What do you get when you mix Salvador Dali‘s surreal art with Disney’s entertainment creativity? The ability to go inside one of Dali’s paintings and explore the surreal surroundings from every angle. The video below details”Dreams of Dali” a virtual reality art exhibit at the Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida. GET THE GOOD NEWS FROM…
Millet’s “Angelus”
Millet’s “Angelus” was probably one of the most famous paintings in the world when Salvador Dali was a young man. It depicts two peasants, a man and a woman, heads bent over in prayer and represents a Catholic devotion commemorating the ‘incarnation’. It is set at the end of the day and a bell has rung in a church we can just see on the horizon.
There are a number of interpretations about the relationship between this couple, husband and wife, farmer and maid servant, or colleagues. It was Salvador Dali who insisted the Louvre x-ray the painting which revealed a small coffin had been originally painted where there is now a basket filled with potatoes, thus he felt the couple were in mourning for their child.
Dali had apparently always been troubled by this image and would often sit for hours watching it and imagining what it would be like within it. His fantasies produced an entire mythology around this image.
“I surrendered myself to a brief fantasy during which I imagined sculptures of the two figures in Millet’s ‘Angelus’ carved out of the highest rocks….”
Archeological Reminiscence of Millet’s “Angelus”
In this painting, the couple appear as ancient monumental ruins in a moonlit landscape. He painted them so that the female towers over the male, whom Dali depicts as dominated and vulnerable. Two pairs of figures observe the couple. Both show Dali as a child accompanied by an adult – the pointing figure is his father, the seated one his nanny. These references to childhood, the “reminiscence” in the title, suggest fragments of memory uncovered through introspection.
