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"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) |
