Crucifixion

Oil on canvas, signed and inscribed lower left. Accompanied by a certificate of authenticity. A late treatment of the subject that occupied Dalí from the Christ of Saint John of the Cross of 1951 onwards. Here the crucified body is dissolved rather than drawn: the torso emerges from a ground of greys, ochres and greens, legible as a figure and as landscape at once, in the double reading that runs through his work from the 1930s. The composition is organised by a diagonal shaft of light entering from the upper left, along which a small group of figures is suspended in mid-air — a device Dalí took from the Baroque and used throughout his religious painting of these years. Below, an avenue of cypresses recedes towards a point beneath the feet, folding a Catalan landscape into the sacred scene. Painted at a small scale and worked thinly, with the weave of the canvas left visible in places. The size is deliberate: these late religious pictures were conceived as objects of private contemplation rather than as the monumental machines of the previous decade.