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What happens when two great masters, from distant times and places, meet to talk about the depths of their lives in their arts? When Salvador Dalí, the great painter of Surrealism, received an order, from the Italian government in the 50s-60s, to paint a series on the Divine Comedy in celebration of the 700th anniversary of the birth of great Renaissance poet Dante Alighieri (13th century) he did not imagine the journey that he was going to make, nor to where or with whom he would go. And this is the journey that the exhibition Dali: The Divine Comedy shows us, with 100 prints by Dali that illustrate, one by one, the chants of Dante’s epic poem. The collection, which belongs to a private collector in Spain, takes visitors not only on the journey that Dante made in his classic work, from hell to paradise, but also on the self-inquisitive journey of Dali to his own depths, where each print of the Divine Comedy is also a reflection of his artistic work, his art and his life on it. And in playing this role of his own Virgil, Dali guides himself in the layers that Dante climbed: in the engravings related to Hell, Dali portrays his agonies referring to his most famous phase, the surrealist period; in Paradise, he finds the serenity that makes reference to his Mystic-nuclear manifesto, of the atomization of the figure, his quest for spirituality, a lesser known but extremely important moment in the work of Dali; and in Purgatory, the controversial angels of his period of transition between the two phases. All this in an environment sonorously enveloped by the fabulous Dante Symphony, composed by Liszt. And so, the exhibition Dali: The Divine Comedy is made up of dialogues between the Florentine and the Catalan, between literature and the visual arts & music, and between the Renaissance and the early 20th century, in a conversation that visitors must intently listen to with their eyes.
