04/05/2026
This work represents a significant intersection between history and Surrealist interpretation.
Napoleon’s original death mask was cast on May 6, 1821, the day after his passing on St. Helena, by his physician Dr. Francesco Antommarchi and British surgeon Francis Burton. The process was fraught with technical and personal conflicts. Due to the tropical heat and the delay in the casting, witnesses noted that the Emperor’s features had already begun to sag and shift. On May 8, the Countess Bertrand (wife of the Grand Marshal) reportedly seized the primary facial block of the mold, leaving Antommarchi with only the peripheral sections, including the cranium and ears.
Upon his return to France, Antommarchi had to reconstruct the missing facial features to complete the mold. This explains the anatomical discrepancies, specifically the imprecise shape of the ears and the divergence from Napoleon’s known living portraits, found in the “Antommarchi version” of the mask.
Dalí obtained permission from the family holding the mask to create a mold, which he subsequently transformed into a bronze sculpture. His intervention consisted of grafting rhinoceros horns onto the eyelids, forehead, and chin of the Emperor’s likeness. The addition of the horns is not decorative but is rooted in Dalí’s “Paranoiac-Critical” method and his scientific-mystic period.
Dalí was obsessed with the rhinoceros horn, as he believed it followed a perfect logarithmic spiral, a divine geometry found in nature. For the Master of Surrealism, the rhinoceros represented a biological “power engine”. Dalí applied this analogy to Napoleon, identifying the Emperor as a figure of unstoppable kinetic energy. The horns symbolize the “imperial fury” and the tireless, relentless intellectual and military labor that characterized Napoleon’s life. By merging the death mask with rhinoceros horns, Dalí elevates the image of the deceased Emperor from a state of static defeat to a symbol of perpetual, cosmic power.
