The Elephants, c.1948

Convincingly composed, Salvador Dali’s disquieting yet mesmerizing “The Elephants” is one of Dali’s classic phantom realities, blurring the distinction between hallucination and reality. Dali, a groundbreaking 20th century artist who redefined Surrealism, symbolically utilizes emaciated elephants with spidery legs in his work, as the elephants’ apparent frailty defies the heavy burden they bear. Inspired by Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s sculpture base of an elephant carrying an ancient obelisk, Dali’s elephants’ brittle legs are thought to represent desire, and the objects on their backs represent power and domination.