Salvador Dalí is what many people think of when they think of the quintessential modern artist. But his career actually had many styles and inspirations, and he was never a modernist. He was, instead, a surrealist, part of the beginnings of a movement that descended from a post-war reaction to the bourgeoisie and materialism. By 1946, when Dalí painted “The Temptation of St. Anthony,” he had lived through two world wars, had emigrated from his home province of Catalonia (and Europe), and had been both a leading figure and an exile from an artistic movement significant. In 1946, Dalí was in a period of transition between his most famous Surrealist style (a style very much his own, as opposed to influences from his past endeavors) and a more reactionary focus on the sciences and mathematics that preoccupied his later years. Given all these influences, it seems almost fitting that Dalí would turn to a religious subject at a time of confusion, or crossroads, and paint a subject so completely at odds with any of his expressed beliefs or influences. “The Temptation of Saint Anthony” can be considered one of Dalì's last homages to surrealism and at the same time a work of reaction to the evident impiety of the Second World War. Salvador Dalí was born on May 11, 1904 in Figueras, Spain, a city in Catalonia. He attended both a public school and a private Christian school during his childhood, after demonstrating a need for a little more discipline than standard teaching methods could provide, and by his (probably biased) accounts, as a child he was problematic in a very Freudian style environment: megalomaniac and “hypersensitive”. Given the outlandish content of his autobiography, as several scholars have observed, that behavior continued throughout his life, and... half the paper... nnica Online. Encyclopedia Britannica, 2010. Web. 6 April 2010. Web.Bigsby, CWE Dada and Surrealism. London: Meuthuen & Co Ltd, 1972. Print.Butler, Edward Cuthbert. "St. Anthony." The Catholic Encyclopedia. vol. 1. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1907. April 6, 2010. Web. "Simbolica Daliniana." Exhibition Dali Montmartre Paris. Np, nd Web. April 7, 2010. Getlein, Mark. Living with art. 9th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2010. Print.Soby, James Thrall. Salvador Dali. New York: Arno Press, 1968. Print. "The 1940s: World Events: Selected Events Outside the United States." American decades. Ed. Judith S. Baughman, et al. vol. 5: 1940-1949. Detroit: Gale, 2001. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Network. April 7. 2010.