![]() By the time of his public embrace of Catholicism, however, Dalí had broken with the Surrealists (though he remains the most well-known of the Surrealist painters) and had announced his intention to “become classical,” combining Surrealist visual liberties with a High Renaissance treatment of the body.ĭalí was excited by the possibilities of expressing mystical ideas in light of new visions of reality made possible by nuclear physics. Dalí’s first painting with an explicitly religious theme, the surrealist “Temptation of Saint Anthony,” appeared in 1946. His journey home had started years earlier when he found himself stirred by the poetry of of the Spanish mystic St. Salvador Dalí, Catholicĭalí returned to the Catholic faith in 1949. Familiarity with the Leonardo da Vinci masterpiece causes most of us to make that leap when we encounter Jesus at table with 12 men around him. I am horrified by it!’ Tillich added it all up: ‘Simply junk!’”īoth theologians misunderstood the image, however, as a depiction of the Last Supper. The technique is a beautifying naturalism of the worst kind. Tillich’s view of the painting, conveyed during a lecture on religion and art, was reported by Time magazine: “Tillich deplored Dalí’s work as a sample of the very worst in ‘what is called the religious revival of today.’ The depiction of Jesus did not fool Tillich: ‘A sentimental but very good athlete on an American baseball team. Because of this, for him there was a reason for a vault into an area of nonreason to give him the hope of meaning.” ![]() Dalí explained in his interviews that he had found a mystical meaning for life in the fact that things are made up of energy rather than solid mass. For Schaeffer, Dalí’s image was a clear example of Christian meaning being lost to a vague existentialism: “This intangible Christ which Dalí painted is in sharp contrast to the bodies of the apostles who are physically solid in the picture. Theologians, like the Protestants Francis Schaeffer and Paul Tillich, have also weighed in. The popularity of Dalí’s image has persisted despite critical hostility toward the painting and the gallery’s own ambivalence. Since its purchase in 1956 by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, The Sacrament of the Last Supper, an oil painting by Salvador Dalí (1904-89), has replaced Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s “Girl With a Watering Can” as the museum’s most popular work (pushing her “into the mud” as Time magazine quipped).
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