Vatican Museums

The canvas The Announcement, produced by Dalì in 1960, is a preparatory study for The Ecumenical Council, a large-scale painting that the artist completed in the same year. As the title indicates, the work is dedicated to the Vatican Council II, announced by John XXIII at the beginning of 1959 and opened in October 1962. Here Dalì focuses on the definition of the upper part of the final work, which belongs to the Salvador Dalì Museum in Cleveland, and examines the figures of the Virgin, Christ and the Archangel Gabriel. The iconographic reference to Michelangelo’s Universal Judgement, and therefore to the Vatican, is clear. Dalì recovers the positions of the Madonna and of the Son, which remain unchanged in the definitive version in which the figure of the Redeemer is inserted in an architectural frame reproducing the interior of St. Peter’s Basilica.