Jacob's Dream

Giorgio Vasari's Jacob's Dream, painted in 1557 on panel and now in the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, depicts the celebrated Old Testament vision in which the patriarch Jacob sees a ladder ascending from earth to heaven with angels moving upon it, and receives God's covenant promise. The ladder — scala Jacob in Latin — was one of the most symbolically rich images in Christian typology, interpreted as a figure of the Virgin Mary as the link between heaven and earth, of the moral ascent of the soul, and of the Incarnation itself. Vasari's Mannerist treatment would have brought the full resources of his elegant figure style to the angelic figures traversing the ladder, while Jacob's sleeping figure below provides the human anchor for the celestial vision. The Walters Art Museum's holding documents American collecting of Italian Mannerist panels from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The panel support enables the careful surface quality Vasari needed for the delicate challenge of depicting both the sleeping earthly Jacob and the luminous celestial vision above. The angels on the ladder would be rendered with his characteristic graceful elongation, while Jacob below might be handled in the more naturalistically observed mode he reserved for sleeping or reclining figures.