Madonna of Port Lligat

For Salvador Dali, who used to be an untiring traveller, his Catalonian homeland was always a port, refuge and oracle, an essential key in the execution of his work. Facing the Mediterranean, his household gods revelated to him a mysterious and enigmatic world, which become more significant in his mystical-metaphysical period which began in the 1950s.

Port Lligat is a fief, the home of his phantasmagorias, where the Madonnas gave him strength and encouraged to go on representing what he found in the distorting concave and convex mirrors of his cosmic-paranoid hallucinations.

The perforated ("foradadas") rocks of the Costa Brava were a recurrent image in Dali's landscapes. And the windows, those spaces opening onto the infinite, are orificies full of symbolism: fear of the void, as in this Madonna, who, like Ceres, is preparing to scatter with her delicate hand the fertile seeds onto the land that Dali had chosen. She is a virgin-goddess, pagan and pre-Christian.