A Nightmare 1770 - 1790

Giovanni David created this wash and graphite drawing, titled 'A Nightmare', sometime in the late 18th century. It’s a scene filled with classical imagery but deployed in the service of the irrational. Drawings like this one reflect a growing fascination among European artists with the darker sides of human experience. Thinkers like Edmund Burke were writing about the sublime: the strange pleasure we take in experiences of awe and terror. David, working in Italy, is drawing on ancient sources, and in his image, we see the underworld, the realm of dreams, and the landscape of the mind merging together. It’s a world populated by the figures of classical myth, like Cerberus, alongside more modern symbols of dread. To understand this work better, we might look at publications of the period like the ‘Encyclopédie’ or consider the impact of political events like the French Revolution on the cultural imagination. What this artwork shows us is that even our nightmares have a history.