Painting the Dream

Organized by period, from the Middle Ages to the present, this intriguing and highly readable book shows how the idea of the dream, and its depictions, have changed throughout history, from the biblical dream--a communication from God--to the deeply personal dream, the lighthearted fantasy, the nightmare.

Sometimes these ideas have existed simultaneously: thus we have, only a few years apart, Raphael's limpid High Renaissance composition of Jacob dreaming his Ladder; Albrecht Durer's watercolor of a mysterious deluge that he saw in his own slumbers; and Hieronymus Bosch's nightmarish hellscapes.

More recently, movements such as Symbolism and Surrealism have taken the dream as a primary source of inspiration, even conflating dreaming and the creative process itself. This rich vein of visionary art runs from Gustave Moreau and Odilon Redon, through De Chirico and Dali, down to the present--demonstrating, as Bergez reminds us, that Morpheus was a god of shape and form as well as of dreams.