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Lot Essay
Le conseil des dieux is an important watercolour painted by Salvador Dalí circa 1968. In a hallucinatory landscape, derived from the extraordinarily anthropomorphic rocky coastline of Cape Creus near Dalí’s Catalan home of Port Lligat, a celestial gathering of gods emerge within a magical light, the characters drawn from the pantheon of Greek mythology. The theme of a celestial council in which the gods convene to discuss and determine the fate of the humans below is one common to many religions and mythologies. Its most famous representation in Western art history is probably the ceiling decorations made by Raphael for the Villa Farnesina in Rome. The late 1960s was a time when Dalí himself was engaged not only in the creation of a series of prints, known as ‘The Mythologies’, but also in the painting of several elaborate ceiling decorations. He may well therefore have had what he called ‘the divine Raphael’s’ famous frescoes in mind when he created this watercolour.
At the centre of this work, a spiralling ‘stairway to heaven’ carved from the central rock winds its way into the sky and around the sun. At its foot, a crouching athletic discus-thrower half crouches, their arm raised behind them creating a characteristic double-image, in which the sun overhead becomes the discus in motion. This is Dali’s ‘Cosmic Athlete,’ a figure that, as Paul Moorhouse has written, reflects the artist’s unique ‘synthesis of Renaissance art, physics and metaphysics in the 1950s and 60s’ (Salvador Dali, London, 2001, p. 23). This character derives from a major oil painting of the same name that Dalí had made as part of a commission from the Spanish government to celebrate the country’s participation in the 1968 Olympics in Mexico city. In this work, the image of the discus thrower, drawn from the famous, lost, original sculpture from Ancient Greece, is seen fusing the earth, the heavens and the architecture of the Olympic stadium into a symbol of earthly and celestial union.
A similar conception is no doubt intended in Le conseil des dieux, only here the appearance of the gods themselves seems more humorous and playful. Hermes is seen leaping rather balletically from a rock to the right of the painting, while what is probably Zeus and his consort Hera appear at the centre of the work within the silhouette of the central discus thrower. The most famous occasion for a council of the gods in Greek mythology was the one convened to debate the case of the divine Eros’s love for the mortal princess Psyche. It is perhaps they, whom Dalí has depicted here in this work in the form of the two, separate and rather melancholic-looking figures seen gazing mournfully down in thought at the sea to the lower right of the picture and within the face of the discus thrower’s silhouette.
At the centre of this work, a spiralling ‘stairway to heaven’ carved from the central rock winds its way into the sky and around the sun. At its foot, a crouching athletic discus-thrower half crouches, their arm raised behind them creating a characteristic double-image, in which the sun overhead becomes the discus in motion. This is Dali’s ‘Cosmic Athlete,’ a figure that, as Paul Moorhouse has written, reflects the artist’s unique ‘synthesis of Renaissance art, physics and metaphysics in the 1950s and 60s’ (Salvador Dali, London, 2001, p. 23). This character derives from a major oil painting of the same name that Dalí had made as part of a commission from the Spanish government to celebrate the country’s participation in the 1968 Olympics in Mexico city. In this work, the image of the discus thrower, drawn from the famous, lost, original sculpture from Ancient Greece, is seen fusing the earth, the heavens and the architecture of the Olympic stadium into a symbol of earthly and celestial union.
A similar conception is no doubt intended in Le conseil des dieux, only here the appearance of the gods themselves seems more humorous and playful. Hermes is seen leaping rather balletically from a rock to the right of the painting, while what is probably Zeus and his consort Hera appear at the centre of the work within the silhouette of the central discus thrower. The most famous occasion for a council of the gods in Greek mythology was the one convened to debate the case of the divine Eros’s love for the mortal princess Psyche. It is perhaps they, whom Dalí has depicted here in this work in the form of the two, separate and rather melancholic-looking figures seen gazing mournfully down in thought at the sea to the lower right of the picture and within the face of the discus thrower’s silhouette.