In this dream I am a small Italian boy (of the late Renaissance?). My father has taken me to see the workshops that have been set up beneath the arcades of a new palace in the countryside near Naples. Except for the painter's tables, the palace is empty. A beautiful ceiling is in the process of being painted on pieces of fine wood cut into geometrical shapes: hexagons, pentagons, ovals, circles and squares. The paintings are laid out upon the tables and in the torchlight appear to palpitate.

I see green lions, a scarlet siren with a scaled tail, sea-scapes, heart-breaking landscapes, the garden of Eden, an entire bestiary! In a blue oval the size and colour of a puffin egg one perfect human eye gazes at me. And then I see an albino ape falling from a tropical tree, his heart pierced by an arrow. Blood spurts from his wound in thick, crimson ropes. This image is of tremendous potency.

The paintings are all laid out on the foor and varnished. The painters retire and a strange figure appears dressed like a peasant in heavy white cloth, a large grain bag slung over his shoulder. Reaching into his bag he pulls out fistfuls of gold dust with which he 'seeds' the wet paintings. Again and again he reaches into his bag for fistfuls of gold. Suddenly the room is filled with particles of gold and I am blinded.

I awaken stunned; the sun--flooding the room--is beating against my eyes.

In 1994 I visited the Palazzo del Te in Mantova with Nancy Joyce Peters, who had published the story inspired by my dream: "The Volatile Ceiling of the Baron Munodi". We were both amazed to see the ceiling I had described.

Then I saw a portrait of Federico Gonzaga, the man whose realised dream the palace was. His face was my father's face, exactly.

EDITOR'S NOTE

The photos are from the Chamber of Cupid and Psyche, in the Palazzo. I can't be sure this is the ceiling that struck Ducornet, for two dozen rooms have such crazy Mannerist paintings on the ceilings. But these coffered panels fit her description best. And believe me, there are more where these came from; Gonzaga believed, unlike Blake, that the Road to Wisdom leads through the Palace of Excess.

So he built it.

--Chris Wayan

SOURCE: The Tiger Garden: A Book of Writers' Dreams by Nicholas Royle, 1996, p.71. Photos from Palazzo Te website (in modern Italian the "del" has been dropped).

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