Pamono Salvador Dali, The Angel Helmsman, 1964, Original Woodcut> Surrealist

L’ANgelo Nocchiero
(The Angel Helmsman)

Plate 2 from “La Divina Commedia” (The Divine Comedy), referring to Purgatory, chant 2

from the special Italian edition of only 80 (out of a total edition of 2900) – see the image of the plaque attached to the portfolio

Original Colour Woodcut on Rives paper
executed in Paris for the Italian publisher, under the direction of Master Printer Raymond Jacquet for the Italian edition

year: 1964
33 x 26 cm
Signed in the Plate
on the back: “Purgatorio Tav. 2” (Purgatory, Plate 2)

Catalogue Raisonné:
R.Michler and L. W. Löpsinger
“Salvador Dali, Catalogue Raisonné of Prints II – Lithographs and Wood Engravings 1956-1980” ref. 1074

Great Condition: full size (no trimming), never framed, minimal traces of time near the edges, original deckle bottom edge, no restoration

with Certificate

Important
PLATE SIGNED: most of woodcuts from the Divine Comedy are unsigned, only the ones from Special Editions are signed (in the plate)
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This very artwork refers to Purgatory, chant 2, verses 43-45:

Da poppa stava il celestial nocchiero,
Tal che faria beato pur descripto;
E più di cento spirti entro sediero.

The heav’nly steersman at the prow was seen,
Visibly written blessed in his looks.
Within a hundred spirits and more there sat.
(Translator: Reverend Henry Francis Cary)

The complex history of Dali’s Divine Comedy

In 1950, preparing to commemorate the 700th anniversary of Dante Alighieri’s birth, the Italian government commissioned the great Catalan surrealist painter Salvador Dalí to illustrate the one hundred cantos of the Divine Comedy. The artist immediately began work on one hundred watercolours, to be published by the Istituto Poligrafico dello Stato.
The work was monumental: Dalí was forced to employ two engravers who for five years hand-carved the 3,500 blocks of wood needed for the woodcuts. The illustrations were presented on May 14, 1954.
The decision to entrust the illustrations for the Divine Comedy to a non-Italian artist sparked heated controversy, and soon the change of government provided the opportunity to revoke the contract.
Having regained possession of the watercolours, Salvador Dalí sold them in 1959 to the French publisher Joseph Foret, who published them in Paris the following year.
The watercolours were not published in Italy until 1964: at the Scuola Grande di San Teodoro in Venice, the publishers Adriano Salani of Florence and Arti e Scienze of Rome organised an International Art Book Exhibition, presenting the Italian edition of the Divine Comedy illustrated by Dalí.
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Dali’s Comedy: between Art and Psychoanalysis

In the Divine Comedy, Dalí traces his artistic evolution, from the surrealism of the Inferno to the mysticism of the Paradiso, illustrating the text with his own symbolic alphabet and distancing himself from any previous figurative interpretation, as the artist explains:

“When they ask me why I embellished Hell with light colours, I reply that Romanticism perpetrated the ignominy of making people believe that Hell was as black as Gustave Doré’s coal mines where nothing can be seen. All this is false. Dante’s Inferno is illuminated by the sun and honey of the Mediterranean, and that is why the terrors of my illustrations are analytical and super-gelatinous, with their angelic viscosity”.

According to critics, Dalí illustrates Dante’s journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise by reinterpreting Dante’s journey from a psychoanalytic perspective, placing a particularly significant character or event from the canto at the center of each panel. The representation is dreamlike and irreverent: Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise emerge suspended between dream and reality, in a single masterpiece, in which the elegance of the line is combined with a masterful use of color. The figuration is ironic, grotesque, and imaginative in the depictions of Hell and Purgatory, while the representations of Beatrice are delicate and celestial, as if the artist were on an imaginary journey within himself. The journey into Dante’s afterlife is thus interpreted in a metaphysical and psychological key, masterfully blending the deepest meaning of the Divine Comedy with the artistic flair of Salvador Dalí, who maintains Dante’s dreamy atmosphere while adding his unmistakable surrealist touch with the famous flaccid figures, crutches, rhinoceros horns, and flying bones.