The Ascension of Christ by Salvador Dali and the Golden Rectangle

Successive Golden Rectangles dividing a Golden Rectangle into squares (The Ascension of Christ by Salvador Dali).

Salvador Dali (1904 - 1989) was a Spanish Catalan surrealist painter born in Figueres. Dali was a skilled draftsman, best known for the striking and bizarre images in his surrealist work. His painterly skills are often attributed to the influence of Renaissance masters.

Dali said that his inspiration for The Ascension of Christ came from a "cosmic dream" that he had in 1950, some eight years before the painting was completed. In the dream, which was in vivid color, he saw the nucleus of an atom, which we see in the background of the painting.

The figure of the Christ, from his feet in the foreground to his outstretched arms, forms a triangle.

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A golden rectangle is a rectangle whose side lengths are in the golden ratio, one-to-phi, that is, approximately 1:1.618. A distinctive feature of this shape is that when a square section is removed, the remainder is another golden rectangle, that is, with the same proportions as the first. Square removal can be repeated infinitely, which leads to an approximation of the golden or Fibonacci spiral.
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