Sunday Dalí: España, 1938.

Dali’s depiction of Spain was heavily influenced by the disastrous civil war which was raging in his homeland and Dalí’s numerous trips to Italy in the late 1930s. Dalí was very taken with the renaissance painters, especially Leonardo Da Vinci. The lower half of the woman (herself a double-image) and the battling figures in the background are drawn in paint, rather than modeled which reflect’s Da Vinci’s underdrawing technique in Adoration of the Magi. Further influence by Da Vinci is found at the woman’s breasts whose nipples are the heads of battling figures in the background. A similar scene (sans nipples) can be seen in the background of Da Vinci’s painting.

Also notable is the use of the lion. Normally for Dalí the lion represents sexual desire (as seen in The Great Masturbator) however here Dalí drops the cartoonish face and wagging tongue in favor of depicting a realistic lion representing ferocity.

Out of the drawer hangs a piece of red meat representing the carnage of war. Dalí’s amazing use of angled light and the paranoiac critical method turns the shadow cast by the dangling meat into a crack in the nightstand. The landscape is Dalí’s beloved Plain of Amupurdán.