Salvador Dalí's 'Christ of Saint John of the Cross,' painted in 1951 and now one of the most famous paintings in Scotland, is one of the most discussed and controversial sacred paintings of the 20th century - a work that polarized opinion between those who found in it a profound metaphysical vision of the Crucifixion and those who saw it as a technically brilliant but theologically superficial exercise.
The painting's origin is unusual. Dalí reported being struck by a drawing made by the Spanish mystic and poet John of the Cross (1542-1591) in which the Crucifixion is shown from a radically elevated perspective - Christ seen from above, as if the viewer is positioned at the crown of the cross looking down. The drawing, made after what John described as a mystical vision, was intended to capture an aspect of the Crucifixion not visible from the ground: the body hanging in submission, the landscape spread below.
Dalí's painting adopts this viewpoint and develops it into one of the most technically audacious compositions in 20th-century religious painting. Christ is suspended against a dark sky, the viewpoint positioned directly above and slightly in front of the cross, so that we look down along the outstretched arms toward the bowed head and the landscape below. The figure is rendered with photographic realism - the musculature of the torso, the posture of the arms, the fall of the hair - in a dramatic chiaroscuro that places the pale body against thunderous darkness.
Significantly, Dalí chose to depict no nails, no crown of thorns, no wounds, no blood. This omission was deliberate: in a statement accompanying the painting, Dalí described a dream in which he received the 'cosmic vision' that determined the composition, and his intention was to present the Crucifixion as a metaphysical and geometric event - the axis mundi, the point where the horizontal and vertical of the cross define the intersection of time and eternity, heaven and earth - rather than as a scene of suffering.
The landscape below Christ is Dalí's own: the fishing village of Port Lligat on the Costa Brava, where the artist had his studio. The fishermen mending nets in the foreground are figures from local life, photographed and painted from life. The effect is to situate the eternal event within the specific geography of Dalí's personal world, much as Bruegel situated the biblical narratives within contemporary Flemish landscapes.
The Glasgow City Council purchased the painting in 1952 for what was then an enormous sum, attracting considerable controversy. It was vandalized and damaged in 1961. Its current home in the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum makes it one of the most visited works of art in Scotland, and it has become a cultural landmark far beyond the art world.
The painting is displayed in the Christ of Saint John of the Cross gallery at the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow, open free of charge daily. Reproductions of the image are among the most widely distributed of any 20th-century sacred painting.