At Your Left, In Your Glory

At Your Left, in Your Glory Commentary by Martin Warner Cite Share Show Bible Passage Salvador Dalí’s Christ of St John of the Cross is one of the most recognizable paintings in the world. Dalí was an exponent of Surrealism, which might seem more likely to deconstruct, rather than confirm, Christian faith. For example, The Virgin Spanking the Christ Child before Three Witnesses, the work of another surrealist artist, Max Ernst, was thought to be blasphemous. But a more positive reading of this style surely lends itself to the exploration of faith. St James the Great, brother of his fellow apostle John the Beloved, found his later vocation in nurturing the faith of pilgrims to a remote corner of the Iberian Peninsula. St John of the Cross (1542–91) was born not so very far away, at Fontiveros. In 1568, John took the title ‘of the cross’ when he joined a branch of the Carmelite Order founded by St Teresa at Avila. At some point during the 1570s he drew a sketch entitled ‘Christ from above’, which inspired Dalí to produce the work we see here. Dalí’s composition is Johannine in many ways. It captures the mood of the prologue of John’s Gospel, which begins, ‘In the beginning’. It explores the contrast between light and darkness as a metaphor for creation, time, and eternity. It uses the canvas to exploit the evangelist’s spatial language of ‘above’ and ‘below’. It also draws attention to the Sea of Galilee where so much of the drama of the gospel is played out. Galilee is where the Gospels of Matthew and Mark locate the discussion between Jesus, James, and John, and James and John’s mother, about the way to glory (Matthew 20:20–28; Mark 10:32–45). Above all, Dalí presents Jesus in the hour of his glory, when he is lifted up from the earth. And for most of Christian history, St John the beloved disciple has been depicted beside that cross (the cross so vividly imagined by his sixteenth-century namesake), at Jesus’s left-hand side. For in the wake of his mother’s request that he be granted a place at Jesus’s side ‘in his Kingdom’, the Apostle found himself taking up his station at the crucifixion, along with the Blessed Virgin Mary, as Jesus entrusted her to his care. References Descharnes, Robert, and Gilles Néret. 2022. Dalí: The Paintings (Cologne: Taschen), pp. 434–76