On the very central Via del Corso in the city of Rome – a mandatory passage for thousands of tourists – a famous oil painting has been on display since May 13 in the ‘Chiesa di San Marcello al Corso’: “The Christ by Salvador Dalí, ”also called the “Christ of Port Lligat”.
The work will be on display until June 23 of this year, as one of the initiatives that prepare the Jubilee of 2025, which will see the arrival of more than 32 million pilgrims in the Eternal City and which, as Mons. Fisichella explained this week, It is expected that thanks to the Holy Year “tourists will also become pilgrims.”
The work of Salvador Dalí was loaned for the event by the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow, however, the sketch drawn by Saint John of the Cross in Ávila in the mid-15th century – which was an inspiration in 1951 for the Spanish painter – It comes from the Monastery of The Incarnation in said city and is now located at the feet of Dalí’s Christ.
In the painting, the Catalan artist paints the crucifixion scene from above, showing the back of Jesus crucified and almost leaning downwards, changing the perspective in which we are used to seeing him. And as if he were seen by God the Father from the top of the heavens, as Saint John of the Cross had drawn him. In the background, you can see the beach of Port Lligat, where the painter lived. It was his friend, the Carmelite Father Bruno de Jesus-Marie, who introduced Dalí to the sketch of Saint John of the Cross.
“This oil painting places the painter at a very special moment in his artistic career, at the end of the 1940s, in full reformulation of his thought and marks the beginning of a new period, that of nuclear mysticism, in which Dalí combines his interest in physics and the Italian Renaissance with Catholic religion and spirituality, and whose founding text is the Mystical Manifesto of the same 1951,” indicates one of the panels.
And another specifies that “After a time in which the artist had distanced himself from the faith received through his mother, the events of the Civil War in Spain, together with the discoveries of quantum physics and a critical assessment of drift expressionist and tragic of much of contemporary art, led Dalí to reopen his heart to Jesus Christ and Catholicism, with the certainty that the new science manifests the intelligence of the Creator and the tension of physical matter towards the life of the Spirit, and that Only in Christ is a port of salvation given to a shipwrecked man.”
Some of Dalí’s works are exhibited in the Vatican, and his author was received by Pius XII in 1949 and by Saint John XXIII in 1959.
In the temple there is also the polychrome Christ carved in wood “who saved Rome from the great plague” in the 16th century and which, taken to St. Peter’s Square in the Vatican at the height of the pandemic, saw Pope Francis ask for the coronavirus to end.
There, on the altar, is a huge cloth with the words received by Saint John of the Cross on that occasion: “If you want a word of hope, fix your gaze only on Him. You will find more than you want.”
