The Christ Who Fell from a Dream
Salvador Dalí saw the nucleus of the atom in his sleep — and painted the crucifixion without a single nail, drop of blood, or thorn.
In 1950, Salvador Dalí had what he called a 'cosmic dream.' In it, he saw an image in vivid color that he understood, within the dream, to represent the nucleus of the atom. Waking, the image transformed in his mind into something larger: the very unity of the universe, embodied in the figure of Christ. From that vision came one of the most famous religious paintings of the twentieth century.
Dalí completed Christ of Saint John of the Cross in 1951. It shows Jesus on the cross, suspended in a darkened sky, floating above a body of water where a boat and fishermen go about their business below. The body of water is not invented — it is the bay of Portlligat in Catalonia, Spain, where Dalí lived at the time.
What makes the painting startling is what it leaves out. There are no nails, no blood, no crown of thorns. Dalí said he had been convinced by a dream that these traditional details would mar his depiction of Christ. Another dream, he claimed, revealed to him the importance of the painting's extreme downward angle, looking at Christ from above.
The title comes from a 16th-century drawing by the Spanish friar John of the Cross, on which Dalí based his composition. The figure of Christ is built from geometric forms: a triangle formed by his outstretched arms, and a circle formed by his head. Dalí saw the triangle as a reference to the Trinity and the circle as an echo of Platonic thought, representing unity.
To get the pose right, Dalí didn't simply imagine it. He had Hollywood stuntman Russell M. Saunders suspended from an overhead gantry, allowing Dalí to study exactly how gravity pulled at a human body from that specific, dizzying angle.
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