Lydgate

Giotto (1266 - 1336) was an early Renaissance painter known for innovations in naturalism (or realism), particularly with regard to perspective. (Note the earlier dates for the Italian Reniassance; if this were England, we'd still call it the medieval period.)

This isn't a painting of a Biblical dream. It's a rendering of a dream of St. Francis (or San Francesco), who lived during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries--not long before Giotto. (Although there is some dispute about the authorship of the frescoes of the Basilica di San Francesco in Italy, most historians seem to be convinced they are Giotto's work.)

The dream in the painting represents a moment of temptation in the life of St. Francis. According to the legend, soon after he joined a Knight's troop, he dreamed his father's house was transformed into a palace full of fine armor. The dream inspired him to set forth to claim glory as a knight, but he soon fell ill. During his illness, he heard a voice telling him to turn back, to serve God rather than pursuing human conflict and human glory. He did.

I would seem to me that St. Francis's dream is the man-made sort (unless it is a temptation fabricated by a nefarious demon or devil) and that the voice comes from a Divine source, but the mural depicts an angel standing over St. Francis's bed, suggesting something more. I'm not sure what to make of this. I suppose you could read the dream as a link in a chain of divine communication, in which case St. Francis's temptation is a necessary stage in his evolution. So, the dream and a "vision" seem at first to conflict and to be distinguished from each other, but the presence of the angel suggests they're conflated as they are, for example, in so many Victorian texts (and in A Midsummer Night's Dream). I'll be curious to hear what Steve Kruger might say about this, because I'm far from an expert on the literature or history of the period.

In addition to questions about the origins and various types of dreams and visions and the various types of dreams, Giotto's fresco suggests an interesting question about form. A fresco is a mural. This one is painted on a church--so it's a representation of a palace originating from a dream and then recreated on the wall of a very different kind of building. A dream image is, of course, ephemeral--it's an "airy nothing," to borrow language from Shakespeare's Theseus--but a wall couldn't be more solid, more "something." In addition, the palace represents temptation, the material world--a moment in the saint's life where he might have lost his way--and here it is transported to the walls of a church, which, though solid and worldly, is intended to be God's palace on earth, a material link to the spiritual realm.

I mention all this because it strikes me that these ironies--the serious (and perhaps disturbing) kind, not the glib or cynical irony that permeates so much contemporary culture--are part of the effect of the fresco. They call attention to the viewer's position. To see this art directly, you have to be in the church, the walls on which it's painted creating a sanctuary from the material world outside. The palace is a reminder that the viewer's current position is contemplative, removed. And this translation of a dream onto a solid wall is a reminder of the ephemerality of such moments--and of the tensions between the spiritual and the material.

I don't think I'm overreeading, but I am aware of another irony--this one perhaps the glib for cynical (or just resigned) kind--that if you're reading this you're seeing the image on your computer screen, very far from the cloistered walls of the Basilica di San Francesco.