Twelve pictures, nine paintings and three prints, show what a nightmare looks like. They run from the demons that Hieronymus Bosch and Matthias Grünewald set on a saint around 1500, through Henry Fuseli's demon squatting on a sleeping woman, to an empty ruin that Zdzisław Beksiński painted in Poland in 1978.
Along the way, the English writer Thomas De Quincey turns Giovanni Battista Piranesi's etchings of imaginary prisons into fever dreams, seventy years after they were printed, on the strength of a story he had only heard secondhand.
Paul Gauguin walks home past midnight to a dark hut in Tahiti and finds a stare full of terror. And Beksiński, an architect who never went to art school, refuses to give his pictures titles, for a reason he put in a single sentence.
Cool Stories About Art is a newsletter to learn art the fun way.
Join 200,000+ readers and get:
10 new art stories / month
The entire archive of content (140+ articles)
Comment, ask questions, and chat with other readers
How These Were Chosen
A nightmare is the one dream nobody chooses. The sleeper cannot move, something has come into the room, and the room itself stops obeying the rules of a real building.
Painting one asks two hard things at once. The painter has to give a body to a fear that has none, and draw an impossible space as carefully as a real one, so that the viewer believes in it.
Each of the twelve pictures, made between about 1500 and the late 1970s, gives that fear a visible shape: a weight sitting on a sleeper, or a place with no way out.
Only a few of these artists spoke of bad dreams. For the others, the nightmare is a reading of what the picture shows, and with Redon, Tanning and Beksiński, who said nothing about sleep, that reading is stated plainly.
12. Giovanni Battista Piranesi, The Drawbridge, from Carceri d'invenzione (about 1749 to 1750)
Halfway up a stone vault, in an etching by Giovanni Battista Piranesi, chains hold a wooden drawbridge in the air. Around it, gangways cross the space at several heights, a spiral staircase climbs a round tower on the left, and the few figures standing on the walkways look tiny beside the beams and ropes.
Piranesi made the plate in Rome around 1749 to 1750, drawing with a needle through a coat of wax on copper before acid bit the lines into the metal. He was a Venetian trained as an architect, and he made his living etching views of Rome and its ruins.
The Drawbridge belongs to a set of imaginary prisons, the Carceri d'invenzione, "Prisons of Invention." No cell or bar is in sight. The prison is the building itself, a hall too vast and too tangled to find a way out of.
In 1761 Piranesi reworked the plates into darker, more detailed versions and reissued the set, with The Drawbridge as the seventh plate.
For seventy years, the prisons were admired as architecture, and nobody connected them with dreams. The link came in 1821, when the English writer Thomas De Quincey published Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, the story of his addiction, in the London Magazine. In it he recalled a talk about Piranesi with the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Coleridge had told him about a set of Piranesi plates he called the "Dreams," a record, he said, of what the artist saw in the "delirium of a fever." In them, Piranesi himself groped up a staircase that stopped abruptly, "without any balustrade."
Higher up, a second flight appeared with "poor Piranesi" on it again, then a third, until stairs and man were "lost in the upper gloom of the hall." De Quincey added that his own opium dreams built architecture in the same endless way.
Yet De Quincey took care to warn his readers: "I describe only from memory of Mr. Coleridge's account." The warning matters, because the description does not fit the prints, The Drawbridge included. Coleridge spoke of "vast Gothic halls," while Piranesi's vaults are Roman.
No plate shows a man climbing a staircase that ends in the air, and the only fever on record is the one in De Quincey's pages.
What the plates do show is a building that keeps producing more building. The people on the gangways are no taller than a single step of the stairs, and the spiral staircase on the left, if the eye follows it up from the ground, vanishes behind a wooden beam before it reaches any floor.
At a Glance
Artist: Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720 to 1778)
Made: About 1749 to 1750, Rome. Reissued in 1761 as Plate VII
Medium: Etching and engraving on paper
Size: Plate 54.9 × 40.9 cm (21 5/8 × 16 1/8 in)
Where to see it: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (Department of Drawings and Prints)
11. Matthias Grünewald, The Temptation of Saint Anthony, Isenheim Altarpiece (about 1512 to 1516)
Demons with beaks, horns and scales have pinned an old man in a monk's habit to the rocks. One pulls his hair, another raises a club, a third bites his hand.
Matthias Grünewald painted this beating between about 1512 and 1516, and not for a church full of healthy worshippers. It was made for the altar of a hospital at Isenheim, in Alsace, the region along the Rhine between France and Germany, in front of the sick.
Every patient brought before that altar faced this Temptation of Saint Anthony. And in its lower corner, well away from the fight, Grünewald painted a small figure that the sick had good reason to recognize.