Artist: Salvador Dalí

Title: Le Cheval de Picasso

Medium: Original Acquaforte  with hand-colouring in watercolour, on Japon paper

Serie: Los amores de Cassandre

Year: 1968

Edition: 95. rare signed piece on special japan paper

Sizes: 37.7 x 28.4 cm

Publisher-editor: P. Argillet, Paris, with the artist's signature blindstamp

Bibliograph/Published: Michler & Löpsinger 249

Signature: Signed on pencil right

Condition: original conditions

Les Amours de Cassandre is a collection of poems in decasyllables by Pierre de Ronsard, published in 1552.

In 1552 the publication of the collection Les Amours, dit Amours de Cassandre, following the success of the Odes (1550-1552), confirms the talents of the young poet, even if the court is still reluctant and if some reproach him for his abandonment of the style. of Pindar for that of Petrarch. He was succeeded by Continuation des Amours in 1553, also called Les Amours de Marie (1555), as well as Sonnets pour Hélène (1578).

Les Amours de Cassandre is a collection of poems in decasyllables by Pierre de Ronsard from 1552. It is about Cassandre Salviati (c. 1530-1607), daughter of Bernardo Salviati, one of François I's bankers. Cassandre was a young Italian girl whom the poet met on April 21, 1545 in Blois at a court ball. She is about fourteen4 and he is twenty-one. Ronsard could not marry the young girl, for he was a tonsured clerk. Cassandre married Jean Peigné, Lord of Pray the following year.

In imitation of Petrarch, who sang of his lover Laura, he made Cassandra his muse, celebrating an entirely imaginary love in a precious style with mythological comparisons and cuteness.

It is in Les Amours that Ronsard adds rules to the sonnet: two quatrains where masculine and feminine rhymes alternate. He praises the physical beauty and moral perfection of a few female characters who have become famous thanks to the evocative power of his images: Cassandre, Marie, Hélène.

The collection will be resumed and completed for the first time in 1537, then in 1560 under the title Premier Livre des amours.

The Second Book of Loves, which succeeds it, is partly dedicated to Cassandre and partly to Marie.

Dali illustrated these poems with 10 original engravings and several vignettes.

Our work: "le cheval de Picasso" does not refer to the poems specifically, and there is no certain information as to why Dalí names Picasso in this work.

Their relationship was always complicated, on one side admiration and on the other disdain, Dalí always declared that he admired the "Master" Picasso, but Picasso never answered him, also for political reasons, placing the two artists at opposite poles due to political ideology.