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

Catena-Historic Gardens and Landscapes Archive

200101

Hypnerotomachie, ou Discours du Songe de Poliphile

[Poliphilo tastes the purifying fruit]

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; Love; Venus (Roman deity); Women priests; Fruit; Communion; Rituals (events); Roses; Shrubs

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.

"No sooner had I tasted the miraculous and sweet fruit than I felt my crude intellect renewed, my anxious heart revived in amorous joy, just as when someone dives into the depths of the sea, going with pressed lips and pent-up breath to the very bottom, and then returns to the surface and, gasping avidly, revives himself with the blessed air. This caused even more amorous flames to burn incontinently within me, and I seemed to be transmuted with the sweeter torment of novel qualities of love. I began to know directly and actually to feel the graces of Venus, the power that they wield over earthlings, and the joyful reward of those who battle their way boldly into those delicious realms through victory in the amorous battte."

fair use