Margot Forman
The Vanity of Saint Radegunda
It was Friday night in March in the year 1979. I was fast asleep with my boyfriend Michael when I awoke suddenly because of a stunning dream. I felt I had traveled directly to the night sky above me and was now flying with a flock of geese. We (my fellow geese and I) were lost and becoming quite anxious. I actually heard nervous goose voices crying, "we're lost, we're lost !" But then our wise leader at the head of the flock cried, “just follow the big star!" We all looked around and saw the big star and flew together in the star’s direction with a renewed sense of confidence. I felt a feeling of wonder and compassion for these geese and their dark journey but quickly fell back to sleep.
Later that night I dreamed a simple image of a tall skinny tree holding plump red fruit. Closer to morning I saw in a dream a house suspended in the air. It appeared in three separate images. In the first image its doors and windows were framed with slabs of stone in a simple style; door in the middle, windows on each side. In the second image the carving around the doors and windows became very elaborate, rather baroque or art nouveau in style. In the third image the windows became two eyes and the door became a mouth. Elaborate carving defined long flowing hair as it wrapped over the roof. The façade of the house had morphed into a woman's beautiful face carved out of precious metal and festooned with jewels.
These images all stayed burned into my memory.
Saturday morning Michael and I woke up and decided to drive out to Leamington, a small town in south-western Ontario (also knows the Tomato Capital of the World) with a nice beach in a small Provincial Park, surrounded by lovely farm land and greenhouses.
It was a beautiful spring day. We left Windsor and drove around the countryside aimlessly for several hours enjoying the day. On the way to Leamington, we first approached Kingsville where I noticed a flock of geese coming in for a landing (this sounds naive to me now but I had never actually seen a flock of geese up close landing or otherwise). Excited, I asked my boyfriend where they were headed. He told me Jack Miner’s Bird Sanctuary was directly ahead, and explained the migratory patterns of Canadian Geese to me. Now I realized where the geese in my dream were coming from and what they were looking for.
A few more miles down the road we stopped at Colasanti's Green House and went inside. There, suspended on strings from the ceiling were tomato plants. I had always thought tomatoes grew on the ground on a vine and had never realized they could be suspended to look like trees. But there was the tree with red fruit just like in my dream. I felt happy and justified because I had felt these images in my dreams were important for some reason.
The next day (a Sunday), back in Windsor we decided to visit The Detroit Institute of Arts across the river. Once there we took in the Napoleon III Exhibit that was on tour. In one room there was a long line up of people that was snaking around a certain mysterious object of art that could not be seen until one reached the head of the line. I stood patiently in line with Michael, not knowing what we might see.
Finally there it was: a bronze, jewel encrusted, miniature house sitting on a pedestal and set into the front of it was a regal woman's face! It was the house revealed to me in my dream two nights before.
Michael and I hardly had a moment to observe the precious artifact before we were pushed on and away by the crowd behind us.
In all these years I had never known just what that object was or how I could see it again. After deciding to paint this series of PSI dreams, I googled the Detroit Institute of Arts, Napoleonic Exhibit, 1979 and discovered there was a book published on the show sitting in their library. The next day I contacted the archive librarian at the D.I.A. who was able to locate a photograph and description of my “house with a face”.
What a thrill after all these years to have my memory confirmed!
But I must admit the reality of the image differed in style and feeling from the image in my dream. The style of the real object was gothic; not the almost art nouveau style that I envisioned, and the woman looked more like a nun than the beautiful woman remembered in my dream.
I was determined to show my own vision of her in my work of art, and breathe some life into her. On reading about the “house with a face” I discovered it is a reliquary of Saint Radegunda, a Thuringian princess and Frankish queen who was born in 518 A.D.
The more I read about this strange early Christian woman the more I felt she needed to live in a work of art that represented the sensuality she denied herself in her life.
Since she came to me so many years ago in a PSI dream I feel her soul is in need of resurrection of some sort. Maybe those geese led her to me!
I have incorporated all of my dreams of that night into one painting, as I feel they occurred on the same night and came true on the same weekend for a reason.
The movie Winged Migration greatly inspired my painting. That movie really captured the feeling of my flight with the geese and I used it for reference. The narrator said birds use landmarks to guide them in their journeys so I used the beacon on the reliquary as such a landmark.
The tomato trees sit in each corner (weren’t tomatoes considered a vanity in the middle ages)? The flowers surrounding the painting represent the first miracle, a “face refulgent with roses and lilies” seen by the bishop when he came to view Saint Radegunda’s body.
After finishing the painting I ordered a novel called Women in the Wall, written in 1975 about the life and times of St. Radegunda. I learned that she was a nun who practiced self-denial to an extreme degree: starving and flagellating herself, and locking herself in a stone cell no bigger than her body for extended periods of time. The book (written by Julia O’Faolain) makes reference to St. Radegunda thinking she was becoming one with the stone wall. Hence the title Women in the Wall, and also similar to the image of her face emerging from the façade of the house as in my dream and in the actual reliquary.
The novel also described St. Radegunda having her eyes rolled back in her head when she would enter one of her frequent trance states; which was the way I saw her in my dream. In her trance state, her eyes were also “ burning like blue flames” which I instinctively adapted as a background motif in my painting.
Reliquary of St. Radegunda: The Second Empire,
Art in France under Napoleon III, Detroit Institute of Arts,
Jan. 15 -March 18, 1979
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