A Nightmare

Melchior Bocksberger · after 1573

Medium

Brush and white gouache on cream laid paper prepared with a black wash, laid down onto a partial ivory laid paper mount

Original size

20.9 × 36.4 cm (8 1/4 × 14 3/8 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Mannerism

Melchior Bocksberger's *A Nightmare* is a work of startling atmosphere — a shadowy vision rendered with the precise tension of a mind caught between sleep and dread. Bocksberger was a Swiss-born artist who built his career in Salzburg and the German-speaking courts of the late sixteenth century, moving comfortably between monumental fresco cycles and intimate works on paper. This drawing belongs to the chiaroscuro tradition: the black-washed ground acts as darkness itself, and Bocksberger pulls his figures forward using only white gouache, coaxing form from shadow with a brushwork economy that feels almost cinematic. The result is less a depiction of nightmare than a demonstration of how light and its absence can manufacture unease. The work dates to after 1573, placing it in the mature period of Bocksberger's output, when his handling of nocturnal subjects had grown particularly assured. Our hand-painted oil reproduction translates this chiaroscuro drama faithfully — the deep tonal range, the delicate gouache highlights, the sense of something materialising from an inky ground — rendered by skilled artists who work exclusively in traditional oil on canvas to honour the original's unsettling presence.