Young Virgin Auto-Sodomized by the Horns of Her Own Chastity

Infobox Painting|

backcolor=#FBF5DF
painting_alignment=right
image_size=250px
title=Young Virgin Auto-Sodomized by
the Horns of Her Own Chastity
artist=Salvador Dalí
year=1954
type=Oil on canvas
height=40.5
width=30.5
height_inch=15.95
width_inch =12
diameter_cm =
diameter_inch =
city=Los Angeles, California
museum=The Playboy Mansion

"Young Virgin Auto-Sodomized by the Horns of Her Own Chastity" is a 1954 painting by Salvador Dalí. During the 1950s, Dalí painted many of his subjects as composed of rhinoceros 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." [King, Elliott in Dawn Ades (ed.), "Dalí" (Milan: Bompiani Arte, 2004), 378-379]

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" 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.Fact|date=October 2007 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, 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;Fact|date=February 2007 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. [Robert Descharnes, "Dalí, L'héritage infernal" (Paris: Éditions Ramsay/La Marge, 2002), 72.]

In 1958, Dalí wrote, "Paradoxically, this painting, which has an erotic appearance, is the most chaste of all." [Morse, A. Reynolds, "Dalí: A Study of His Life and Work" (Greenwich: New York Graphic Society, 1958), 81.]

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