, one of the most renowned artists of his century and of ours, affords us a new reading of the work of Raphael and the theme of the ascension in this innovative exhibition in which the two paintings, Raphael's Madonna of the Rose and Dalí's The Ascension of Saint Cecilia - together with drawings, photographs and other material from the artist's studio that shed light on his creative process - enable us to trace some of the ways in which the great Renaissance painter influenced Dalí in his approach to harmony, perspective, perfection, colour, the presence of a particular landscape, and also in the engagement with an ideal of beauty, mysticism and spirituality, all intimately connected, for Dalí, with science and more specifically with nuclear physics and the discontinuity of matter.
The title comes from a statement by Dalí in his treatise on painting, 50 Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship, published in 1948, in which - like Cennino Cennini or Leonardo, among others - he pays tribute to the technique and art of painting, and also, significantly, to the distinction of the artist.
The loan by the Museo del Prado in Madrid of Raphael's oil painting Madonna of the Rose to the Dalí Theatre-Museum, as part of the celebration of the Madrid museum's bicentenary, is the starting point of the exhibition Dalí-Raphael, a Prolonged Reverie.
Montse Aguer Teixidor - Director of the Dalí Museums
0 kommentar(er)
