Simone dei Crocefissi, 'Dream of the Virgin', about 1365-80

This panel combines complex medieval symbols in a single vision. The whole scene takes place in a barren landscape surrounded by colourful castle-like buildings. The Virgin Mary, dressed in a blue robe, rests on a solid wooden bed with a shaped headboard. It has a distinctive patterned coverlet. At the foot of the bed, a companion sits reading from a book with a red binding.

From the Virgin’s womb grows the stem of a vine made in gold leaf, on which hangs the crucified Christ. Beneath her figure, a hand reaches down to grasp the arm of an old, bearded man. This is Adam, who is in a dark cave at the base of the picture. His wife Eve peers over his shoulder. They are at the entrance to Limbo, whose gates lie on the ground. Medieval Christians believed that Christ descended into Limbo after the Crucifixion and brought out those good men and women who had lived before him, led by Adam and Eve.

This small panel once formed the top tier of a larger altarpiece. It probably belonged to one of Bologna’s many religious houses, maybe a nunnery such as Sant’Agostino or San Lorenzo. Its highly unusual subject – the Dream of the Virgin – would have been appropriate for a multi-panelled altarpiece (polyptych) with different scenes from the life of the Virgin. Perhaps the central panel showed the Coronation of the Virgin, as in surviving intact polyptychs by Simone (Pinacoteca Nazionale, Bologna).

The panel weaves together a number of themes and symbols that would have been more familiar to medieval viewers than they are to us. The Cross was compared to a living tree in early Christian sources. According to the Golden Legend, the wood of the Cross derived from the Tree of Life, one of the two trees growing in the Garden of Eden (Genesis 2:9). The Virgin was described as a fruit-bearing tree: ‘As the vine I have brought forth a pleasant odour: and my flowers are the fruit of honour and riches’ (Ecclesiasticus 24:22–3). So the body of Christ suspended on a living vine represents the ‘fruit of her womb’ described in the Gospel of Luke (1:39–44).

Simone seems to have based his work on a closely related episode in the extensive fresco cycle of about 1340 (Pinacoteca Nazionale, Bologna) from the church at Mezzaratta, Bologna. These frescoes are mainly the work of Vitale da Bologna, but Giorgio Vasari records signatures of several painters, among them Simone. He was hired in 1366 to paint Old Testament episodes there, and contributed to other scenes. Vitale’s Dream of the Virgin was on the west wall of the nave, below a Nativity. Its composition is similar in many ways to that in the panel, down to the distinctive pattern of the bedspread. However, it does not include the figure of Christ hanging on the vine. It faced a scene of the release of Adam and Eve from Limbo on the opposite side of the Nativity.

When Bolognese monasteries were seized and broken up under Napoleon in 1799, the panel was taken from its altarpiece. Its original curved surround was removed and it was reshaped and re-gilded to turn it into a separate painting.