Adagio and Christopher Columbus - Surreal!

Our stop in Clearwater/St. Petersburg, Florida included a visit to the Salvador Dali museum on St. Pete's waterfront. With the world's largest collection of Dali's surrealistic art outside of his home country of Spain, the museum proved a perfect outing for a rainy day. The surrealists were influenced by the irrationality of World War I as well as Freud's study of the unconscious, and much of their work has a dream-like quality.

Though a bit more metaphorical, Dali's The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus seems to share a common theme with Adagio's journey. The 14x9 foot painting is filled with the religious imagery of Dali's Catholicism, including Dali himself as a monk with a cross near the bottom of the composition and his wife Gala as the Virgin Mary on the flowing banner. Wikipedia suggests that, instead of a middle-aged mariner, Dali depicts Columbus as an adolescent boy in a classical robe to symbolize America as a young country with its best years ahead of it. Let us hope that is still true.