press realease

press realease
The Renaissance and
Dreams
Bosch, Veronese, El Greco…
9 october 2013 – 26 january 2014
Musée du Luxembourg
19 rue de Vaugirard, 75006 Paris
An exhibition organised by the Réunion des musées
nationaux - Grand Palais, Paris, and the Soprintendenza del
Polo Museale Fiorentino.
Presented at the Palazzo Pitti, Florence, from 21 May to 15
September 2013
Itself sparked by a dream of a new life, the Renaissance set great store by dreams, their interpretation and
representation: in political and social life, with the revival of divinatory practices; in literature, both prose and
poetry (Francesco Colonna and Rabelais, Ariosto and Tasso, the Pléiade and d’Aubigné…); in medical and
theological debates, especially during the terrible witch hunts throughout Europe from the fifteenth to the
seventeenth centuries. There then flowered what might be called 'the old regime' of dreams, based on the idea
that sleep and dreaming put us in contact with the powers of the other world. When we dream, do we escape the
constraint of our own bodies to enter into contact with the divine? Or are we delivered up to foreign 'demons'?
What credit should be accorded to oneiromancy? Is it possible to draw up a vocabulary of dreams, as in "The
Interpretation of Dreams"?
Renaissance painters and engravers dealt with these problems in their manner: that is, artistic and not
theological, philosophical or medical. The questions they asked, which are proper to art, go beyond the debates
of the time and still fascinate us today: is there a profound affinity between the imagery of art and that of
dreams? How can an artist possibly represent what a dreamer sees? In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries,
although some artists explored dreams as a revelation of another world, be it holy or hellish, and others used
them to transform everyday experience or heighten its erotic dimension, the more demanding artists saw dreams
as a metaphor for art itself. Life became a dream and the artist was a dreamer.
With one famous exception — Dürer, presented at the end of the exhibition — Renaissance artists did not paint
their own dreams. They painted the dreams that other had, or could have had, showing them sometimes as
narratives of dreams taken from mythology and Biblical history, and sometimes as nightmarish visions. But they
all stumbled on the same obstacle: painting a dream, that is, not an appearance but an apparition, means trying
to objectify what cannot be objectified. Dreams are elusive. But the very impossibility of representing them
aroused in artists seeking to test the limits of their art the desire to take up the challenge; to show their skill in
representing what cannot be represented, more spectacular still than storms; and to give their works greater
power by striking the imagination and the eyes by a particularly vivid image. To try to paint an oneiric world, as
the medieval artists had already done (but in a different context), was in many respects to transgress the limits of
art; it meant broadening the field and asserting new powers.
Battista Dossi, Allégorie de la Nuit (detail), around 1543-1544, oil on canvas, 82x149,5 cm, Dresde, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen,
Gemäldegalerie, © BPK, Berlin, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Elke Estel / Hans-Peter Kluth
Depending on the subject, period and region, and their individual talents, artists responded very differently to this
challenge. There is a huge difference between a Dream in the Quattrocento and a Dream in the next century,
just as there was between works from northern and southern Europe as shown in variety of artists on display —
whether famous like Bosch, Dürer or Michelangelo or less well known like Mocetto or Naldini. Logically and
chronologically, the exhibition goes from night and sleep, from dawn - where for Renaissants manifest the true
dreams - to the final awakening, with the main part devoted to dreams and visions. Visitors will therefore see in
succession figurations of the night (Michelangelo and Battista Dossi), sleeping beauties whose soul is vacant
(like those of Paris Bordon) before passing to a decisive stage, in which artists paint not only the body of the
sleeper and dreamer, but the dream itself. Sometimes to show "true dreams" taken from the Bible (Jacopo
Ligozzi) or lives of saints (Garofalo, Veronese), sometimes, on the contrary, to conjure up infernal visions (Jan
Brueghel, Hieronymus Bosch…). Some artists juxtapose the dreamer and the dream in the same space (as
Giotto did); others imagine meditations (El Greco), while the northern artists thrust us straight into a nightmare.
We see things in the night, too; far from extinguishing the visible, the darkness releases other spaces for games,
freedom or anguish.
The argument of the exhibition, which also includes some enigmatic works (Raphael's Dream, by the engraver
Raimondi), is not only historical. No doubt it is useful to recall the importance of the 'old regime' of dreams,
largely effaced from our memories by the successive and antagonistic revolutions of psychoanalysis and the
neurosciences; but it is even more important to invite visitors to dream, too, to keep the paths of imagination
open by offering them, for the first time, such a collection of Renaissance works.
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curators :
Alessandro Cecchi, director of the Galleria Palatina and the Boboli Gardens at the Palazzo Pitti, Florence,
Yves Hersant, professor at the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris,
Chiara Rabbi-Bernard, art historian
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open : every day from 10 a.m. to 7:30 p.m,
late night until 10 p.m. on Mondays and
Fridays.
Exceptional closing on December 25
rates : 11 €, concession 7,5 €
free for visitors under 16 years
square 26-30: 4 people between 26 and 30
years : 30 €
access : M° St Sulpice or Mabillon
Rer B : Luxembourg
Bus: 58 ; 84 ; 89 ; bus stop
Musée du Luxembourg / Sénat
audioguides: French, English, Italian,
Spanish : 4 € concession 3 €, download 2 €
information and bookings on
www.museeduluxembourg.fr and
www.grandpalais.fr
publications, éditions de la
Réunion des musées nationauxGrand Palais, Paris 2013 :
- exhibition catalogue :
22,5 x 26 cm, 176 pages, 100 ill.,
35 €
- exhibition album :
21 x 26,5 cm, paper-backed, 48
pages, 40 ill., 10 €
press contacts :
Réunion des musées
nationaux -Grand Palais
254 – 256 rue de Bercy
75577 Paris cedex 12
Florence Le Moing
[email protected]
+33 (0)1 40 13 47 62
Julie Debout
[email protected]