“It is precisely because I passed through cubism and surrealism that my Christ does not resemble the others, while still remaining a classical repiction. I believe that He is, at the same time, the least expressionist of those painted in contemporary art, but also the most innovative. He is a Christ as beautiful as the God that He is."
Salvador Dalí's Christ, from 1951, is one of the most important masterpieces of all time. The oil painting comes from a very important moment in the painter’s artistic career. The late 1940s marked a reformulation of his thought, and heralded the beginning of a new period, that of ‘nuclear mysticism’, in which Dalí combined his interest in physics and the Italian Renaissance with Catholic faith and spirituality. Its founding text is the Mystical Manifesto from the same year as the painting - 1951. After a period in which the artist had distanced himself from the faith he had received from his mother, the events of the Civil War in Spain, together with the discoveries of quantum physics and a critical evaluation of the expressionistic and tragic drift of much contemporary art, led Dalí to reopen his heart to Jesus Christ and Catholicism. He was convinced that the new science showed the intelligence of the Creator and the tension between physical matter and the life of the Spirit, and that only in Christ is a port of salvation available to shipwrecked humanity.
In Dalí's painting we find the unmistakable landscape of Port Lligat at the base of the image. Note the picturesque rocks of Cap de Creus and the shade of the water and sky - an intense blue that contrasts powerfully with the darkness above, accentuating the dramatic atmosphere of the work. The darkness that enveloped Jerusalem at the death of Christ is symbolically invoked, as is the original darkness at the beginning of Creation, when, according to the book of Genesis, the Spirit of God hovered over the waters. The whole world becomes, in a sense, Port Lligat. But at the same time, this is also the Sea of Galilee, where the adventure of Jesus of Nazareth began with the calling of his first apostles, shown in the painting near their two moored boats. An island in the distance reproduces, in its jagged crags, the profile of Dalí, who is seen to contemplate Christ. A sense of mystery is evoked by the perspective chosen for the Crucifixion scene, which is inscribed inside an (invisible) equilateral triangle and seen from above: thus, the face of Christ is beyond all imagination, so much so that we cannot even tell if he is still alive or already dead on the wood of that cross. And yet the classical beauty of the Savior's body appears in all its wonder, adhering to the cross without any nail fixing his limbs to the wood. The message is moving: He offers himself voluntarily, his is a free choice of love.
“The Basket of Bread”, from 1945, is an excellent example of Dalí's classical period, which began in 1941. This painting can, in many ways, be compared to the Christ painting, in a dialogue that goes far beyond questions of pictorial technique. As the artist explained in 1952: “From the point of view of style and artistic technique, I painted my Christ of St. John of the Cross in the way in which I painted my Basket of Bread, which already when I was painting it, more or less unconsciously represented the Eucharist for me."