Wednesday, May 06, 2009

Christ of St. John of the Cross


 
The previous entry about surrealism was written to introduce this one.  
Salvador Dali saw an original sketch that Saint John of the Cross drew sometime between 1775 and 1777. He said that he saw in a vision an unusual perspective of the crucifixion of Jesus . . . from above. I was a perspective one could associate with God the Father looking down on the Son He had just crucified. It looks as if it were ready to fall were it not held fast to the cross by oversized nails.  
Dali saw the sketch in 1945, and then again in 1950. In the 1940’s the artist was swerving back into the faith of his youth. He’d even met the Pope in 1947. When he saw this sketch, his surrealistic eye could now appreciate the spiritual value rendered in the sketch. And his encounter with this sketch resulted in his own version of Christ on the Cross.  
While Dali used the same perspective that he saw in the antique sketch, the concept of his painting was new and attuned to his surrealistic touch. “In 1950 I had a cosmic dream,” the artist wrote, “in which I saw this image in color and which in my dream represented the nucleus of the atom. This nucleus later took on a metaphysical sense. I considerate it the very unity of the universe, the Christ. I worked out geometrically a triangle and a circle, which summarized all my previous experiments. And I inscribed my Christ in this triangle.”  
While St. John’s sketch is an impressionistic recording of a vision in time, Dali’s painting is a rendering of an eternal Christ. Dali’s Christ, you’ll notice, has no nails holding Him to the cross. His artistic statement is of Christ of the Resurrection. Jesus here is the center and very focus of the universe itself. Hebrews 1 expresses it this way: Who being the brightness of His glory and the express image of His person, and upholding all things by the word of His power. His own Word holds him to the cross.
It took four months to finish the painting, and it was immediately panned by critics around the world for being too religious and too realistic. Even the gallery who purchased it, Kelvingrove, in Glasgow, was criticized over the $16,000 spent for it. In 1961 a deranged student entered the gallery and attacked the painting with a brick, shredding the canvas. It took four months to repair.  
Dali’s masterpiece resided in a room all by itself in Saint Mungo’s Museum of Religious Life and Art. The Spanish government offered to buy it from Scotland for $80 million, but the Scottish authorities refused.  

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