3-008-928 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

The International Exhibition: "The Sleep of Sorrow and the Dream of Joy", sculpted by R. Monti, 1862. 'Nothing can be embodied more abstract and insubstantial than a dream; and nothing can be...more conventional than the representation of two figures as one and the same person...The success of the sculptor is due to the force of the sorrowful expression in the sleeper, and the felicity with which the elated buoyancy of the spirit is rendered - disembodied as it seems to be in sleep, though still wearing a thin veil of earth - floating away to dreamland, that home and resting-place, those Elysian fields...As we look at this poor sleeping maiden, at the contorted, uneasy position of her limbs, the still painfully-contracted brow, we see that sleep has come from exhaustion as a respite...The roses are still within her grasp, but they are unplucked, and she seems to have found only their thorns in her path. Is the overturned empty cup at her side an emblem of her life?...The execution of this upper figure is extremely refined; the action is very graceful and expressive, the buoyancy...admirably expressed, and the technical difficulty of representing "flying drapery" (in marble even more than in painting) perfectly mastered'. From "Illustrated London News", 1862.