The surreal journey of Salvador Dalí’s legs in a cardboard box: A window into the DNA of human creativity

A cardboard box containing half of the right leg of painter Salvador Dalí traveled 435 miles across Spain a decade ago, from his tomb in Figueres, in the province of Girona, to the laboratory of geneticist Antonio Alonso in the Madrid suburb of Las Rozas. The package also contained three teeth, four fingernails and a lock of the artist’s hair. The scene resembled a surrealist oil painting by Dalí himself, with its imagery of dismembered corpses. But it was in fact part of a court-ordered scientific test to determine whether the painter was the father of Pilar Abel, a fortune teller who claimed to be his daughter.Alonso’s team collected DNA samples and confirmed that there was no biological relationship between Dalí and the woman. But the geneticist was left unsatisfied. He felt it had been “an outrage” to exhume Dalí’s remains for such an extravagant case, until he had an idea that, in his view, would make the surreal journey of the genius’s leg worthwhile: sequencing his entire genome in search of clues about his personality. “We could analyze the genetic bases of creativity in one of the greatest exponents of human creativity,” the researcher argues.Alonso outlines his proposal to EL PAÍS during a walk through the Thyssen Museum in Madrid, where a retrospective exhibition now shows Dalí’s obsession with science and Freud’s psychoanalysis. The painter believed DNA — or deoxyribonucleic acid, as he solemnly called it — was “the memory of God,” and that his “miraculous structure” hid immortality. Alonso, former director of Spain’s National Institute of Toxicology and Forensic Sciences, recalls that he sent his proposal to the Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation, which oversees the artist’s legacy, just weeks after the exhumation in September 2017. It was only days before the illegal independence referendum called by the government of Carles Puigdemont in Catalonia. The idea, eclipsed by the political turmoil of the moment, was rejected and never became public.Now, encouraged by the Thyssen exhibition, Alonso is calling for the proposal to be reconsidered: “It would be a fitting tribute to the artist.” The foundation, when contacted by this newspaper, maintains its reservations.Salvador Dalí died on January 23, 1989. On his bedside table, he kept scientific magazines and A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes by British cosmologist Stephen Hawking. By then, he had been obsessed with DNA for decades. In 1963, Dalí presented the work Galacidalacidesoxiribunucleicacid, a monumental painting that paid homage to James Watson and Francis Crick, the two scientists who had won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine the previous year for discovering DNA’s revolutionary structure: the double helix. In the painting, the molecule — a kind of instruction manual for every living being — is associated with the biblical resurrection of Christ.“Master, what is the source of your genius?” Mexican journalist Jacobo Zabludovsky asked Dalí in a delirious 1971 interview. “It is, precisely, the molecular structure of deoxyribonucleic acid, which Crick and Watson found,” the artist replied. “Do you take it or how does it work?” the reporter inquired, apparently confusing DNA with lysergic acid or LSD. “Ah, no, no, no. That is not taken; that is something one is born with. You know very well that I am Catholic, apostolic and Roman. And according to the latest scientific research, from the first molecule God created to the last one being created, everything is transmitted monarchically and genetically through deoxyribonucleic acid,” Dalí concluded.Art historian Jaime Brihuega, the curator of the Thyssen exhibition, believes the painter would approve of having his DNA analyzed. “Dalí would surely love it, and he would say (from the metaverse) that that research was setting his resurrection in motion. That was the meaning he gave to the DNA molecule. No wonder his shroud bore the helices of DNA,” says Brihuega, professor emeritus at the Complutense University of Madrid. “He would love being back in the spotlight, absolutely,” the curator adds, unaware of Alonso’s proposal.James Watson himself turned up one day in 1965 at the luxury New York hotel where Dalí was staying. The scientist had seen Galacidalacidesoxyribonucleicacid in person and decided to ask the painter to illustrate his forthcoming book, The Double Helix. Watson left a note for Dalí at the front desk: “The second-most-intelligent person in the world wants to meet the most intelligent.” The artist came downstairs 10 minutes later.Watson and his colleague Francis Crick had revealed in 1953 that the molecule containing the instruction manual of living organisms has a double-helix structure, like a spiral staircase whose steps consist of two pieces that only pair with their corresponding partner. This arrangement, in Watson’s words, is “the secret of life,” because it allows DNA to make heritable copies of itself: each half of the ladder contains the information needed to build the other half.The scientist recalled his meeting with the painter in the documentary Dimensión Dalí (The Dalí Dimension). “He was an intelligent man. However, when he said that the double helix proved the existence of God, he interpreted the double helix in his own way, whereas to me it was exactly the opposite: with the double helix you don’t need God,” Watson declared.Dalí’s exhumation, carried out on the night of July 20, 2017, was highly controversial. There was no solid evidence that the painter had fathered the fortune teller, but a judge ordered that his tomb, located beneath the dome of the Dalí Theatre-Museum in Figueres, be opened and samples collected. Nearly 30 years after his death, the embalmed body still bore his trademark mustache, its ends pointing upward like the hands of a clock showing 10:10. The forensic team cut Dalí’s two legs at the knees and also removed teeth, nails and hair. Half was sent to the central headquarters of Spain’s National Institute of Toxicology and Forensic Sciences in Las Rozas, and the other half was taken to the Barcelona branch to run duplicate analyses.Alonso recalls that it was not even necessary to use Dalí’s legs to obtain DNA. The dental roots and a fingernail provided enough material. The painter’s remains were returned to their tomb in March 2018, but the retired geneticist notes that the leftover DNA extracts remained in the institute’s custody indefinitely. He thinks it may be possible to sequence Dalí’s entire deoxyribonucleic acid from those scant microliters of the artist that were not returned to his grave. “Since this outrageous act was carried out — cutting off his legs and sending them in a box — let us take advantage of what has already been done to extract added value,” he reasons. “I do not defend the idea that the genome is, by any means, the only thing that conditions creativity. Environmental factors such as education are also enormously important, but there are gene networks relevant to creativity and to disorders related to personality, such as paranoia and schizophrenia.” The Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation, established by the artist during his lifetime, is “solely responsible” for his remains, according to a spokesperson. The foundation itself has studied Dalí’s interest in genetics, but continues to reject the idea of sequencing the painter’s DNA. “We understand that an initiative of this nature raises ethical, legal and scientific issues of special sensitivity that require the utmost prudence,” the spokesperson said. “For this reason, the Foundation does not contemplate promoting or supporting an initiative of this nature.”The nonconformist geneticist Antonio Alonso, however, recalls a reflection by the painter himself: “Thinkers and literati can’t give me anything. Scientists give me everything, even the immortality of the soul.”Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition