Salvador Dalí Symbolism What type of symbolism did Dali use? The elephant is also a recurring image in Dali's works. What did the elephant mean? "The elephant is a distortion in space", one analysis explains, "its spindly legs contrasting the idea of weightlessness with structure. Did Dali use any other forms of symbolism? The egg is another common Daliesque image. What did the egg represent? He connects the egg to the prenatal and intrauterine, thus using it to symbolize hope and love;
How did Dali come up with these symbolism ideas?
How did Salvador Dalí come up with the elephant and the egg as symbols?
Dali employed extensive symbolism in his work. For instance, the hallmark "melting watches" that first appear in The Persistence of Memory suggest Einstein's theory that time is relative and not fixed. The idea for clocks functioning symbolically in this way came to Dali when he was staring at a runny piece of Camembert cheese on a hot August day.  The elephant is also a recurring image in Dali's works. It appeared in his 1944 work Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening. The elephants, inspired by Gian Lorenzo Bernini's sculpture base in Rome of an elephant carrying an ancient obelisk, are portrayed "with long, multijointed, almost invisible legs of desire" along with obelisks on their backs. Coupled with the image of their brittle legs, these encumbrances, noted for their phallic overtones, create a sense of phantom reality. "The elephant is a distortion in space", one analysis explains, "its spindly legs contrasting the idea of weightlessness with structure." "I am painting pictures which make me die for joy, I am creating with an absolute naturalness, without the slightest aesthetic concern, I am making things that inspire me with a profound emotion and I am trying to paint them honestly." --Salvador Dali, in Dawn Ades, Dali and Surrealism.  The egg is another common Daliesque image. He connects the egg to the prenatal and intrauterine, thus using it to symbolize hope and love; it appears in The Great Masturbator and The Metamorphosis of Narcissus. The Metamorphosis of Narcissus also symbolized death and petrification. There are also giant sculptures of eggs in various locations at Dali's house in Port Lligat as well as at the Dali Theatre and Museum in Figueres.  Various other animals appear throughout his work as well: ants point to death, decay, and immense sexual desire; the snail is connected to the human head (he saw a snail on a bicycle outside Freud's house when he first met Sigmund Freud); and locusts are a symbol of waste and fear.  Both Dali and his father enjoyed eating sea urchins, freshly caught in the sea near Cadaques. The radial symmetry of the sea urchin fascinated Dali, and he adapted its form to many art works. Other foods also appear throughout his work. CANNOTANSWER
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Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, 1st Marquess of Dalí of Púbol  (; ; ; 11 May 190423 January 1989) was a Spanish surrealist artist renowned for his technical skill, precise draftsmanship, and the striking and bizarre images in his work.

Born in Figueres, Catalonia, Spain, Dalí received his formal education in fine arts in Madrid. Influenced by Impressionism and the Renaissance masters from a young age, he became increasingly attracted to Cubism and avant-garde movements. He moved closer to Surrealism in the late 1920s and joined the Surrealist group in 1929, soon becoming one of its leading exponents. His best-known work, The Persistence of Memory, was completed in August 1931, and is one of the most famous Surrealist paintings. Dalí lived in France throughout the Spanish Civil War (1936 to 1939) before leaving for the United States in 1940 where he achieved commercial success. He returned to Spain in 1948 where he announced his return to the Catholic faith and developed his "nuclear mysticism" style, based on his interest in classicism, mysticism, and recent scientific developments.

Dalí's artistic repertoire included painting, graphic arts, film, sculpture, design and photography, at times in collaboration with other artists. He also wrote fiction, poetry, autobiography, essays and criticism. Major themes in his work include dreams, the subconscious, sexuality, religion, science and his closest personal relationships. To the dismay of those who held his work in high regard, and to the irritation of his critics, his eccentric and ostentatious public behavior often drew more attention than his artwork. His public support for the Francoist regime, his commercial activities and the quality and authenticity of some of his late works have also been controversial. His life and work were an important influence on other Surrealists, pop art and contemporary artists such as Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst.

There are two major museums devoted to Salvador Dalí's work: the Dalí Theatre-Museum in Figueres, Spain, and the Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Biography

Early life 

Salvador Dalí was born on 11 May 1904, at 8:45 am, on the first floor of Carrer Monturiol, 20 in the town of Figueres, in the Empordà region, close to the French border in Catalonia, Spain. Dalí's older brother, who had also been named Salvador (born 12 October 1901), had died of gastroenteritis nine months earlier, on 1 August 1903. His father, Salvador Rafael Aniceto Dalí Cusí (1872–1950) was a middle-class lawyer and notary, an anti-clerical atheist and Catalan federalist, whose strict disciplinary approach was tempered by his wife, Felipa Domènech Ferrés (1874–1921), who encouraged her son's artistic endeavors. In the summer of 1912, the family moved to the top floor of Carrer Monturiol 24 (presently 10). Dalí later attributed his "love of everything that is gilded and excessive, my passion for luxury and my love of oriental clothes" to an "Arab lineage", claiming that his ancestors were descendants of the Moors.

Dalí was haunted by the idea of his dead brother throughout his life, mythologizing him in his writings and art. Dalí said of him, "[we] resembled each other like two drops of water, but we had different reflections." He "was probably the first version of myself but conceived too much in the absolute". Images of his brother would reappear in his later works, including Portrait of My Dead Brother (1963).

Dalí also had a sister, Anna Maria, who was three years younger. In 1949, she published a book about her brother, Dalí as Seen by His Sister.

His childhood friends included future FC Barcelona footballers Emili Sagi-Barba and Josep Samitier. During holidays at the Catalan resort town of Cadaqués, the trio played football together.

Dalí attended the Municipal Drawing School at Figueres in 1916 and also discovered modern painting on a summer vacation trip to Cadaqués with the family of Ramon Pichot, a local artist who made regular trips to Paris. The next year, Dalí's father organized an exhibition of his charcoal drawings in their family home. He had his first public exhibition at the Municipal Theatre in Figueres in 1918, a site he would return to decades later. In early 1921 the Pichot family introduced Dalí to Futurism and Dalí's uncle Anselm Domènech, who owned a bookshop in Barcelona, supplied him with books and magazines on Cubism and contemporary art.

On 6 February 1921, Dalí's mother died of uterine cancer. Dalí was 16 years old and later said his mother's death "was the greatest blow I had experienced in my life. I worshipped her... I could not resign myself to the loss of a being on whom I counted to make invisible the unavoidable blemishes of my soul." After his wife's death, Dalí's father married her sister. Dalí did not resent this marriage, because he had great love and respect for his aunt.

Madrid, Barcelona and Paris 

In 1922, Dalí moved into the Residencia de Estudiantes (Students' Residence) in Madrid and studied at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando (San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts). A lean  tall, Dalí already drew attention as an eccentric and dandy. He had long hair and sideburns, coat, stockings, and knee-breeches in the style of English aesthetes of the late 19th century.

At the Residencia, he became close friends with Pepín Bello, Luis Buñuel, Federico García Lorca, and others associated with the Madrid avant-garde group Ultra. The friendship with Lorca had a strong element of mutual passion, but Dalí said he rejected the poet's sexual advances. Dalí's friendship with Lorca was to remain one of his most emotionally intense relationships until the poet's death at the hands of Nationalist forces in 1936 at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War.

Also in 1922, he began what would become a lifelong relationship with the Prado Museum, which he felt was, 'incontestably the best museum of old paintings in the world.' Each Sunday morning, Dalí went to the Prado to study the works of the great masters. 'This was the start of a monk-like period for me, devoted entirely to solitary work: visits to the Prado, where, pencil in hand, I analyzed all of the great masterpieces, studio work, models, research.'

Dalí's paintings in which he experimented with Cubism earned him the most attention from his fellow students since there were no Cubist artists in Madrid at the time. Cabaret Scene (1922) is a typical example of such work. Through his association with members of the Ultra group, Dalí became more acquainted with avant-garde movements, including Dada and Futurism.  One of his earliest works to show a strong Futurist and Cubist influence was the watercolor Night-Walking Dreams (1922). At this time, Dalí also read Freud and Lautréamont who were to have a profound influence on his work.

In May 1925 Dalí exhibited eleven works in a group exhibition held by the newly formed Sociedad Ibérica de Artistas in Madrid. Seven of the works were in his Cubist mode and four in a more realist style. Several leading critics praised Dalí's work. Dalí held his first solo exhibition at Galeries Dalmau in Barcelona, from 14 to 27 November 1925. This exhibition, before his exposure to Surrealism, included twenty-two works and was a critical and commercial success.

In April 1926 Dalí made his first trip to Paris where he met Pablo Picasso, whom he revered. Picasso had already heard favorable reports about Dalí from Joan Miró, a fellow Catalan who later introduced him to many Surrealist friends. As he developed his own style over the next few years, Dalí made some works strongly influenced by Picasso and Miró. Dalí was also influenced by the work of Yves Tanguy, and he later allegedly told Tanguy's niece, "I pinched everything from your uncle Yves."

Dalí left the Royal Academy in 1926, shortly before his final exams. His mastery of painting skills at that time was evidenced by his realistic The Basket of Bread, painted in 1926.

Later that year he exhibited again at Galeries Dalmau, from 31 December 1926 to 14 January 1927, with the support of the art critic . The show included twenty-three paintings and seven drawings, with the "Cubist" works displayed in a separate section from the "objective" works. The critical response was generally positive with Composition with Three Figures (Neo-Cubist Academy) singled out for particular attention.

From 1927 Dalí's work became increasingly influenced by Surrealism. Two of these works, Honey is Sweeter than Blood (1927) and Gadget and Hand (1927), were shown at the annual Autumn Salon (Saló de tardor) in Barcelona in October 1927. Dalí described the earlier of these works, Honey is Sweeter than Blood, as "equidistant between Cubism and Surrealism". The works featured many elements that were to become characteristic of his Surrealist period including dreamlike images, precise draftsmanship, idiosyncratic iconography (such as rotting donkeys and dismembered bodies), and lighting and landscapes strongly evocative of his native Catalonia. The works provoked bemusement among the public and debate among critics about whether Dalí had become a Surrealist.

Influenced by his reading of Freud, Dalí increasingly introduced suggestive sexual imagery and symbolism into his work. He submitted Dialogue on the Beach (Unsatisfied Desires) (1928) to the Barcelona Autumn Salon for 1928 but the work was rejected because "it was not fit to be exhibited in any gallery habitually visited by the numerous public little prepared for certain surprises." The resulting scandal was widely covered in the Barcelona press and prompted a popular Madrid illustrated weekly to publish an interview with Dalí.

Some trends in Dalí's work that would continue throughout his life were already evident in the 1920s. Dalí was influenced by many styles of art, ranging from the most academically classic, to the most cutting-edge avant-garde. His classical influences included Raphael, Bronzino, Francisco de Zurbarán, Vermeer and Velázquez. Exhibitions of his works attracted much attention and a mixture of praise and puzzled debate from critics who noted an apparent inconsistency in his work by the use of both traditional and modern techniques and motifs between works and within individual works.

In the mid-1920s Dalí grew a neatly trimmed mustache. In later decades he cultivated a more flamboyant one in the manner of 17th-century Spanish master painter Diego Velázquez, and this mustache became a well known Dalí icon.

1929 to World War II 

In 1929, Dalí collaborated with Surrealist film director Luis Buñuel on the short film  (An Andalusian Dog). His main contribution was to help Buñuel write the script for the film. Dalí later claimed to have also played a significant role in the filming of the project, but this is not substantiated by contemporary accounts. In August 1929, Dalí met his lifelong muse and future wife Gala, born Elena Ivanovna Diakonova. She was a Russian immigrant ten years his senior, who at that time was married to Surrealist poet Paul Éluard.

In works such as The First Days of Spring, The Great Masturbator and The Lugubrious Game Dalí continued his exploration of the themes of sexual anxiety and unconscious desires. Dalí's first Paris exhibition was at the recently opened Goemans Gallery in November 1929 and featured eleven works. In his preface to the catalog, André Breton described Dalí's new work as "the most hallucinatory that has been produced up to now". The exhibition was a commercial success but the critical response was divided. In the same year, Dalí officially joined the Surrealist group in the Montparnasse quarter of Paris. The Surrealists hailed what Dalí was later to call his paranoiac-critical method of accessing the subconscious for greater artistic creativity.

Meanwhile, Dalí's relationship with his father was close to rupture. Don Salvador Dalí y Cusi strongly disapproved of his son's romance with Gala and saw his connection to the Surrealists as a bad influence on his morals. The final straw was when Don Salvador read in a Barcelona newspaper that his son had recently exhibited in Paris a drawing of the Sacred Heart of Jesus Christ, with a provocative inscription: "Sometimes, I spit for fun on my mother's portrait". Outraged, Don Salvador demanded that his son recant publicly. Dalí refused, perhaps out of fear of expulsion from the Surrealist group, and was violently thrown out of his paternal home on 28 December 1929. His father told him that he would be disinherited and that he should never set foot in Cadaqués again. The following summer, Dalí and Gala rented a small fisherman's cabin in a nearby bay at Port Lligat. He soon bought the cabin, and over the years enlarged it by buying neighboring ones, gradually building his beloved villa by the sea. Dalí's father would eventually relent and come to accept his son's companion.

In 1931, Dalí painted one of his most famous works, The Persistence of Memory, which developed a surrealistic image of soft, melting pocket watches. The general interpretation of the work is that the soft watches are a rejection of the assumption that time is rigid or deterministic. This idea is supported by other images in the work, such as the wide expanding landscape, and other limp watches shown being devoured by ants.

Dalí had two important exhibitions at the Pierre Colle Gallery in Paris in June 1931 and May–June 1932. The earlier exhibition included sixteen paintings of which The Persistence of Memory attracted the most attention. Some of the notable features of the exhibitions were the proliferation of images and references to Dalí's muse Gala and the inclusion of Surrealist Objects such as Hypnagogic Clock and Clock Based on the Decomposition of Bodies. Dalí's last, and largest, the exhibition at the Pierre Colle Gallery was held in June 1933 and included twenty-two paintings, ten drawings, and two objects. One critic noted Dalí's precise draftsmanship and attention to detail, describing him as a "paranoiac of geometrical temperament". Dalí's first New York exhibition was held at Julien Levy's gallery in November–December 1933. The exhibition featured twenty-six works and was a commercial and critical success. The New Yorker critic praised the precision and lack of sentimentality in the works, calling them "frozen nightmares".

Dalí and Gala, having lived together since 1929, were civilly married on 30 January 1934 in Paris. They later remarried in a Church ceremony on 8 August 1958 at Sant Martí Vell. In addition to inspiring many artworks throughout her life, Gala would act as Dalí's business manager, supporting their extravagant lifestyle while adeptly steering clear of insolvency. Gala, who herself engaged in extra-marital affairs, seemed to tolerate Dalí's dalliances with younger muses, secure in her own position as his primary relationship. Dalí continued to paint her as they both aged, producing sympathetic and adoring images of her. The "tense, complex and ambiguous relationship" lasting over 50 years would later become the subject of an opera, Jo, Dalí (I, Dalí) by Catalan composer Xavier Benguerel.

Dalí's first visit to the United States in November 1934 attracted widespread press coverage. His second New York exhibition was held at the Julien Levy Gallery in November–December 1934 and was again a commercial and critical success. Dalí delivered three lectures on Surrealism at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and other venues during which he told his audience for the first time that "[t]he only difference between me and a madman is that I am not mad." The heiress Caresse Crosby, the inventor of the brassiere, organized a farewell fancy dress ball for Dalí on 18 January 1935. Dalí wore a glass case on his chest containing a brassiere and Gala dressed as a woman giving birth through her head. A Paris newspaper later claimed that the Dalís had dressed as the Lindbergh baby and his kidnapper, a claim which Dalí denied.

While the majority of the Surrealist group had become increasingly associated with leftist politics, Dalí maintained an ambiguous position on the subject of the proper relationship between politics and art. Leading Surrealist André Breton accused Dalí of defending the "new" and "irrational" in "the Hitler phenomenon", but Dalí quickly rejected this claim, saying, "I am Hitlerian neither in fact nor intention". Dalí insisted that Surrealism could exist in an apolitical context and refused to explicitly denounce fascism. Later in 1934, Dalí was subjected to a "trial", in which he narrowly avoided being expelled from the Surrealist group. To this, Dalí retorted, "The difference between the Surrealists and me is that I am a Surrealist."

In 1936, Dalí took part in the London International Surrealist Exhibition. His lecture, titled , was delivered while wearing a deep-sea diving suit and helmet. He had arrived carrying a billiard cue and leading a pair of Russian wolfhounds and had to have the helmet unscrewed as he gasped for breath. He commented that "I just wanted to show that I was 'plunging deeply into the human mind."

Dalí's first solo London exhibition was held at the Alex, Reid, and Lefevre Gallery the same year. The show included twenty-nine paintings and eighteen drawings. The critical response was generally favorable, although the Daily Telegraph critic wrote: "These pictures from the subconscious reveal so skilled a craftsman that the artist's return to full consciousness may be awaited with interest."

In December 1936 Dalí participated in the Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism exhibition at MoMA and a solo exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York. Both exhibitions attracted large attendances and widespread press coverage. The painting Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War) (1936) attracted particular attention. Dalí later described it as, "a vast human body breaking out into monstrous excrescences of arms and legs tearing at one another in a delirium of auto-strangulation". On 14 December, Dalí, aged 32, was featured on the cover of Time magazine.

From 1933 Dalí was supported by Zodiac, a group of affluent admirers who each contributed to a monthly stipend for the painter in exchange for a painting of their choice. From 1936 Dalí's main patron in London was the wealthy Edward James who would support him financially for two years. One of Dalí's most important paintings from the period of James' patronage was The Metamorphosis of Narcissus (1937). They also collaborated on two of the most enduring icons of the Surrealist movement: the Lobster Telephone and the Mae West Lips Sofa.

Dalí was in London when the Spanish Civil War broke out in July 1936.  When he later learned that his friend Lorca had been executed by Nationalist forces, Dalí's claimed response was to shout: "Olé!" Dalí was to include frequent references to the poet in his art and writings for the remainder of his life. Nevertheless, Dalí avoided taking a public stand for or against the Republic for the duration of the conflict.

In January 1938, Dalí unveiled Rainy Taxi, a three-dimensional artwork consisting of an automobile and two mannequin occupants being soaked with rain from within the taxi. The piece was first displayed at the Galerie Beaux-Arts in Paris at the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme, organized by André Breton and Paul Éluard. The Exposition was designed by artist Marcel Duchamp, who also served as host.

In March that year, Dalí met Sigmund Freud thanks to Stefan Zweig. As Dalí sketched Freud's portrait, Freud whispered, "That boy looks like a fanatic." Dalí was delighted upon hearing later about this comment from his hero. The following day Freud wrote to Zweig "...until now I have been inclined to regard the Surrealists, who have apparently adopted me as their patron saint, as complete fools.....That young Spaniard, with his candid fanatical eyes and his undeniable technical mastery, has changed my estimate. It would indeed be very interesting to investigate analytically how he came to create that picture [i.e. Metamorphosis of Narcissus]." 

In September 1938, Salvador Dalí was invited by Gabrielle Coco Chanel to her house "La Pausa" in Roquebrune on the French Riviera. There he painted numerous paintings he later exhibited at Julien Levy Gallery in New York. This exhibition in March–April 1939 included twenty-one paintings and eleven drawings. Life reported that no exhibition in New York had been so popular since Whistler's Mother was shown in 1934.

At the 1939 New York World's Fair, Dalí debuted his Dream of Venus Surrealist pavilion, located in the Amusements Area of the exposition. It featured bizarre sculptures, statues, mermaids, and live nude models in "costumes" made of fresh seafood, an event photographed by Horst P. Horst, George Platt Lynes, and Murray Korman. Dalí was angered by changes to his designs, railing against mediocrities who thought that "a woman with the tail of a fish is possible; a woman with the head of a fish impossible."

Soon after Franco's victory in the Spanish Civil War in April 1939, Dalí wrote to Luis Buñuel denouncing socialism and Marxism and praising Catholicism and the Falange. As a result, Buñuel broke off relations with Dalí.

In the May issue of the Surrealist magazine Minotaure, André Breton announced Dalí's expulsion from the Surrealist group, claiming that Dalí had espoused race war and that the over-refinement of his paranoiac-critical method was a repudiation of Surrealist automatism. This led many Surrealists to break off relations with Dalí. In 1949 Breton coined the derogatory nickname "Avida Dollars" (avid for dollars), an anagram for "Salvador Dalí". This was a derisive reference to the increasing commercialization of Dalí's work, and the perception that Dalí sought self-aggrandizement through fame and fortune.

World War II 
The outbreak of World War II in September 1939 saw the Dalís in France. Following the German invasion, they were able to escape because on 20 June 1940 they were issued visas by Aristides de Sousa Mendes, Portuguese consul in Bordeaux, France. They crossed into Portugal and subsequently sailed on the Excambion from Lisbon to New York in August 1940.  Dalí and Gala were to live in the United States for eight years, splitting their time between New York and the Monterey Peninsula, California.

Dalí spent the winter of 1940–41 at Hampton Manor, the residence of Caresse Crosby, in Caroline County, Virginia, where he worked on various projects including his autobiography and paintings for his upcoming exhibition.

Dalí announced the death of the Surrealist movement and the return of classicism in his exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York in April–May 1941. The exhibition included nineteen paintings (among them Slave Market with the Disappearing Bust of Voltaire and The Face of War) and other works. In his catalog essay and media comments, Dalí proclaimed a return to form, control, structure and the Golden Section. Sales however were disappointing and the majority of critics did not believe there had been a major change in Dalí's work.

The Museum of Modern Art held two major, simultaneous retrospectives of Dali and Joan Miró from November 1941 to February 1942, Dalí being represented by forty-two paintings and sixteen drawings. Dalí's work attracted significant attention of critics and the exhibition later toured eight American cities, enhancing his reputation in America.

In October 1942, Dalí's autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí was published simultaneously in New York and London and was reviewed widely by the press. Time magazine's reviewer called it "one of the most irresistible books of the year".  George Orwell later wrote a scathing review in the Saturday Book. A passage in the autobiography in which Dalí claimed that Buñuel was solely responsible for the anti-clericalism in the film L'Age d'Or may have indirectly led to Buñuel resigning his position at MoMA in 1943 under pressure from the State Department. Dalí also published a novel Hidden Faces in 1944 with less critical and commercial success.

In the catalog essay for his exhibition at the Knoedler Gallery in New York in 1943 Dalí continued his attack on the Surrealist movement, writing: "Surrealism will at least have served to give experimental proof that total sterility and attempts at automatizations have gone too far and have led to a totalitarian system. ... Today's laziness and the total lack of technique have reached their paroxysm in the psychological signification of the current use of the college [collage]". The critical response to the society portraits in the exhibition, however, was generally negative.

In November–December 1945 Dalí exhibited new work at the Bignou Gallery in New York. The exhibition included eleven oil paintings, watercolors, drawings, and illustrations. Works included Basket of Bread, Atomic and Uranian Melancholic Ideal, and My Wife Nude Contemplating her own Body Transformed into Steps, the Three Vertebrae of a Column, Sky and Architecture. The exhibition was notable for works in Dalí's new classicism style and those heralding his "atomic period".

During the war years, Dalí was also engaged in projects in various other fields. He executed designs for a number of ballets including Labyrinth (1942), Sentimental Colloquy, Mad Tristan, and The Cafe of Chinitas (all 1944). In 1945 he created the dream sequence for Alfred Hitchcock's film Spellbound. He also produced artwork and designs for products such as perfumes, cosmetics, hosiery and ties.

Post War in United States (1946–48) 
In 1946 Dalí worked with Walt Disney and animator John Hench on an unfinished animated film Destino.

Dalí exhibited new work at the Bignou Gallery from November 1947 to January 1948. The 14 oil paintings and other works in the exhibition reflected Dalí's increasing interest in atomic physics. Notable works included Dematerialization Near the Nose of Nero (The Separation of the Atom), Intra-Atomic Equilibrium of a Swan's Feather, and a study for Leda Atomica. The proportions of the latter work were worked out in collaboration with a mathematician.

In early 1948 Dalí's 50 Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship was published. The book was a mixture of anecdotes, practical advice on painting, and Dalínian polemics.

Later years in Spain 

In 1948 Dalí and Gala moved back into their house in Port Lligat, on the coast near Cadaqués. For the next three decades, they would spend most of their time there, spending winters in Paris and New York. Dalí's decision to live in Spain under Franco and his public support for the regime prompted outrage from many anti-Francoist artists and intellectuals. Pablo Picasso refused to mention Dalí's name or acknowledge his existence for the rest of his life. In 1960, André Breton unsuccessfully fought against the inclusion of Dalí's Sistine Madonna in the Surrealist Intrusion in the Enchanter's Domain exhibition organized by Marcel Duchamp in New York.  Breton and other Surrealists issued a tract to coincide with the exhibition denouncing Dalí as "the ex-apologist of Hitler... and friend of Franco".

In December 1949 Dalí's sister Anna Maria published her book Salvador Dalí Seen by his Sister. Dalí was angered by passages that he considered derogatory towards his wife Gala and broke off relations with his family. When Dalí's father died in September 1950 Dalí learned that he had been virtually disinherited in his will. A two-year legal dispute followed over paintings and drawings Dalí had left in his family home, during which Dalí was accused of assaulting a public notary.

As Dalí moved further towards embracing Catholicism he introduced more religious iconography and themes in his painting. In 1949 he painted a study for The Madonna of Port Lligat (first version, 1949) and showed it to Pope Pius XII during an audience arranged to discuss Dalí 's marriage to Gala. This work was a precursor to the phase Dalí dubbed "Nuclear Mysticism," a fusion of Einsteinian physics, classicism, and Catholic mysticism.  In paintings such as The Madonna of Port Lligat, The Christ of Saint John on the Cross and The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory, Dalí sought to synthesize Christian iconography with images of material disintegration inspired by nuclear physics. His later Nuclear Mysticism works included La Gare de Perpignan (1965) and The Hallucinogenic Toreador (1968–70).

Dalí's keen interest in natural science and mathematics was further manifested by the proliferation of images of DNA and rhinoceros horn shapes in works from the mid-1950s. According to Dalí, the rhinoceros horn signifies divine geometry because it grows in a logarithmic spiral. Dalí was also fascinated by the Tesseract (a four-dimensional cube), using it, for example, in Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus).

Dalí had been extensively using optical illusions such as double images, anamorphosis, negative space, visual puns and trompe-l'œil since his Surrealist period and this continued in his later work. At some point, Dalí had a glass floor installed in a room near his studio in Port Lligat. He made extensive use of it to study foreshortening, both from above and from below, incorporating dramatic perspectives of figures and objects into his paintings. He also experimented with the bulletist technique pointillism, enlarged half-tone dot grids and stereoscopic images. He was among the first artists to employ holography in an artistic manner. In Dalí's later years, young artists such as Andy Warhol proclaimed him an important influence on pop art.

In 1960, Dalí began work on his Theatre-Museum in his home town of Figueres. It was his largest single project and a main focus of his energy through to 1974, when it opened. He continued to make additions through the mid-1980s.

In 1955 Dalí met Nanita Kalaschnikoff, who was to become a close friend, muse, and model. At a French nightclub in 1965 Dalí met Amanda Lear, a fashion model then known as Peki Oslo. Lear became his protégée and one of his muses.  According to Lear, she and Dalí were united in a "spiritual marriage" on a deserted mountaintop.

Final years and death 

In 1968, Dalí bought a castle in Púbol for Gala, and from 1971 she would retreat there for weeks at a time, Dalí having agreed not to visit without her written permission. His fears of abandonment and estrangement from his longtime artistic muse contributed to depression and failing health.

In 1980, at age 76, Dalí's health deteriorated sharply and he was treated for depression, drug addiction, and Parkinson-like symptoms, including a severe tremor in his right arm. There were also allegations that Gala had been supplying Dalí with pharmaceuticals from her own prescriptions.

Gala died on 10 June 1982, at the age of 87. After her death, Dalí moved from Figueres to the castle in Púbol, where she was entombed.

In 1982, King Juan Carlos bestowed on Dalí the title of Marqués de Dalí de Púbol (Marquess of Dalí of Púbol) in the nobility of Spain, Púbol being where Dalí then lived. The title was initially hereditary, but at Dalí's request was changed to life-only in 1983.

In May 1983, what was said to be Dalí's last painting, The Swallow's Tail, was revealed. The work was heavily influenced by the mathematical catastrophe theory of René Thom. However, some critics have questioned how Dalí could have executed a painting with such precision given the severe tremor in his painting arm.

From early 1984 Dalí's depression worsened and he refused food, leading to severe undernourishment. Dalí had previously stated his intention to put himself into a state of suspended animation as he had read that some microorganisms could do. In August 1984 a fire broke out in Dalí's bedroom and he was hospitalized with severe burns. Two judicial inquiries found that the fire was caused by an electrical fault and no findings of negligence were made. After his release from hospital Dalí moved to the Torre Galatea, an annex to the Dalí Theatre-Museum.

There have been allegations that Dalí was forced by his guardians to sign blank canvases that could later be used in forgeries. It is also alleged that he knowingly sold otherwise-blank lithograph paper which he had signed, possibly producing over 50,000 such sheets from 1965 until his death. As a result, art dealers tend to be wary of late graphic works attributed to Dalí.

In July 1986, Dalí had a pacemaker implanted. On his return to his Theatre-Museum he made a brief public appearance, saying:

In November 1988, Dalí entered hospital with heart failure. On 5 December 1988, he was visited by King Juan Carlos, who confessed that he had always been a serious devotee of Dalí. Dalí gave the king a drawing, Head of Europa, which would turn out to be Dalí's final drawing.

On the morning of 23 January 1989, while his favorite record of Tristan and Isolde played, Dalí died of heart failure at the age of 84. He is buried in the crypt below the stage of his Theatre-Museum in Figueres. The location is across the street from the church of Sant Pere, where he had his baptism, first communion, and funeral, and is only  from the house where he was born.

The Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation currently serves as his official estate. The US copyright representative for the Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation is the Artists Rights Society.

Exhumation 
On 26 June 2017 it was announced that a judge in Madrid had ordered the exhumation of Dalí's body in order to obtain samples for a paternity suit. Joan Manuel Sevillano, manager of the Fundación Gala Salvador Dalí  (The Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation), denounced the exhumation as inappropriate. The exhumation took place on the evening of 20 July, and his DNA was extracted.  On 6 September 2017 the Foundation stated that the tests carried out proved conclusively that Dalí and the claimant were not related. On 18 May 2020 a Spanish court dismissed an appeal from the claimant and ordered her to pay the costs of the exhumation.

Symbolism 
From the late 1920s, Dalí progressively introduced many bizarre or incongruous images into his work which invite symbolic interpretation. While some of these images suggest a straightforward sexual or Freudian interpretation (Dalí read Freud in the 1920s) others (such as locusts, rotting donkeys, and sea urchins) are idiosyncratic and have been variously interpreted. Some commentators have cautioned that Dalí's own comments on these images are not always reliable.

Food 
Food and eating have a central place in Dalí's thoughts and work. He associated food with beauty and sex and was obsessed with the image of the female praying mantis eating her mate after copulation. Bread was a recurring image in Dalí's art, from his early work The Basket of Bread to later public performances such as in 1958 when he gave a lecture in Paris armed with a 12-meter-long baguette. He saw bread as "the elementary basis of continuity" and "sacred subsistence".

The egg is another common Dalínian image. He connects the egg to the prenatal and intrauterine, thus using it to symbolize hope and love. It appears in The Great Masturbator, The Metamorphosis of Narcissus and many other works.  There are also giant sculptures of eggs in various locations at Dalí's house in Port Lligat as well as at the Dalí Theatre-Museum in Figueres.

Both Dalí and his father enjoyed eating sea urchins, freshly caught in the sea near Cadaqués. The radial symmetry of the sea urchin fascinated Dalí, and he adapted its form to many artworks. Other foods also appear throughout his work.

The famous "melting watches" that appear in The Persistence of Memory suggest Einstein's theory that time is relative and not fixed. Dalí later claimed that the idea for clocks functioning symbolically in this way came to him when he was contemplating Camembert cheese.

Animals 
The rhinoceros and rhinoceros horn shapes began to proliferate in Dalí's work from the mid-1950s. According to Dalí, the rhinoceros horn signifies divine geometry because it grows in a logarithmic spiral. He linked the rhinoceros to themes of chastity and to the Virgin Mary. However, he also used it as an obvious phallic symbol as in Young Virgin Auto-Sodomized by the Horns of Her Own Chastity.

Various other animals appear throughout Dalí's work: rotting donkeys and ants have been interpreted as pointing to death, decay, and sexual desire; the snail as connected to the human head (he saw a snail on a bicycle outside Freud's house when he first met Sigmund Freud); and locusts as a symbol of waste and fear. The elephant is also a recurring image in his work; for example, Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening. The elephants are inspired by Gian Lorenzo Bernini's sculpture base in Rome of an elephant carrying an ancient obelisk.

Science 
Dalí's life-long interest in science and mathematics was often reflected in his work. His soft watches have been interpreted as references to Einstein's theory of the relativity of time and space. Images of atomic particles appeared in his work soon after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and strands of D.N.A. appeared from the mid-1950s. In 1958 he wrote in his Anti-Matter Manifesto: "In the Surrealist period, I wanted to create the iconography of the interior world and the world of the marvelous, of my father Freud. Today, the exterior world and that of physics have transcended the one of psychology. My father today is Dr. Heisenberg."

The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory (1954) harks back to The Persistence of Memory (1931) and in portraying that painting in fragmentation and disintegration has been interpreted as a reference to Heisenberg's quantum mechanics.

Endeavors outside painting 
Dalí was a versatile artist. Some of his more popular works are sculptures and other objects, and he is also noted for his contributions to theater, fashion, and photography, among other areas.

Sculptures and other objects 

From the early 1930s, Dalí was an enthusiastic proponent of the proliferation of three-dimensional Surrealist Objects to subvert perceptions of conventional reality, writing: "museums will fast fill with objects whose uselessness, size and crowding will necessitate the construction, in deserts, of special towers to contain them." His more notable early objects include Board of Demented Associations (1930–31), Retrospective Bust of a Woman (1933), Venus de Milo with Chest of Drawers (1936) and Aphrodisiac Dinner Jacket (1936). Two of the most popular objects of the Surrealist movement were Lobster Telephone (1936) and Mae West Lips Sofa (1937) which were commissioned by art patron Edward James. Lobsters and telephones had strong sexual connotations for Dalí who drew a close analogy between food and sex. The telephone was functional, and James purchased four of them from Dalí to replace the phones in his home. The Mae West Lips Sofa was shaped after the lips of actress Mae West, who was previously the subject of Dalí's watercolor, The Face of Mae West which may be used as a Surrealist Apartment (1934–35).  In December 1936 Dalí sent Harpo Marx a Christmas present of a harp with barbed-wire strings.

After World War II Dalí authorized many sculptures derived from his most famous works and images. In his later years other sculptures also appeared, often in large editions, whose authenticity has sometimes been questioned.

Between 1941 and 1970, Dalí created an ensemble of 39 pieces of jewelry, many of which are intricate, some containing moving parts. The most famous assemblage, The Royal Heart, is made of gold and is encrusted with 46 rubies, 42 diamonds, and four emeralds, created in such a way that the center "beats" like a heart.

Dalí ventured into industrial design in the 1970s with a 500-piece run of Suomi tableware by Timo Sarpaneva that Dalí decorated for the German Rosenthal porcelain maker's "Studio Linie".  In 1969 he designed the Chupa Chups logo. He facilitated the design of the advertising campaign for the 1969 Eurovision Song Contest and created a large on-stage metal sculpture that stood at the Teatro Real in Madrid.

Theater and film 
In theater, Dalí designed the scenery for Federico García Lorca's 1927 romantic play Mariana Pineda. For Bacchanale (1939), a ballet based on and set to the music of Richard Wagner's 1845 opera Tannhäuser, Dalí provided both the set design and the libretto. He executed designs for a number of other ballets including Labyrinth (1942), Sentimental Colloquy, Mad Tristan, The Cafe of Chinitas (all 1944) and The Three-Cornered Hat  (1949).

Dalí became interested in film when he was young, going to the theater most Sundays. By the late 1920s he was fascinated by the potential of film to reveal "the unlimited fantasy born of things themselves" and went on to collaborate with the director Luis Buñuel on two Surrealist films: the 17-minute short Un Chien Andalou (1929) and the feature film L'Age d'Or (1930). Dalí and Buñuel agree that they jointly developed the script and imagery of Un Chien Andalou, but there is controversy over the extent of Dalí's contribution to L'Age d'Or. Un Chien Andalou features a graphic opening scene of a human eyeball being slashed with a razor and develops surreal imagery and irrational discontinuities in time and space to produce a dreamlike quality. L'Age d'Or is more overtly anti-clerical and anti-establishment, and was banned after right-wing groups staged a riot in the Parisian theater where it was being shown. Summarizing the impact of these two films on the Surrealist film movement, one commentator has stated: "If Un Chien Andalou stands as the supreme record of Surrealism's adventures into the realm of the unconscious, then L'Âge d'Or is perhaps the most trenchant and implacable expression of its revolutionary intent."

After he collaborated with Buñuel, Dalí worked on several unrealized film projects including a published script for a film, Babaouo (1932); a scenario for Harpo Marx called Giraffes on Horseback Salad (1937); and an abandoned dream sequence for the film Moontide (1942). In 1945 Dalí created the dream sequence in Hitchcock's Spellbound, but neither Dalí nor the director was satisfied with the result. Dalí also worked with Walt Disney and animator John Hench on the short film Destino in 1946. After initially being abandoned, the animated film was completed in 2003 by Baker Bloodworth and Walt Disney's nephew Roy E. Disney. Between 1954 and 1961 Dalí worked with photographer Robert Descharnes on The Prodigious History of the Lacemaker and the Rhinoceros, but the film was never completed.

In the 1960s Dalí worked with some directors on documentary and performance films including with Philippe Halsman on Chaos and Creation (1960), Jack Bond on Dalí in New York (1966) and Jean-Christophe Averty on Soft Self-Portrait of Salvador Dalí (1966).

Dalí collaborated with director José-Montes Baquer on the pseudo-documentary film Impressions of Upper Mongolia (1975), in which Dalí narrates a story about an expedition in search of giant hallucinogenic mushrooms. In the mid-1970s film director Alejandro Jodorowsky initially cast Dalí in the role of the Padishah Emperor in a production of Dune, based on the novel by Frank Herbert. However, Jodorowsky changed his mind after Dalí publicly supported the execution of alleged ETA terrorists in December 1975. The film was ultimately never made.

In 1972 Dalí began to write the scenario for an opera-poem called Être Dieu (To Be God). The Spanish writer Manuel Vázquez Montalbán wrote the libretto and Igor Wakhévitch the music. The opera poem was recorded in Paris in 1974 with Dalí in the role of the protagonist.

Fashion and photography 

Fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli worked with Dalí from the 1930s and commissioned him to produce a white dress with a lobster print. Other designs Dalí made for her include a shoe-shaped hat and a pink belt with lips for a buckle. He was also involved in creating textile designs and perfume bottles. In 1950, Dalí created a special "costume for the year 2045" with Christian Dior.

Photographers with whom he collaborated include Man Ray, Brassaï, Cecil Beaton, and Philippe Halsman. Halsman produced the Dalí Atomica series (1948) –  inspired by Dalí's painting Leda Atomica  –  which in one photograph depicts "a painter's easel, three cats, a bucket of water, and Dalí himself floating in the air".

Architecture 

Dalí's architectural achievements include his Port Lligat house near Cadaqués, as well as his Theatre Museum in Figueres. A major work outside of Spain was the temporary Dream of Venus Surrealist pavilion at the 1939 New York World's Fair, which contained several unusual sculptures and statues, including live performers posing as statues.

Literary works 
In his only novel, Hidden Faces (1944), Dalí describes the intrigues of a group of eccentric aristocrats whose extravagant lifestyle symbolizes the decadence of the 1930s. The Comte de Grandsailles and Solange de Cléda pursue a love affair, but interwar political turmoil and other vicissitudes drive them apart. It is variously set in Paris, rural France, Casablanca in North Africa, and Palm Springs in the United States. Secondary characters include aging widow Barbara Rogers, her bisexual daughter Veronica, Veronica's sometime female lover Betka, and Baba, a disfigured U.S. fighter pilot. The novel was written in New York, and translated by Haakon Chevalier.

His other literary works include The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí (1942), Diary of a Genius (1966), and Oui: The Paranoid-Critical Revolution (1971). Dalí also published poetry, essays, art criticism, and a technical manual on art.

Graphic arts 
Dalí worked extensively in the graphic arts, producing many drawings, etchings, and lithographs. Among the most notable of these works are forty etchings for an edition of Lautréamont's The Songs of Maldoror (1933) and eighty drypoint reworkings of Goya's Caprichos (1973–77). From the 1960s, however, Dalí would often sell the rights to images but not be involved in the print production itself. In addition, a large number of fakes were produced in the 1980s and 1990s, thus further confusing the Dalí print market.

Book illustrations were an important part of Dalí's work throughout his career. His first book illustration was for the 1924 publication of the Catalan poem  ("The Witches of Liers") by his friend and schoolmate, poet Carles Fages de Climent. His other notable book illustrations, apart from The Songs of Maldoror, include 101 watercolors and engravings for The Divine Comedy (1960) and 100 drawings and watercolors for The Arabian Nights (1964).

Politics and personality

Politics and religion 

As a youth, Dalí identified as Communist, anti-monarchist and anti-clerical and in 1924 he was briefly imprisoned by the Primo de Rivera dictatorship as a person "intensely liable to cause public disorder". When Dalí officially joined the Surrealist group in 1929 his political activism initially intensified. In 1931, he became involved in the Workers' and Peasants' Front, delivering lectures at meetings and contributing to their party journal. However, as political divisions within the Surrealist group grew, Dalí soon developed a more apolitical stance, refusing to publicly denounce fascism. In 1934, Andre Breton accused him of being sympathetic to Hitler and Dalí narrowly avoided being expelled from the group. After the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, Dalí avoided taking a public stand for or against the Republic. However, immediately after Franco's victory in 1939, Dalí praised Catholicism and the Falange and was expelled from the Surrealist group.

After Dalí's return to his native Catalonia in 1948, he publicly supported Franco's regime and announced his return to the Catholic faith. Dalí was granted an audience with Pope Pius XII in 1949 and with Pope John XXIII in 1959. He had official meetings with General Franco in June 1956, October 1968, and May 1974. In 1968, Dalí stated that on Franco's death there should be no return to democracy and Spain should become an absolute monarchy. In September 1975, Dalí publicly supported Franco's decision to execute three alleged Basque terrorists and repeated his support for an absolute monarchy, adding: "Personally, I'm against freedom; I'm for the Holy Inquisition."  In the following days, he fled to New York after his home in Port Lligat was stoned and he had received numerous death threats. When King Juan Carlos visited the ailing Dalí in August 1981, Dalí told him: "I have always been an anarchist and a monarchist."

Dalí espoused a mystical view of Catholicism and in his later years he claimed to be a Catholic and an agnostic. He was interested in the writings of the Jesuit priest and philosopher Teilhard de Chardin and his Omega Point theory. Dalí's painting Tuna Fishing (Homage to Meissonier) (1967) was inspired by his reading of Chardin.

Sexuality 
Dalí's sexuality had a profound influence on his work. He stated that as a child he saw a book with graphic illustrations of venereal diseases and this provoked a life-long disgust of female genitalia and a fear of impotence and sexual intimacy. Dalí frequently stated that his main sexual activity involved voyeurism and masturbation and his preferred sexual orifice was the anus. Dalí said that his wife Gala was the only person with whom he had achieved complete coitus. From 1927 Dalí's work featured graphic and symbolic sexual images usually associated with other images evoking shame and disgust. Images of anality and excrement also abound in his work from this time. Some of the most notable works reflecting these themes include The First Days of Spring (1929), The Great Masturbator (1929), and The Lugubrious Game (1929). Several of Dalí's intimates in the 1960s and 1970s have stated that he would arrange for selected guests to perform choreographed sexual activities to aid his voyeurism and masturbation.

Personality
Dalí was renowned for his eccentric and ostentatious behavior throughout his career. In 1941, the Director of Exhibitions and Publications at MoMA wrote: "The fame of Salvador Dalí has been an issue of particular controversy for more than a decade...Dalí's conduct may have been undignified, but the greater part of his art is a matter of dead earnest." When Dalí was elected to the French Academy of Fine Arts in 1979, one of his fellow academicians stated that he hoped Dalí would now abandon his "clowneries".

In 1936, at the premiere screening of Joseph Cornell's film Rose Hobart at Julien Levy's gallery in New York City, Dalí knocked over the projector in a rage. "My idea for a film is exactly that," he said shortly afterward, "I never wrote it down or told anyone, but it is as if he had stolen it!" In 1939, while working on a window display for Bonwit Teller, he became so enraged by unauthorized changes to his work that he pushed a display bathtub through a plate glass window. In 1955, he delivered a lecture at the Sorbonne, arriving in a Rolls Royce full of cauliflowers. To promote Robert Descharnes' 1962 book The World of Salvador Dalí, he appeared in a Manhattan bookstore on a bed, wired up to a machine that traced his brain waves and blood pressure. He would autograph books while thus monitored, and the book buyer would also be given the paper chart recording.

After World War II, Dalí became one of the most recognized artists in the world, and his long cape, walking stick, haughty expression, and upturned waxed mustache became icons of his brand. His boastfulness and public declarations of his genius became essential elements of the public Dalí persona: "every morning upon awakening, I experience a supreme pleasure: that of being Salvador Dalí".

Dalí frequently traveled with his pet ocelot Babou, even bringing it aboard the luxury ocean liner SS France. He was also known to avoid paying at restaurants by executing drawings on the checks he wrote. His theory was the restaurant would never want to cash such a valuable piece of art, and he was usually correct.

Dalí's fame meant he was a frequent guest on television in Spain, France and the United States, including appearances on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson on 7 January 1963   The Mike Wallace Interview and the panel show What's My Line?. Dalí appeared on The Dick Cavett Show on 6 March 1970 carrying an anteater.

He also appeared in numerous advertising campaigns such for  chocolates and Braniff International Airlines in 1968.

Legacy
Two major museums are devoted to Dalí's work: the Dalí Theatre-Museum in Figueres, Catalonia, Spain, and the Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, U.S.

Dalí's life and work have been an important influence on pop art, other Surrealists, and contemporary artists such as Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst. He has been portrayed on film by Robert Pattinson in Little Ashes (2008), and by Adrien Brody in Midnight in Paris (2011). The Salvador Dalí Desert in Bolivia and the Dalí crater on the planet Mercury are named for him.

The Spanish television series Money Heist (2017–2021) includes characters wearing a costume of red jumpsuits and Dalí masks. The creator of the series stated that the Dalí mask was chosen because it was an iconic Spanish image. The Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation protested against the use of Dalí's image without the authorisation of the Dali estate. Following the popular success of the series, there were reports of people in various countries wearing the costume while participating in political protests, committing crimes or as fancy dress.

Honors 

 1964: Knight Grand Cross of the Order of Isabella the Catholic
 1972: Associate member of the Royal Academy of Science, Letters and Fine Arts of Belgium
1978: Associate member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts of the Institut de France
 1981: Knight Grand Cross of the Order of Charles III
 1982: Created 1st Marquess of Dalí of Púbol, by King Juan Carlos

List of selected works 

Dalí produced over 1,600 paintings and numerous graphic works, sculptures, three-dimensional objects, and designs. Below is a sample of important and representative works.

 Landscape Near Figueras (1910–14)
 Vilabertran (1910–14)
 Cabaret Scene (1922)
 Night Walking Dreams (1922)
 The Basket of Bread (1926)
 Composition with Three Figures (Neo-Cubist Academy) (1927)
 Honey is Sweeter than Blood (1927)
 Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog) (1929) (film in collaboration with Luis Buñuel)
 The Lugubrious Game (1929)
 The Great Masturbator (1929)
 The First Days of Spring (1929)
 L'Age d'Or (The Golden Age) (1930) (film in collaboration with Luis Buñuel)
 Board of Demented Associations (1930–31) (Surrealist object)
 Premature Ossification of a Railway Station (1931)
 The Persistence of Memory (1931)
 Retrospective Bust of a Woman (1933) (mixed media sculpture collage)
 The Ghost of Vermeer of Delft Which Can Be Used As a Table (c.1934)
 Lobster Telephone (1936)
 Venus de Milo with Drawers (1936)
 Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War) (1936)
 Metamorphosis of Narcissus (1937)
 Swans Reflecting Elephants (1937)
 The Burning Giraffe (1937)
 Mae West Lips Sofa (1937)
 Apparition of Face and Fruit Dish on a Beach (1938)
 Shirley Temple, The Youngest, Most Sacred Monster of the Cinema in Her Time (1939)
 Slave Market with the Disappearing Bust of Voltaire (1940)
 The Face of War (also known as The Visage of the War) (1940)
 Geopoliticus Child Watching the Birth of the New Man (1943)
 Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening (c.1944)
 Basket of Bread – Rather Death than Shame (1945)
 The Temptation of St. Anthony (1946)
 The Elephants (1948) (also known as Project for "As You Like It")
 Leda Atomica (1947–1949)
 The Madonna of Port Lligat (1949)
 Christ of Saint John of the Cross (also known as The Christ) (1951)
 Galatea of the Spheres (1952) (also known as Gala Placidia)
 The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory (1952–54)
 Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus) (c.1954) (also known as Hypercubic Christ)
 Young Virgin Auto-Sodomized by the Horns of Her Own Chastity (1954)
 The Sacrament of the Last Supper (1955)
 Still Life Moving Fast (c. 1956) (also known as Fast-Moving Still Life)
 The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus (1958)
 Perpignan Railway Station (c. 1965)
 Tuna Fishing (1966–67)
 The Hallucinogenic Toreador (1970)
 Nieuw Amsterdam (1974 object/sculpture)
 The Swallow's Tail (c.1983)

Dalí museums and permanent exhibitions 

 Dalí Theatre-Museum – Figueres, Catalonia, Spain, holds the largest collection of Dalí's work
Gala Dalí House-Museum – Castle of Púbol in Púbol, Catalonia, Spain
 Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia (Reina Sofia Museum) – Madrid, Spain, holds a significant collection
 Salvador Dalí House Museum – Port Lligat, Catalonia, Spain
 Salvador Dalí Museum – St Petersburg, Florida, contains the collection of Reynolds and Eleanor Morse, and over 1500 works by Dalí, including seven large "masterworks"

Major temporary exhibitions 

 In 2018, a traveling museum exhibition focusing on Dalí's illustrations for Dante's Divine Comedy premiered at the Hilliard University Art Museum in Lafayette, Louisiana. The exhibition titled Salvador Dalí's Stairway to Heaven will be touring the United States through 2021.

Gallery

See also 
 List of Spanish artists
 Salvador Dalí and Dance

References

Further reading 
Important books by or about Salvador Dalí readily available in English include:

 Ades, Dawn, Salvador Dalí, Thames and Hudson, 1995 (2nd ed.)
 Dalí, Salvador, Oui: the paranoid-critical revolution: writings 1927–1933, (edited by Robert Descharnes, translated by Yvonne Shafir), Boston: Exact Change, 1998
Dalí, Salvador, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí,  New York, Dover, 1993 (translated by Haakon M. Chevalier, first published 1942)
 Dalí, Salvador, The Diary of a Genius, London, Hutchinson, 1990 (translated by Richard Howard, first published 1964)
 Dalí, Salvador, The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dalí, London, Quartet Books, 1977 (first published 1973)
 Descharnes, Robert, Salvador Dalí   (translated by Eleanor R. Morse), New York, Abradale Press, 1993
 Gibson, Ian, The Shameful Life of Salvador Dalí, London, Faber and Faber, 1997
 Shanes, Eric, Salvador Dalí, Parkstone International, 2014

External links 

 Salvador Dalí on What's My Line?
  Interview and bank advertisement.
  A collection of interviews and footage of Dalí in the French television
Mike Wallace interviews Salvador Dalí Archived 15 December 2015. Harry Ransom Center, the University of Texas at Austin 
Panorama: Salvador Dali - Malcolm Muggeridge BBC interview, first transmitted 4 May 1955
Salvador Dalí at LletrA, Catalan Literature Online (Open University of Catalonia).

 
1904 births
1989 deaths
People from Figueres
Spanish artists
20th-century Spanish painters
Spanish male painters
Surrealist artists
Painters from Catalonia
Spanish illustrators
Recipients of the Legion of Honour
Marquesses of Spain
Members of the Royal Academy of Belgium
Modern painters
Spanish printmakers
Spanish erotic artists
Spanish Roman Catholics
Spanish surrealist artists
Surrealist filmmakers
20th-century Spanish sculptors
20th-century male artists
Spanish male sculptors
Mathematical artists
Knights Grand Cross of the Order of Isabella the Catholic
Federico García Lorca
1939 New York World's Fair artists
Spanish people of Arab descent
Spanish people of Jewish descent
Digital Addressable Lighting Interface (DALI) is a trademark for network-based products that control lighting. The underlying technology was established by a consortium of lighting equipment manufacturers as a successor for 1-10 V/ lighting control systems, and as an open standard alternative to several proprietary protocols. The DALI, DALI-2 and D4i trademarks are owned by the lighting industry alliance, DiiA (Digital Illumination Interface Alliance).

DALI is specified by a series of technical standards in IEC 62386. Standards conformance ensures that equipment from different manufacturers will interoperate. The DALI trademark is allowed on devices that comply with the DiiA testing and certification requirements, and are listed as either registered (DALI version-1) or certified (DALI-2) on the DiiA website. D4i certification  - an extension of DALI-2 - was added by DiiA in November 2019.

Members of the AG DALI were allowed to use the DALI trademark until the DALI working party was dissolved on 30 March 2017, when trademark use was transferred to DiiA members. Since 9 June 2017, Digital Illumination Interface Alliance (DiiA) certifies DALI products. DiiA is a Partner Program of IEEE-ISTO.

Technical overview
A DALI network consists of at least one application controller and bus power supply (which may be built into any of the products) as well as input devices (e.g. sensors and push-buttons), control gear (e.g., electrical ballasts, LED drivers and dimmers) with DALI interfaces. Application controllers can control, configure or query each device by means of a bi-directional data exchange. The DALI protocol permits addressing devices individually, in groups or via broadcast.

Each device is assigned a unique short address between 0 and 63, making up to 64 control gear devices and 64 control devices possible in a basic system. Address assignment is performed over the bus using a "commissioning" protocol, usually after all hardware is installed. Data is transferred between devices by means of an asynchronous, half-duplex, serial protocol over a two-wire bus with a fixed data transfer rate of .

A single pair of wires comprises the bus used for communication on a DALI network. The network can be arranged in bus or star topology, or a combination of these.  Each device on a DALI network can be addressed individually, unlike DSI and 0–10V devices. Consequently, DALI networks typically use fewer wires than DSI or 0–10V systems.

The bus is used for both signal and bus power.  A power supply provides up to 250 mA at typically 16 V DC; each device may draw up to 2 mA unless bus-powered.  While many devices are mains-powered (line-powered), low-power devices such as motion detectors may be powered directly from the DALI bus.  Each device has a bridge rectifier on its input so it is polarity-insensitive.  The bus is a wired-AND configuration where signals are sent by briefly shorting the bus to a low voltage level.  (The power supply is required to tolerate this, limiting the current to 250 mA.)

Although the DALI control cable operates at ELV potential, it is not classified as SELV (Safety Extra Low Voltage) and must be treated as if it has only basic insulation from mains.  This has the disadvantage that the network cable is required to be mains-rated, but has the advantage that it may be run next to mains cables or within a multi-core cable which includes mains power.  Also, mains-powered devices (e.g., LED drivers) need only provide functional insulation between the mains and the DALI control wires.

The network cable is required to provide a maximum drop of  along the cable.  At 250 mA of supply current, that requires a resistance of ≤  per wire.  The wire size needed to achieve this depends on the length of the bus, up to a recommended maximum of  at 300 m when using the maximum rating of bus power supply.

The speed is kept low so no termination resistors are required, and data is transmitted using relatively high voltages ( for low and  for high) enabling reliable communications in the presence of significant electrical noise.  (This also allows plenty of headroom for a bridge rectifier in each slave.)

Each bit is sent using Manchester encoding (a "1" bit is low for the first half of the bit time, and high for the second, while "0" is the reverse), so that power is present for half of each bit.  When the bus is idle, the voltage level is continuously high (which is not the same as a data bit).  Frames begin with a "1" start bit, then 8 to 32 data bits in msbit-first order (standard RS-232 is lsbit-first), followed by a minimum of 2.45 ms of idle.

Device addressing
A DALI device, such as an LED driver, can be controlled individually via its short address. Additionally, DALI devices may be arranged into groups in which all devices of the same group can respond to the commands addressed to the group. For example, a room with 4 ballasts can be changed from off to on in three common ways:

Single device
Using the Short Address, e.g. sending the following DALI messages:

 DALI Short Address 1 go to 100%
 DALI Short Address 2 go to 100%
 DALI Short Address 3 go to 100%
 DALI Short Address 4 go to 100%

This method has the advantage of not requiring programming of group and scene information for each ballast. The fade time of the transition can be chosen on the fly.
This method may be undesirable because simultaneous control of a large number of devices may not be possible due to network latency and the comparatively slow 1200 baud rate of DALI. For example, turning all lighting fixtures off may result in a visible delay between the first and last ballasts switching off. This issue is normally not a problem in rooms with a smaller number of ballasts.

Device groups
Using the DALI Group previously defined for the ballasts in the room, e.g.:
 DALI Group address 1 go to 100%

This method has the advantage of being immune to synchronization effects as described above.
This method has the disadvantage of requiring each ballast to be programmed with the required group numbers and scene information. The fade time can still be configured on the fly, if required.

Broadcast
Using the DALI Broadcast command, all control gear will change to that level, e.g.:
 DALI Broadcast go to 50%

Brightness control
DALI lighting levels are specified by an 8-bit value, with 0 representing off, 1 means 0.1% of full brightness, 254 means full brightness, and other values being logarithmically interpolated, giving a 2.77% increase per step.  I.e., a (non-zero) control byte  denotes a power level of .

(A value of 255 is reserved for freezing the current lighting level without changing it.)

This is designed to match human eye sensitivity so that perceived brightness steps are uniform, and to ensure corresponding brightness levels in units from different manufacturers.

Scenes
Devices store 16 programmable output levels as "scenes".  A single broadcast command causes each device to change to its configured level, e.g. dim lights over the audience and bright lights over the stage.  (A programmed output level of 255 causes a device not to respond to a given scene.)

A 17th "system failure" scene is triggered by a loss of power (sustained low level) on the DALI bus, to provide a safe fallback if control is lost.

Commands for control gear
Forward frames sent to control gear are 16 bits long, comprising an address byte followed by an opcode byte.  The address byte specifies a target device or a special command addressed to all devices.

When addressing a device, the least significant bit of the address byte specifies the interpretation of the opcode byte, with "0" meaning a target (light) level byte follows, and "1" meaning a command follows.

Several important special commands are used to save the data byte to one of the three "data transfer registers" which can be used as a parameter by subsequent commands.

Address byte format:
 0AAA AAAS: Target device 0 ≤ A < 64.
 100A AAAS: Target group 0 ≤ A < 16.  Each control gear may be a member of any or all groups.
 1111 110S: Broadcast unaddressed
 1111 111S: Broadcast
 1010 0000 to 1100 1011: Special commands
 1100 1100 to 1111 1011: Reserved

Common control gear commands:

Commands for control devices
The DALI-2 standard  added standardisation of control devices. Control devices can include input devices such as daylight sensors, passive infrared room occupancy sensors, and manual lighting controls, or they can be application controllers that are the "brains" of the system - using information to make decisions and control the lights and other devices. Control devices can also combine the functionality of an application controller and an input device. Control devices use 24-bit forward frames, which are ignored by control gear, so up to 64 control devices may share the bus with up to 64 control gear.

D4i
DiiA published several new specifications in 2018 and 2019, extending DALI-2 functionality with power and data, especially for intra-luminaire DALI systems. Applications include indoor and outdoor luminaires, and small DALI systems. The D4i trademark is used on certified products to indicate that these new features are included in the products.

Colour control
IEC 62386-209 describes colour control gear. This describes several colour types - methods of controlling colour. The most popular of these is Tc (tunable white), and was added to DALI-2 certification in January 2020.

Emergency lighting
IEC 62386-202 describes self-contained emergency lighting. Features include automated triggering of function tests and duration tests, and recording of results. These devices are currently included in DALI version-1 registration, with tests for DALI-2 certification in development. Such DALI version-1 products can be mixed with DALI-2 products in the same system, with no problems expected.

Wireless
IEC 62386-104 describes several wireless and wired transport alternatives to the conventional wired DALI bus system. DiiA is working with other industry associations to enable certification of DALI-2 products that operate over certain underlying wireless carriers. 
It is also possible to combine DALI with wireless communication via application gateways that translate between DALI and the wireless protocol of choice. While such gateways are not standardized, DiiA is working with other industry associations to develop the necessary specifications and tests to achieve this. DiiA: DALI and Wireless

See also
 Dimmer
 Lighting control console
 Lighting control system

References

External links 
 Digital Illumination Interface Alliance

Building automation
Lighting
Open standards Dali (also Daal or Dæl; ) is a goddess from the mythology of the Georgian people of the Caucasus region. She is a hunting goddess who serves as the patron of hoofed wild mountain animals such as ibexes and deer. Hunters who obeyed her numerous taboos would be assured of success in the hunt; conversely, she would harshly punish any who violated them. She is most prominently attested in the stories of the Svan ethnic subgroup in northwestern Georgia. Other groups in western Georgia had similar figures considered equivalent to Dali, such as the Mingrelian goddess Tkashi-Mapa ().

She was usually described as a beautiful nude woman with golden hair and glowing skin, although she sometimes took on the form of her favored animals, usually with some marking to differentiate her from the herd. She was said to reside in a cavern high in the mountains, where she kept watch over the hoofed game animals who live on the cliffs. Dali was styled with a variety of regional epithets reflecting her different roles and associations.

Stories of the Svan people depict her taking human lovers and killing them out of jealousy, giving birth to sons such as the culture hero Amirani, and later clashing with her rival Saint George. Some myths depict her working alongside other forest deities, and she is sometimes accompanied by the legendary hunting dog Q'ursha. After the rise of Christianity in Georgia, Dali's importance as a goddess waned, which was reflected in changes to stories told about her. Saint George was presented as having the power to overrule her, and she began to be conflated with a malicious nature spirit called the ali.

Many authors have described parallels between Dali and stories from other mythologies. As a patron of the hunt associated with hoofed beasts, she has been compared with Artemis of Greek mythology, a Scottish hag called the glaistig, and the maiden who tames the unicorn. Her associations with gold, seduction, and the morning star have led scholars to draw connections with goddesses such as Aphrodite and Ishtar, who have similar mythological themes.

Her story remains an important part of Georgian cultural consciousness, and she is often referenced with eponyms and literary allusions. Although younger people treat her as a figure from mythology, some older hunters still consider her to be a real figure one might encounter deep in the forest.

Origins 

Dali is attested primarily in surviving pieces of Svan folklore: myths, ballads, and round-dance songs. Linguistic anthropologist Kevin Tuite regards the surviving texts as fragmentary, representing "but a tiny fraction of the texts that would have been in circulation in the Svaneti of a few centuries ago". He also noted that most of these pieces would have been performed and likely composed by men, leaving any female perspective of Dali unclear.

Dali is also attested in oral traditions recorded in modern academic fieldwork by Georgian academics such as Vera Bardavelidze in the 1930s and Elene Virsaladze in the 1950s–1970s. According to Virsaladze, Georgian culture exhibits an extraordinary degree of live retention of ancient folklore and traditions, possibly from as far back as 3,300 years ago.

It has been suggested that Dali, along with numerous other deities of Georgian mythology, had her origins in a lost common religion of the Kartvelian peoples. Variations on this idea were supported by the Georgian historians Nikolai Marr and Ivane Javakhishvili, both of whom independently theorized that the similarities in folklore between the various Georgian ethnic groups indicated a common religious origin. Dating the origin of this religion, and therefore of Dali in particular, may be impossible due to the lack of surviving written sources. The only thing that can be stated definitively is that these beliefs predate the adoption of Christianity in Georgia, which archaeological evidence indicates began as early as the 3rd century.

Some archaeological artifacts have been suggested to have a connection to Dali. Folklorist Mikheil Chikovani considered the Trialeti Chalice, a Georgian artifact from approximately the 2nd millennium BCE, to depict a round dance or ritual dedicated to a goddess of the hunt comparable to Dali. He connected the motif of the animals on the lower portion of the chalice to the hoofed animals which Dali protected. Folklorist David Hunt also suggested the Chalice could be a depiction of a mistress of beasts. Some historians have speculated that certain Phasian drachma coins from the 4th to 5th century may have depicted Dali or her precursors, although numismatist John Hind argued against these interpretations in a 2005 paper.

Etymology and epithets 

The etymology of Dali's name is unclear. Although many figures in Georgian mythology have origins in figures from the early Georgian Orthodox Church, Dali is not among them. It has been suggested that the name comes from the Georgian word dila, meaning "morning", or the Ossetian word dælimon meaning "demon", but these links are disputed. Tuite has linked the name to the various words for "god" in the Nakh languages, a group of languages in the Northeast Caucasian language family: "Chechen dēla, Ingush dǣlə, Bats dalě". These words can refer to Allah specifically, or can be used as a general term for pre-Islamic deities in the region. It was characteristic for central Caucasian cultures to replace sacred words with substitutes; this lexical replacement was driven by taboos against speaking the true words. Tuite believed Dali might originally have had a Svan name that gradually became replaced by the Nakh term for "god" as a result of this process.

Dali and her equivalents were also known by various epithets, reflecting local perceptions of the goddess's role or associations. At times she was simply called "Radiant", in reference to her extraordinary beauty. When focusing on her association with New Year's Eve, she was referred to with the epithet of Dæl Ešxwmiš, or "Dali of New Year's Eve". The Svan called her "the Queen Dali". Because she was said to live high in the mountains, she was sometimes referred to as "Dali of the Rocks". In the Racha and Kakheti regions she was called "the Mistress of Beasts" and the "Angel of the Crags". The name Tkashi-Mapa, used by the Mingrelians, translates as "the Queen of the Woods" or "the Sovereign of the Forest".

Depiction 

Traditionally, Dali lived in a cavern high up in the mountains, far away from human settlement. Some traditions specified her home was the distinctive double-peaked mountain Ushba, whose ice-covered south face was sometimes called Dalis panjara, the Window of Dali (). The cave's exact location varied; it could be on the side of a glacier, or at the summit of the mountain. Sometimes the entrance was concealed by a rock door which Dali opened and closed to hide her dwelling. Rarely, Dali and her flock lived inside an enormous hollowed-out spruce tree. As a rule, Dali did not enter civilized spaces such as villages except on rare occasions, such as the funerals of her human lovers.

Dali was usually described as a beautiful young woman with long braided hair. She was most often portrayed as nude, occasionally wearing gold jewellery. If she wore clothes, they were white. Her skin was so white it was literally radiant. Her beauty was extraordinary: "both irresistible and terrible", it could drive a man to madness if he even spoke to her.

Dali's long hair was an important component of her mythology. Her hair was gold-colored; in some cases, it was actually made of gold, and shone like the sun. Some stories depicted this gleaming aspect as fire, describing the goddess leaving "little tongues of flame" in her wake, although this is less prevalent. She would sit on the cliffs combing her hair with a golden comb. In some tales, Dali used her supernaturally-strong hair to bind hunters who wronged her. In one story, she used it to strangle a hunter who had stolen one of her hairs to string his hunting bow.

Although strong enough to string a bow with, her hair was not invulnerable; indeed, using Dali's hair to threaten, harm, or kill her was a recurring motif. Multiple tales depict hunters grabbing or cutting Dali's hair in order to subdue and rape her. This tactic did not necessarily prevent the goddess from later taking revenge. In a story about Dali's Mingrelian equivalent Tkashi-Mapa, the goddess agrees to marry a hunter when he threatens to cut off her luxurious hair. He eventually grows tired of her endlessly washing and combing it, and hides her prized comb so she will stop. She destroys his family, killing one of his children and stealing another, and curses his entire line of descendants.

Women could also use Dali's hair against her. In one of the major Dali stories, a woman discovers her husband sleeping with Dali. She cuts Dali's hair off in a rage, killing her or banishing her from the world. A superstition recorded in 1971 described how a woman whose man had been away hunting too long might cut her own hair off, praying that God would cut Dali's hair in return, which would force the goddess to allow her husband to return home. In one unusual variation of the hair-cutting motif, a woman wishing to rid her son or her husband of Dali's influence sneaks up on the goddess while she is sleeping and washes her hair, sometimes in deer's milk. Dali is rendered so powerless, or so grateful, by this act that she becomes the woman's servant. Her Mingrelian equivalent could be dismissed with a similar method, using milk from a black cow instead of a deer.

Primary motifs

Game animals and hunting 

Dali's primary mythological role was that of the mistress and guardian of hoofed game animals of the mountain. She protected her charges, which included deer, ibex, wild sheep, and goat-antelopes like turs and chamois, just as a shepherd guards a flock. Some stories portray her milking her animals. She was responsible for granting favor or misfortune to hunters, punishing the greedy and ensuring there would always be enough game to go around.

Stories involving Dali often feature animals that have been marked as special: either they are Dali's favorites among the herd, or they are the goddess herself in the form of an animal. Examples of these special features include a purely white coat, unusual markings, or golden horns. Dali could vary her size in both her animal and her human forms. When she took the shape of her favored animals, they were often significantly larger or smaller than the usual animals of that kind. She could also make her human form very small: in eastern Georgia, hunters would leave tiny pairs of shoes on the cliffs as an offering to her.

Several tales recorded by Georgian folklorist Elene Virsaladze reflect the deadly consequences for a hunter who wounded or killed one of Dali's marked beasts, or hunted too greedily. Two stories describe Dali cursing a hunter's family such that his sons, and later the hunter himself, died as a result. Another story describes Dali destroying the town of Nakvderi with an avalanche as revenge after a hunter wounded a tur marked by the goddess. In another story, a hunter killed a doe and its fawn, and was cursed by the herd's protector to never have any descendants of his own.

One Svan story describes the consequences for three brothers who follow one of Dali's mountain goats up into the crags and attempt to shoot it. The first two brothers both miss the goat, and are attacked and killed by Dali, who has been hiding in her cave nearby watching. The third brother watches the goat vanish into Dali's cave, and hides. Dali eventually emerges. The hunter leaps out of hiding, grabs her by the hair, and rapes her. She then becomes his mistress. The story's unusual inclusion of a hunter who overpowers Dali may indicate that it took some influence from an Ossetian legend involving two brothers overcoming a deer-herding witch.

Appeasement through taboos and offerings 

Despite her protectiveness towards her animals, Dali was not necessarily hostile to hunters, and would even grant them blessings if they respected certain taboos and made appropriate offerings to her. These taboos typically revolved around concerns about spiritual purity and prevention of overhunting. Offerings usually involved small personal sacrifices given before and after the hunt.

Dali was perceived as extremely sensitive to any kind of spiritual pollution entering her mountains, which were considered pure and therefore sacred. She demanded that hunters abstain from the hunt if they were impure in any of a number of ways. Impurity usually originated from women and blood, but could also come from use of foul language, commission of adulterous acts, and association with dead bodies. On the night before a hunt, hunters had to refrain from intercourse with any women, even their wives. They had to avoid any contact, sexual or otherwise, with any woman who was menstruating or in childbirth. The wives of hunters were also subject to behavioral taboos. In some regions, "the wives of huntsmen were traditionally forbidden to wash, comb, or unplait their hair" while their husbands were out on the hunt. In an extension of the hunter's menstrual taboo, women were not permitted to eat meat from the hunt while menstruating, pregnant, or in childbirth.

Hunting was treated as a sacred act among the Svan. The hunt began with a sacrifice of a ceremonial bread, called lamsir, which was offered to Dali with a prayer. Hunters were taught to not kill more beasts than they could carry, usually one for each man in the hunting party. If their efforts were successful, hunters would make an offering of organ meat to Dali in thanksgiving. In some traditions, the horns of the animal would be consecrated to Dali once the hunters returned to their village.

It was believed that hunters who respected these taboos and made correct offerings, thereby avoiding ritual impurity, would always find enough game to ensure they and their families were fed. Conversely, hunters who became impure by failing to abide by taboos and restrictions could be punished by Dali in a number of ways ranging from failure to find game all the way to death by fatal fall. It was sometimes possible to abate Dali's rage after a transgression with appropriate offerings, as in one story where an offering of sacred bread prevented Dali from destroying a village by flooding the Inguri River.

Seduction and jealousy 

Stories involving Dali often depict her taking mortal hunters as lovers, bringing both blessings and peril to the hunter. In an inversion of traditional gender roles, it is the goddess who chooses the hunter and initiates the affair. Often, her target was a hunter who had done her a favor such as protecting her from a pursuer. She would give her lovers tokens of affection such as beads, jewellery, or small objects like scissors, which he was required to keep hidden from everyone. A hunter who became Dali's lover would be guaranteed success in the hunt. The goddess might even protect the hunter from human assailants and heal his wounds. In return, he was prohibited from revealing the secret of his good fortune, and from taking any mortal lovers for the duration of the affair.

Engaging in an affair with Dali was a dangerous undertaking. Dali's beauty would inflame the hunter's passions to the point of near-madness, a state that was referred to as being "dalelukdune, Dali-possessed" (). Afflicted hunters would wander the wilderness aimlessly waiting for the goddess to find them. After the affair was consummated, any appearance of infidelity on the hunter's part would incur the goddess's wrath. He could be attacked by her animals or lured to his death upon a dangerous cliff. Dali's Mingrelian equivalent was known to petrify hunters who offended her. Even if a hunter did survive the liaison, he might be unable to take a mortal lover for the remainder of his life for fear of angering the goddess.

It was possible for a wily hunter to negotiate terms with Dali, such as limiting the length of the affair, or securing the right to marry a mortal at a later time. As long as the hunter's terms were set before the affair began, Dali would respect them. Some traditions held that a hunter could safely end an affair with Dali by giving his undergarments to a male guest, who would become the new focus of Dali's affections, allowing the original hunter to marry without enraging the goddess.

Even death did not end Dali's obsessive behavior toward her beloved hunters. She would come down from the mountains into villages to grieve dramatically over the bodies of hunters, even those whose deaths she was responsible for in the first place. Some villages had family members stand guard over freshly buried bodies to prevent Dali from unearthing them to weep over. In others, the family would leave the hunter's body alone in the house, enabling Dali to dress the body and mourn over it for a short time.

Although not specifically regarded as a fertility goddess, two major myths depict Dali giving birth. In one, the goddess drops her infant after the birth. It is rescued by a hunter, to whom she offers a sexual liaison as a reward. In the second, Dali seduces a hunter, becomes pregnant, and gives birth to a demigod son who becomes a hero.

Times of transition 

Although she is primarily a hunting deity, Dali has strong associations with symbols and states of transition such as dawn, the morning star, and New Year's Eve. Svan hunting lore placed significant emphasis on the morning star. Svan hunters were taught to leave their homes before dawn, and arrive at the hunting grounds by its light. Once at the hunting grounds, they would light a small fire and offer a prayer via the morning star to Dali and other hunting deities such as Apsat (the god of small game) or Saint George (the patron of hunters). In the story of the hunter Betkil, his death at Dali's hands is sometimes set at the moment the morning star appears in the sky, or the moment the night becomes dawn.

Dali was also celebrated on New Year's Eve as the bringer of a peaceful transition from the old year to the new. During these celebrations, she was referred to with the epithet of Dæl Ešxwmiš, or "Dali of New Year's Eve". Both male and female heads of household would make offerings of special bread baked from consecrated grain to Dali of New Year's Eve. Georgian ethnologist Vera Bardavelidze documented a number of different forms of this sacred bread from various villages based on fieldwork she conducted in the 1930s. Some loaves would be kept until spring, where they would be crumbled and sown into the earth at a planting festival.

Mythology

Affair with Betkil 

The most well-known of Dali's affairs is her dalliance with the legendary hunter Betkil or Betgil, who falls to his death from a high cliff after betraying Dali's affections. The story is depicted in the traditional Svan circle dance songs Bail Betkil, Betkan Kutsa and Betkani. These dances were performed in the Racha region of western Georgia each year on the third Sunday following Easter, at the bottom of the cliff where Betkil is believed to have died. The exact location is uncertain: Tuite mentions the Free Svaneti communes of Mulakhi and Muzhali, while folklorist Anna Chaudhri pinpoints the village of Ghebi. The annual performance of these dances was linked to a ritual meant to summon the rain.

The story begins with Dali selecting and pursuing Betkil. She gives him a token of her favor (Tuite translates it as "a bead, ring, or charm") and demands that he abstain from the touch of mortal females, including his own wife. For a time he is faithful to her and his hunts are always fruitful. Eventually, he breaks his vow with a mortal womanmost often his wife, but occasionally his sister-in-lawand this woman steals the goddess's love-token. In a rage, Dali transforms herself into a white deer or chamois and lures an unsuspecting Betkil from his village to the top of her mountain. The path closes, crumbles, or melts away behind him, forcing him to continue forward until he reaches the peak. There, Dali returns to her human form and angrily confronts Betkil about his betrayal and the loss of her token. The ground beneath Betkil's feet crumbles away entirely and leaves him hanging by one hand and one foot. Dali disappears, leaving Betkil to either jump or fall to his death. In some versions, prior to his death, Betkil entreats his family to grieve for him in various ways, and laments that his mortal lover allowed him to go out hunting while "impure".

In some variations of the Betkil story, he is accompanied up the mountain by the supernatural dog Q'ursha. In this version, Betkil is trapped on the mountain for several days and runs out of food. Eventually, Q'ursha insists that Betkil kill and eat him to survive. In some versions he goes through with it. In others, he kills the hound but cannot bring himself to eat him. Finally, in other versions, he sends Q'ursha to his village for help instead. The villagers come to Betkil's aid and throw ropes to him, but Dali's mountain grows taller and taller and the ropes cannot reach him. Again, he falls to his death.

White Mangur 

Another hunter, known as White Mangur, fares unusually well in his encounter with Dali. One version of the story, recorded by academic researchers and first published in 1939, describes Mangur as a famously prosperous hunter. One night he takes shelter in an empty cave. Dali arrives and demands that he explain his presence in her cave. Mangur explains that he was overtaken by nightfall and had no other shelter available. Dali remarks that if he were any other man, she would "arrange for you an unlucky return home", but says it would be a pity to harm a man like Mangur. Instead, she invites him to her bed. He protests briefly that he has a wife and child, but quickly relents, and they have an affair. She tells him she will give him plenty of game, and if he is ever in trouble to call her name. In the morning, White Mangur leaves Dali's cave, but is soon accosted by enemies. He kills nine of his enemies, but receives nine serious wounds in return. He calls out to Dali for help, and the goddess leaps from behind the crags and massacres Mangur's enemies with an ash branch. She heals his wounds at a touch and sends him home.

"Dali is Giving Birth on the Crags" 

The story of Dali giving birth on the crags has been passed down as a song accompanied by a traditional circle dance, called Dælil k'ojas khelghwazhale in Svan (). Linguistic analysis corroborated by archaeological findings indicates that the song is of ancient origin.

The song begins with a hunter named Mepsay or Mepisa, who hears the goddess crying out in pain from childbirth. Immediately after giving birth, Dali drops the infant down the mountain, where it is snatched up by a waiting wolf. The hunter shoots the wolf and brings the infant back up the mountain to Dali. She offers the hunter a choice of reward: she will gift him with various game animals, or he can become her lover. He warily declines her offer of sexual favors and asks for success in the hunt. Later, he attempts to shoot an ibex with golden horns, not realizing that it is the goddess herself. His bullet ricochets off the ibex's horns and strikes him down, killing him. In this story, the name of the child's father and the fate of the child are never given.

Amirani 

The second of Dali's childbirth stories has more variations, but generally describes the conception and birth of the culture hero Amirani. In the most prominent version, a hunter finds Dali in the mountains, and she takes him as her lover. After several days together, they are discovered by his angry wife, who cuts off Dali's golden hair or ties her up with it. As a result, Dali is forced to abruptly leave the world. (In some variations, the cutting of her hair kills her outright.) If she is killed, her pregnancy is discovered after her death. If she is simply banished, she announces that she is pregnant before departing. She declares that her child will be a powerful hero, though not as powerful as he would be had he been carried to term. In either case, her lover reluctantly cuts the infant from her womb. In some versions, the infant is premature and must be placed in the stomach of a bull (or the womb of a cow, or both) to complete gestation. Eventually he is left beside a spring, where he is found by either the Christian God or Saint George and baptized with the name Amirani.

In another version of Amirani's birth story, a mortal hunter cuts off Dali's braids while she sleeps and rapes her; she becomes pregnant. Later, an old hunter named Sulkalmakhi hears her wailing high in the cliffs, and climbs up to her. She tells him she is dying, and begs him to cut her infant free so he does not die with her. She tells Sulkalmakhi to name him Amirani and care for him as his own.

Although Amirani is generally depicted as Dali's son, there is a story from the Guria region called "Dali and Amirani" in which Dali, enraged by an unspecified offense, attempts to entrap an adult Amirani. While wandering the mountains with his dog, Amirani sees a flame and begins to follow it up the cliffs, eventually discovering that the flame is Dali's hair. Dali lures Amirani to the top of the mountain by saying she has been looking for him. His dog warns him of her ill intentions, but Amirani disregards the dog's advice and climbs up to meet her. When he reaches the very top of the mountain, Dali disappears and Amirani finds himself hung from the rocks by her hair. His dog, unable to reach him, convinces a bird to pluck the hair away. Just as the bird frees Amirani, Dali returns and curses the bird and its kind to be weak and useless. This is a variation on the story in which Dali strangles an unnamed hunter at the top of a mountain after he stole a hair to string his bow.

Saint George 

Later Svan mythology depicts Dali in opposition to St. George. In Georgian mythology, Saint George is regarded as a deity whose primary function is the protection of "men exploiting the world outside their villages for the benefit of the community", such as shepherds, beekeepers, and most significantly, hunters. The Svan round dance song Monadire Chorla ("The Hunter Chorla"), a late variation of the Betkil story, depicts a significant clash between Dali and Saint George. In the song, a hunter named Chorla kills more than his share of ibexes, despite knowing this will anger the goddess. Dali punishes Chorla for his greed by binding him up on a treacherous cliff. Chorla sends his dog for help, and it returns with Saint George, who intervenes for Chorla as a reward for his faith in Jesus Christ. Saint George threatens to pollute or destroy the mountains with storms and landslides unless Dali releases Chorla, which she does. Furthermore, he places Chorla under his protection and declares that he can hunt without limit in the future.

Some versions of this story, such as the Svan ballads of the hunters Givergil and Kala, describe the hunter being tormented by a group of spirits, collectively referred to as the Dalis, rather than a singular goddess. In the ballad about Kala, the Dalis explicitly call Saint George their master when he threatens to destroy their territory. Tuite found this plural representation similar to the "St Georges" and "St Elijahs" of Ossetic mythology, which were groups of spirits sharing traits of the Christian saints they were named for. In contrast, Virsaladze found the change from singular goddess to coven of spirits to be a confirmation that Dali had been relegated to a secondary role in Svan hunting mythology.

Associated figures 

Dali was not the only hunting deity worshipped by the Svans, and she was sometimes depicted working alongside others. Georges Charachidzé, a French-Georgian scholar of Caucasian culture, recorded that Dali worked with three other Svaneti forest gods to assist the Lord of the Bare Mountain, Ber Shishvlish. These deities were Apsat, the god of small game like fish and birds, Cxek'isk angelwez, the Angel of the Forest, who ruled over forest animals like foxes and bears, and Saint George, who was the patron of wolves and hunters. Mikheil Chikovani believed this multitude of deities represented a later development of the original matriarchal myth, in which Dali was the mistress of all beasts. Particularly, he saw Ber Shishvlish as an unsuccessful replacement for Dali.

Some groups in eastern Georgia viewed Apsat and Dali as siblings who each took a season in turn protecting herds of wild beasts. When Apsat was in charge of the animals, hunters were said to have an easy time making kills, but when Dali took over, she watched the animals closely, making it much harder for the hunters to bring them down. The Svaneti circle dance Metkhvar Mare praises both Dali and Apsat in these roles. In some instances, Apsat is represented as Dali's husband or son, or even her father, rather than her sibling. Tuite theorized that this partitioning of roles between the two deities was the result of Apsat being adapted into a pre-existing belief system which featured a female figure as the primary patron of game animals.

Another Georgian hunting deity, Ochopintre, is often mentioned alongside Dali. Some sources report that they worked together to herd and protect animals from hunters. In contrast, Virsaladze reports that the Khevsurian people of the Khevsureti region viewed the male Ochopintre as their primary hunting god. They had a figure called the "forest woman", an unnamed protector of deer, but she was treated as minor in comparison.

Some sources refer to Dali being accompanied by hunting dogs, sometimes specifically the legendary black-eared hunting dog Q'ursha. However, Q'ursha is not a consistent feature of Dali stories. He is more commonly depicted accompanying male hunters, including her son, Amirani, as well as the hunter Betkil.

Post-Christianization depiction 

As Christianity became more prominent in Georgia, beginning with its arrival in the 3rd century, many pagan beliefs were altered or appropriated to fit Christian ideology. Dali's functions as the mistress of the hunt began to be shifted to Saint George, as in the story of the hunter Chorla. Ethnomusicologist Maka Khardziani identified Saint George's victory over Dali in the Chorla story as emblematic of the weakening of pagan beliefs in the face of Christian influence. David Hunt suggested that the story in which Dali attempts to strangle Amirani reflects a Christian rejection of the female goddess, who is reduced to a malicious and "witch-like" figure.

Dali's loss of status and power in the Christian era was reflected in altered folk practices. Prayers and sacrifices once offered to Dali were instead offered to Saint George. In the village of Tskheta in historic Lechkhumi province, hunters who encountered "the forest woman" could dismiss her simply by speaking George's name, confirming his power over her.

Virsaladze writes that as Saint George began to eclipse Dali, she became increasingly associated with evil spirits and demonic imagery. Her character became entwined with a kind of evil spirit called the ali. The ali retained Dali's connection with hunters and high crags, but her supernatural beauty, particularly her radiant hair, was inverted into horrifying ugliness. A spell to protect travelers from the ali described her as having misplaced features, backwards limbs, a terrible visage, and "ghastly hair, soiled with blood". Her malicious aspects were emphasized and her patronage and protection of hunters were downplayed. Dali's favored animals, such as the wild goats and chamois she often transformed into, were used in Christian imagery to depict Satan, an evil entity who opposes God. This degraded version of Dali is sometimes depicted in the company of devils.

Virsaladze and Hunt have both suggested these changes to the Dali myth are a direct consequence of the Christian church altering existing pagan beliefs to associate them with evil in an effort to discredit them. According to Virsaladze, this was not entirely successful, and belief in Dali persisted alongside Christianity, particularly in remote mountainous regions where the Christian church had less influence. One elderly man she interviewed during her research in the mid twentieth-century described Dali as both a deity and as a tormenting spirit, indicating that both versions of the myth were still extant in the modern era.

Mythological parallels 

More than one author has discussed significant parallels between Dali and other mythological figures from other cultures with similar roles and associations. Equivalent figures to Dali appear in the mythologies of many Caucasian groups. Scholarly comparisons to various figures from Greek mythology are also prevalent, and some have argued that these similarities are a result of sustained contact between the peoples of ancient Greece and ancient Georgia. Other work has compared Dali to Near Eastern goddesses, as she shares similar motifs including dawn associations and mortal lovers. Finally, it has also been suggested that Dali represents a preserved version of a particular Western European mythological archetype of a mistress of hunting or beasts, which has become altered or corrupted in other places.

Caucasian equivalents 

Dali was important to the Svan, to the point of being their most widely-known mythological figure. Other Caucasian peoples had myths that described significantly similar deities who may be considered roughly equivalent with Dali, with regional variations. The Mingrelian people of the historical Samegrelo region, to the south of Svaneti, revered a golden-haired goddess of the hunt called Tkashi-Mapa, who scholars view as an equivalent of Dali due to the overlap in their mythological roles and associations. Both lived in the wilderness, shape-shifted into animals, took mortal lovers, and were dangerously jealous. Tuite, drawing on Chikovani's work in 1972, has proposed that the golden-haired goddess Samdzimari ("necklace-wearer") from northeastern Georgia served a similar, even equivalent role to Dali, though she was not explicitly a hunting deity. Samdzimari and Dali were both seductive figures associated with domestic functions who moved in inaccessible or non-civilized spaces. Each serves as the female counterpart of their respective regional version of Saint George.

Caucasian cultures who worshipped a male hunting deity often had stories about a figure who served Dali's function as the "mistress of the beasts", but was not considered a deity. In many places this figure is known only as the "forest woman" or a similar descriptive title. Virsaladze regarded this figure as essentially the same as Dali. The Khevsurians, who worshipped the male Ochopintre, retained the concept of a tiny protectress of the cliffs. The Ossetians, whose primary hunting deity was Æfsati, had a forest woman. The northern Caucasian Kumyks and the inhabitants of the Lechkhumi and Guria regions each had a forest woman rather than a strong tradition of a hunting goddess. The Avar people of the northern Caucasus have stories about a "Forest Beauty" with golden hair like Dali. The recurring concept of a "forest woman" (or less frequently a "forest man") has been proposed as possible evidence of a common pan-Caucasian mythology that might have existed before Christianity and Islam came to the Caucasus.

The "forest woman" is a recurring motif in the Nart saga, a loose collection of stories from the northern Caucasus which underpins much of the mythology of the area. The Digor, an Ossetian subgroup, have a story from about a deer-herding witch who bears some similarities to Dali. Like Dali, she favors a white doe and uses her hair to bind hunters who offend her, although unlike most Dali stories, the hunters overcome the witch in the end. Other Nart saga stories involve goddesses or magical women who, like Dali, transform into deer, have glowing skin, and take hunters as lovers. Tuite has also noted that Dzerassae, a water spirit of the Nart saga, had similarities to Dali: she had golden hair and could change her shape into a fish or a deer. He cited linguist John Colarusso, who suggested there might be a link between their names based on the initial syllable, with the shift in phoneme caused by translation into Circassian.

Greek mythology 

Tuite compared Dali in her role as the mother of Amirani to the Greek Nereid Thetis, mother of Achilles. Each goddess took a mortal for a lover and bore a demi-god son. Their sons were destined to be warriors of enormous power, possibly enough to challenge the creator deity of their respective mythologies. Although extremely formidable, neither attains his full potential, and both are eventually defeated. Tuite posits that the similarity between the two myths is indicative of prehistoric contact between the ancient Greek and Caucasian peoples.

Classical scholar Egbert Bakker discussed Dali as a parallel to the Greek witch-goddess Circe of Homer's Odyssey, highlighting their shared aspects: "protection of animals, sexual predation, dawn and New Year associations", and a "male divine counterpart and adversary". He went on to suggest that their similarities indicated a cultural exchange between the Georgians and the Greeks, noting that the Svan homeland is close to the ancient Georgian kingdom of Colchis, a region with close trading connections to Greece.

Some sources have noted a similarity to the Greek goddess Artemis, who was also a patron of wild animals and hunting, although unlike Dali she was known for prudishness rather than promiscuity. Both were associated with transitions and boundaries, especially between civilization and the wilderness.

Near Eastern goddesses 

Writing in the 1940s, the Georgian author Demna Shengelaya examined Dali as an equivalent of the Babylonian goddess Ishtar, identifying themes of matriarchy struggling against patriarchal values reflected in the stories of each.

Virsaladze found similarities between Dali and several related Near Eastern deities including Ishtar, the Phrygian goddess Cybele, Phoenician Astarte, and Carthaginian Tanit, noting that all these goddesses were associated with a mortal lover in a story cycle representing the transition to spring and the cyclical rebirth of nature. She particularly stressed the similarities between Dali and Ishtar: sovereignty over animals, an association with dawn, and a sexual aggressiveness that was feared by men. She suggested the possibility that the mythology surrounding Dali represented a preserved form of "a very ancient cycle of traditions and songs about the interrelations of the mistress, patroness, or sovereign, of the beasts, forest, crags and waters, with a mortal young man". According to Virsaladze, this mythological motif is a fragment of a matriarchal belief system which venerated nature and life-giving mother deities, later supplanted by patriarchal ideology.

Drawing on the work of earlier writers such as Walter Burkert and Paul Friedrich, Tuite described mythological similarities between Dali and several other similar goddesses who have parallel motifs possibly indicating mutual influence. Foremost among these similarities are an association with gold (both as a color and as a precious metal), fertility and patronage of animals, seductive behavior combined with destructive jealousy, and a connection to dawn or the morning star. He refers to these similarities as the "dawn goddess complex". Goddesses with some or all of these features include the Proto-Indo-European dawn goddess Hausōs, and two Greek deities likely descended from her, the dawn goddess Eos and the love goddess Aphrodite. He also highlights the Sumerian goddess Inanna, and her Babylonian counterpart Ishtar as sharing these parallel motifs, despite not being derived from Hausōs. Tuite identifies the overarching themes of the dawn goddess complex as ambiguity and transition. He notes that the mythological associations of these goddesses serve as symbols for larger concepts such as transitions between night to day, old to new, and birth to death. In Dali's case, her identification with both the morning star and New Year's Eve directly reinforce her status as a patron of transitions.

Archaeologist Elena Rova, drawing on Tuite's work, wrote that there appears to be evidence of the transmission of symbols and beliefs between the Mesopotamian and Georgian peoples during the Bronze Age. She described the 2014 discovery of a fragment of a decorated sandstone plaque in the Aradetis Orgora mounds on the Dedoplis Mindori archaeological site in Georgia as the basis for this speculation. The plaque, attributed to the 14th–13th centuries BCE, features a nine-pointed star similar to the eight-pointed star of Ishtar. Rova believed the star design may have been passed from Mesopotamia to Georgia through long-distance trade of the item itself or indirect memetic transmission of the design. It may then have been appropriated for use as a symbol of a local solar goddess such as Dali, possibly because some of Ishtar's features were similar enough to Dali "for the symbol of the latter to have been consciously chosen by the local population in order to symbolise a local goddess".

Western European figures 

David Hunt compared the hunting mythology surrounding Dali to the western European concept of the unicorn and the lady who tames it. He noted that stories of the unicorn typically focus on hunting, often in high mountains. Traditional descriptions of the unicorn include features which are characteristic of goats and deer, such as cloven hooves. In turn, hoofed animals are important prey for the hunters of the Caucasian mountains and feature heavily in their mythology. Dali's favored animals were marked in ways that make them similar to the unicorn; in particular, they were often pure white or single-horned. Finally, he found a parallel between the motif of a lady taming the unicorn and the recurring idea of a goddess or supernatural mistress who protects wild game animals. Although he admitted the evidence was "circumstantial and sparse", he suggested that the unicorn story originated from ancient European hunting mythology, which he believes was preserved in the mythology of the Caucasus after fading elsewhere.

Hilda Ellis Davidson and Anna Chaudhri found similarities between stories of Dali and the glaistig of the Scottish Highlands. The glaistig was commonly described as a hag who lived high in the mountains and protected hoofed game animals. Like Dali, the glaistig could be both helpful and malicious, depending on the story in question. Although protective of her animals, in some stories the glaistig would allow them to be hunted, as long as the hunters were respectful and left appropriate offerings to her. In other stories, the glaistig would pose as an old woman and prey on hunters staying in mountain huts called bothies. Both Dali and the glaistig use their supernaturally-strong hair as bindings; Dali binds hunters directly, while the glaistig binds hunting dogs so she can safely attack their masters.

Davidson and Chaudhri concluded that Dali and the glaistig each represent a local version of an archetypal figure of a female guardian of the wilderness, which they suggested is a widespread mythological theme. Dali represents a preserved form of the myth, where the goddess retains her power and her beauty. In contrast, the glaistig represents an altered form, where the goddess has been reduced to an ugly hag and is accorded significantly less respect. They argue that similar figures who ranging from seductive to disturbing were once widespread across various European places and cultures, referencing the forest women of Scandinavia, Greek Artemis, and the Irish Cailleach. The later forms where the guardian figure is ugly or wicked represent a version that became prominent after respect for the earlier goddess figures had withered.

Modern legacy 

Dali has retained cultural significance among Georgians into the modern day, particularly in more rural areas where hunting is still practiced as a profession. A survey conducted in 2013 found that, while most people who were either younger or more educated considered Dali to be mythological, many elderly hunters still thought of Dali as a real figure, although not one that any of them had personally encountered. They recounted stories to the researchers of hunters they knew who had encountered Dali and been injured or driven mad as a result.

In the modern era, eponyms and literary allusions to Dali indicate the persistence of her narrative in the cultural memory. The Dali Chasma and the Tkashi-mapa Chasma on Venus are named for Dali and her Mingrelian equivalent Tkashi-Mapa. Capra dalii, a fossil species of goat discovered in Georgia, is named for Dali. Fragments of Capra dalii fossils were first located at the Dmanisi archaeological site in 2006, and are believed to be related to the west Caucasian tur, Capra caucasica.

Celebrated Georgian novelist Konstantine Gamsakhurdia wove numerous figures from Georgian folklore, including Dali, into his 1936 novel Stealing the Moon. Georgian author Grigol Robakidze integrated Dali into his German-language works, particularly the novels MegiEin georgisches Mädchen (Megi – A Georgian Girl, 1932), where Dali forms the basis of the character Ivlite, and Der Ruf der Göttin (The Call of the Goddess, 1934), based on the stories of hunters falling from cliffs because of Dali. Two poems composed after the accidental death of the famed Svan mountain climber Mikhail Khergiani in 1969 refer to Dali mourning his loss.

In 2019, the town of Lentekhi removed a figure of Dali from the design of a large fountain planned for the city's main square. The original proposal featured a statue of Dali, nude, standing atop a large rock, with three ibexes standing on the rock beneath her. Metropolitan Stephan of the Georgian Orthodox eparchy of Tsageri and Lentekhi strongly criticized the inclusion of the goddess as idolatry, although mayor Badri Liparteliani stated the change was intended to increase the fountain's efficiency and visual appeal. The final version was built without the statue of Dali, and simply features three ibexes sitting atop a rock.

See also 

 Britomartis – Greek goddess of mountains and hunting
 Bugady Musun – Siberian animal guardian who took the form of a reindeer
 Deer Woman – seductive forest spirit whose form was partially a deer
 Devana – Slavic goddess of forests and the hunt
 Mielikki – Finnish hunting goddess who herded cows and could determine the success of a hunt
 Potnia Theron – widespread motif found in ancient art depicting a female holding two animals
 Skaði – Norse mountain goddess associated with hunting, skiing, and winter

Notes

Citations

References 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Georgian mythology
Animal goddesses
Fertility goddesses
Hunting goddesses
Mountain goddesses
Nature goddesses
Solar goddesses