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

Catena-Historic Gardens and Landscapes Archive

200086

Hypnerotomachie, ou Discours du Songe de Poliphile

[Logistica and Thelemia accompany Poliphilo to a garden made of silk]

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; Nymphs; Formal gardens; Vines; Silk (textile); Arbors; Espalier; Domes

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.

"The ground of the level area appeared to be of green silken velvet, like a lovely meadow, and in its centre there stood a round enclosure with a tall cupola, made from golden rods and covered in a distinctive manner with flowering rosebushes of the same material, so that I would have said that they were more acceptable to the senses than real ones. Beneath this roof was a circle of seats made from reddish jasper, and the entire area inside it, right to the edge, was a solid circle of yellow jasper, marked by a confusion of colours that harmonized beautifully together. It was so lustrous that every object was reflected in it."

fair use