Salvador Dali filled a Rolls-Royce with fresh cauliflowers. Then drove it 829 miles to solve a mystery

Salvador Dalí once arrived at Sorbonne University in Paris in a Rolls-Royce filled with fresh cauliflowers. Weird, right? But the Spanish artist, apparently, had a clear artistic reason in mind. Speaking to Dick Cavett, Dalí said every shape in the world — from rhinoceros horns to Vermeer's paintings — followed a special geometric pattern, and he thought what's better than a cauliflower to explain the mysterious phenomena? 

In December 1955, Dalí borrowed a black-and-yellow Rolls-Royce from one of his friends and drove it all the way from Spain to France with 1,000 pounds of cauliflower. When Cavett, a former talk-show host, asked him about it, he went on to associate it with "logarithmic spirals" that only a true artist can understand. He explained that cauliflowers "represent exactly the same morphological problem" as that of a rhinoceros' horn.

The Spanish artist said that if one looks at a cauliflower carefully, one might be able to spot identical patterns to those of a sunflower. "And Leonardo da Vinci discovered for the first time this mathematical phenomenon in the sunflower. Later on, discovered thousands of times more powerful mathematical problems in the cauliflower. This is the reason to arrive at Sorbonne because my speech was about cauliflower and the horn of a rhinoceros," Dalí explained. Confused, Cavett asked him whether people generally have a hard time interpreting him or if it's just him; to this, Dalí said nobody really understands his work. Moreover, on the same show, when he was asked if he ever tried to deliver any message to the world through his painting, he refused, saying, "I am against any kind of message."

Dalí, the famous Surrealist painter, had arrived at the Paris University to deliver a lecture on "Phenomenological Aspects of the Critical Paranoiac Method." This, basically, was his perception of the world through strange and fascinating ideas. His way of delivering the lecture was also extraordinary. Well, according to TIME, he placed his elbows on a table and said, "All emotion comes to me through the elbow. Everything departs from the rhinoceros horn! Everything departs from [Dutch Master] Jan Vermeer's The Lacemaker! Everything ends up in the cauliflower!" Dalí then admitted that cauliflowers, however, are too small to prove his theory fully. 

Dalí, as a true artist, had a different way of looking at objects, whether it's a cauliflower or rhinoceros horns. In fact, all artists exhibit extraordinary potential to perceive visual scenes differently from non‑artists. For instance, in a study, nine psychology students and nine art students were asked to view a series of 16 pictures while a camera and computer monitored their gazes. In the end, the researcher, Stine Vogt, found that the artists were more likely to scan the entire picture, including small details, whereas the non-artists focused on specific objects, especially people. While artists spent only 20% of the time looking at the objects, non-artists focused on them 40% of the time. "This finding suggests that while nonartists were busy turning images into concepts, artists were taking note of colors and contours," the researcher added. 

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