The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili : image and text in a Renaissance romance (2025)

The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: Art and Play in a Renaissance Romance

Elucidating and Enigmatizing: the Reception of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili in the Early Modern Period and in the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries

eSharp: Imagination and Innovation, 2009

Hypnerotomachia Poliphili is a dream romance published in 1499 in Venice. Though complex both in terms of language and of content, it attracted the interest of many learned individuals throughout the ages, who interpreted and used it in their own unique way. This paper explores Hypnerotomachia's impact on the literature, art and typography of the early modern period and compares it to its reception in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, aiming to illustrate how versatile this romance is to different interpretations (alchemical, antiquarian, pornographic etc.) and, furthermore, to provide a view of the book as innovative in itself, re-using and transforming past literary traditions, and as an imaginative basis for the creative endeavors of later generations. The investigation of the reception of Hypnerotomachia Poliphili in the early modern period and in our age follows a parallel, rather than a linear, pattern, since the two periods are quite distinct from each other, separated by a chronological gap. This paper's aim is to demonstrate how each period's cultural background provided the right circumstances for the emergence or re-emergence of an interest in the book through an exploration of both primary and secondary sources, using the abundant Special Collections of the University of Glasgow, particularly the Stirling Maxwell collection and the digitization projects of Italian and French emblem books.

The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili and Italian art circa 1500: Mantegna, Antico, and Correggio

This essay focuses on the interplay between the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili and Italian art of the early sixteenth century. While the Hypnerotomachia exerted some influence on artists of the subsequent generation, the nature of that influence will be reevaluated in light of the functions that poetic favole accrued around the turn of the sixteenth century. Opening with an examination of two paintings by Antonio Allegri da Correggio that are often seen as illustrative of the impact that the Hypnerotomachia had on Italian art, this essay will subsequently open up distance between the pictures and their purported source text. Focusing attention on Correggio’s complex engagement with the Hypnerotomachia affords new insights into the intricacy of the text itself, its relationship with antiquity, and how the tension between these two elements helped shape the anomalous status the Hypnerotomachia occupies today. The peculiar antiquarian approach that the Hypnerotomachia takes toward the study of language, architecture, and artifacts was quite common throughout the fifteenth century, but it quickly fell out of favor in the sixteenth century. The article concludes by suggesting that art historians begin thinking of the Hypnerotomachia as the extended manifesto of a model of engaged beholdership that held currency in Northern Italy around 1500 rather than as a source for iconography and new subjects. Viewed in this light, Colonna’s text yields important insights into the alluring qualities of artists like Mantegna and Antico, who shared with the Hypnerotomachia an abiding interest in interrogating antiquity as one of the animating forces underwriting their artistic project.

The Allegory of Love in the Early Renaissance: Francesco Colonna's Hypnerotomachia Poliphili and its European Context

Routledge , 2023

The Allegory of Love in the Early Renaissance This monograph is the first full-length study to critically engage with the narrative of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili and with Poliphilo as a character within this narrative in relation to the antiquarian, architectural, numerosophical, botanical and iconographical symbolism that frames each scene. The Hypnerotomachia is a Renaissance allegorical dream narrative published anonymously by the Aldine press in 1499 and attributed posthumously to Francesco Colonna (1433-1527) a Venetian Dominican priest (though which Francesco Colonna is still a matter of some debate). The narrative follows Poliphilo through a series of highly symbolic and allegorical scenes from the selva oscura (dark forest) of Brunetto Latini and Dante, through landscapes littered with classical ruins, through extraordinary gardens, architecture and topography, before a magical wedding ritual and eventual union with Polia, for whom he is searching for on his dream-love-journey. This book examines the love-journey of Poliphilo, and the series of symbolic, allegorical, and metaphorical experiences narrated by him that are indicative of his metamorphosing interiority within this mystagogic love journey. This is conducted through a narratological analysis of the relationship between Poliphilo and his external surroundings in sequences of the narrative pertaining to thresholds; the symbolic architectural, topographical, and garden forms and spaces; and Poliphilo’s transforming interior passions pertaining to his love of antiquarianism, language and rhetoric, and of Polia, the latter of which leads to his elegiac description of lovesickness. This is framed in relation to the broader European literary context from which this extraordinary narrative draws its inspiration from and which encompasses a great breadth of Medieval scholasticism and Renaissance humanism. This study examines the relationship between the narrative, which functions both realistically and symbolically to portray the protagonist’s transforming self into its final state at the climax of the narrative, and the symbolic function of the architecture and objects of art within the narrative. The monograph engages with the source material for the narrative that is drawn from classical, medieval, and Renaissance literature in the areas of philosophy, poetry, natural history, travel diaries and architectural treatises. It demonstrates, through analysis of the broad literary source material of the Hypnerotomachia, how antiquarian objects, buildings, gardens, and topography are used as expressive narrative devices by the author, drawing on medieval and humanist concepts, to demonstrate Poliphilo’s transforming interiority, symbolically, metaphorically or allegorically, and established through the character’s encounters during the narrative.

The Annotated Copy of Hypnerotomachia Poliphili at the Chapin Library, Williams College, Inc. C699

Bulletin of the Society for Renaissance Studies

embership of the Society is open to anyone interested in Renaissance studies and to institutions. All members receive issues of the Bulletin, which is published twice yearly, in April and October. The Society and its branches organize a full programme of events including an annual lecture, symposia and sixth-form conferences. Individuals and institutions interested in joining the Society should contact Dr Chloë Houston,

E-Thesis (Durham University): Self-Transformation in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili

Self-Transformation in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, 2022

This thesis critically engaged with the narrative of the Hypnerotomachia and with Poliphilo as a character within this narrative. Using narratological analysis, it examines the journey of Poliphilo and the series of symbolic, allegorical, and metaphorical experiences narrated by him that are indicative of his metamorphosing interiority within a mystagogic journey. This is conducted through an analysis of the relationship between Poliphilo and his external surroundings in sequences of the narrative pertaining to thresholds; the symbolic architectural, topographical, and garden forms and spaces; and Poliphilo’s transforming interior passions pertaining to his love of antiquarianism, language and rhetoric, and of Polia, the latter of which leads to his elegiac description of lovesickness. The thesis analyses the relationship between the narrative, which functions both realistically and symbolically to portray the protagonist’s transforming self into its final state at the climax of the narrative, and the symbolic function of the architecture and objects of art within the narrative. The thesis engages with the source material for the narrative drawn from classical, medieval and humanist literature in the areas of philosophy, poetry, natural history, travel diaries and architectural treatises, using a mixed methods methodology combining philology with narratology and socio-historic approaches. It demonstrates, through analysis of the broad literary source material of the Hypnerotomachia, how antiquarian objects, buildings, gardens, and topography are used as expressive narrative devices by the author, drawing on medieval and Renaissance concepts, to demonstrate Poliphilo’s transforming interiority, symbolically, metaphorically or allegorically, established through the character’s encounters during the narrative.

'Many Other Things Worthy of Knowledge and Memory': The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili and its Annotators, 1499-1700

2014

Due to its elaborate woodcuts and artificial language, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Venice: Aldus Manutius, 1499, hereafter ‘HP’) has traditionally been presented as a fringe anomaly within the histories of the book and of Italian philology. Other studies have examined the influence of the HP in art and literature, but there has been little study of the role of readers in mediating that influence. This framing of the HP as unreadable visual marvel has impeded consideration of Aldus’ creation as a used text within the wider fabric of humanism. Liane Lefaivre’s conceptualisation of the HP as a creative dream-space for idea generation was a significant step towards foregrounding the text’s readers. This thesis set to testing this hypothesis against the experiences of actual readers as recorded in their marginalia. A world census of annotated copies of the HP located a number of examples of prolific annotation, showing readers making use of the HP for a variety of purposes. Benedetto and Paolo Giovio applied a Plinian model of extractive reading to two copies at Como and Modena, reading the HP in a manner analogous to the Natural History. Ben Jonson read his copy of the 1545 HP as a source for visual elements of stage design. An anonymous second hand in Jonson’s copy read the text as an alchemical allegory, as did the hands in a copy at the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library. Pope Alexander VII (Fabio Chigi) combed the text for examples of verbal wit, or acutezze, while comparing Poliphilo’s journeys through an architectural dream with his own passages through Rome. Informed by analogy with modern educational media, I have reframed the HP as a ‘humanistic activity book’, in which readers cultivated their faculty of ingegno through ludic engagement with the text.

Review of Francesco Colonna Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: The Strife of Love in a Dream Trans. Joscelyn Godwin. Thames and Hudson, 1998; CAA Reviews, 2000.

Lexical Notes To Francesco Colonna’s ‘Hypnerotomachia Poliphili’ (1499) – Cruces, Contradictions, Contributions

Lexis - Poetica, retorica e comunicazione nella tradizione classica, 2015

Abstract: The first translation into German of Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Venice 1499) has just been published in 2014. Its notes were kept as brief as possible and, to provide a comfortable reading, they were inserted into the main text. Thus, new proposals for solving both the known and hitherto unnoticed difficulties within the original, as well as calls for assistance to specialists from other fields, had to remain somewhat hidden. This accompanying publication will therefore discuss these proposals at length, provide further secondary literature and reflection, making them available to an international public, to future translators and to revisors of existing versions.

A New Edition and Translation of Poliziano’s Miscellanea. Review of: Angelo Poliziano, Miscellanies, Volume 1 and 2. Edited and translated by Andrew R. Dyck and Alan Cottrell. Cambridge, MA / London: Harvard University Press 2020 (I Tatti Renaissance Library 89-90)

Neulateinisches Jahrbuch, 2022