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

Catena-Historic Gardens and Landscapes Archive

200119

Hypnerotomachie, ou Discours du Songe de Poliphile

[The nymphs lead Polia and Poliphilo to a sacred spring and fountain]

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; Springs (bodies of water); Fountains; Water; Arbors; Berceaux; Trellises; Tombs; Adonis (Greek deity)

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.

"I saw a venerable object beneath the arbour, to which we and the divine nymphs devoutly paid our respects: it was wondrous and full of mystery, resembling a tomb five feet in length, ten twelfths of that in width and the same in height, excluding the socle and the cornice which measured five inches. This tomb, said the nymphs, was that of Adonis the hunter, slain in this place by the tusked boar; and here, similarly, holy Venus had leaped naked from the spring and torn her divine calf on these rose-bushes, as with indignant looks and anguished soul she hastened to help Adonis, when jealous Mars had beaten him."

fair use