The book was published anonymously in Venice in 1499, by a celebrated humanist publisher, Aldus Manutius. Although attributions have been made to various authors, all evidence concerning authorship remains circumstantial, and like the designers of the book's nearly 170 woodcuts, the book has remained anonymous. However, the work is often attributed to a certain 'Franciscus Columna' or Francesco Colonna on the basis of an acrostic Latin sentence concealed in the majuscules heading each chapter of the book.
The Hypnerotomachia was written neither in Latin nor in Italian vernacular, but in a curious mixture of both languages, abundantly mixed with Greek words and roots, and is a language replete with vocabularies from arcane word lists, classical name-dropping, neologisms and hapax legomena. The fascination with language and meaning extends into the architecture in the form of inscriptions and hieroglyphics.
For five hundred years this book has mystified scholars while delighting enthusiasts of many disciplines, foremost among them, architecture and gardens. This page is dedicated to looking at what the architectural ekphrases in the story are all about.
The book commences with a special first chapter which alone bears a title: “A Description of the Dawn”. Along with the final chapter, it forms the frame of the story told by Poliphilo. With a fiat lux, Phoebus Apollo, the Sun, appears to illuminate a cosmic picture gradually built up, using rhetorical structures to evolve the world envisioned into finer particulars, picturing the place and finally locating the time of Poliphilo’s prodigious dream at dawn in springtime.
Mainly by use of polysemic key words, this first chapter covertly introduces the primary themes with which its philosophy is concerned, and the description of the dawn thus acts as a mnemonic picture to be held in the mind’s eye while the book is being read. The dynamism of the world picture is echoed within the hero’s mind.
Like the universe itself, Poliphilo’s soul is propelled by love, the force underlying unity, harmony, peace, and attraction of like to like. The object of his love is the beautiful Polia, whom he visualises fervently in sleepless ardour. In agonic meditation on unrequited love, he slips into a dream which releases his soul from worldly and bodily stimuli to focus on its own nature, and to recognize in itself a mirror of the macrocosm. Thus liberated by sleep from his physical body Poliphilo’s soul can gain access to the memory of things it knew before falling into generation: the ultimate realities and true cosmic laws for which poets invoked the Muses. Paradoxically, though, this knowledge of his commences with the soul’s descent into a material body, with this event paralleled in the first landscape setting in the dream by a natural world seemingly untouched by human civilisation.
Throughout the dream, there are two interrelated, progressive aspects to Poliphilo which the reader can trace: ontological and epistemological, his level of being and his level of knowing. Both commence at their lowest level within the dream, and Poliphilo’s phenomenological and reflective experiences help him become aware of what constitutes and fulfils his own proper nature.
THE OAK FOREST
At the beginning of the first dream, a bewildered Poliphilo, who has as yet no capacity for overview or theoria, is too fascinated with looking at natural greenery and quickly finds himself lost in a dark forest, turning on a Greek pun on 'hyle' which means both forest and prima materia, unformed base matter. Within the forest he runs back and forth in a blind effort to escape, performing those very motions of a newly incarnated soul discovering its orientation which Plato describes in his Timaeus. Finally, with a prayer to Jupiter, a slender ray of sunlight sifts through the treetops, and he is able to find his way out of the forest. The inchoate fabric of the thick, impassable wood is now revealed in a proto-architectonic form: the upper branches are cambered in the form of a dome or vault, creating a clearing of space within. The proximity of the natural setting to a geometrical configuration has been effected by the transformation in his own consciousness: a motif reiterated with increasing refinement and subtlety throughout the narrative.
Each aspect or part of his soul is foregrounded in a zone of the story. The soul, in order to communicate with a corporeal body, makes use of the intermediary, subtle substance of spirit — the stuff of thoughts and dreams, in which phantasms are imprinted. Phantasia is the language of intercommunication between body and soul, by which physical impressions and intellectual concepts can be compared. All the language of the dream, therefore, is necessarily converted into these mental images, often in enigmatic form.
As a whole, the soul animates and governs the body, to which it is ontologically superior. The soul has three principal parts which each have their functions: there is the rational or intellectual soul, the sensitive soul, and the appetitive or vegetative soul. The silent flowery mead in which the dream begins represents the most basic life-giving operations ordained by the vegetative soul. In his prowess we can identify three operations established on the virtues of plants: the nutritive power which concerns self-preservation, the augmentative power which concerns the fulfilment of his potential, or destiny, and the generative power of substantial change, linked to the reproductive capacity.
Also known as the sensitive soul, the spirit comprises the vis cogitativa, that power of thought or process of cogitation which utilizes phantasms as its medium of eloquence. It is and is treated in three divisions of natural, animal, and vital powers, which govern consecutive segments of Poliphilo’s journey. Because the sensitive soul is substantially spirit, a quasi-material entity, its powers enjoy locational relations with the human body, in organs governed by planetary virtues. The vital spirit resides in the heart, liver, and stomach, governed by Jupiter and the Sun. The animal spirit is ruled by Mercury, who governs the brain and sense organs. The natural spirit, corresponding to the genitals, resides in the liver and is governed by the goddess of beauty, Venus, and Diana, the moon-goddess who also presides over procreation.
The Heavens and the Earth
The Landscape of Ruins and the Great Pyramid
The Five Senses and their place in the Garden
The Flowery Mead
The Queen's Palace Gardens
The Festival of Flowers
Venus, Goddess of Living Nature
A Garden of Death
The Garden Island of Cythera
The Hanging Gardens of the Amphitheatre
Venus' Secret Garden