Ragionando sopra un letto di papaveri. L'ars somniandi di Anton Francesco Doni

Abstract

Starting from the intrinsic link between literature, art and dream – fed by the common imaginative and metamorphic vein – we intend here to verify, in Anton Francesco Doni’s Pitture (1564), some figurations of the dream world, tracing his literary and iconographic sources. From the engravings by Salviati to the frescoes by Parmigianino, not to mention the statues of Michelangelo, Donian poetry is constantly fed by the language of images. This poetry takes shape as an itinerarium mentis from the real to the visionary, in the name of the dialectic tension between iconography and iconology. A real ars somniandi coinciding with the same compositional logic.