Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus)
| Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus) | |
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| Artist | Salvador Dalí |
| Year | 1954 |
| Medium | Oil on canvas |
| Dimensions | 194.3 cm × 123.8 cm (76.5 in × 48.7 in) |
| Location | Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City |
Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus) is a 1954 oil-on-canvas painting by Salvador Dalí. A nontraditional, surrealist portrayal of the Crucifixion of Jesus, it depicts Christ on the polyhedron net of a tesseract (hypercube). It is one of his best known paintings from the later period of his career.
Dalí's inspiration for Corpus Hypercubus came from his change in artistic style during the 1940s and 1950s. Around that time, his interest in traditional surrealism diminished and he became fascinated with nuclear science, feeling that "thenceforth, the atom was [his] favorite food for thought". His interest grew from the bombing of Hiroshima at the end of World War II, which left a lasting impression on him. In his 1951 essay "Mystical Manifesto", he introduced an art theory he called "nuclear mysticism" that combined Dalí's interests in Catholicism, mathematics, science, and Catalan culture in an effort to reestablish classical values and techniques, which he extensively utilized in Corpus Hypercubus.
That same year, to promote nuclear mysticism and explain the "return to spiritual classicism movement" in modern art, he traveled throughout the United States giving lectures. Before painting Corpus Hypercubus, Dalí announced his intention to portray an exploding Christ using both classical painting techniques along with the motif of the cube, and he declared that "this painting will be the great metaphysical work of [his] summer". Juan de Herrera's Treatise on Cubic Forms was particularly influential to Dalí.
Corpus Hypercubus is composed of oil on canvas, and its dimensions are 194.3 cm × 123.8 cm (76.5 in x 48.75 in). Consistent with his theory of nuclear mysticism, Dalí uses classical elements along with ideas inspired by mathematics, science, etc. Some noticeably classic features are the drapery of the clothing and the Caravaggesque lighting that theatrically envelops Christ, though like his 1951 painting Christ of Saint John of the Cross, Corpus Hypercubus takes the traditional Biblical scene of Christ's Crucifixion and almost completely reinvents it. The union of Christ and the tesseract reflects Dalí's opinion that the seemingly separate and incompatible concepts of science and religion can in fact coexist. Upon completing Corpus Hypercubus, Dalí described his work as "metaphysical, transcendent cubism".
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