In both Salvador Dal\u00ed’s written \u00a0and \u00a0pictorial work, there are many mythological references. Here we will look \u00a0more precisely into \u00a0the myth of Leda.<\/p>\n
The oil painting entitled Leda at\u00f2mica<\/em> (1949) is in the Treasure Room of the Dal\u00ed Theatre-Museum of \u00a0Figueres. When painting this work, Salvador Dal\u00ed took inspiration from the classical myth of Leda. The most popular version recounts that Leda was the daughter of the king of Aetolia, Thestius, and of Eurithemis. Leda married Tyndareus, who upon his expulsion from Lacedaemon was taken in at Thestius’ palace. Zeus, father of the gods, fell in love with the beautiful Leda and, when rejected by her, turned himself into a swan. It is said that the same night that Tyndareus coupled with Leda, so too did Zeus, in the form of a swan. Two eggs resulted from the union of Leda with theswan, and each egg gave birth to twins: Castor and Pollux – called the Dioscuri – and Helen and Clytemnestra. One member of each set of twins was immortal and the other mortal.<\/p>\n Dal\u00ed began painting his Leda in \u00a01945, in the United States. The painting depicts Leda face-on, sitting on a pedestal, and with her left hand caressing a swan approaching her as if to kiss her. Around the main figure are various objects such as a book, a set square, an egg which might represent the fruit of the union between Leda and the swan, from which the twins were born. In the background are the rocks of Cape Norfeu, situated between Roses and Cadaqu\u00e9s, that serves as a reference to the painter’s \u00a0homeland.<\/p>\n Leda At\u00f2mica<\/em> was executed \u00a0following the divine proportions \u00a0conceived \u00a0by Luca Paccioli, a painter from \u00a0the Italian Renaissance period. Leda and the swan are set in a pentagon inside of which is a five-point star that \u00a0Dal\u00ed sketched \u00a0several times. The artist calculated the harmony of the references by \u00a0following the rules of the mathematician Matila Ghyka, who, at the time, was \u00a0teaching at the University of San Diego. His works showed that divine\u00a0proportion lies at the foundation of any work. Dal\u00ed, unlike his contemporaries who thought that mathematics distracted from or interrupted artistic inspiration, considered that any work of art, to be such, had to be based on composition and \u00a0calculation.<\/p>\n His wife and muse sat as his model, and in Dal\u00ed’s interpretation we see that love is treated in a more spiritual manner than it is in the work of other painters, who saw the more carnal side of the myth in the physical union of Zeus-swan and Leda, as did Michelangelo or Nicolas Poussin. Here, all is ethereal and there is no contact between the elements of the painting; not even the sea touches the land. Indeed, in his work Hidden Faces,<\/em> Dal\u00ed already explains the idea of an intense love without physical contact, which he called “cledalism”. In other works by Dal\u00ed such as the Madonna of Portlligat<\/em> (1952) or Rhinocerotic Figure of Illissus of Phidias<\/em> (1954) the central figures are also in a state of levitation.<\/p>\n It is also said that Dal\u00ed identified with Pollux and that his dead brother, Salvador, might represent the mortal twin, Castor. From the other couple, his sister Anna Maria would be the mortal Clytemnestra, and Gala the divine Helen, whose beauty was so great that it led to war between the Greek and Trojan people.<\/p>\n The painter might \u00a0have easily identified his wife with Helen, since she was for him a source of inspiration, and by contemplating her he was capable of creating sublime works.<\/p>\n Finally, in one of his written works Salvador Dal\u00ed tells us the purpose of this \u00a0painting: “I started to paint the Leda At\u00f2mica<\/em> to \u00a0exalt Gala, the goddess of my metaphysics, and I succeeded in creating the”suspended space.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In both Salvador Dal\u00ed’s written \u00a0and \u00a0pictorial work, there are many mythological references. Here we will look \u00a0more precisely into \u00a0the myth of Leda. The oil painting entitled Leda at\u00f2mica (1949) is in the Treasure Room of the Dal\u00ed Theatre-Museum of \u00a0Figueres. When painting this work, Salvador Dal\u00ed took inspiration from the classical myth of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":13196,"menu_order":0,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_coblocks_attr":"","_coblocks_dimensions":"","_coblocks_responsive_height":"","_coblocks_accordion_ie_support":""},"class_list":["post-13277","textos-en-descarrega","type-textos-en-descarrega","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/webdali.latempesta.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/textos-en-descarrega\/13277","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/webdali.latempesta.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/textos-en-descarrega"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/webdali.latempesta.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/textos-en-descarrega"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webdali.latempesta.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13196"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/webdali.latempesta.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13277"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}