Enchanting mid 20th Century cold painted and gilt bronze study of a Unicorn with its extra long alicorn piercing through a heart shaped hole in a brick wall, beside the Unicorn a naked lady is seen lying down covering her face. Signed Salvador Dali, numbered 122/350, dated 1984 and with Jemelton foundry stamp.
The unicorn is a mythical creature prominent in legends as an intricately linked symbol of purity. The horn of a unicorn is believed capable of neutralizing any poison. This animal also has connotations of chastity and virginity, both male and female, and was adopted as the sign or ideal representation of the "perfect" knight. In some legends it was also a symbol of virility. Dalí chose to portray the unicorn as a phallic figure whose horn penetrates a stone wall through a heart-shaped opening, from which a drop of blood seems to be slowly falling. The nude, reposing female stretched out in the foreground at the hooves of the animal underlines the sensual nature of this sculpture.
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ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Height: 57 cm
Width: 48 cm
Circa: 1984
Condition: Excellent Original Condition
Materials: Bronze
SKU: 7984
ABOUT
Dali Early Life
Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech was born on 11 May 1904, at 8:45 am GMT, at the 1st floor of Carrer Monturiol, 20 (presently 6), in the town of Figueres, in the Empordà region, close to the French border in , Spain. In the Summer of 1912, the family moved to the top floor of Carrer Monturiol 24 (presently 10). His older brother, who had also been named Salvador (born 12 October 1901), had died of gastroenteritis nine months earlier, on 1 August 1903. His father, Salvador Dalí i Cusí, was a middle-class lawyer and notary whose strict disciplinary approach was tempered by his wife, Felipa Domenech Ferrés, who encouraged her son’s artistic endeavors.
When he was five, he was taken to his brother’s grave and told by his parents that he was his brother’s reincarnation, a concept which he came to believe. Of his brother, Dalí said, “… [we] resembled each other like two drops of water, but we had different reflections.” He “was probably a first version of myself but conceived too much in the absolute.” Images of his long-dead brother would reappear embedded in his later works, including Portrait of My Dead Brother (1963).
He also had a sister, Anna Maria, who was three years younger. In 1949, she published a book about her brother, Dalí As Seen By His Sister. His childhood friends included future FC Barcelona footballers and . During holidays at the Catalan resort of , the trio played football (soccer)together.
He attended drawing school. In 1916, he also discovered modern painting on a summer vacation trip to Cadaqués with the family of Ramon Pichot, a local artist who made regular trips to Paris. The next year, Dalí’s father organized an exhibition of his charcoal drawings in their family home. He had his first public exhibition at the Municipal Theatre in Figueres in 1919, a site he would return to decades later.
In February 1921, Dalí’s mother died of breast cancer. Dalí was 16 years old; he later said his mother’s death “was the greatest blow I had experienced in my life. I worshipped her… I could not resign myself to the loss of a being on whom I counted to make invisible the unavoidable blemishes of my soul.” After her death, Dalí’s father married his deceased wife’s sister. Dalí did not resent this marriage, because he had a great love and respect for his aunt.
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