Leonardo and the dream theme. New interpretation of the Louvre's "Allegory of the Solar Mirror"

One of Leonardo da Vinci’s allegorical drawings, the so-called Allegory of the Solar Mirror in the Louvre (Département des Arts Graphiques, no. 2247), dated to ^about 1485-1494,1 continues to arouse interest because of the cryptic nature of its meaning, which is still far from being clarified. As early as 1730 its first commentator, Pierre Jean^Mariette2, pointed out its hermeticism and symbolism. The scene does indeed appear highly problematic. A long-haired young man seated on a rock, positioned three-quarter-length and with his back to the observer, holds with his left hand, resting on the corresponding leg, a convex mirror reflecting a blazing sun; the man directs the sun’s rays with the mirror toward a group of animals fighting in front of him, and which can be identified with good ^{approximation3}: a dragon immobilizes a lion with his claws and a bite on his neck, but in turn is attacked from behind by a wolf; on the left, a unicorn is charging the group, against which another feline, in the foreground, depicted from behind, is turned indignantly, looking like a cat with pronounced ^vibrissae4; in the background, on the left, a wild boar peeps out among the rocks. The setting is given to two layered rocky backdrops, one, closer to the viewer, stands beside the man, the other, more extensive, is overhung by the sun; both accommodate leafy shrubs, four in all.

A variety of interpretations have followed one another by exegetes, some minority like the illustration of an ^alchemical spell5, or the reference to the Platonic theme of ^Orpheus6, others more followed, like the reading in a moral key launched by Giuseppina^Fumagalli7 who explained the sun as the Truth and the figure with the mirror as Virtue or Science, up to the proposition by Varena^Forcione8of the struggle between the world of evil, symbolized by the fighting animals, and the world of truth, symbolized by the shining sun. But the interpretation that has had the most success is that of political allegory.

Leonardo da Vinci, Allegory of the Solar Mirror (c. 1490-1494; pen and ink, 104 x 124 mm; Paris, Musée du Louvre, Département des Arts graphiques)

From Leonardo da Vinci, Allegory of the Solar Mirror (16th century; pen and ink, 89 x 105 mm; London, British Museum)

Edmondo^Solmi9 actually saw in the drawing an allegory of the conflict between the House of Aragon, ruler of the kingdom of Naples, and Ludovico il Moro, interpreting the dragon with the House of Aragon, the unicorn with the role of Gian Giacomo Trivulzio antagonist of the Moor, and the rocky crags in the background with Lombardy, while Truth, symbolized by the sunlight, intervened to break up the struggle. Anny^Popp10 similarly referred the allegory to Ludovico il Moro, recognizing in the blazing sun one of the Sforza’s emblems, the raza, or radiant sun, inherited from the similar ^Visconti uniform11, and identifying the mulberry-blackberry plant, alluding to Ludovico, in the saplings in the background. Recently, Marco^Versiero12 has revived the reading in a political key, recovering Solmi’s reference to Charles VIII’s crucial expedition, which began in theautumn-winter of 1494, and hypothesizing that the drawing was preparatory to a banner or celebratory panel of the Moor, aimed at the political legitimization of the new duke, heir to the previous ducal lineage, hence the allusion to the heraldic insignia of the Visconti raza; in the figure of the young man, according to the scholar, would perhaps be an idealized image of Ludovico.

While it is difficult to recognize the mulberry moro tree in the hexoradic shrubs clinging to the rocky backdrops, with leaflets generically sketched and not at all pointed like those of the essence in question,¹³ it is instead highly probable that Leonardo in depicting the radiant sun was inspired by the ducal insignia. But I do not know whether this is sufficient to support the political interpretation, just evoked, of the allegory, or whether it is simply indicative of a work nevertheless conducted within the Sforza patronage .

The new interpretive proposal presented here moves from the observation of two details of the design that, to my knowledge, have not been highlighted so far.

The young protagonist of the allegory has his eyes in shadow, as if they were closed, has his right leg stretched out in a resting condition, and rests his head reclined on his ^right hand14 with which he holds a second mirror, recognizable from the oval frame and apparently devoid of reflections. So there are two elements to be emphasized: we are dealing with the figure of a ^sleeper ,15 and there is a second mirror in the drawing, whose darkness is clearly visible, especially in the London copy. In light of these new observations, what can be the meaning of the allegory?

The mirror, be it flat or convex, represents for Leonardo the quintessence of vision, for not only does the analogy of the ancients between eye and ^mirror16 apply to him, but the mirror, as we glean from several places in the Book of ^Painting17, is the painter’s privileged instrument, and the visualization it offers of external reality, thanks to the laws of reflection, is a powerful aid to sight. Thus the dark mirror, incapable of reflection, which the sleeper in the drawing holds tightly to himself, symbolizes the sense of sight that is inactive during sleep. In contrast, the reflecting mirror that the same sleeper holds up is symbolic of the imaginative faculty of dreaming, it is “the eye in dreams” that, according to the note from the Arundel Codex (f. 278v=P 78r; ^c. 150418) “sees more certain the thing... than with imagination being awake. ”¹⁹ The association between mirror and dream had foundations in medieval culture, however, where one thinks of Alain de Lille’s De planctu naturae and Guillaume de ^{Deguilleville}’s Pélerinage de la vie humaine20 .

Leonardo’s relationship with the dream is rather problematic. It is no coincidence that the only dream account he has given us relates to a nightmare he had in childhood, the frightening scene of a kite opening his mouth with its tail and beating him inside his ^lips21. Leonardo was knowledgeable aboutoniromancy, and went so far as to possess a copy of the Italian vernacular of the leading dream-interpretation manual of the time, the Somniale ^Danielis22; but, as a scientist, he also nurtured a phenomenological interest in dreams, indebted perhaps to the little treatise on Dreams in Aristotle’s Parva naturalia . We have recalled in this connection the note from the Arundel Codex in which he attributed to the images produced in dreams a veracity superior to that of mental images, reflecting the high hallucinatory degree of the dream, which appears to be an effective duplicate of reality. But even in the prophecy Del sognare from the Codex Atlanticus (f. 393r=ex 145 ra), written around 1508, he is shown to be aware of the enormous power of the human mind during the dream phase, capable of making the dreamer fly, of making him move from place to place in a flash, of making him hear animals speak; and he will state, “Oh marvel of human spices!” But immediately afterwards he will ask mankind, “What frenzy has so led you?” Indeed, he is troubled by dream fantasies that can give rise to the basest passions (“you will use carnally with mother and sisters”) and false images.

Returning to the drawing, the dreamer’s shining mirror catches the sun’s rays, symbolizing the truth of ^vigilant reality,23 and reflects them by distorting their moral and experiential value with distorted images. The struggle of the animals on which the reflected rays converge evokes the potentially dramatic but also fallacious content of dreams, hence the presence of hybrid, bizarre and fanciful beings such as the dragon and the unicorn. That in Leonardo’s mind truth and dreams occupied diametrically opposed positions is proven by a passage from the Codex on the Flight of Birds (f. 12r; 1503-1506) dedicated to the “excellency” of truth and the “vilification” of lies, comparing the former to light and the latter to darkness, when a marginal note on the same sheet reads: “But you who live in dreams like more the sophistical and barerous reasonings of speech in things great and uncertain, than of the certain, natural, and not of so high.” The “eye in dreams” (i.e., the dreamer’s mirror in the Louvre drawing) illusionistically reflects the forms of reality, but inevitably deviates from “certain” and “natural” things, and approaches the sphere of lies.

The Louvre drawing is thus an Allegory of Dream, and Leonardo entrusted his personal conception of the dream phenomenon to it, choosing the graphic medium as Michelangelo would later do in the drawing of the Dream of Human Life (c. 1533; London, The Courtauld Gallery). From an iconographic point of view it represents a unicum, which did not have a following in the genre of ^Renaissance dream depictions24. But on closer inspection Leonardo anticipates a figurative element that will become paradigmatic, namely the presence on the scene of hybrid creatures with the intention of alluding to the bizarre and deformed images of dreams and nightmares. In the engraving Il sogno di Raffaello (c. 1508) Marcantonio Raimondi will include a series of little monsters, and later in the sixteenth century Battista Dossi will populate his Allegoria della notte (1543-1544; Dresden, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen) with unlikely creatures. The dragon would become the concise representation of the power of Icelo, son of sleep and personification of the nightmare, to take on the characteristics of beasts, birds, and serpents (Ovid, Metamorphoses, XI), as is evidenced by the scene of Iris arriving at the house of Primaticcio ’s Sleep (1541-1544; Fontainebleau, vestibule of the Porte Dorée), where the character has the appearance of the fantastic animal; finally, a little dragon appears in a central position in the so-called Dream of Raphael engraved by Giorgio Ghisi (1561), actually Titone who invokes Aurora’s intervention to be awakened from his eternal sleep, populated by ^nightmares25.

Michelangelo, Dream of Human Life (c. 1533; black pencil, 398 x 280 mm; London, The Courtauld Gallery)

Marcantonio Raimondi, Raphael’s Dream (c. 1508; burin print, 338 x 238 mm; Pavia, Musei Civici)

Battista Dossi, Allegory of Night (1543-1544; oil on canvas, 82 x 149.5 cm; Dresden, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister)

Giorgio Ghisi, Dream of Raphael (1561; burin engraving, 385 x 546 mm; Private collection)

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