Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: Dreams, Hieroglyphs and Aldus's Finest Book

In December 1499 Aldus Manutius printed in Venice a book unlike any that had appeared until then. It was called Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, that is, «the strife of love in a dream of Poliphilo», and it was a long allegorical tale written in a very strange language, an Italian steeped in Latin and Greek. Its woodcuts, elegant and perfectly integrated into the page, still make it one of the most admired illustrated books in the history of printing.

A dream of architecture and ruins

The protagonist, Poliphilo, falls asleep and dreams of wandering in a landscape filled with ancient ruins, pyramids, obelisks, temples, gardens and fountains, in search of his beloved Polia. The story is above all a pretext for describing in minute detail imaginary monuments, inscriptions, triumphal processions and pagan rites. In the second part the narration passes to Polia, and the book ends with the dreamer's awakening, when he discovers that he has lost his beloved.

The volume contains about one hundred and seventy woodcuts by an unknown artist. Some show buildings and objects with almost technical precision, others mythological scenes and processions. The text itself is sometimes set in the shape of a chalice or a vase, a sign of exceptional typographic care. The printing was financed by a Veronese nobleman, Leonardo Crasso, who signed the dedication.

The mystery of the author

The author's name does not appear on the title page. By joining the initials of the thirty-eight chapters, however, one reads a Latin sentence, POLIAM FRATER FRANCISCUS COLUMNA PERAMAVIT, that is, «Brother Francesco Colonna greatly loved Polia». For this reason the book is usually attributed to Francesco Colonna, a Dominican friar of the Venetian convent of Santi Giovanni e Paolo. Other scholars have proposed a Roman lord of the same name from the Colonna family, and the debate has never been entirely closed.

Hieroglyphs and emblems

Among the book's most influential elements are its inscriptions in false hieroglyphs. On the façades of the dreamed monuments appear sequences of objects and animals, such as an eye, an anchor, a dolphin, a vase, which the author translates into Latin moral sentences. They have nothing to do with real Egyptian writing, but they reflect the Renaissance conviction that the ancient priests had expressed their wisdom in images.

These imaginary hieroglyphs played an important role in the birth of emblematics and influenced artists and architects. The image of an elephant bearing an obelisk, for example, is generally considered the source of inspiration for the monument designed by Gian Lorenzo Bernini in Piazza della Minerva in Rome, unveiled in 1667. Gardens, fountains and palace decorations of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries also took up motifs drawn from its plates.

Esoteric readings

The enigmatic character of the book has encouraged interpretations of every kind. In France, where a translation appeared in Paris in 1546, the work was read as an initiatory journey. In 1600 the writer François Béroalde de Verville published a French edition presenting it as an alchemical allegory, in which Poliphilo's journey concealed the stages of the transformation of matter.

The Hypnerotomachia thus remains a meeting point of typographic art, antiquarianism, love literature and Hermetic imagination. It is neither a grimoire nor an alchemical treatise, but it taught generations of readers to look for hidden meanings in images, and that is also why it holds a special place in the history of the esoteric book.