The eyeing d’Epstein -- plus Bonifacio Bembo and Optimus Prime

I dreamed that the TV mob boss Tony Soprano and I were sitting together on a teak settee, drinking beer and looking through a large coffee-table book full of photos of objets d’art from a museum’s collection. It was possible to reach into these photos and pull out the item depicted, which then became a three-dimensional object in one’s hand.

The last page of the book had a photo of the museum’s prize exhibit: a large, enormously complicated wooden chest full of moving parts and hidden compartments. Tony thought it was great. “The most expensive thing in the damn museum, worth more than all the rest put together, and what is it? A fucking box! Let’s put some stuff in it.”

So we started pulling items out of other pages and putting them in the box. One of these (the only one I can remember specifically) was a painting that looked like it was by Bonifacio Bembo, of Charlemagne. The background was painted naturalistically, in full color, but Charlemagne himself was all gold: gold skin, gold hair, gold clothing. We carefully peeled him off the painting and put him in the box, leaving the Bembo painting looking strangely empty, just background with no central subject.

I told Tony that I thought gangsters were the best people to hang out with because they have no filter, so you know the conversation will be totally uncensored. Tony enthusiastically agreed and said, “Let me tell you some shit no one else is gonna tell you. You know the dying Epstein? It’s more like the eyeing d’Epstein, know what I’m saying?”

I didn’t.

“Jeff’s dead, man. That means now he can see everything. A big old Jew eye in the sky looking down, and he doesn’t miss a thing. He’s changed the blackmail game forever, man. Anyone anywhere want some dirt on their enemies, they’re like, ‘Bring me up Jeff.’ You know what they say, ‘Strike me down’? Shit, man.”

(Note: I’ve never seen The Sopranos and know nothing about it except that Tony Soprano is a Mafia boss played by James Gandolfini. No idea how this character found his way into my dreams.)

Update: The dream turned out to be somewhat precognitive. I posted the above at 3:31 p.m. At 3:42 p.m., eleven minutes later, I popped into a used bookstore and found that they had for sale a replica of the Visconti-Sforza Tarot deck, marketed as "The Golden Tarot," and sold in an unusually complicated box:

Together with the cards in the box is a little book giving some historical background an including a photograph of each individual card. Thus each card -- among which are four Kings and an Emperor -- exists both as a photograph in a book and as a physical object you can hold in your hand. When I opened up the book, a name jumped out at me, and not only because it was the only English on a page of Chinese:

The original Visconti-Sforza cards, of which these are replicas, are believed to have been painted by none other than Bonifacio Bembo. Thirty-five of the original cards are now at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York, where, according to Gertrude Moakley, "They are kept in a fourteenth-century French casket-box made of dark brown calfskin, decorated in relief with scenes from a romance of chivalry." (A French romance of chivalry would likely revolve around Charlemagne and his Paladins.)

Curiosity about this casket led me to this video from the Morgan, which characterizes the Visconti-Sforza deck as "The Tarot Cards that Inspired Dior" -- meaning, I guess, the fashion brand, but it's also a name from Tolkien that has frequently come up on William Wright's blog.

Incidentally, on a shelf right next to the "Golden Tarot" in the bookstore, I spotted this:

Just hours earlier, I had read Bill's latest post, which is called "Optimus Prime" and features this image:

As everyone knows, we Mormons are "best friends with Optimus Prime."