Young Virgin Auto-Sodomized by the Horns of Her Own Chastity

Young Virgin Auto-Sodomized by
the Horns of Her Own Chastity
Salvador Dalí, 1954
Oil on canvas
40.5 × 30.5 cm, 15.95 × 12 in
The Playboy Mansion, Los Angeles, California

Young Virgin Auto-Sodomized by the Horns of Her Own Chastity is a 1954 painting by Salvador Dalí. During the 1950s, Dalí painted many of his subjects as composed of rhinoceros horns. Here, the Young Virgin's buttocks consist of four converging horns; "as the horns simultaneously comprise and threaten to sodomise the callipygian figure, she is effectively (auto-)sodomised by her own constitution."1

Dalí's inspiration for the image appears to have come from Vermeer, one of a handful of artists regarded by Dalí as masters. Specifically, Vermeer's The Lacemaker seems to have been the galvanising element, with its convergent curves which focus on the subject's fingers and so to the penetration point of her needle - which as Dalí has pointed out is merely implied and not actually painted. In a stunt, Dalí set up his easel before Vermeer's original with the expressed intent of making a copy.citation needed The result however was this painting, which consciously uses Vermeer's focal-point arrangement, albeit to entirely different effect.

The painting, formerly in the collection of The Playboy Mansion, recalls his depiction of his sister Ana María in Figure at a Window (1925), and has therefore been read by some critics as a nasty jab at his sister, punishing her for publishing a biography on Dalí that presented a quite negative point of view;citation needed it has also been interpreted as a painting of Gala, though in fact the figure is based on a photograph from a 1930s sex magazine.2

In 1958, Dalí wrote, "Paradoxically, this painting, which has an erotic appearance, is the most chaste of all."3

References

  1. ^ King, Elliott in Dawn Ades (ed.), Dalí (Milan: Bompiani Arte, 2004), 378-379
  2. ^ Robert Descharnes, Dalí, L'héritage infernal (Paris: Éditions Ramsay/La Marge, 2002), 72.
  3. ^ Morse, A. Reynolds, Dalí: A Study of His Life and Work (Greenwich: New York Graphic Society, 1958), 81.
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Salvador Dalí
List of works
Selected
paintings
Landscape Near Figueras (1910) • Vilabertrin (1913) • Fiesta in Figueres (1914-16) • Port of Cadaqués (Night) (1918-19) • The Artist's Father at Llane Beach (1920) • The Garden of Llaner (Cadaqués) (1920-21) • Cabaret Scene (1922) • Cubist Self-Portrait with "La Publicitat" (1923) • Self-portrait with L'Humanitie (1923) • Portrait of Luis Bunuel (1924) • Siphon and Small Bottle of Rum (1924) • The Basket of Bread (1926) • Honey Is Sweeter Than Blood (1927) • The Lugubrious Game (1929) • The First Days of Spring (1929) • The Great Masturbator (1929) • The Persistence of Memory (1931) • The Ghost of Vermeer of Delft Which Can Be Used As a Table (1934) • Morphological Echo (1934-36) • Archaeological Reminiscence of Millet's Angelus (1935) • Autumn Cannibalism (1936) • Lobster Telephone (1936) • Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War) (1936) • The Burning Giraffe (1937) • Metamorphosis of Narcissus (1937) • Swans Reflecting Elephants (1937) • Apparition of Face and Fruit Dish on a Beach (1938) • The Sublime Moment (1938) • Shirley Temple, The Youngest, Most Sacred Monster of the Cinema in Her Time (1939) • The Face of War (1940) • Slave Market with the Disappearing Bust of Voltaire (1940) • Honey is Sweeter than Blood (1941) • Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening (1944) • Galarina (1944-45) • Basket of Bread (1945) • The Temptation of Saint Anthony (1946) • The Elephants (1948) • Leda Atomica (1949) • The Madonna of Port Lligat (1949) • Christ of Saint John of the Cross (1951) • Galatea of the Spheres (1952) • The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory (1952-54) • Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus) (1954) • Young Virgin Auto-Sodomized by the Horns of Her Own Chastity (1954)  • The Sacrament of the Last Supper (1955) • Still Life Moving Fast (1956) • The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus (1958-59) • Tuna Fishing (1966-1967) • The Hallucinogenic Toreador (1968-1970) • La Toile Daligram (1972) • The Swallowtail (1983) •
Other works
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