By breaking out of three dimensions, the artist could find new meaning in a traditional biblical scene, argues du Sautoy. “The idea of the fourth dimension existing beyond our material world resonated for Dalí with the spiritual world transcending our physical universe.”

The shape of things to come

A fourth dimension in art seemed for many a natural development. In his 1936 Dimensionist Manifesto, Hungarian poet and art theorist Charles Tamkó Sirató claimed that artistic evolution had led to “Literature leaving the line and entering the plane… Painting leaving the plane and entering space… [And] sculpture stepping out of closed, immobile forms.” Next, Sirató said, there would be “the artistic conquest of four-dimensional space, which to date has been completely art-free”.

Cubists like Pablo Picasso had already attempted to represent four-dimensional shapes on the two-dimensional canvas, excited by the theories of 19th-Century mathematicians Bernhard Riemann and Henri Poincaré. Yet Dalí looked further back for inspiration, describing his painting as “metaphysical, transcendent cubism”. He claimed that Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus) was influenced by a 13th-Century mystic and a 16th-Century architect. “It is based entirely on the Treatise on Cubic Form by Juan de Herrera, Philip II’s architect, builder of the Escorial Palace; it is a treatise inspired by Ars Magna of the Catalonian philosopher and alchemist, Raymond Lull.”