Depictions of sleeping body in western art of painting

Sleep, which we need regularly at certain times of the day since the beginning of life, has been a subject of curiosity throughout the ages and has been tried to be explained through physiological activities on the body. Many beliefs that construct social life have associated sleep with supernatural powers, while scientific research has associated it with the physiological structure of the mind and body. The different views put forward in the process of analyzing the state of sleep are also reflected in the field of art. The main purpose of this study is to evaluate the state of sleep, which gains a concrete expression with body representations in painting, in terms of the ways artists interpret it. The scope of the thesis includes the relationship between the concepts of body and sleep and the reflection of this relationship from the prehistoric period to modernism in the art of painting. In this study, which was designed with qualitative research method, it was concluded that the depictions of the sleeping body were interpreted with different forms and contents by many periods and artists.