Explore the Background of this artwork, The Ecumenical Council (painting).
Salvador Dalí was 54 years old when he began to paint The Ecumenical Council. He was established as a surrealist with a reputation for shocking audiences with fantastic imagery, something that New York Times chief art critic John Canaday later characterized as "the naughtiness that obsessed him". His work began to take on darker, more violent overtones during World War II. Possibly spurred both by the death of his father in 1950 and his interest in the writings of French theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Dalí began to incorporate religious iconography in his work.
He was by this time an international star and able to secure an audience with Pope Pius XII. By the late 1950s, both religious and cosmic matters preoccupied his work while his canvases became especially large, as if, according to author Kenneth Wach, he was "motivated by a desire to match such admired historical antecedents as the Spanish artists Murillo, Velázquez, and Zurbarán, and thereby to secure his place in the art of the century". When a new pope was being considered in 1958, Dalí was an enthusiastic supporter of Angelo Giuseppe Cardinal Roncalli, to the extent that Roncalli's ear became the subject of his trompe-l'œil composition The Sistine Madonna (1958).
trompe-l'œil Angelo Giuseppe Cardinal Roncalli Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Pope Pius XII surrealist art critic Zurbarán World War II Murillo Salvador Dalí John Canaday New York Times Velázquez