Salvador Dali's Vision Of Hell
"The Vision of Hell (1962) is a highly sophisticated painting that juxtaposes Salvador Dali's earlier style, Surrealism, (for which he was most famous) with a more classical style of religious mysticism which he developed later in life.
Most critics believe that Dali's greatest works were those done during his Surrealistic period, (before the 1940's). It was then that Dali, greatly influenced by Freud's Interpretation of Dreams tried to enter the subconscious world while he was painting, in order to fathom subconscious imagery. To this end he tried various methods. For example, he attempted to simulate insanity while painting, and he tried setting up his canvas at the base of his bed to paint before sleeping and upon rising.
During this …show more content…
period of his life certain images repeated themselves in his art: eyes, hands, noses, bones, crutches, clouds, mountains, blood, soft bodies and/or objects. In Vision of Hell we find all of these symbols, called cliches by some critics, but, here they seem to be much more than a trite convention. They are an expression of Dali himself. Too Dali uses the techniques of double images, hidden appearances, counter appearances.
It is important to note that although in the early 1960's (the time when Vision of Hell was painted) Dali's art was pejoratively classified as "academic", "religious," and "mystic," and despite the fact that he was, at the time, often excluded from the company if Surrealists, Dali deliberately chose the lapse into his previous surrealist style to accomplish these portrayal of hell. Note, his old style, surrealism,dominates these portrayal of hell (the left side of the painting), while his newer style of "Religious Mysticism" is used on the right side of the painting in the portrayal of Our Lady of Fatima. A close look at Our Lady of Fatima shows that an experimental technique was used around the upper body of Our Lady. The paint has texture. It is interesting to note that Dali does not use his wife Gala as the subject for his portrayal of Mary, as he had in previous portrayals of Our Lady (The Madonna of Port Lligat (1949,1950)); however, in vision of hell Our Lady of Fatima does hold her hands open in a similar way as the Madonna of Port Lligat.
The central image in the painting is that of eight carving forks, that, in the form of a circle are piercing a body that, typical of Dali's earlier period, is soft. The parts most visible in this human form are the left chest, the left arm and the head. Note, too, the blood. Vision of Hell is Dali's portrayal of death. Whenever an artist seriously approaches the subject of death, we can expect profundity. When this part of the painting is placed side by side with Dali's famous birth painting, Geopoliticus Child Watching the Birth of the New Man, (1943) the comparison is startling. Both bodies are curved in a type of fetal position; there are large drops of blood; the arm, the navel and the breast are the central focus of attention. Vision of Hell would be well shown beside ...Birth of a New Man. One painting shows life, the other death.
Not to be dismissed is the elongated eye of the pierced victim.
Eyes have always been a symbol for Dali, particularly in his own polymorphic self-portraits. His paintings The First Days of Spring, Illuminated Pleasure, The Enigma of Desire and The Persistence of Memory all show a head, a face and a prominent eye. Those eyes, however, are all closed. The long extended eye in Vision of Hell is open, as if to say, the victim's eyes have been opened at death. This eye is a double image, typical of Dali. From one side it seems to be a human eye, bent out of shape, from the other it is the eye of a strange creature (Bosch like) with its mouth wide open ready to take a bite.
Hieronymous Bosch Influenced Dali's Vision of Hell
Dali, as well as other surrealist painters, were greatly influenced by the Dutch painter, Hieronymous Bosch (1450-1516). Vision of Hell actually copies a part of Hieronymous Bosch's Hell, portrayed in the right hand panel of the Garden of Earthly Delights (triptych). The burning buildings shown in the top left if Dali's painting closely resemble Bosch's burning building in hell, and, interestingly, Dali also picks up from Bosch's inferno the image of the tattered flag, as well as a rectangular structure from which emanate four rays of light.
Crutches
In his earlier, much more famous works, Dali frequently employed crutches in his paintings. He, himself, says he finds the crutch to be "the significance of life and death...a support for inadequacy." (p.66) It is well known that Dali, for a long time, had a fetish about crutches, which stemmed from his youthful desire to place a crutch under the breast of a woman whom he saw working in the fields. The orange/red spirit, shown escaping from the pierced body in Vision of Hell, has two crutches, one under or on each breast. They seem claw like. Clutching. These crutches are more easily seen when the painting is lighted by high intensity artificial light. (Recall that Dali sometimes painted with artificial light and a jewelers eye piece.)
Hidden Self Portrait
Salvador Dali often hides images and faces within his paintings, and many of his works are self-portraits. There are three places in this painting where it seems Dali is portraying himself. First, in the polymorphic body. Second, in a whimsical face which appears in a puff of smoke in the lower left center part of the painting. However, there is another face, hidden face, composed of an eye and a nose, that dominates the painting.
Before studying this last hidden face in Vision of Hell, remember that eyes and noses are among the dominant symbols in Dali's art. (Refer to The Enigma of Desire, Illuminated Pleasures and The Persistence of Memory). One might do well to look at a photographic portrait of Dali which was done in 1955. In it Dali holds a magnifying glass over his eye and nose.
The dominant face in Vision of Hell can be found by focusing on the black drops that appear in the middle left side of the painting. These black drops (which echo the red drops on the lighter side) if seen as tears falling from a closed eye, anchor us into position to see a bushy black eyebrow above the crying eye, the inside edge of which is being pierced by two carving forks. If one perceives the eye, then the large white nose, which too is being pierced by carving forks, appears. the hidden face is composed of an eye crying black tears, a bushy eyebrow and a large nose, all of which closely resemble Dali's own features. When viewed in this way, the hell of Hieronymous Bosch appears to be flushing from the mind, (to the left of the eye).
This dominant and tormented face, floating in the air, recalls the lines which Dali used to inspire the painting, ""plunged in this fire were demons and souls in human form...raised into the air by the flames that issued from within themselves..."" (from St. Lucia's Description of hell). The "flames that issued from within" could well be the Hieronymous Bosch flames that are issuing from the mind of this tormented face.
Why did Dali choose to sign his name so prominently in the middle of the painting? Could it be that Vision of Hell is not only a portrayal of the vision of hell seen by the three shepard children of Fatima (which he was commissioned for $15,000.00 to portray here) but also a portrayal of Dali himself, tormented and crying. Is a serious portrayal of death, such as this, a minor work?
The Lower Half of the Painting
The lower half of the painting has yet to be explored. But, one must note that a solitary female figure who stand on the cracked earth is holding a cross in her right hand, just as St. John of the Cross held a cross in Dali's painting The Temptation of St. Anthony (1946). She also had another form in her left hand which may be a shepherd staff. The painting must be examined with a magnifying glass in order to determine this. If it is a shepherd's crook, this figure could very well represent Lucia, the sole survivor and one of the three shepherd children who saw Our Lady of Fatima. and hell. It was Lucia's account of the vision of hell that Salvador Dali studied before he painted Vision of Hell.
The White Circle
The white circle on Our Lady's stomach could very well symbolize Jesus. An extremely thick glob of paint, this circle seems to be molded, like clay, into a shape that still needs to be explored with a magnifying glass. It does recall, in corporal placement, the square tabernacle forms found in Dali's representation of the Madonna of Port Lligat, (1949)."
Most critics believe that Dali's greatest works were those done during his Surrealistic period, (before the 1940's). It was then that Dali, greatly influenced by Freud's Interpretation of Dreams tried to enter the subconscious world while he was painting, in order to fathom subconscious imagery. To this end he tried various methods. For example, he attempted to simulate insanity while painting, and he tried setting up his canvas at the base of his bed to paint before sleeping and upon rising.
During this …show more content…
period of his life certain images repeated themselves in his art: eyes, hands, noses, bones, crutches, clouds, mountains, blood, soft bodies and/or objects. In Vision of Hell we find all of these symbols, called cliches by some critics, but, here they seem to be much more than a trite convention. They are an expression of Dali himself. Too Dali uses the techniques of double images, hidden appearances, counter appearances.
It is important to note that although in the early 1960's (the time when Vision of Hell was painted) Dali's art was pejoratively classified as "academic", "religious," and "mystic," and despite the fact that he was, at the time, often excluded from the company if Surrealists, Dali deliberately chose the lapse into his previous surrealist style to accomplish these portrayal of hell. Note, his old style, surrealism,dominates these portrayal of hell (the left side of the painting), while his newer style of "Religious Mysticism" is used on the right side of the painting in the portrayal of Our Lady of Fatima. A close look at Our Lady of Fatima shows that an experimental technique was used around the upper body of Our Lady. The paint has texture. It is interesting to note that Dali does not use his wife Gala as the subject for his portrayal of Mary, as he had in previous portrayals of Our Lady (The Madonna of Port Lligat (1949,1950)); however, in vision of hell Our Lady of Fatima does hold her hands open in a similar way as the Madonna of Port Lligat.
The central image in the painting is that of eight carving forks, that, in the form of a circle are piercing a body that, typical of Dali's earlier period, is soft. The parts most visible in this human form are the left chest, the left arm and the head. Note, too, the blood. Vision of Hell is Dali's portrayal of death. Whenever an artist seriously approaches the subject of death, we can expect profundity. When this part of the painting is placed side by side with Dali's famous birth painting, Geopoliticus Child Watching the Birth of the New Man, (1943) the comparison is startling. Both bodies are curved in a type of fetal position; there are large drops of blood; the arm, the navel and the breast are the central focus of attention. Vision of Hell would be well shown beside ...Birth of a New Man. One painting shows life, the other death.
Not to be dismissed is the elongated eye of the pierced victim.
Eyes have always been a symbol for Dali, particularly in his own polymorphic self-portraits. His paintings The First Days of Spring, Illuminated Pleasure, The Enigma of Desire and The Persistence of Memory all show a head, a face and a prominent eye. Those eyes, however, are all closed. The long extended eye in Vision of Hell is open, as if to say, the victim's eyes have been opened at death. This eye is a double image, typical of Dali. From one side it seems to be a human eye, bent out of shape, from the other it is the eye of a strange creature (Bosch like) with its mouth wide open ready to take a bite.
Hieronymous Bosch Influenced Dali's Vision of Hell
Dali, as well as other surrealist painters, were greatly influenced by the Dutch painter, Hieronymous Bosch (1450-1516). Vision of Hell actually copies a part of Hieronymous Bosch's Hell, portrayed in the right hand panel of the Garden of Earthly Delights (triptych). The burning buildings shown in the top left if Dali's painting closely resemble Bosch's burning building in hell, and, interestingly, Dali also picks up from Bosch's inferno the image of the tattered flag, as well as a rectangular structure from which emanate four rays of light.
Crutches
In his earlier, much more famous works, Dali frequently employed crutches in his paintings. He, himself, says he finds the crutch to be "the significance of life and death...a support for inadequacy." (p.66) It is well known that Dali, for a long time, had a fetish about crutches, which stemmed from his youthful desire to place a crutch under the breast of a woman whom he saw working in the fields. The orange/red spirit, shown escaping from the pierced body in Vision of Hell, has two crutches, one under or on each breast. They seem claw like. Clutching. These crutches are more easily seen when the painting is lighted by high intensity artificial light. (Recall that Dali sometimes painted with artificial light and a jewelers eye piece.)
Hidden Self Portrait
Salvador Dali often hides images and faces within his paintings, and many of his works are self-portraits. There are three places in this painting where it seems Dali is portraying himself. First, in the polymorphic body. Second, in a whimsical face which appears in a puff of smoke in the lower left center part of the painting. However, there is another face, hidden face, composed of an eye and a nose, that dominates the painting.
Before studying this last hidden face in Vision of Hell, remember that eyes and noses are among the dominant symbols in Dali's art. (Refer to The Enigma of Desire, Illuminated Pleasures and The Persistence of Memory). One might do well to look at a photographic portrait of Dali which was done in 1955. In it Dali holds a magnifying glass over his eye and nose.
The dominant face in Vision of Hell can be found by focusing on the black drops that appear in the middle left side of the painting. These black drops (which echo the red drops on the lighter side) if seen as tears falling from a closed eye, anchor us into position to see a bushy black eyebrow above the crying eye, the inside edge of which is being pierced by two carving forks. If one perceives the eye, then the large white nose, which too is being pierced by carving forks, appears. the hidden face is composed of an eye crying black tears, a bushy eyebrow and a large nose, all of which closely resemble Dali's own features. When viewed in this way, the hell of Hieronymous Bosch appears to be flushing from the mind, (to the left of the eye).
This dominant and tormented face, floating in the air, recalls the lines which Dali used to inspire the painting, ""plunged in this fire were demons and souls in human form...raised into the air by the flames that issued from within themselves..."" (from St. Lucia's Description of hell). The "flames that issued from within" could well be the Hieronymous Bosch flames that are issuing from the mind of this tormented face.
Why did Dali choose to sign his name so prominently in the middle of the painting? Could it be that Vision of Hell is not only a portrayal of the vision of hell seen by the three shepard children of Fatima (which he was commissioned for $15,000.00 to portray here) but also a portrayal of Dali himself, tormented and crying. Is a serious portrayal of death, such as this, a minor work?
The Lower Half of the Painting
The lower half of the painting has yet to be explored. But, one must note that a solitary female figure who stand on the cracked earth is holding a cross in her right hand, just as St. John of the Cross held a cross in Dali's painting The Temptation of St. Anthony (1946). She also had another form in her left hand which may be a shepherd staff. The painting must be examined with a magnifying glass in order to determine this. If it is a shepherd's crook, this figure could very well represent Lucia, the sole survivor and one of the three shepherd children who saw Our Lady of Fatima. and hell. It was Lucia's account of the vision of hell that Salvador Dali studied before he painted Vision of Hell.
The White Circle
The white circle on Our Lady's stomach could very well symbolize Jesus. An extremely thick glob of paint, this circle seems to be molded, like clay, into a shape that still needs to be explored with a magnifying glass. It does recall, in corporal placement, the square tabernacle forms found in Dali's representation of the Madonna of Port Lligat, (1949)."