A high-end car-boot sale of the unconscious: Colnaghi’s Dreamsongs reviewed

In 1772 the 15-year-old Mozart wrote a one-act opera set, like The Magic Flute, in a dream world. Il sogno di Scipione was based on an account in Cicero’s Republic of a dream experienced by the Roman general Scipio Aemilianus while serving in North Africa in 148 BC. In the dream the younger Scipio is visited by his adoptive grandfather Scipio Africanus, who foretells his destruction of Carthage, dishes out advice on dealing with populist politics and shows him ‘the stars such as we have never seen them from this earth’.

Scipio’s is a recurring dream: it inspired Dante’s vision of Heaven and Hell and it returns to haunt us in Colnaghi’s latest exhibition Dreamsongs. But instead of Cicero’s original, this show takes its cue from a 5th-century commentary by Macrobius that divides dreams into five categories — enigmatic, prophetic, oracular, nightmare and apparition. Hopeless. Categorising dreams is like herding witches’ cats — within minutes of entering the gallery I was happily lost (partly thanks to the absence of labels).

Dreamsongs is a high-end car-boot sale of the unconscious in which it is a pleasure to rummage. Spanning five millennia, and cutting between periods, subjects and styles, the show has the authentic feel of a dream sequence in which nothing is sequential. It sensibly avoids the obvious. There’s only a light dusting of surrealists, represented by lesser-known works — Raymond Daussy’s ‘Shadow who found its man’ (1949) is a real find — and the selection of old masters is just as quirky. Cranach’s ‘Melancholia’ (1532) is a marvellous oddity, picturing a depressed young woman with wings confined to a nursery full of bouncing babies. Anyone would succumb to melancholia minding that lot; to pass the time, she whittles a stake to a point.