Thursday, 1 August 2013

Santiago El Grande (1957) Dali's Jasmine flower

COMMENT: We appreciate the outstanding Art  Essay from the month of Magnificat.net.

Santiago El Grande (1957)
Salvador Dali (1904-1989),
The Beaverbrook Art Gallery,
Gift of the Sir James Dunn Foundation,
 Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada.

IN 1941 the artist Salvador Dali made an announcement that was as confounding to the art world as Paul's conversion on the road to Damascus had been to ancient Judaism. Dali called it his "last scandal", and it was a formal declaration that henceforth he would engage in "classical painting". The world-famous Surrealist had long been noted for his provocative evocations of an irrational dream world, and, like Saul, Dali had been an approving cloak bearer for a movement that had taken great delight in ridiculing the Church. But now as he struggled with the prospect of returning to the faith of his Spanish childhood and grounding his work in the traditional iconography of Catholicism, this enfant terrible of the counter-culture was willing to be seen as an outcast and a traitor to the movement he had helped form.

While the style of his art remained basically the same, its content changed radically. In the next twenty years many of his noted masterpieces were works that reverently extolled Christ and the Virgin Mary, saints, sacraments and the Second Vatican Council. His detractors dismissed this turn of events as just another opportunity for the self-promoting artist to gain fame and fortune. But in an address to students at the Sorbonne in Paris, Dai declared that since modern artists had come to believe in nothing, then their art basically amounted to nothing. In essence, art had lost its soul!

Santiago El Grande of 1957 is one of Deli's post-war religious masterpieces. It represents the Apostle James the Greater astride a white charger triumphantly holding aloft a crucifix that is an artistic reference to another masterpiece he created six years earlier, Christ of Saint John of the Cross. In order to interpret the painting, one must know the legendary details of this patron saint of Spain and understand the exalted place he holds in Spanish myth and history.

While James the Greater was the brother of John the Apostle and is mentioned fre­quently in the Gospels, the story of his life after Christ's Ascension is rooted in legend and lore. According to the Spaniards, Saint James (Santiago in Spanish) was having great difficulty preaching the Gospel in the Iberian Peninsula. On 2nd January in the year 40 AD he knelt and prayed for guidance on the shore of the Ebro River. Our Lady ap­peared to him seated atop a pillar. To aid his mission she ordered that a church be built on the site. To this day many venerate it as the oldest church dedicated to Mary in all of Christendom. Returning to Jerusalem, James suffered martyrdom and was beheaded by order of King Herod Agrippa in 44 AD. His remains were taken back to Spain and buried, but were lost when Muslim forces invaded the Iberian Peninsula and kept its Christian population in subjugation for centuries. As the Spaniards periodically rose up to battle their conquerors, there were visions of the saint on a white horse ready to lead them to victory. In this guise he became known as "Santiago Matamoro", or Saint James the Moor-Slayer, brandishing a sword and carrying a white banner on which was emblazoned a red cross. By the ninth century Santiago's remains were recovered and venerated at Compostela in northern Spain. The fervour surrounding his cult gave rise to a network of important pilgrimage routes across Western Europe that elevated Compostela to the level of Jerusalem and Rome as a destination for the faithful.

Dali's painting portrays a mystical vision. Santiago is perched atop a rampant white steed with a network of rib vaults fanning outward from a single column lodged at the horse's hind legs. The column recalls the pillar on which the Virgin appeared to Saint James and encouraged his mission. The rib vaulting represents the pilgrimage routes splayed across Europe, with Compostela as their terminus point. This architectural canopy is derived from the Church of the Jacobins in Toulouse, one of the many stopping points on the road to Compostela. Designed by the Dominicans in 1230, it bears the nickname given to them in France, the 'Jacobins" due to the fact that their major house in Paris was located on the rue Saint Jacques, a starting point for French pilgrims making their way to the shrine in Spain.

Instead of a banner or sword, Dali's Apostle holds aloft the corpus of Christ whose radiant pose approximates the shape of the sword-like cross of Saint James, the emblem of Spain's highest military order. In fact "Santiago" became a battle cry for Spaniards who retook their homeland from the invaders. A halo of eleven cockle shells surrounds the saint at the intersections of the ribbing, with a twelfth shell strapped to the horse's chest, This shell became an attribute for Saint James as it is a useful tool for pilgrims.

The frenetic design of the ribbing coupled with the nuclear cloud from which the horse springs reveals Dali's own conviction that the discovery of the atomic nature of the universe could prove the very existence of God. Dali saw himself as the first painter to combine science with religious belief. He preached a theory of "nuclear mysticism", issuing his own Mystic Manifesto in 1951. Even the tendons in the horse's neck create the shape of an angel that Dali repeats in the azure sky. yet despite the exalted ideas that underscore his painting and the nationalistic fervour it enshrines, the artist personalised the canvas by rendering a miniscule self-portrait at the bottom of the lo­calised landscape and shrouded his wife Gala in prayerful repose. The dirty bare foot of the Apostle James becomes the symbol of Everyman, representing all the millions of perambulating pilgrims who have walked the dusty road to Compostela over the past one thousand years. It was modelled on Dali's own foot. Without shame, the artist liked to point out, "I have very saintly feet!"
Father Michael Morris, O.P.
Professor, Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology, Berkeley, CA.

To view this masterpiece in greater detail visit:
www.magnificat.com

Note: the atomic cloud mass is a sweetly painted jasmine flower – a symbol of purity and harmony

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