Media Information

 
 
 
Collection:
Catena-Historic Gardens and Landscapes Archive
Image No.:
200106
Title:
Hypnerotomachie, ou Discours du Songe de Poliphile
View:
[The gardens of Cythera]
Dates:
1561
Location:
Europe--France--Ile- de-France--Paris
Location Type:
Creation
Culture:
French
Period:
Renaissance
Creator:
author
Colonna, Francesco
Attributed
1433/34-1527
Italian
Materials:
paper
Techniques:
woodcut (process)
Measurements:
33.8 x 22.2 cm
Repository:
New York, NY, USA, Private Collection, New York
Category:
Villas
Work Type:
Books
Subjects:
Romances; Pleasure gardens; Dreams; Garden sculpture; Topiary; Paradise; Kythera Island (Greece); Aphrodite (Greek deity); Mythology; Love
Work Notes:
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.
Image Notes:
"But first I admired on the bare banks beside the shore the tall, uniform cypresses with their astringent, pitted cones, rising firmly to their heavy tops. Between their trunks, which are not tasty to the gnawing woodworm, there was a space of three feet separating one from the other. This regular order continued round in a circle, and was followed along the entire periphery of the island. Then came a circle of pleasant flowering myrtle, lover of the babbling banks, forever vowed and dedicated to the divine mother of amorous fires. It was dense and compact, cut and formed into the shape of an enclosing wall a foot and a half high, enclosing in itself the trunks of the upright cypresses whose foliage began to grow two feet above the flat leveled top of myrtle."
Rights Type:
fair use

Hypnerotomachie, ou Discours du Songe de Poliphile