José María Ridao

In the early hours of June 7, 1525, after the Diet of Nuremberg decided to support the Lutheran Reformation, Albrecht Dürer—who had attended the meeting—suffered a terrifying nightmare. Freshly awake and drenched in sweat, he rushed to reproduce it in a watercolor, recording its meaning in a few lines written at the bottom of the image. For the first time in art history, a painter depicted the actual content of a dream rather than a figure dreaming, resulting in a timeless and chilling work—perhaps one of the most faithful representations of the fear experienced by the individual in the face of historical events.

With Dürer Dreaming, José María Ridao proposes taking the same path in reverse, beginning with the tumultuous history of the Reformation and ending at the moment the painter realizes the catastrophe in the making. To do so, Ridao establishes a subtle parallel with the combination of image and text in Dürer's work, offering, on the one hand, an innovative essayistic reflection on the causes of the Reformation—in which the conquest of the Indies played a decisive role—and, on the other, a dialogued fiction that attempts to recreate the emotional climate surrounding the painter's artistic output.

The result is an unclassifiable book in which, through the lens of past events, issues of renewed relevance emerge: the effects of corruption on the disintegration of societies, the function of art, and the inherently fallible nature of humankind.