From the first day that he set foot on the pavement of Surrealist Paris, Dalí has never ceased to proclaim that most of the pompiers painters and the ultra-academicians, especially Meissonier and the Spanish Mariano Fortuny, were a thousand times more interesting than the representatives of the aging "isms" of modern art, and the African, Polynesian, Indian, and even Chinese art objects. Therefore, it was normal that, at a certain point in his life, he should come face to face with patriotism, and, as the pompiers did at the end of the nineteenth century, he decided to paint pictures glorifying the history of his country.
    The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus was painted in 1958 and 1959. This oil antedated Santiago el Grande, which depicts Saint James of Compostela, patron saint of Spain. Dalí says that in this canvas he painted for the first time with an existentialist shiver: the shiver for the unity of the fatherland. Everything in it springs from the four petals of a jasmine flower exploding in an atomic cloud of creative genius. Two years after finishing his Discovery of America, Dalí produced a third historical work, The Battle of Tetuan, inspired by Mariano Fortuny's painting of the same name which is in the Museum of Modern Art in Barcelona. The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus was a major step in Dalí's painting of that period. Here one finds for the first time, brought together and intimately mixed with previous styles, the technique of his corpuscular period. In this canvas, the figure on the banner is Gala, and the monk kneeling and holding the crucifix is Dalí. In a taped interview in 1972, while speaking about this picture he told me [Robert Descharnes] that he had wished to pay homage to the glory of Velazquez. On the other hand, what seemed to him more important from a technical point of view was to employ a process utilizing the lines of the photoengraver which, greatly enlarged, would allow the image, taken from the Christ of Glasgow, to reappear so that it would seem to mingle with the glorious halberds of the Spanish warriors, inspired by the painting by Velazquez in the Prado Museum, The Surrender of Breda.
    It may seem surprising to say that Dalí decided to paint pictures glorifying his country and then show Columbus discovering America. However, it has been argued that Columbus was a Spaniard. He never wrote anything in Italian; all writings are in Spanish, and some historians believe that his family was forced to leave Spain and flee to Italy. The Catalonians firmly believe that he was from Catalonia. Therefore, to Dalí, this was the logical beginning of his historical paintings.
    Three major influences (other than Gala, who was ALWAYS Dalí's chief muse) inspired Dalí to create this Masterwork, which is more than 14 feet tall. The first of these was the approaching 300th anniversary of the death of Velazquez, who was very important to Dalí. The second was that there was considerable academic debate at the time regarding the true nationality of Columbus. Some were asserting that Columbus had been Catalonian rather than Italian, and Dalí seized upon this opportunity to further glorify his wondrous Catalonia. Finally, the gallery which commissioned Dalí to paint this work, the Huntington Hartford Gallery, was situated on Columbus Circle in New York City. The combination of these 3 things was enough to inspire Dalí to wondrous heights of creativity.
    The appointment of Columbus to explore the New World by King Ferdinand, and Queen Isabella of Spain is depicted in the upper center of the painting. Just to the right of that, the flying crosses, and the lances, standards and polearms held aloft by the figures below are direct references to the Velazquez painting The Surrender at Breda (or The Lances). In this way, Dalí is paying his direct respects to the 17th Century Spanish Master who has so influenced him.
    The center of the painting is dominated by a young Columbus who is leading one of his ships onto the shoreline of the New World. He holds in his right hand, a standard on which the visage of Gala is depicted in the pose of St. Helena, the mother of Constantine. Constantine was the founder of Constantinople and the Byzantium Empire, which so heavily influenced the development of Western Civilization. To the right of Columbus, is a kneeling figure of a monk, who is actually Dalí, and in the lower right hand corner, the figure whose head is totally covered by the cloak is representative of the introspective and private side of his wife Gala.
    In the lower left hand corner, a translucent bishop holds his staff aloft amongst a series of crosses and other objects. This is Saint Narcisso, the Bishop of Gerona, who had been murdered in his own abbey. There was a Spanish legend that said whenever any foreign invaders would advance into the area of St. Narcisso's tomb, that huge clouds of gadflies would pour forth in order to drive the foreign invaders away.
    This painting, above all, is a tribute to Dalí's Spanish Catholic heritage. The pose of Gala on the banner held by Columbus symbolizes the way in which Gala helped Dalí to discover America. She was very much responsible for many of the antics for which he became famous, and as a result of her guidance, Dalí rose to the great heights with which we are now familiar.

    Roses appear in many of Dalí's works; in the Thirties he made several paintings of women whose heads were formed by roses. Dalí uses the rose as a female sexual symbol. The Invisible Man (1929-32) includes two partially naked women with huge roses appearing where their wombs should be. In 1930, Dalí used this image again but in a more definitive way, depicting a nude woman with bleeding roses coming from her womb. To Dalí then, the rose represented menstruation and the internal reproductive organs of women.
    The Rose shares a similar structure with the Portrait of Gala with the Rhinocerotic Symptoms (1954). Both paintings have the familiar intensely blue sky as a backdrop to a dominating central image that hovers over a Spanish landscape. The paintings also share the same vivid red color of the rose, which contrasts so effectively with the blue sky; in Portrait of Gala with the Rhinocerotic Symptoms, the red is used for the border beneath her head. In The Rose, there is a tiny drop of water on one of the petals of the flower, as realistic as a photograph. Dalí often used this effect of trompe l'oeil to highlight a small detail of a painting.

    The Sistine Madonna is one of Dalí's many representations of the Virgin Mary, although she appears here in the most obscure setting. The painting was completed in 1958, using oil on canvas. Like the later painting, The Portrait of my Dead Brother (1963), it uses a matrix of dots to create the images. The technique that Dalí used for the matrix was taken from an industrial printing system. This work shows Dalí was well ahead of his time as, with the use of optical illusion and the playful subject, The Sistine Madonna would fit well into the Op and Pop Art scene that emerged in the Sixties.
    The dot matrix forms two images: one being the huge ear, the smaller image being the Madonna. The ear is a reproduction of Pope John XXIII's ear, which was taken from a photograph in a newspaper. The face of the Madonna is a copy of The Sistine Madonna by Raphael, one of the Renaissance painters that Dalí most admired. He enjoyed the idea that this painting can be seen in different ways, depending on the viewer's perspective: if the viewer is at a close distance the painting seems abstract, if further away one of the separate images will come into focus.

   Here, Dalí recovers the sobriety and evocative power of the youthful portraits of his sister Anna Maria. The indicated existence of a mirror that we cannot see introduces an enigma into the picture: What is Gala contemplating in the mirror? The same subject appeared fifteen years earlier in My Wife Nude Contemplating Her Own Body Becoming a Staircase, Three Vertebrae of a Celestial Colonnade, and Architecture.

    The ample curves of the body of Mary Magdalene emerge from the cloudy whirlwinds of a stormy sky. This picture was painted in Port Lligat in 196o concurrently with The Ecumenical Council. The glimpses of sky visible through the storm clouds remind one of those in The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus. At the time that he painted this study of Mary Magdalene, Dalí was working on several similar pictures in which he utilized real teeth and actual nails glued onto the canvas; the most notable of these are undoubtedly Hyperxiological Sky and a lost wax model with intermingled forks, knives, and precious stones which, cast in bronze, serves as the cover for the unique copy of The Apocalypse of Saint John. In all his researches Dalí has depicted the things that afford the maximum of opposition, such as the sky and the nails, while always happily opposing them. He expounded apropos of Hyperxiological Sky that he had painted for the first time in history a sky that his compatriot Francesc Pujols, the most genial and least-known philosopher of our epoch, had described in a most extraordinary way. According to Pujols, the celestial substance was of colloidal origin. The body of Mary Magdalene is not imaginary; Dalí painted it with the help of sketches made from living models.