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

Catena-Historic Gardens and Landscapes Archive

200071

Hypnerotomachie, ou Discours du Songe de Poliphile

[Poliphilo encounters the pyramid and obelisk between two mountains]

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; Pyramids (Geometric figures); Obelisks; Harpies; Nymphs; Ruins

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.

"Lifting my eyes to the place where the wooded hills seem to meet, I saw far off an incredibly tall structure in the form of a tower, or a high watch-tower, next to a great building that was not yet fully visible, but seemed to be a work of antiquity. I could see the pleasant hills surrounding the valley rising ever higher as they neared this edifice, and seeming to join it, so that it was connected with the hills on either side and made with them an enclosed valley. I reckoned that it would be well worth examining, and so without delay I set my hastening steps in that direction. The more closely I approached it, the more it appeared to be a huge and magnificent object, and the greater was my desire to admire it; for now it did not look like a high watch-tower, but rather a tall obelisk resting on a vast mass of stone."

fair use