Il sacramento dell'Ultima Cena

Dalí finished this in 1955, in the middle of the decade when he was turning out large religious paintings built on mathematics and geometry. Christ sits at the center with his 12 apostles bowed around the table, but the whole scene is enclosed inside a huge translucent 12-sided shape, a dodecahedron, which since the days of Plato had been used as a symbol of the heavens. Through its panes you see the calm bay of Port Lligat, the Catalan cove where Dalí lived and set many of his sacred pictures. Above the table a bare male torso hovers with arms outstretched over the whole company. The American collector Chester Dale, who paid for it, gave it to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, where it quickly became one of the most visited paintings in the building. Dalí kept the apostles' faces deliberately blank and lowered, so that none of them competes with Christ.