Sleepy heads

When Italian artists began to imitate classical statues, they copied the blank eyes. On rare occasions a statue’s eyes were closed, not blank. If the figure was in action we had to imagine that their pose showed us their dream. More commonly such statues were lying, or at least their head was sideways, like this sculpture in a village outside Cambridge.

Sophie Cave's "The Floating Heads" (Kelvingrove Museum, Glasgow) uses another trope - floating, which is more to do with dreaming, I'd guess.

In painting, the "sleeping lover" is a genre, but that's not what Dali's depicting in "Sleep" - the head looks more like a dirigible that's lost all hope, precariously propped up. In paintings, closed eyes can mean death, but except for crucifixions statues of the dead are rare. I suppose using stone to represent death is too literal.

But couldn’t these figure with eyes closed be blinking? We spend about 2% of our waking life with our eyes closed. Perhaps Venus de Milo was caught in the moment of blinking – we can see her but she can’t see us. Nowadays kids sometimes paint eyes on their eyelids. Eyes, after all, are the windows of the soul. If Michelangelo had known that old statues had painted eyes, would he still have given David sculpted irises?