Divine Art

Good art can be appreciated on the visual level. Great art has many levels more. Take for example Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus) by Salvidore Dali.

Called Corpus Hypercubus when it was first exhibited in Rome in 1954, it was renamed Crucifixion when it was moved to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

My initial impression of this piece was that it seemed to be another example of the unexpected one has come to expect from a surrealist artist like Dali. Whilst his skills in rendering the more realist elements of this work are there to be seen, the geometric elements of it do seem bizarre. It is however these elements which launch this into great art.

In place of the expected wooden cross, Dali has painted a hypercube or a tesseract, a 4 dimensional cube.

The unfolding of a tesseract into eight cubes is analogous to unfolding the sides of a cube into six squares. The use of a hypercube for the cross has been interpreted as a geometric symbol for the transcendental nature of God. Just as God exists in a way that is incomprehensible to humans, the hypercube exists in four spatial dimensions, which is equally inaccessible to the mind. The three-dimensional representation of the hypercube is a visual metaphor of how for us, God made himself more relatable as a human through Christ in The Cross.

The union of Christ and the tesseract also reflects Dalí’s opinion that the seemingly separate and incompatible concepts of science and religion can in fact coexist.
Great art makes one think, so it is here.

Image: From Internet.