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The Profanation of the Host.

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Larger Image	Larger image may be viewed by UofL faculty, staff, and students only (log-in required using ULink username/password) at: http://echo.louisville.edu/login?url=http://vrc-web.louisville.edu/Jpegs/830/835-19.jpg
Title	The Profanation of the Host.
Creator	Dali, Salvador (Spanish painter and printmaker, 1904-1989)
Date	1929
Cultural Context	Spanish European Western European
Style/Period	Surrealist Modern (styles and periods) Modernist
Theme	Paintings (visual works) Oil paintings (visual works) Avant-garde Fantasy Symbols Symbolism (artistic concept) Allusion Imagery Fear Anxiety Eroticism Sex Sexuality Phallic Figurative art Figures (representations) Heads (representations) Women Men (male humans) Fathers Nudes (representations) Nudity Lions Wild animals Wildlife Animals Locusts Chalices Cups Communion cups Blood (animal material) Containers (receptacles) Vessels (containers) Beaches
Subject	Paintings Oil paintings Fantasy Symbols Allusions Disgrace Anxiety Distress Sex Lust Relations between the sexes Heads (Anatomy) Women Men Fathers Nudes Body parts Lions Animals Ants Locusts Insects Chalices Drinking vessels Containers Blood Beaches
Description	"Dali's variation on Paolo Uccello's work of the same title, this is probably his most sacrilegious painting." (Caption); The Profanation of the Host […] is one of Dali's most sacrilegious paintings (although later he tried to exonerate himself by saying that it was a work 'of Catholic essence'). While it may have been begun in 1929, the date habitually ascribed to it, the painting was almost certainly not finished until 1930, after Dali had been thrown out by his father. The picture develops a motif that had made its first appearance in The Lugubrious Game, where the Host's profanation consisted in being placed next to an anus about to be penetrated by a finger. In the present work, the Host and communion cup are positioned in front of the mouth of the Great Masturbator, from which a blood-imbued liquid is flowing into the Cup. Santos Torroella has suggested that the liquid is sperm symbolized by saliva, this possibility being reinforced by the presence in it of blood, which for Dali is often associated with masturbation (in his adolescent diary […] he had feared that too much wanking would make him 'lose blood'). The same critic has drawn our attention to another possible source for the motif, an anecdote included in Ernesto Giménez Caballero's book I, Inspector of Drains (1928), in which an old Jesuit recalls how a schoolfriend of his used to boast that he had ejaculated into the Chalice, exclaiming: 'I sully myself over God and the Virgin, His Mother, and in the Holy Cup'. Dali had been close to Giménez Caballero in 1928, publishing regularly in his La Gaceta Literaria, and he may well have been struck by this piece of daring. Indeed, his boast in the painting of the Sacred Heart of Jesus that got him thrown out of his home ('Sometimes I spit for pleasure on the portrait of my mother') might conceivably been calqued on the same phrase. [...] Dali may also have had in mind Paolo Uccello's altarpiece, similarly titled The Profanation of the Host, one panel of which shows a Host bleeding after some Jews have attempted in vain to destroy it by fire. And it is possible, too, that he was aware that, in Bouvier's The Secret Manual of the Confessor […], ejaculation into the Holy Cup was singled out as a particularly heinous sin. […] The swirling construction occupying the middle ground of the work, with Art Nouveau elements relating it to The Great Masturbator, contains four other onanists' heads, each with a locust at its mouth. To increase the terror, ants are in attendance. From the beach, far below, a statuesque woman of apparently huge dimensions stares haughtily in the direction of the masturbators, oblivious to the other figures around her (notably a naked male directly behind). But it is in the dark foreground, out of the sun, that most of the action is taking place. Here again is the lion's head, suggestive of the angry father, juxtaposed with the crazily staring, lascivious adult male figure, now equipped with a huge penis, whom we know from The Lugubrious Game. A young person leans in shame and surrender on his shoulder, as he does in that painting, and a girl is seen in a similar posture to his right. The glinting white of a woman's eye suggests wild excitement. Naked buttocks and breasts gleam voluptuously in the half-light. This is where it's happening, whatever exactly "it" is." (Excerpt, pp.337-338)
Material	Oil on canvas Oil paint (pigmented coating) Paint Canvas
Measurements	100 x 73 cm
Technique	Oil painting (technique) Painting (image-making)
Work Type	Oil paintings Paintings
Repository	Salvador Dalí Foundation Museum (St. Petersburg, Florida)
Source	Gibson, Ian. The Shameful Life of Salvador Dali. New York; London: W.W. Norton, 1998. (Color plate XVIII)
Rights	Photograph reproduced in Gibson courtesy: © 1998 Salvador Dali Museum, Inc.
Digital Publisher	University of Louisville Department of Fine Arts/Allen R. Hite Art Institute Visual Resources Center
Format	image/jpeg
Digital File Name	VRC 835-19.jpg
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