Litte-Known Message in Dali's Original Museum Sign

I suspect few people realized it when Salvador Dali created and proudly held up his stylized Dali Museum sign when he was on hand to inaugurate the world's first Dali Museum in the Cleveland, Ohio suburb of Beachwood on March 7, 1971.

Most didn't know that the sign didn't simply read "DALI." The Surrealist genius also designed the letters so that they would, at the same time, also spell DOU, in homage to Gerard Dou, the 17th century Dutch Golden Age painter, whom Dali admired. Most particularly because Dali believed the reason Dou painted some works that seemed nearly identical was that he was an early experimenter in stereoscopy. And that inspired Dali's own stereoscopic paintings of the 1970s.

But, wait, there's more to that sign. The letters, while spelling the names of Dali and Dou, also spell GALA, Dali's wife, model and muse.

And now you know.