Grand Rhino en Dentelles

Description

In Dalí’s childhood home, there was a woodcut xylograph entitled “Rhinoceros” by Albrecht Dürer (1515). It was the year 1515 when the enormous, impetuous and astute animal appeared for the first time in Europe, bought from Asia by the King of Portugal. In creating this woodcut, Durer wished to immortalize this famous event.

Dalí was interested in the rhinoceros; he considered the horn a perfect logarithmic spiral; the perfect form present in nature.

The rhino’s horns ‘were ‘the only ones in the animal kingdom constructed in accordance with a perfect logarithmic spiral’ (Dalí quoted in H. Finkelstein, The Collected Writings of Salvador Dalí, Cambridge, 1998).

The Catalan genius was only nine years old, when his rhinoceros obsession started; an obsession he couldn’t separate from his admiration of Vermeer and Da Vinci. The triangle Dalí – Vermeer- Vinci is necessary to analyses Dalí’s obsession for the rhinoceros, and its horn.