Rhinocerotic Figure of Phidias's Illisos, 1954 by Salvador Dali

Rhinocerotic Figure of Phidias's Illisos, 1954 by Salvador Dali
Rhinocerotic Figure of Phidias's Illisos, 1954 by Salvador Dali

This comes from what Dali described as his 'almost divine and chaste rhinoceros-horn period', when he claimed that the curve of the beast's horn was the only perfect logarithmic spiral and consequently the ultimate in formal perfection. With characteristic Daliesque logic - or critical paranoia - this insight came to him while he was copying a canvas that had obsessed him for decades: the cool, lovely, light-filled portrait of The Lacemaker by Vermeer.

In the mid-1950s Dali even made a film called The Prodigious Story of the Lacemaker and the Rhinoceros, starring himself, a reproduction of the Johannes Vermeer, and a life, if carefully fenced-off, rhino. Here a torso from the Parthenon by the most famous of ancient Greek sculptors, Phidias, is fragmenting into a rhino head and horn-shapes which hang above a typical Dali seascape, which is in turn suspended over the sea-bed.