Codex Seraphinianus, the encyclopedia of an imaginary world

Not all mysterious manuscripts come from the Middle Ages. The Codex Seraphinianus was published in Milan in 1981 by Franco Maria Ricci, in two luxury volumes, and is the work of the Roman artist and architect Luigi Serafini, who worked on it between 1976 and 1978. It presents itself as the encyclopedia of an unknown world, written in an invented alphabet and illustrated with hundreds of colour plates.

A parallel world in plates

The book follows the pattern of the great illustrated encyclopedias: a section on plants, one on animals, then chemistry, machines, clothing, writing, architecture. But everything is transformed. Trees uproot themselves and migrate, fruits take the shape of objects, animals merge with tools. One famous plate shows a pair of lovers gradually turning into a crocodile.

Every image comes with captions and long passages in the codex's script, which looks like an elegant, regular cursive. The reader has the impression of facing a complete and coherent body of knowledge, of which only the key is missing. It is this very feeling, rather than any single riddle, that forms the heart of the work.

A script without meaning

For years readers and linguists tried to decipher it. Some enthusiasts managed to reconstruct the system used to number the pages, but the text itself has resisted every attempt. Serafini himself, at a public talk in 2009, stated that the script hides no message: it is asemic writing, designed to evoke the experience of language without conveying any content.

This statement did not put an end to curiosity. Many readers still look for patterns in the signs, and the comparison with the Voynich Manuscript has become almost inevitable. Unlike that codex, however, here the author, the date and the place of composition are known precisely, and the mystery is openly an artistic invention.

The fortunes of a book as object

The first edition, printed in a limited run, soon became a rarity sought by collectors. The volume was accompanied by a text by Italo Calvino, who used it as an occasion to reflect on the relationship between word and image. In the following years the codex was reprinted several times, including in more affordable editions, and found its way into the libraries of artists, designers and scholars of semiotics.

The book's success can also be explained by its dialogue with tradition. The plates recall medieval bestiaries, Renaissance herbals and the great illustrated encyclopedias of the eighteenth century, but they reverse their purpose: instead of ordering the known world, they build a world that does not exist. In this sense the codex belongs to the same family as the fantastic books that, from Lucian of Samosata onwards, describe impossible lands in the serious tone of travel accounts.

The Codex Seraphinianus shows that the appeal of unreadable books does not depend on their age. A coherent system of signs and a meticulous set of images are enough to recreate the emotion one feels before an ancient codex: that of a body of knowledge close at hand, visible, and yet closed. That is why the book takes its place beside the great riddles of the past.