Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, Aldus Manutius's most enigmatic book

In December 1499 the press of Aldus Manutius in Venice printed one of the most beautiful and strangest books of the Renaissance: the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, 'the strife of love in a dream of Poliphilo'. The volume, adorned with some one hundred and seventy woodcuts, did not give the author's name on any page. To discover it, one had to read the chapter initials carefully, arranged like a hidden message.

The hidden name

The capital letters opening the thirty-eight chapters, read in sequence, form the Latin sentence 'Poliam frater Franciscus Columna peramavit', meaning 'Brother Francesco Colonna dearly loved Polia'. On this basis the work is traditionally attributed to the Venetian Dominican Francesco Colonna, connected with the friary of Santi Giovanni e Paolo, a documented but little-known figure.

The attribution, however, is disputed. Some scholars have proposed a namesake, the Roman nobleman Francesco Colonna, lord of Palestrina; others have put forward different names, including that of Leon Battista Alberti. The designer of the woodcuts is also unknown: various hypotheses have been made about artists working in Venice and the Veneto, but none is proven, and the draughtsman remains one of the great anonymous figures of Renaissance art.

A dream of ruins and gardens

The plot is simple. Poliphilo falls asleep and dreams of crossing landscapes of ancient ruins, pyramids, obelisks, temples and gardens in search of his beloved Polia. Along the way he meets nymphs, triumphal processions and mysterious inscriptions, which he describes in almost architectural detail, giving proportions and materials. In the second part the story is told from Polia's point of view, before the final awakening.

The language is the hardest aspect: an Italian vernacular loaded with Latinisms and Graecisms, with words coined by the author. The text also includes inscriptions in Greek, Hebrew and Arabic, and pseudo-hieroglyphs inspired by a Renaissance vision of Egypt as a source of symbolic wisdom. The result is a prose that fascinates and repels at the same time, and that even contemporaries found arduous.

A visible legacy

The Hypnerotomachia enjoyed great success among artists and architects. It was translated into French in 1546 and, in partial form, into English in 1592. Its images influenced garden design and the taste for emblems. In Rome, the elephant carrying an obelisk in front of the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, made to a design by Gian Lorenzo Bernini in 1667, draws on one of the book's woodcuts.

Enthusiasts of esotericism have seen in the book an initiatory or alchemical path, marked by trials and revelations. It is a possible reading of the dream's symbolism, but it remains an interpretation: the text presents itself first of all as a learned love story and as a celebration of classical antiquity, written by an author as enamoured of monuments as of his Polia.

Today the Hypnerotomachia is regarded as a masterpiece of typography for the harmony between text and images, with pages in which the lines of type take the shape of goblets and triangles. Its mystery does not lie in an unreadable script, but in the identity of its author and the breadth of a learning that even now is hard to decipher completely.