This painting is an oil on canvas portrait that
measures 81x66 centimetres and it can be seen in the National Museum Reina
Sofía, in Madrid. The title of the work is “The Maximum Speed of Raphael’s
Madonna”, and it was painted by Salvador Dali in 1954. We can barely see a
woman’s face depicted out of strange shapes, spheres of different colours and
horns, which are also employed to shape the landscape and the rocks and cliffs
in the bottom part of the painting. Her head is crowned by an aureole or a golden
halo. She has no body, Dali just painted her like the busts or heads very usual
in the art of sculpture. Instead, the low part of the work depicts a rounded
fence made out of crosses, spheres and straight lines. It appears to have a
door or an entrance in the left and right parts. In any case, the head is
floating in the air and it takes up the majority of the painting.
This one could be described as a blue painting,
due to the different tones of this colour which we may appreciate both in the
clear sky and the immense sea. Some of the spheres are also depicted in several
tones of yellow, green and brown. The framing of the scene is quite simple and
the only remarkable element that might draw the viewer’s attention is the cliff
and rocks which we are familiar with because of dozens of Dali’s paintings, for
Cadaqués and Cap de Creus appear very often in the usual landscape of his works.
The light appears to be coming from the left
part of the painting because the colours are brighter in that side. The horizon
is also clearly represented separating the sea and the sky with an almost white
light.
This time, the woman’s face is not that of
Gala, Dali’s wife and muse, as we may have expected, but the face of a
Raphael’s Madonna, as we can tell from the title of the painting. The
Renaissance master was greatly admired by Dali, but the Spanish painter
combined the classicism and mysticism of the Madonna’s portrait with the modern
atomic theory. This is why this painting has been described as “Nuclear
mysticism”. The face appears to take shape out of several particles and
elements, which represent the discontinuity of matter, the physical theory that
claims that all that exist is just material particles moving and floating
through and infinite void.
This should come as no surprise knowing the
peculiarity and eccentricity of Dali’s work and personality, but it is indeed a
curious mixture of very deep religious believes (the virginity of Maria, her
sudden apparition, the ideas of immortality and divinity) with recent and
ground-breaking scientific discoveries regarding the composition of matter in
the universe and the complex laws that rule everything in it.
Another interesting and also recurring element
in Dali’s art, is the depiction of rhino’s horns. Of course, the choice of this
particular item is far from being accidental, since the author was almost
obsessed with the mathematical structure of nature and with the importance of
introducing geometrical proportions into his paintings. This horn is an example
of the Golden Section, a figure that can be formed following Fibonacci’s
sequence. This famous mathematical proportion was supposed to be the main
ingredient of beauty and order and can be found in lots of artworks, with the
Athenian Parthenon being maybe the most famous one.
This astonishing painting was created the same
year as another similar one (Dali Nude,
in Contemplation Before the Five Regular Bodies), where we can found again
a woman’s face formed out of spherical particles and rhino’s horns. Once again,
we can appreciate an inspiring combination of a materialistic scientific theory along
with mystical, religious and supernatural figures and events.
