Sunday Dalí: Leda Atomica, 1947-49. Oil on canvas, 61.1 x 45.3 cm.

The most striking thing in this painting that is none of the elements are touching anything else. Even the sea is levitating above the ground. This reflects Dalí’s superficial understanding of the discontinuity of matter. Particles at the atomic level do not touch each other.

The mythology of Leda and the swan oft repeated. Leda was seduced by Zeus who took the form of a swan. On the same night Leda also had sex with her husband, Tyndareus. As a result, Leda had two sets of twins: Helen and Pollux were the children of Zeus, and thus, immortal; Castor and Clytemnestra were the children of Tyndareus and mortal.¹

Dalí cast his wife, Gala as Leda in the painting who caresses the head of the swan. The swan is the only element that does not cast a shadow, suggesting its other-worldly quality.²

Ian Gibson and Jean-Luis Ferrier posit that Dalí’s version of Leda and the swan exhibits clédalism, which is, opposed to sadism and masochism, a pleasure and pain sublimated in an all transcending identification with the object.³ This shows a tenderness that is not normally associated with Dalí — this painting is about love. Dalí tacts more towards Leonardo da Vinci’s interpretation of the Leda myth and away from the more corporeal interpretations by Michalengelo or Correggio.

Further influences by Leonardo’s Leda are apparant in the latent geometry of each painter’s works. Matila Ghyka discovered two superimposed “golden rectangles” in the work by Leonardo. Leonardo’s famous pentagon can be superimposed over Dalí’s version. In fact, Dalí himself drew the pentagon over a sketch. In the lower right Dalí wrote P_r = (R/2) * √(10-2√5), which is the formula used to calculate the side of a regular pentagon. The final clue to the underlying mathematics is in the square-edge floating in the lower-right quadrant of the painting, right where the formula was written in the sketch.