Dream - Antiquity, The Bible In The Middle Ages, Saints And Holy People, East And West
dreams nightmare picture depict
It is midnight in the desert, and the full moon has just passed its apex. On the sandy ground, staff in hand, guitar and jug by his side, a dark-skinned man is nuzzled by a tawny-maned lion. Is the man dreaming? Are we? Or is this the dream of the artist, Henri Rousseau (1844–1910)? If, as some traditions have it, the Universe was dreamed into existence by its Creator, then it makes perfect sense that all of art—the microcosm created by human beings in emulation of the Creator's macrocosm—is a dream of sorts. And art is a dream, in a way—a projection of the deepest subconscious and unconscious desires upon canvas and stone, the etching plate and the loom. But when artists depict dreams and dreaming, whether explicitly, with the dreamer in the picture, or implicitly, with the picture illustrating the dream, ambiguities flourish, and polyvalency abounds.
There are many loci classici of the dream in art, in many times, places, and cultures. Some are explicit, yet ambiguous, like Rousseau's Sleeping Gypsy of 1897. Some are explicit and distinctly unambiguous, such as Francisco Goya's (1746–1826) Capricho 43: El Sueno de la Razon Produce Monstruos (1797–1798, "The Sleep/Dream of Reason Begets Monsters") or Henry Fuseli's (1741–1825) The Nightmare (1781) where dreams are made manifest in oil on canvas. Even those depictions in which the intention to depict a dream is overt are fraught with a multiplicity of interpretive possibilities—Maurice Sendak's (b. 1928) nightmare creatures in Where the Wild Things Are (1963) are both the products of the dreams of Max, the young protagonist, and of Sendak's own family history, wherein those things that go bump in the night are stand-ins for his loud, invasive, cheek-pinching aunts and uncles.
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In the biblical tradition, sleep is rarely personified, but dreams bear great significance as prophetic moments, or as the means of connection between the divine and the earthly realms. Thus, occasions arise in art not to depict images that are "dream-like," or that one may imagine represent the artists' dreams, but that, rather, explicitly represent dreams as described in the…
Depictions of prophetic dreams or dreams that advance the narrative of a sacred tale or myth are not limited to the biblical realm—saints and holy people of all religious traditions are depicted in art. Vittore Carpaccio's (c. 1455–c. 1525) lyrical Dream of St. Ursula (Italy, early sixteenth century) is devoted mostly to a depiction of the saint asleep in bed, with a rather se…
The dream as a time out of time, depicted from the perspective of a soul out of body, is an important topos in native and tribal cultures. The native peoples of what is now Australia imagined the Dreamtime—an era in which humans and nature came to be as they are now. They created churinga, magical depictions, tracings, or maps of Dreamtime events seen
from the point of view of the spiritua…
Sleep and dreams in art can also take on symbolic and what one would term psychological valences, what would have been called at the times and places of the creation of the art stages or stations in the spiritual journey. The story of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus was current in the sixth century and remained popular in both East and West throughout the Middle Ages. Paintings of this theme based i…
The late medieval and early modern periods saw the triumph of the visionary in art. While not illustrations of dreams or dreamers per se, the work of this period, including the phantasms of Hieronymous Bosch (c. 1450–1516), Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c. 1525–1569), and others, first in large-scale commissions and later in more popular prints, brought the realm of the dream-like and hi…
The nineteenth century heralded a revolution in the understanding of the dream, with Sigmund Freud (1836–1939) and Carl Jung (1875–1961) engaging very different interpretations of what both agreed was a phenomenon highly significant for the understanding of the farthest reaches of the human subconscious. Freud argued that dreams revealed the most occluded aspects of the individual un…
Contemporary art is so much enamored of the idea of the dream that one would be hard-pressed to name an artist in the postwar era who did not engage the subject on some level. The work or stages in the work of some artists revolves around dreams. African and African-American artists such as Olu Amoda (b. 1959), in his Window of Dreams (1991), and Jacob Lawrence (1917–2000), with his Dreams …
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