Young Virgin Auto-Sodomized by the Horns of Her Own Chastity
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Young Virgin Auto-Sodomized by the Horns of Her Own Chastity is a 1954 painting by Salvador Dalí
Salvador Dalí
Salvador Domènec Felip Jacint Dalí i Domènech, Marquis de Púbol , commonly known as Salvador Dalí , was a prominent Spanish Catalan surrealist painter born in Figueres,Spain....

. During the 1950s, Dalí painted many of his subjects as composed of rhinoceros
Rhinoceros
Rhinoceros , also known as rhino, is a group of five extant species of odd-toed ungulates in the family Rhinocerotidae. Two of these species are native to Africa and three to southern Asia....

 horns. Here, the Young Virgin's buttocks consist of four converging horns; "as the horns simultaneously comprise and threaten to sodomise the callipygian figure, she is effectively (auto-)sodomised by her own constitution."

Dalí's inspiration for the image appears to have come from Vermeer, one of a handful of artists regarded by Dalí as masters. Specifically, Vermeer's The Lacemaker
The Lacemaker (Vermeer)
The Lacemaker is a painting by the Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer , completed between 1669–1670 and held in the Louvre, Paris. The work shows a young woman dressed in a yellow shawl, holding up a pair of bobbins in her left hand as she carefully places a pin in the pillow on which she is making her...

seems to have been the galvanising element, with its convergent curves which focus on the subject's fingers and so to the penetration point of her needle - which as Dalí has pointed out is merely implied and not actually painted. In a stunt, Dalí set up his easel before Vermeer's original with the expressed intent of making a copy. The result however was this painting, which consciously uses Vermeer's focal-point arrangement, albeit to entirely different effect.

The painting, formerly in the collection of The Playboy Mansion
The Playboy Mansion
The Playboy Mansion is the home of Playboy magazine founder Hugh Hefner. Located in the Holmby Hills area of Los Angeles, California, the mansion became famous during the 1970s through media reports of Hefner's lavish parties.-History:The house is described as being in the "Gothic-Tudor" style...

, recalls his depiction of his sister Ana María in Figure at a Window (1925), and has therefore been read by some critics as a nasty jab at his sister, punishing her for publishing a biography on Dalí that presented a quite negative point of view; it has also been interpreted as a painting of Gala, though in fact the figure is based on a photograph from a 1930s sex magazine.

In 1958, Dalí wrote, "Paradoxically, this painting, which has an erotic appearance, is the most chaste of all."
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