Sacred Mysteries: Side by side – El Greco and Dalí’s visions of Christ

I was uncertain about seeing the celebrated Crucifixion by Salvador Dalí hanging at the Spanish Gallery in Bishop Auckland next to a painting in its permanent collection by El Greco, Christ on the Cross.

Dalí’s canvas, called Christ of St John of the Cross, was bought by Kelvingrove Museum, Glasgow, in 1952 for a bargain £8,200, and has more than once been voted Scotland’s favourite painting. The El Greco, from 1600-1610, at just under 6ft high, is similar in size to the Dalí. They can be seen together until December. On walls at 90 degrees, about 10ft apart, they work a little like a diptych, viewable separately or together.

Settling down to look at them I had a sense of tranquillity in the room dimly lit around them. I was reminded of the historic exhibition curated by Xavier Bray, The Sacred Made Real, at the National Gallery in 2010. There, the last room was devoted to one picture, Zurbarán’s St Serapion beside which visitors could spend time contemplatively.

But a question remains, originally posed by the philanthropic Jonathan Ruffer, founder of the Auckland Project of urban regeneration and of the gallery of Spanish Golden-Age art that forms part of it. Of the El Greco and the Dalí, he asked: “Are they pictures about the same thing?”

Well they both show Christ on the Cross. They are ostensibly aids to devotion, putting Christians in mind of Jesus having died in a mysterious way for their sins. El Greco shows Jesus with exaggeratedly large eyes raised to heaven. Seen more clearly in the flesh, as it were, rather than in a reproduction, are drops of blood falling through the air. These reflect the humanity of God incarnate but also stand for the sacrificial effect of the Saviour’s blood.

Above the head of El Greco’s Christ is the titulus put up by Pilate: “Jesus of Nazareth King of the Jews”. The painter has stylishly rendered the inscriptions specified, in Latin, Greek and Hebrew. Dalí painted instead a blank sheet of paper showing folds, as though it were a cartolino for the artist’s signature.

A striking characteristic of the Dalí Crucifixion, apart from its hanging forward in space, is that it is bloodless No blood, no bruises, no crown of thorns, no agony. What might be mistaken for a nail turns out to be the shadow of a little finger. The wood of the cross is smooth as Formica. We know that Dalí hired the Hollywood stuntman Russell Saunders to get the form of the suspended body right. “My principal consideration,” Dalí said, “was that my Christ should be beautiful as the God that he is.”

As a child, Neil MacGregor the museum curator bought a postcard of the Dalí and suddenly realised it was “depicted from an impossible position – from the viewpoint of God the Father looking down”.

The title of the painting, Christ of St John of the Cross, refers to a sketch made by the mystic St John of the Cross (1542-91) during his years in Avila in the 1570s. It shows Christ on the cross seen from above and one side. Controversy on its perspective began in 1629, with the idea that he had seen a crucifix from an upper gallery in a church. But, if he had not the imagination to conceive such a view, he might have drawn a small crucifix on his own desk. In any case, the saint clearly meant his two-inch sketch as a work of prayer rather than “art”.

Part of Jonathan Ruffer’s answer to his own question is that Dalí, given to teasing, was here teasing the cadre of men around Franco. This sounds plausible; certainly some professed a conventional religiosity which they did not inhabit, and so poisoned the wells of traditional piety. But go to Bishop Auckland and make up your own mind.