Sleep, Dreams (1905)

Signed and dated lower right: “A. Mussino 1905”
Titled in the centre: “SLEEP AND DREAMS”
Exhibitions: Forlì, Museo di San Domenico, 2014; Milan, Palazzo Reale, 2016
Bibliography: Liberty. Uno stile per l’Italia moderna, exhibition catalogue edited by F. Mazzocca (Forlì, Museo di San Domenico, 1 February – 15 June 2014), Milan, Silvana Editoriale, p. 280, no. 204; Il Simbolismo. Arte in Europa dalla Belle Époque alla Grande Guerra, exhibition catalogue edited by F. Mazzocca, (Milan, Palazzo Reale, 3 February – 5 June 2016), Milan, 24 Ore Cultura, 2016, p. 109, no. 13.

Attilio Mussino, one of the greatest Italian painters and illustrators of the late 19th and early 20th centuries – famous for his graphic interpretation of the fairy tale Pinocchio in 1911 – was a refined symbolist artist, capable of translating the atmospheres and themes of the Secessionist movement into images of intense narrative power. With his large canvas Sleep. Dreams, painted in 1905 and considered the high point of his pictorial production, he transcended the boundaries of illustration and established himself as an artist who was fully able to measure himself against the most sophisticated European artistic experiences in the Symbolist field. Translating reality into a suspended, dreamlike dimension, Mussino places an enigmatic figure at the centre of the scene, a femme fatale, a magnetic and ambiguous presence, positioned between angelic apparitions on her right and demonic shadows on her left.

Beneath the dome of a dark forest of brambles, the woman stands asleep, as if suspended in a trance, among the poppies. The scene is enveloped in an unreal atmosphere, where the tranquillity of sleep is mixed with the ambiguity of dreams. The female figure, solemn and mysterious, represents the fine line between wakefulness and the world of visions. The poppies surrounding her contribute to reinforcing the sense of alienation, evoking the idea of a journey that unfolds between light and shadow, between reality and myth. Flowers linked to the symbolism of sleep and death, poppies have an ambivalent nature: they grow on battlefields, regenerate land exhausted by cultivation, numb pain, induce sleep and are offered as gifts to the deceased. Angelo De Gubernatis, in his book La mythologie des plantes; ou, Les légendes du règne végétal, associates the flower with various figures from Greco-Roman mythology: ‘The Greeks depicted Hypnos, the god of sleep, with his head crowned with poppies or with poppies in his hand; they depicted Thanatos, the god of death, and Nyx, the goddess of night, in the same way […]. It is said that Ceres, distraught over the abduction of her daughter, fell asleep eating poppies to forget her great sorrow. The poppy, which usually grows in wheat fields, easily becomes the attribute of the goddess of wheat; this is why we see Ceres crowned with poppies. In a wonderful painting that was part of the Pantheon of Pompeii, a priestess was seen holding poppies and ears of wheat in her hands[1].

The female figure at the centre of the composition, shrouded in an aura of mystery amid opium smoke, can be linked to the goddess Demeter, whose power manifests itself both through magical knowledge and through the symbolic, healing and hallucinogenic properties of the poppy. It was used during the Eleusinian Mysteries, closely linked to the celebration of the reunion between Demeter and Persephone and therefore a moment of communication between earth and the underworld, where the image of life after death was evoked. As a legacy of the ancient world, the poppy is also believed to have been one of the plants used by witches during their sabbaths.  A painting that therefore contains a profound tension between opposites: the subtle boundary between life and death, wakefulness and oblivion, dreams and nightmares, light and shadow, good and evil, ecstasy and torment. The sleep and dreams of the title thus become the ideal place to explore the shadow areas of the unconscious and to reflect on occult themes, but also on the psychoanalytic theories that were gaining ground at the beginning of the 20th century. Mussino’s painting fits perfectly into the series of works that, over the centuries, have been dedicated to sleep, nightmares, dreams or the visions they generate, from Füssli’s Nightmare (1781) to Goya’s The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (1797), to Ingres’ The Dream of Ossian (1813), to Hodler’s The Dream (1897), in which a female figure is picking poppies.

[1] A. De Gubernatis, La mythologie des plantes; ou, Les légendes du règne végétal, Paris, C. Reinwald, 1879, p. 283.

Elena Lago