Which painting by Dalí features a double image of the bust of Voltaire?

The Dalí painting featuring a double image of Voltaire’s bust is “Slave Market with the Disappearing Bust of Voltaire.”

Salvador Dalí painted the oil on canvas in 1940. At first glance, the composition shows a slave market with figures in seventeenth-century clothing. When the forms are viewed differently, two women become the eyes and face of a bust resembling Jean-Antoine Houdon’s famous sculpture of the French philosopher Voltaire.

This visual trick is an example of Dalí’s double-image technique, in which one arrangement of shapes can be read as two distinct subjects. The apparent bust seems to appear and disappear depending on how the viewer groups the figures and surrounding forms.

The work also reflects Dalí’s interest in making ordinary perception unstable: a scene that initially reads as a historical market becomes a portrait through a shift in attention. It is held by the Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, and is sometimes confused with Dalí’s more famous melting-clock painting, The Persistence of Memory.