At 7:00 p.m. on weekdays, Shamian changed from the hottest wedding photography base in Guangzhou to a quiet Western-style island. And the wind blows, the flowers are gushing, and the air can finally smell a smell of small bourgeoisie, which makes people have a little fantasy about the past glory here, such as this:
When it gets dark, the old buildings glow warm yellow lights, and neon signs are lit at the entrance of the trail garden. It is not surprising that such a gallery appears on the sand surface at this moment.
The In Arcade Gallery is exhibiting Dalí's engravings on the subject of Dante's Divine Comedy, composed in the 1950s-1960s.
Salvador Dalí (1904-1989), a famous Spanish Surreal artist. His unruly and unruly grotesque, vague dream-like or nonsensical works include, but are not limited to:
In 1949, Salvador Atheist Antisocial Personality, who seems to have worshipped Satan, announced his conversion to Catholicism. In November of the same year, Pope Pias XII met privately with Dalí and (unexpectedly) agreed to let Dalí paint Immaculate Conception. In general, this painting should look like this:
Immaculate Conception by Antonio Licata (1820)
Then Dalí handed in his assignment, The Madonna of Port Lligat, looked like this.
The Madonna of Port Lligat, Salvador Dalí (1949)
"In the painting, the chest cavities of the Virgin and the Son are empty, like a modern building with thickness and a sense of space that is believed to have been left behind after cutting. Living in the 21st century, we may often see images of robots in science fiction movies, which can pull apart their bodies at will and reveal the mechanical equipment in them. But in the 20th century, Dalí's exploration went beyond the traditional perceptions of his contemporaries, and his use of such images in paintings of traditional religious themes was also a bold rebellion against religious people who were influenced by traditional thinking and classic works. (Zhao Qingchuan, "Dalí: The Grotesque Surreal Dream")
Dalí and his wife Gala watch the second edition of the completed Virgin of the Port of Ligat
After seeing the pope hook up with Dalí, the Italian government was not to be outdone. In 1950, to celebrate the 700th anniversary of Dante's birth, the Libreria dello Stato commissioned Dalí to create illustrations for one of the most important works in Italian literature, Dante's Divine Comedy.
If nothing else, then the accident will happen. The Italians who heard the news protested en masse to have a Spaniard come and illustrate their cultural treasure, and this person was Dalí, the one who once declared himself "a surreal who lacked all moral values" and was considered a "blasphemous" (in 1929, the Paris Surrealist group really said that the Internet has a memory).
The project was yellowed, and the National Library terminated its collaboration with Dalí and cancelled the exhibition of divine comedy watercolors that were supposed to be exhibited in Rome. Dalí, whose creative enthusiasm had already erupted, could not restrain his desire to create at this time, so in the end he immersed himself in the world of the Divine Comedy, creating more than a hundred watercolor works with the support of the French publisher Joseph Forêt, which were published in volumes and prints.
Let's talk about Dante and the Divine Comedy.
Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), Italy's "second poet of the Middle Ages and at the same time the first poet of the New Age" (Engels), the founder of modern Italian, is known in Italy as the "Supreme Poet" and father of the Italian language.
Dante began his political career in 1298 and in 1300 became an administrator in Florence, Italy, before being forced to get involved in a political struggle between the black and white parties and was unfortunately permanently exiled. During the bitter and difficult exile, he traveled to all Italian-speaking places, came into contact with all levels of society, experienced the hardships of the world, expanded his vision from Florence to the whole of Italy and even the entire Christian world, paid more attention to the fate of the country, and began to compose the Divine Comedy around 1307.
Dante and the Three Kingdoms, Domenio Di Michellino, 1465
The Divine Comedy was originally called "Comedy", and at the time the meaning of the word was not equivalent to what is called "comedy" today. In the classical sense, "Comedy" refers to a work that believes in an orderly universe. In such works, under god's blessing, things move in an orderly manner towards a better ending. On the contrary, "from a more upright state to an increasingly unlucky state, it is called tragedy Ragedy" (nishikawa sensei said). Rounding can be understood as: Comedy = happy ending, Tragedy = bad ending.
The Divine Comedy is a long poem divided into three parts: "Inferno", "Purgatorio", and "Paradiso", each with 33 chapters, plus a total of 100 chapters of the book's overture, with a total of 14233 lines. In the book, Dante tells in the first person that at the age of 35, he stumbled into a dark forest and was stopped at the foot of the mountain by three wild beasts (leopard, lion, and she-wolf). As he cried for help, the soul of the ancient Roman poet Publius Vergilius Maro appeared before him and said to him, "You cannot defeat these three beasts, and I show you another path." So he took Dante through hell and purgatory, and finally was accompanied to heaven by Beyatrich, Dante's lover of white moonlight and crush.
Dante and Beatrizi look up to heaven (illustration of chapter 31 of The Divine Comedy in Heaven, by Gustave Doré)
In Dante's constructed worldview, hell resembles a wide and narrow funnel, with 9 floors, sinking deeper and deeper into the sin of the soul it controls, up to the center of the earth. The first layer is the Spiritual Hell, where ancient pagans who were born before Christ and who had not been baptized awaited God's judgment. In the remaining 8 layers, sinners' souls are subjected to different severe tortures according to the sins committed in their lifetime (lust, gluttony, greed, anger, heresy, violence, fraud, betrayal).
Hell, Sandro Botticelli, 1480-1490
Illustration of the fifth chapter of The Divine Comedy in Hell, by Gustave Doré
Purgatory is shaped like a mountain, and in the sea on the other side of the earth, there are 9 layers of the Pure Realm Mountain and the Garden of Eden. Souls who have committed sins but are lesser and have repented have been cultivated and washed here according to the seven deadly sins of mankind (arrogance, jealousy, anger, laziness, greed, gluttony, and lust), and then ascended layer by layer to the top level of purgatory, the Garden of Eden. After arriving here, Virgil handed Dante over to Beatrizi. Beatricci told him to repent of his sins, drink the water of the Forgotten River, get a new life, and then guide him to heaven.
Illustration of an early print edition of Divine Comedy Purgatory. At this level, Virgil leads Dante forward, and the proud people behind him are crushed by boulders and are carrying heavy loads.
Purgatory structure diagram
Heaven is shaped like a roulette wheel, with nine weights, and each heaven is a transparent gas. From the Earth outwards are the lunar sky, the mercury sky, the venus sky, the sun sky, the Martian sky, the Jupiter sky, the saturn sky, the stellar sky, and the crystal sky. There are good-doers, devout priests, meritorious ones, philosophers and theologians, martyrs, righteous monarchs, monks, Christs and angels, home to happy souls. The higher he ascended, the more he felt the light, until after ascending to the crystal sky, Beatricci flew into the rose and disappeared, and a mystical priest led Dante on to the light of God.
Illustration of the twelfth chapter of The Divine Comedy in Heaven, by Gustave Doré
Dante and Beatrice with the Sages on The Day of the Sun (Chapter 10 of the Divine Comedy in Heaven, Philipp Veit, Frescoes)
Dante's Divine Comedy World Overview: The lowest end is the inferno that flips 180 degrees, the 9-story mountain of Purgatory in the middle, and the outer circle of the earth is the ninth heaven of heaven. (By Michelangelo Caetani)
Back to Dalí's Divine Comedy.
In arcade hall
Many of the images in Dalí's illustrations are far removed from the literal meaning of the text of the Divine Comedy. In this group of works, he uses a psychoanalytic perspective to try to discover the metaphors hidden in Dante's poetry. That aesthetic style of intertwining dreams and reality comes from his exploration of the unconscious and the subconscious.
There are 100 paintings in this group, each of which corresponds to a chapter (or "song", Canto) in the original text, and is full of strong Dalí style. The 100 paintings cannot be described in detail, but the following is only a few works selected from hell, purgatory, and heaven.
Hell Inferno
In the middle of my life, I found that I had lost the right way and walked into a dark forest. How difficult it is to explain how wild, dangerous, and difficult this forest is! As soon as I think about it, I feel scared again. Its bitterness and death are almost the same. (Divine Comedy hell 1st song)
启程远航 Salvador Dalí, Departure on the Grand Voyage (Inferno: Canto 1)
The "dark forest" of Dante's journey in the original Divine Comedy was transformed into several cypress trees here. The empty landscape was split in two by a road, and a long horizontal shadow was projected behind a red-robed Dante. In contrast to the horror of darkness, the empty wilderness gives people another kind of uneasiness and loneliness.
"Why did you tear me apart?" Don't you have a little mercy? We used to be human beings, and now we have become trees: if we are the souls of the serpent, you should be softer. ”...... It was as if when a green wood burned at one end, the other end ticked with water, breathed out, and squeaked, and the wound of the broken branch spoke like this, and at the same time bleeding; seeing this, I felt that I threw away the branch and stood there like a frightened person. (Divine Comedy hell 13th song)
Salvador Dalí , The Forest of Those who Committed Suicide (Inferno: Canto 13)
Dante inherited the Christian belief that suicide is a sin and that destroying oneself is an atrocity. So in the section "The Woods of the Suicidals", the suicidal person falls into the second ring of the seventh layer of hell, the soul is imprisoned forever, and the body becomes a multi-knotted and multi-tumor tree, which can only be pecked by the bird-like banshee Halpi. In Dalí's painting, the suicidals have muscular arms, entangled with each other, tearing each other apart. Behind them were Dante and Virgil watching it all.
The ghosts of two miserable white naked bodies... Run and bite people, just like when a pig is released from the pen. One of them came up to Capocho and bit his neck with his teeth, dragging him, making his stomach move against the hard bottom of the groove. The Arezzo man stayed there and said to me with a shudder, "That evil ghost is Jannie Skidge, who walks madly and tortures others like this." (Divine Comedy, Hell, Song 30)
Salvador Dalí, Men Who Devour Themselves (Inferno: Canto 30)
The eighth layer of hell punishes fraudsters. The main body of the picture is not so much two people as two pieces of rotten flesh. The painting has the same creative elements as his famous The Persistence of Memory: like the clock that turns into fluid in The Eternity of Memory, the two people here also become paralyzed and bloated flesh. The one who was biting was Gianni Schicchi, a cunning aristocratic knight of Florence who was imprisoned here and punished by rabies for pretending to be someone else forging a will; and being bitten was Capocchio, a clever alchemist and pagan who fell here and was eaten by boils. In this painting, Dalí still uses radiating lines to create a surreal empty space, enhancing the dreamlike blur and emptiness.
There is another famous painting about this plot: William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Dante and Virgil in Hell. Unlike Dalí's ethereal dream expressions, Bouguereau's paintings show us the intense tension of Michelangelo's tight flesh and body pulls.
William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Dante and Virgil in Hell, 1850, Musee d'Orsay, Dante and Virgil in Hell, 1850
Purgatorio
(Virgil said to the old man who guarded this layer: "I have made him see all sinners, and now I intend to let him see the souls who have eliminated their sins under your supervision." (Divine Comedy Purgatory Song 1)
Salvador Dalí The Fallen Angel (Purgatory: Canto 1)
Below goes into the section of Purgatory. The painting corresponds to the content of the first song of Purgatory, which is titled "Fallen Angels". In the original Text of the Divine Comedy, the fallen angel appears in the eighth and ninth songs of Hell, "There are more than a thousand fallen from heaven at the gates of the city", which is the angel who followed Satan's betrayal of God and fell here to become the devil. The painting is yet another example of Dalí's borrowing of psychoanalytic theory. Several drawers grew out of the body of the wounded fallen angel, and he looked down at his body, symbolizing the examination of his own soul and the reflection of his own sins. Here you can see Dalí repeatedly using the symbol he created: the drawer — like his 1936 sculpture Venus de Milo with Drawers.
Venus de Milo of Milo with Drawers 1936
"You see, it is an angel of God, clasp your hands together, and you will see such messengers in the future." You see, he despises the tools of the world, so he sails between the two shores so far apart without oars or sails, but with his wings as sails. You see, he cocked his wings to the sky and cut through the air with his eternal feathers, which do not change like earthly feathers. ”...... He came to the shore in a boat, so light and so fast that it did not draft at all. At the stern stood the helmsman from heaven, whose face seemed to bear the blessings of heaven he enjoyed; on board sat more than a hundred souls, all of whom sang in unison "In exitu de Aegyto" and the entire text of the psalm. (Divine Comedy Purgatory Song 2)
Guiding Angel Salvador Dalí The Grim Boatman's Boat (Purgatory: Canto 2)
"In exitu de Aegyto" is the first sentence of the Latin Bible, Psalm 114 of the Old Testament: "Israel came out of Egypt", which originally referred to the Israelites fleeing Egypt and freeing themselves from Egyptian slavery. By which Dante is referring, "Free from sin, the soul becomes holy and free in its power" (Feast, 2, 13). This painting by Dalí is one that Dante and Virgil saw on the seashore in the early morning—an angelic helmsman sailing on the surface of the sea with his wings as a sail. On board were more than a hundred souls of atonement, who followed the angelic helmsman, and could only see vague silhouettes in the morning light.
The cliffs here spew flames, and wind blows upwards along the platform, forcing the flames to retreat,...... Then I heard the chanting of "Summae Deus clementiae" in the midst of the fire, which made me turn my eyes equally eagerly; I saw the ghosts walking in flames; and therefore I alternated from time to time to look at them and at my own footsteps. (Divine Comedy, Purgatory, Song XXV)
Ascension to the seventh level: Salvador Dalí, Rising to the Seventh Level: The Lustful (Purgatory: Canto 25)
Here is a layer of punishment for lust in purgatory. The ghosts of the sinners of lust sing hymns in the midst of the fire, in which they say, "Burn our loins and weak livers with the flames of righteousness, so that they are strict and free from pornography." The waist and liver are the parts of the human body's sexual desires, so the poem asks God to burn it with the flame of righteousness and eliminate pornography. In Dalí's painting, the souls travel in the form of an S toward the center of the flames, and the messy fire has burned them to the point of losing their human form.
[I] whispered, "O holy woman, you know my needs and what I use to satisfy." She said to me, "I wish you to be freed from fear and shyness in the future, and no longer speak like a dreamer." ...... I do see, so I tell you that the stars, which cannot be stopped by all obstacles, all obstacles, are approaching. ”...... I returned from the most sacred waves of water, and was reborn like a new tree giving birth to new leaves, pure in body and mind, ready to rise to the stars. (Divine Comedy, Purgatory, Song XXXIII)
Dante ascends to the stars after The Stars Salvador Dalí, Dante Purified (Purgatory: Canto 33)
"The stars, which cannot be stopped by all obstacles and all obstacles, are approaching." This passage comes from the last chapter of the Purgatory section. In this chapter, Dante sees that the auspicious stars in the sky are about to rise, and no obstacle can stop it, and it will bring a happy moment to the world. This work of Dalí and his Virgin of the Port of Ligat adopt a similar composition, and we see the pious Dante through the body of the angel, which highlights the meaning of the angel washing his soul.
Tiantang Paradiso
I had doubts, "Say it to her, say it to her!" "I said to myself in my heart," say to her, to my holy daughter, who quenches my thirst, with the nectar of the often true. "But the kind of awe that dominates my whole body as soon as I hear Be and ice makes me bow my head like a sleepy person." (Divine Comedy, Heaven, Song VII)
Dante's Questions Salvador Dalí, Dante's Men Doubt (Paradise: Canto 7)
I was not aware that I had risen to this star; but my virgin made me sure that I was there, for I saw that she had become more beautiful. (Divine Comedy, Heaven, Song VIII)
Salvador Dalí The Grandest Beauty of Beatrice (Paradise: Canto 8)
In the seventh and eighth songs of Heaven, Dalí chose as an illustration the portrait of Dante and his beloved woman, Beatrizi, with his side faces. Dante has been in love with Beatricci since they first met at the age of 9, but he always hid his feelings and maintained a spiritual love until Beatricci married someone else and then died early. After Beatrizi's death, Dante put his love for her "in a foolproof place" and composed the Divine Comedy for her.
In the Divine Comedy, hell and purgatory are led by the poet Virgil, and the suffering of hell and purgatory is only to see Beatricci in heaven. If Virgil symbolizes the image of a mentor, then Beatrizi plays the role of lover, mother and even goddess, and only under her guidance can the soul be redeemed.
Those joyful souls swirled in circles around the fixed center, one side shining like a comet with a strong light. Just as the gears in the structure of the clock's apparatus each rotate at different speeds, so that to the observer the first gear seems to stand still and the last one spins like a fly; likewise, the dancing souls in circles and circles also dance in different rhythms, some fast and some slow, so that I can infer their happiness. (Divine Comedy, Heaven, Song 24)
Salvador Dalí, The Joy of the Blessed (Paradise: Canto 24)
Under the leadership of Beatricci, Dante rose step by step to the higher levels of heaven. After ascending to the stars, St. Peter examined Dante's faith in order to check his qualifications for ascension to heaven. After entering the heavenly part, Dalí's painting style obviously began to change. The figurative (or abstract) images of terror in hell and purgatory are replaced by peaceful and elegant colors and illusory images, and everything is shrouded in holy light.
In a sense, Dalí's illustrations of the Divine Comedy do not correspond to the images of hell, purgatory, and the heavenly world described in Dante's text, but it is his paranoid and grotesque imagination that creates those broken and distorted torsos, non-existent creatures, and empty surreal spaces, just like experiencing a ridiculous nightmare, which makes us resonate psychologically with Dante's hell and purgatory, and feel their spiritual similarities.