Dali Gained Inspiration from Many of the Classics

Salvador Dali's art often was informed -- and made extraordinarily interesting -- by works of many of the great artists that came long before him.

Here, in his "Rhinocerotic Disintegration of Illissos of Phidias" of 1954, Dali paid homage to the Greek sculpture by Phidias that's owned by the British Museum and has recently been lent to the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia. Dali reimagined the Greek river-god's morphology, now comprised of atomic particle-like "rhino horns" and exhibiting a discontinuity of matter that intrigued the scientifically minded Surrealist master.

For Dali -- consumed at this period in his career with new discoveries in mathematics and atomic physics -- the horn of the rhinoceros was a natural logarithmic spiral and inherent in the mathematical harmony of his exacting compositions. (Painting in the collection of the Fundacio Gala-Salvador Dali, Figueres, Spain, and used in this blog for fair use/journalistic, non-commercial purposes only.)