Visage of War

In 1940 Salvador Dalí created his painting Visage of War where eyes and mouth each contain a face, whose eyes and mouth each contain a face and so on. Painting this artwork Dalí thought about Spanish Civil War, and eyes are filled with infinite death. Perhaps Dali decided the infinite horrors of war were better depicted in a bounded canvas through self-similarity, though most certainly he had not been exposed to this as a mathematical concept.

Analogous fractal of order four can be viewed to the right.

Interestingly, a preliminary study (below) of this picture had a face within only one face within the mouth of the largest face.

Corpus Hypercubus

Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus)

Salvador Dalí (1954)

Salvador Dalí, the master of surrealism, had a keen interest in natural science and mathematics. He was fascinated by hypercube, and it is featured in the painting Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus). Here Christ is crucified on figure of unfolded hypercube.

Hypercube is four-dimensional analogy of three-dimensional cube. It comes in by shifting three-dimensional cube perpendicular to three axis of our space. It consists of eight cubes. Frequently it depicted in it's frontal view as you can see in the image right. As cube can be unfolded into flat figure of six squares, hypercube can be unfolded into three-dimensional construction of eight cubes. This construction we see at Dalí's artworks, in particular.