Detail View: Catena-Historic Gardens and Landscapes Archive: Hypnerotomachie, ou Discours du Songe de Poliphile

Catena-Historic Gardens and Landscapes Archive

200074

Hypnerotomachie, ou Discours du Songe de Poliphile

[A great portal]

1561

Europe--France--Ile-de-France--Paris

Creation

French

Renaissance

author Colonna, Francesco Attributed 1433/34-1527 Italian

paper

woodcut (process)

33.8 x 22.2 cm

New York, NY, USA, Private Collection, New York

Villas

Books

Romances; Pleasure gardens; Dreams; Portals; Acanthus; Bas-reliefs; Ovid, Metamorphoses, 43 B.C.-17 or 18 A.D.

Collation: a6 A-Bb6 Cc8 = 164 ff., complete. With engraved woodcut title-page and 181 woodcuts illustrating the text, of which 13 are full-page, several crible initials in preliminary text, large 9-line floriated arabesque initials forming an acrostic throughout, Kerver's unicorn device (Renouard 515) on verso of final leaf. Folio, 338 x 222 mm, bound in nineteenth-century calf, marbled endpapers. A superb French Edition of the most famous illustrated book of the Renaissance. A large number of these magnificent illustrations are dedicated to gardens. The designer of the original 1499 Aldus woodcuts remains unidentified although speculation has included artists such as Mantegna and Giovanni Bellini. Nor has the author of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili been identified with certainty. It was probably written by Francesco Colonna, a Dominican from Treviso, in Latin about 1445. Its two main themes are the allegorical dream-journey of Poliphilus in search of his love Polia, and the praise of Antique art and culture.

"This is why I have spoken in several places about the proper goal of architecture, which is its supreme invention: the harmonious establishment of the solid body of a building. After the architect has done this, he reduces it by minute divisions, just as the musician sets the scale and the largest unit of rhythm before subdividing them proportionately into chromaticisms and small notes. By analogy with this, the first rule that the architect must observe after the conception of the building is the square, which is subdivided to the smallest degree to give the building its harmony and consistency and to make the parts correlate with the whole. This is why the present portal was so beautiful in its admirable composition and invention, and why it was so particularly elegant and so faultlessly arranged, so that not even the most obscure element of it could provoke criticism..."

fair use