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| Jan Polack St Martin dividing his Cloak with a Beggar ca. 1500 oil on panel Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht |
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| Giovanni di Pietro (Lo Spagna) St Catherine of Siena ca. 1505-1515 oil on panel Art Institute of Chicago |
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| Gerard David St Jerome (panel from the Polittico della Cervara) ca. 1506-1510 oil on panel Palazzo Bianco, Genoa |
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| Altobello Melone Simonino da Trento (his death was pretext for anti-Semitic persecutions) 1521 oil on panel Castello del Buonconsiglio, Trento |
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| Pierre Puget Baptism of Clovis 1653 oil on canvas Musée des Beaux-Arts de Marseille |
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| Giuseppe Gambarini Aeneas plucks the Golden Bough before 1725 oil on canvas Palazzo Buonaccorsi, Macerata |
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| Albert Joseph Moore Kingcups ca. 1870 oil on canvas York City Art Gallery |
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| Edward Burne-Jones Sibylla Delphica ca. 1886 oil on panel Manchester Art Gallery |
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| James McNeill Whistler Rose et Or: La Tulipe 1894-96 oil on canvas Hunterian Art Gallery, University of Glasgow |
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| Byam Shaw Portrait of Margaret Nettlefold before her Dining Room at Winterbourne 1904 oil on panel University of Birmingham, West Midlands |
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| Antonio Rizzi Saltimbanco 1906 oil on canvas Museo Civico Ala Ponzone, Cremona |
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| Laura Sylvia Gosse St Rémy ca. 1930 oil on canvas The Potteries Museum & Art Gallery, Stoke-on-Trent |
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| Meredith Frampton Portrait of a Young Woman 1935 oil on canvas Tate Britain |
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| Sebastian Isepp after Giovanni Battista Pittoni Adoration of the Shepherds (copy) ca. 1951-54 oil on canvas Courtauld Gallery, London |
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| Raymond C. Booth Jay in Winter Woodland ca. 1965 oil on canvas Dover Collections, Kent |
Despite the geologists' knowledge and craft,
mocking magnets, graphs and maps –
in a split second the dream
piles before us mountains as stony
as real life.
And since mountains, then valleys, plains
with perfect infrastructures.
Without engineers, contractors, workers,
bulldozers, diggers, or supplies –
raging highways, instant bridges,
thickly populated pop-up cities.
Without directors, megaphones, and cameramen –
crowds knowing exactly when to frighten us
and when to vanish.
Without architects deft in their craft,
without carpenters, bricklayers, concrete pourers –
on the path a sudden house just like a toy,
and in it vast halls that echo with our steps
and walls constructed out of solid air.
Not just the scale, it's also the precision –
a specific watch, an entire fly,
on the table a cloth with cross-stitched flowers,
a bitten apple with teeth marks.
And we – unlike circus acrobats,
conjurers, wizards, and hypnotists –
can fly unfledged,
and we light dark tunnels with our eyes,
we wax eloquent in unknown tongues,
talking not with just anyone, but with the dead.
And as a bonus, despite our own freedom,
the choices of our heart, our tastes,
we're swept away
by amorous yearnings for –
and the alarm clock rings.
So what can they tell us, the writers of dream books,
the scholars of oneiric signs and omens,
the doctors with couches for analyses –
if anything fits,
it's accidental,
and for one reason only,
that in our dreamings,
in their shadowings and gleamings,
in their multiplings, inconceivablings,
in their haphazardings and widescatterings
at times even a clear-cut meaning
may slip through.
– Wisława Szymborska (1923-2012), translated from Polish in 2010 by Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak