The Last Supper / 1955 / Salvador Dali / Oil on canvas / National Gallery Washington

The painting "The Last Supper" is a painting with a religious theme, which is separated from other works of Salvador Dali due to its special composition.

Dalí's fame from the late 1920s to the mid-1940s was due to his use of a surrealistic style and his Freudian dream imagery.

Created in 1955, "The Last Supper" is both religious and realistic. Unlike Dalí's previous paintings, which depicted the weathered and rugged cliffs of Catalonia, the background of the work is a simple landscape of the Catalan coast in northeastern Spain, depicting the bay of Port Ligat.

In the late 1940s, Dali's return to Christian imagery and traditional values was influenced by three factors: The devastating effects of the Spanish Civil War and World War II, His renewed interest in classical art,  and reassessing Freud's psychological principles after meeting this psychologist in his old age.

One of the classic effects that can be mentioned in this image is the hair style of the worshipers, the curved shape of their bodies and the bright white color of their robes, which is borrowed from the Spanish painter Francisco de Zurbarán.

The great Italian Renaissance of the early 1500s was another major source of Dali's classicism. The situation of the foreground and the background scenery, the type of placement of men around the table symmetrically, exactly on both sides of Christ (PBUH) is repeated in a mirror-like manner. In addition, the dimensions of the image are drawn based on complex mathematical ratios calculated by Renaissance scientists.

Relying on this geometric pattern, after completing the work after nine months, Dali explained about the painting as follows:

I wanted to realize a luminous and Pythagorean moment based on the celestial numbers and the number twelve: twelve hours of the day, twelve months of the year, twelve pentagons of twelve faces, twelve signs of the zodiac around the sun and twelve apostles around Christ.

Prepared and arranged by: Narges Saheb Ekhtiari