Lapis-lazuli Corpuscular Assumption repeats several of the images seen in Raphaelesque Head Exploding (1951). The outline of the Pantheon can be seen, the top of which acts as a halo to Gala's head. Like the Madonna, Gala is exploding, her body delineated by the rhinoceros horns that swirl about the painting.
    Above an altar is the figure of the crucified Christ. The model for Christ was a boy from Cadaqués called Juan whom the Dalís were very close to, treating him like an adopted son. The boy's body forms a triangle, a shape repeated by Gala's arms and head above. Dalí had a glass floor put in his studio so that he could look up or down on his models in order to recreate this perspective.
    Dalí saw this painting as an interpretation of the philosopher Nietzsche's idea of natural strength, although here we have Gala as a "superwoman", ascending to heaven through her own innate force. In a later explanation of the work, Dalí wrote that Gala was rising to heaven with the aid of "anti-matter Angels". The painting can be interpreted as Gala's body either disintegrating or integrating.

    This painting can be considered as a companion piece to another work that Dalí had done many years before, namely The Persistence of Memory in which Dalí initially created the scene on which this painting is based.
    The ochre colored plain of the ground, has been divided up into cubic shaped blocks, and the addition of the rhinoceros horns in the upper left-hand portion of the painting also refers to Dalí's fascination with the molecular world. The melting watches and landscape of Cadaqués make another appearance herein, and the addition of the fish serves as a witness to the event.
    Dalí created this painting as a continuation of his themes of Nuclear Mysticism by applying a perspective of Divisionism to the original painting. Dalí painted this work to explore the effects of nuclear weaponry, asserting that the invention of such weaponry had a profound effect upon everyone on the planet, even those in the small fishing villages along the coastline of Spain.

   The previous year, Dalí had written his Mystical Manifesto, where he pronounced a new component of his universe, This double image of Gala combines the stimuli of spirituality and science, two recurrent obsessions in Dalí's works dated after the Second World War.

    When disembarking from the steamship America in Le Havre on March 27, 1953, on his return from New York, Dalí announced to the reporters gathered around him that he was going to paint a picture he himself termed as sensational: an exploding Christ, nuclear and hypercubic. He said that it would be the first picture painted with a classical technique and an academic formula but actually composed of cubic elements. To a reporter who asked him why he wanted to depict Christ exploding, he replied, "I don't know yet. First I have ideas, I explain them later. This picture will be the great metaphysical work of my summer."
    It was at the end of spring in 1953 in Port Lligat that Dalí began this work, but it is dated 1954, the year in which it was finished and then exhibited in the month of December at the Carstairs Gallery in New York. The painting may be regarded as one of the most significant of his religious oils in the classical style, along with The Madonna of Port Lligat, Christ of Saint John of the Cross, and The Last Supper, which is in the National Gallery in Washington, D.C.
    "Metaphysical, transcendent cubism" is the way that Dalí defines his picture, of which he says: "It is based entirely on the Treatise on Cubic Form by Juan de Herrera, Philip II's architect, builder of the Escorial Palace; it is a treatise inspired by Ars Magna of the Catalonian philosopher and alchemist, Raymond Lulle. The cross is formed by an octahedral hypercube. The number nine is identifiable and becomes especially consubstantial with the body of Christ. The extremely noble figure of Gala is the perfect union of the development of the hypercubic octahedron on the human level of the cube. She is depicted in front of the Bay of Port Lligat. The most noble beings were painted by Velazquez and Zurbaran; I only approach nobility while painting Gala, and nobility can only be inspired by the human being."
    Crucifixion is a stunning work that successfully combines elements of Dalí's Nuclear Mysticism with his return to his Catholic heritage during this time. In this work, Dalí is giving us a crucifixion in the age of modern science, completing his theme started in Christ of St. John of the Cross.
    Of particular note is the stunning athleticism with which the crucified savior is represented. Even the nail holes in the palms and feet are not present, as Salvador shows us his perfect redemption. The cross itself, an eight sided octahedral cube, represents the possible theoretical reflection of a separate 4-dimensional world. Dalí's fascination with mathematics is incorporated with his return to his Catholic faith in later life. This union represents Dalí's assertion that the two seemingly diametrically opposed worlds of faith and science CAN coexist.
    Six feet in height, this painting can be considered one of the 18 Masterworks, so named by Mr. Reynolds Morse. Gala Dalí stares up at the crucifixion as a reverent witness, wrapped in gold and white robes, standing on a large chessboard, while the familiar outline of the mountains of Catalonia recede into the distance.

    Portrait of Gala with the Rhinocerotic Symptoms is another exploration of Dalí's theory of the recurring form of the rhinoceros horn, as seen in the 1951 painting Raphaelesque Head Exploding. This theory came from Dalí's study of the 1665 painting called The Lacemaker by Jan Vermeer. In 1955, Dalí gave a lecture at the Sorbonne where he put forward his view that The Lacemaker was composed from the repetition of the rhinoceros horn pattern. Dalí saw the rhinoceros horn as "the delirium sign", saying there was no better example "in nature of logarithmic spirals than those of the curve of the rhinoceros horn".
    In this portrait of Gala, her disembodied face appears over a Spanish bay. The two intense blues of the sky and the sea contrast with the vivid red border that delineates her bust. The curves and lines of her neck and chest are formed by rhinoceros horns that swirl beneath her head. To the left of Gala, one of the cliffs along the coast has also fallen prey to Dalí's obsession with the rhinoceros horn. The cliff has disintegrated, but the horns still delineate an overall shape.

    Painted during Dalí's corpuscular period, this is one of the pictures in which the artist used rhinoceros' horns in suspension to form a part or the entire figure of his subject, as in Raphaelesque Head Exploding of 1951, Paranoiac-Critical Study of Vermeer's Lacemaker of 1954-55, or Young Virgin Auto-Sodomized by Her Own Chastity. The Illisos was begun in Port Lligat during the summer of 1953 at the same time that Dalí was working on the Crucifixion (Corpus Hybercubus), now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. In his Le Journal d'un genie, Dalí has given a detailed account of his day-to-day progress on these two works, describing how he managed to overcome his fear of undertaking certain surfaces of the canvas, which seemed to come from his neurotic fear of not having any testicles and of always keeping his teeth too tightly clenched. He conquered this fear one afternoon by attacking two completely different things: the torso and the testicles of Illisos. The care he devoted every day to this picture must be regarded as the strenuous work of a painter who knows how to seek mastery by doing a still life at the same time that he controls the atmosphere and the rendering of a work of his imagination, such as Crucifixion (Corpus Hybercubus). As a respite from the tension demanded by his work on the Crucifixion, he did the Illisos in his studio, using as a model a plaster replica of this marvelous sculpture by Phidias, originally found on the west pediment of the Parthenon and today in the British Museum in London.
    The mythological figure is depicted in suspension in the middle of the Bay of Cadaqués, where one glimpses in the background the rock called Cucurucuc which stands at the entrance to the bay. The underpart of the water is treated the same as in two other paintings, the first one dated 1950 and entitled Dalí at the Age of Six When He Believed Himself to Be a Young Girl, Lifting with Extreme Precaution the Skin of the Water to Observe a Dog Sleeping in the Shadow of the Sea, and the second from 1963: Hercules Lifts the Skin if the Sea and Stops Venus for an Instant from Waking Love.