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

Catena-Historic Gardens and Landscapes Archive

200076

Hypnerotomachie, ou Discours du Songe de Poliphile

[The octagonal bath building]

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; Bathhouses; Octagonal Buildings; Cupids; Festoons; Friezes (ornamental bands)

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.

"Here I saw a miraculous octagonal bath-building, which had a pair of pilasters at every angle. The areobates that joined them beneath began at the level of the ground. Then followed the pilasters, which protruded from the solid wall by a third of their width, and their capitals supporting the straight beam with a frieze above it, beneath a cornice that went unbroken all around....Now I saw the entrance, on the side opposite the beautiful nymph of the spring, with an exquisite doorway that I thought must have been made by the same excellent sculptor as carved the sleeping nymph..."

fair use