Sunday Dalí: Vertigo or The Tower of Pleasure, 1930. Oil on canvas.

From Dalí-Gallery:

In one of the best examples of de Chirico’s influence, the shadow projected by an enigmatic figure outside the picture is a hovering menace, as is the ball in unstable equilibrium. The couple, emblem of love and death, and the lion’s head also appear in The Great Masturbator, 1929 and other canvases of the same period.

May favorite part is the rock formations on the lower left side. Paranoiac-critical indeed!

It is also interesting that one of Dalí’s other paintings from the same year, The Bleeding Roses features a very similar scene.

To put these canvases in perspective Dalí himself wrote:

My love for Dullita (whose face I had not yet seen) spread over all thing and became a sentiment so general that the idea of the slightest possibility of her real presence would have horrified and disappointed me; I adore her, and at the same time remain more alone, more ferociously alone than ever!

The mechanical side of the Mill interested me very little … The tower, on the other hand, as the reader of this book already initiated to my tastes will readily understand, became the sacred spot, the tabernacle, the “mansion of sacrifice” – and it was, in fact, up in the tower that I perpetrated the sacrifice! …

The hight of the tower where I found myself exceeded everything I had imagined; I leaned over the edge and spat; I saw my spittle become smaller and disappear in a mass of dark vegetation from which emerged the remains of an old chicken coop. …

If Dullita had been there I would have made her lean very far over the edge, at the same time holding her back so she would not fall. This would have giver her an awful scare. …¹

The narrative continues for multiple pages encompassing many of the young Dalí’s fascinations: sexual desire, paranoiac-critical analyzations, the female body objectified, fear, anticipation, and rage.

This part of the book is available on Google Books.