Young Virgin Auto-Sodomized by the Horns of Her Own Chastity is a 1954 painting by Salvador Dalí. During the 1950s, Dalí painted many of his subjects as composed of rhinoceros horns. Here, the Young Virgin's buttocks consist of four converging horns; "as the horns simultaneously comprise and threaten to sodomise the callipygian figure, she is effectively (auto) sodomised by her own constitution."
Dalí's inspiration for the image appears to have come from Vermeer, one of a handful of artists regarded by Dalí as masters. Specifically, Vermeer's The Lacemaker seems to have been the galvanising element, with its convergent curves which focus on the subject's fingers and so to the penetration point of her needle - which as Dalí has pointed out is merely implied and not actually painted. In a stunt, Dalí set up his easel before Vermeer's original with the expressed intent of making a copy. The result however was this painting, which consciously uses Vermeer's focal-point arrangement, albeit to entirely different effect.
The painting, formerly in the collection of The Playboy Mansion (Playboy Enterprises sold the painting in London in 2003 for 1.35 million pounds), recalls his depiction of his sister Ana María in Figure at a Window (1925), and has therefore been read by some critics as a nasty jab at his sister, punishing her for publishing a biography on Dalí that presented a quite negative point of view; it has also been interpreted as a painting of Gala, though in fact the figure is based on a photograph from a 1930s sex magazine.
In 1958, Dalí wrote, "Paradoxically, this painting, which has an erotic appearance, is the most chaste of all."
Famous quotes containing the words young, virgin, horns and/or chastity:
“Family is the first school for young children, and parents are powerful models.”
—Alice Sterling Honig (20th century)
“A hidden strength
Which if Heav’n gave it, may be term’d her own:
‘Tis chastity, my brother, chastity:
She that has that, is clad in compleat steel,
And like a quiver’d Nymph with Arrows keen
May trace huge Forests, and unharbour’d Heaths,
Infamous Hills, and sandy perilous wildes,
Where through the sacred rayes of Chastity,
No savage fierce, Bandite, or mountaneer
Will dare to soyl her Virgin purity,”
—John Milton (1608–1674)
“Don Pedro. But when shall we set the savage bull’s horns on the sensible Benedick’s head?
Claudio. Yes, and text underneath, “Here dwells Benedick, the married man?””
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“The generative energy, which, when we are loose, dissipates and makes us unclean, when we are continent invigorates and inspires us. Chastity is the flowering of man; and what are called Genius, Heroism, Holiness, and the like, are but various fruits which succeed it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)