Word & Image

A Journal of Verbal/Visual Enquiry

ISSN: 0266-6286 (Print) 1943-2178 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/twim20

The wanderings of Poliphilo through Renaissance

studies

Ann E. Moyer

To cite this article: Ann E. Moyer (2015) The wanderings of Poliphilo through Renaissance
studies, Word & Image, 31:2, 81-87, DOI: 10.1080/02666286.2015.1023006

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02666286.2015.1023006

Published online: 26 Jun 2015.

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 The wanderings of Poliphilo through Renaissance
studies
ANN E. MOYER
Poliphilo’s wanderings have taken him to many places over the
last five hundred years. His book went through two Italian
editions and enjoyed several more in its French and English
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translations into the seventeenth century and beyond. Many
books from the early days of printing have led two lives, one as
text to be read and another as collectible object; the
Hypnerotomachia Polifili has figured prominently among them.
Production costs prevented the appearance of inexpensive
readers’ editions, so its copies always remained in the realm
of the serious purchaser, outside the range of the casual or
impecunious reader. Just as the book’s contents celebrated
ancient artifacts and a past only partly within reach, so the
book itself has long been a prize much sought after by dealers
and collectors. The size of the original print run is unknown,
but estimated at 500–600 copies, of which approximately 372
survive.1 They gravitated to noted book collections and
libraries and have appeared on the market but rarely for
many years. Eventually the work attracted the attention of
scholarly researchers, becoming an object not only of collection
but also of study. The complexity of the contents with its mix of
visual and textual appeal, along with its role as artifact, have
meant that the work’s observers, admirers, and critics have
found a wide variety of features to attract their attention.
The recent acquisition of a copy of this work by the
University of Pennsylvania offers an occasion to follow the
trail of Poliphilo back to see both how he arrived among us,
and how we have found the means to trace his path; his
wanderings through the groves of academe have lasted a cen-
tury or more. He left some very visible trails among art and
architectural historians, with some scattered sightings in the
history of letters. Although only scant traces can be found
among twentieth-century historians, he has made his way lately
into histories of reading and of Renaissance culture more
generally. Along the way he managed to make a major appear-
ance in a modern best-selling novel. Nonetheless, references to
the book or its characters may still include words that empha-
size the exotic, the rare, or the mysterious, an image invited by
the book’s contents. Yet Poliphilo and his beloved Pollia
appear no less charming when we have a better sense of
where they have been all these years.
As a work of prose fiction, the Hypnerotomachia’s first audience
would have been literary rather than scholarly. Its publisher,
WORD & IMAGE, VOL. 31, NO. 2, APRIL–JUNE 2015
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02666286.2015.1023006
# 2015 Taylor & Francis
Aldus Manutius, was already known for humanistic editions in
Greek and Latin, and related scholarly texts. Colonna’s text,
though vernacular, made heavy demands on both publisher
and reader with its classical references and multilingual word-
play. Some guidance as to the book’s early purchasers and
readership can be found in its publishing history. Details of
the original publication are few and by now well rehearsed.
The costs of the 1499 edition were paid by the Veronese
patrician Leonardo Grassi, who dedicated the work in turn to
Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, the Duke of Urbino. Grassi had
apparently assumed he would sell copies internationally, a plan
hampered by the wars of Italy; in 1509, Grassi requested an
extension of his privilege for the work from the Council of Ten,
arguing that due to the wars he had been unable to ship and
still had nearly all the copies.2 Francesco Colonna may have
invested in it as well, as he borrowed money for the printing of
a book at this time.3
Despite this slow start, a sufficient audience continued for
the work such that Aldus’s heirs brought out the second print-
ing in 1545. That edition, a copy of which now graces the
Special Collections of the University of Pennsylvania
Libraries, was the work’s last publication in Renaissance Italy.
It is impossible to know whether the cause was a lack of further
interest or due to the restrictions on publishing that began a
decade later with the first Index of Forbidden Books (1559) and the
censorship that accompanied it, though the latter seems likely
to bear at least some of the blame. That development altered
the dynamics of book publishing across Europe, hitting Italian
publishing centers particularly. Some classic authors, such as
Boccaccio, were permitted expurgated editions. Others, such as
Machiavelli, ceased to appear in Italy while they continued to
be published elsewhere, notably in France, where enforcement
of the various Indexes was more negotiated. The
Hypnerotomachia escaped listing on the Index, but a new printing
would have required an application for an imprimatur, an
undertaking that it surely could not have endured. Its future
in print also lay mainly in France.
The first French version (by an anonymous translator)
appeared soon after the second Italian printing, in 1546, pub-
lished by Jean Martin. More followed in 1554 and 1561. An
English version appeared in 1592. The French text held its
audience; an amended translation appeared in 1600, 1610,
81
 and finally 1657. The work’s presence in seventeenth-century
bibliographies is consistent with other evidence, both textual
and visual, indicating its continuing interest to readers.4 Yet
another French version was published in 1772, and was rep-
rinted in 1804 and 1811. The late nineteenth century saw a new
series of translations and facsimile editions, whose audience
included scholars and artists as well as collectors. Scholarly
attention continued from that point onward, and scholars and
collectors remain at the core of its present audience.
Additional information about the Hypnerotomachia’s early
readership can be found in other sixteenth-century Italian
texts. Victoria Kirkham has noted that contemporary authors
of prose fiction in Italy showed only limited interest in emulat-
ing the work’s distinctive stylistic features, so references outstrip
imitations. A few such direct comments can be found, not all of
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which were words of praise. “When I hear the story of
Poliphilo, I invariably fall asleep,” stated Girolamo Cardano,
the noted mathematician, physician, and astrologer.5
Baldassare Castiglione recommended to his own readers that
using the language of Poliphilo was not an effective way to
impress women. Nonetheless, he claims that this advice came
from having watched some young men try, suggesting that
some of his colleagues had at least hoped otherwise in
practice.6 Poliphilo’s name seems to have been invoked for
those who spoke with excessively elevated style, a sign of the
work’s currency among the reading public if not entirely a
compliment to the work’s vocabulary and wordplay.
Many Renaissance readers left marginal notes and com-
ments in their books that help to suggest their reading prac-
tices. Some copies of the Hypnerotomachia are pristine, so no
doubt a number of purchasers collected the copy from the
outset rather than reading it actively. Modern scholars have
examined some of the marked copies, in a few cases identifying
noted owners or readers. Benedetto Giovio, elder brother of
the historian Paolo Giovio, owned and notated the copy now at
the Biblioteca Pubblica of Como.7 The theologian Sisto Medici
left a verse in a copy that he read (in 1518) as a novitiate at
Colonna’s community, SS. Giovanni e Paolo in Venice. It
moved eventually to England, becoming part of the collection
of John Moore, Bishop of Ely, and passing after his death to its
present home in the Cambridge University Library.8 This copy
as well as others, notes Edoardo Fumagalli, suggests at least
some Dominican readership in the work’s early decades. Some
of those copies remained many years in those locations; when
Apostolo Zeno reported in 1732 that he had found a copy
annotated in 1512 which had placed the author at the convent
of SS. Giovanni e Paolo, that copy (now lost) was at an
Observant Dominican house on the Zattere.9
Some readers took their marginalia very seriously; the
volume at the Biblioteca Comunale in Siena, owned by an
otherwise unknown Franciscus Finus, includes extensive anno-
tations copied from other notators in turn.10 This team of
commentators also annotated some of the illustrations.11
Fumagalli identified several types of marginal comments in
82 ANN E. MOYER
this manuscript; those in other copies fall into at least some of
the same categories. They may amend the text, correcting
errors; offer drawings that relate to the text or the illustrations
in some way; explain difficult terms; track down the classical
source used by the author; or offer an allegorical explanation of
a name, an event, or some other aspect of the text. Some offer
only a terse word or two, while others ramble along the
margins and constitute a fairly discursive comment or
reflection.
A copy now in Modena presents a reader whose energies
flagged part way through the text, a common enough feature
of readers and annotators then and now. As Dorothea Stichel
presents him to us, he did his best to proceed systematically,
noting similar usages that appeared elsewhere in the text and
marking puzzles to be solved later. The reader consulted mod-
ern reference works for information on words and meanings,
among them the Cornucopiae sive commentaria linguae Latinae (1489)
of Niccolò Perotti, used by Colonna, as well as Pietro Crinito’s
De honesta disciplina (1504) and Konrad Gessner’s Onomasticon
(1544), which appeared only after the Hypnerotomachia. He also
used modern editions of ancient sources, from Pliny to the
Suda (1499).12 In some places he offered corrections to some
of Colonna’s own references: while the text suggested Pliny, the
reader notes that a particular discussion of Egyptian stone
carving had actually been drawn from Leon Battista Alberti,
who himself had cited Diodorus Siculus.13 In all, he named
some sixty ancient sources and over twenty post-classical ones,
and showed a particular interest in references to matters med-
ical and botanical. References to Vesalius demonstrate his
currency with the scholarship of the decades following the
work’s first edition. One noted some parallels with Apuleius’s
Golden Ass; Colonna had used the1488 edition for Book I.14
The goals of some annotations are more readily apparent
than others. Some seem intended to explain the difficult text to
the reader, so as to make the work itself more understandable.
Those comments that amplify and explain Colonna’s idiosyn-
cratic vocabulary and wordplay would fall into this category.
Others seem rather to point outward, offering information or
corroboration that the reader may take away and use else-
where. It would seem that both directions were significant to
readers. Some comments seem to show a readerly appreciation
for the lengths to which the author had gone to make this
modern text consistent with ancient sources and current scho-
larship, whether in literary terms or those of natural philoso-
phy. That Poliphilo slept on his left side and then had a vivid
dream was understandable, commented the reader of the
Modena copy, as medical authorities show that this position
can lead to sleep disruption and nightmares.15 This sort of
learned reading seems to have appealed to a number of read-
ers. To go through the text and its illustrations raised in the
mind of the reader a range of associations from the literary and
classical world, from the play of words to the literary refer-
ences, from botanical arcana to the ruined vistas of Rome as
viewed in person and from the most recently published books.
 For these persons, then, the act of reading called upon their
educational background in a wide range of ways that brought
their own sort of enjoyment.
Several topics seem particularly to have engaged readers not
only as part of interpreting the text but also in moving from the
text into other aspects of their world. One was hieroglyphics.16
Poliphilo confronted them along with other mysterious inscrip-
tions and had to decipher them. Renaissance Europeans, espe-
cially Italians, had a growing number of examples of ancient
inscriptions before them, both as physical objects and as pub-
lished in books. Rome had its rediscovered obelisks. In his
treatise on architecture, Leon Battista Alberti had suggested
reviving hieroglyphics as a form of allegorical writing that
would transcend linguistic change and hence remain under-
standable to learned elites over milennia. Filarete’s architecture
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treatise praised them along with other styles and features of
ancient architecture. Ciriaco of Ancona had drawn and dis-
cussed them in Padua, in a manner that finds resonance in the
Poliphilo’s illustrations.17 Marsilio Ficino had brought attention
to Egyptian learned culture and philosophy with his transla-
tions of Hermes Trismegisthus. The year before the Poliphilo
appeared, Annius of Viterbo, another enterprising Dominican,
published his work of forged texts and inscriptions that
included the claim that ancient Egyptian divinities had a role
in establishing culture in Italy. Alexander VI had just had
Pinturicchio devote a room’s worth of frescoes at the Vatican
Palace to the myth of Isis and Osiris. Hieroglyphics captured
the imagination as evocative symbols of the distant past, their
meaning just beyond reach.
Bereft as they were of the Rosetta Stone, these viewers could
not actually decipher the meaning of these inscriptions. Their
main guide was the Hieroglyphica of Horapollo, that late-antique
text brought to Italy in the first decades of the fifteenth century
whose author claimed to offer keys to their interpretation; they
did not yet know that the author had come too late to the scene
really to be able to read them himself or teach others to do so.
The work circulated in manuscript, and Manutius published it
a few years after the Hypnerotomachia, in 1505. Poliphilo used its
principles to positive result. Readers might hope to profit by
Colonna’s application of this resource just as they did by his use
of Pliny or Varro.
Although most readers would have found limited need to
read actual hieroglyphics on a regular basis, they found other
uses for the skill as they understood it. Emblems, a combination
of motto and visual symbol, were coming increasingly into use
for individuals and organisations. A number of persons, includ-
ing some printers, used the hieroglyphics (and related architec-
tural elements) in the Hypnerotomachia to compose their own
emblems. Manutius’s own anchor-and-dolphin sign, expressing
his motto “festina lente,” developed at this time, and its ele-
ments appeared in the work.18 For these readers, the book’s
mixed genre, in which large amounts of information, imagery,
and description were included as part of a fictional narrative,
was effective in presenting information. They could and did
mine its contents for signs to represent themselves to the world
in turn, and to use the images as models when they wanted
examples of hieroglyphics, obelisks, or other ancient and exotic
features.
Descriptions of places and spaces of all kinds occupy an
enormous amount of space in the text. Lian Lefaivre counted
pages of coverage of various subjects and presented modern
readers with some impressive results. In a work of some three
hundred and seventy pages, a good two hundred consist of
architectural description of some sort, and Colonna might
devote multiple pages to such particulars as their various mea-
surements. He described other sorts of objects in similarly
lavish detail. Botanical descriptions occupy sixty pages, descrip-
tions of chariots a few pages more; even a banquet is presented
to the reader over some fourteen pages. The actual plot of the
story is advanced in only about thirty pages of the total.19 Little
wonder the story seems to move at a glacial pace to most
modern readers, since it occupies less than ten percent of the
work’s total volume.
Absent direct comments, it is not easy to know whether or to
what degree early readers found this feature a deterrent.
Negative remarks from the era seem aimed more at the lan-
guage than at the amount of description or the pace of the plot.
When the work moved into French, however, the publisher
and translator had the opportunity to edit. They moderated
some of the linguistic and stylistic extremes.20 Publisher Jean
Martin, in a preface, points that fact out to his readers. That
shortened the work to some degree. They also abridged some
sections, including some of the plot; yet they kept nearly all the
architectural description, and Martin brought that to the read-
er’s attention as well.21 Whether or not readers might have
preferred this topical balance or another if given the option,
this version remained in print for years and continued to
attract the interest of readers. A new set of illustrations updated
the visual style as well.
The English version, by comparison, cut the architectural
description considerably. The anonymous translator (known
only by the initials R.D.) seems not to have relied on the
French version but used Colonna’s 1499 original. He amplified
to some degree Colonna’s original apology for prolixity in such
matters, and added throughout a few English references, and
some Christian ones as well; he expanded a few remarks while
contracting very many more.22 This project seems to have been
truncated quickly for reasons unexplained. The last seventy
pages of Book 1 and all of Book 2 are missing, with no
justification or notice. The illustrations are cheaply done and
they too trail off. The project was not revived, and existing
copies are very rare. Little wonder it seems to have offered no
serious competition to the French editions.
The French versions started out well and remained influential.
Francis I owned a copy. Rabelais made use (and made fun) of it.23
Interest in the work continued through the seventeenth century;
Anthony Blunt surveyed its appeal in a classic article.24 The elite
social and literary movement, the Précieux, used it for emblems
83
 and in pastoral novels; those who satirized the movement also
employed references to Poliphilo as a standard part of their
weaponry. But they were not its sole audience. Given that so
much of the text was devoted to both descriptions and illustrations
of structures, places, and objects, it is hardly surprising that so
much of the book’s effect has been identified in visual culture.
Architects Francois Blondel and Jean Francois Félibien referred to
it as important for the information it conveyed about ancient
architecture; it influenced the Colonnade at Versailles and was
consulted for garden design; it inspired a tapestry and painting
series.25
It was also read as an alchemical work. Martin’s preface to
the first French edition (1546) observed that the text contained
many hidden things that could not be stated directly. The
next printing (1554) included a Latin preface by Jacques
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Gohorry, who claimed that hidden in the text lay the secret
of the philosophers’ stone. This claim was picked up and
repeated in later works of reference, including Charles
Sorel’s Bibliothèque francaise and Pierre Borel’s Bibliotheca
chemica.26 The version of 1600 was published by François
Béroalde de Verville, who claimed it as a new translation
though it seems only a revision of the previous version. His
title for the volume presented the work as alchemical discov-
eries hidden beneath a narrative veil: Le Tableau des Riches
Inventions Couvertes du voile des feintes Amoureuses, qui sont representees
dans le Songe de Poliphile Desvoilees des ombres et subtilement exposees
par Beroalde. Béroalde referred to the author in his preface as a
Mercuralist sage, and included a set of alchemical symbols
and definitions supposedly found in the work as well as a
frontispiece featuring those symbols.
This reading would seem not to have been the intent of the
original author. Nonetheless, such a claim might seem plausible
to later readers for several reasons. First, it was well known that
the author had left his name in an acrostic; the French versions
had carefully retained it. Thus it was not difficult to suspect
that other such codes might have been placed in the text.
Second, dreamlike or visionary narratives were not an uncom-
mon way to present alchemical ideas, as allegorical tales that
must be deciphered by the expert reader. Further, many twists
of the plot depended on solving puzzles and ciphers, so it did
not require much of a stretch to suppose that some might be
embedded in the work itself. In addition, readers were already
using the symbols and hieroglyphics in the work to construct
their own emblems and other designs. Finally, the existence of
some sort of coded message in the text would seem to offer a
plausible explanation for sections of prose that were especially
obtuse and difficult to follow.
Eighteenth-century interest left evidence that merits further
study. The new French version of 1772 was reprinted twice, in
1804 and 1811. Blunt suggested that after this point the work
became a “museum specimen,” no longer read for use or
pleasure.27 Indeed, by the late eighteenth century the early
editions of the work were appearing in a number of printed
catalogs of rare book sales; they had certainly become objects
84 ANN E. MOYER
of collection, and book collection was a well-established enter-
prise. Nonetheless, as Mario Praz has noted, the Poliphilo was
no mere museum specimen from this point onward. Later in
the nineteenth century it served once again as inspiration to
small but significant clusters of English writers and aesthetes,
the decadents and Pre-Raphaelites. Praz identified some pas-
sages by Algernon Charles Swinburne inspired by it; Aubrey
Beardsley used the Poliphilo in his novel Under the Hill.28 Dante
Gabriel Rossetti owned both Italian and French versions and
had claimed it as a favorite text since his youth.29 John Ruskin
and William Morris owned copies; the latter eventually gave
his (1499) copy to Edward Burne-Jones.30
By this time, Poliphilo had also wandered into the realms of
scholarship, an environment he has not left. Nearly all the
evidence presented here about the work’s readers in its first
centuries is the result of the scholarly readership that has
developed over the past century and more. Scholarship invol-
ving the Poliphilo dates from the time that Swinburne and his
aesthetically inclined colleagues were using the work to inspire
their own, though Apostolo Zeno’s notes in a learned journal of
his day and other similar references might properly push that
boundary back another century or more. The production of a
German doctoral dissertation on the subject would seem a
relevant milestone: in 1872 Albert Ilg examined the work’s art
historical merits.31 That paved the way for additional scholar-
ship in the history of art. Just over a decade later, in 1883,
Claude Popelin produced the first full translation into a mod-
ern language. Unlike the sixteenth-century version that had
taken on such a life of its own, this publication strove for
academic accuracy in rendering the original text, with critical
notes and a companion volume of scholarly essays.32 Within a
few years, a new edition of the English 1592 edition appeared.
New printing technologies began to allow for reproductions
and facsimile editions as well. Collectors, artists, and scholars
shared interests in these new versions as they did in originals. A
notice and brief exchange in the journal Notes and Queries in
1882, for example brought auction sales of the 1592 English
version to the attention of readers both scholarly and other-
wise, with information concerning the very few number of
known copies.33
Given the work’s unique connections between words and
text, it is not surprising that it became useful to scholars inter-
ested not only in the work itself, but in larger issues regarding
word and image in the Renaissance. Aby Warburg first read
the French 1546 version in 1889 as a doctoral student.34 Among
his studies of classical motifs in Renaissance art and letters was
a focus on a figure he labeled the Nympha Fiorentina, and the
Hypnerotomachia proved a valuable resource. As he worked, he
used both Ilg’s dissertation and a copy of the facsimile edition
of illustrations, into which he copied relevant sections of the
text. This process was especially useful for developing his ideas
about the rendering of movement in draperies. Most of this
work remained for him at the level of working papers. His only
published reference to the Hypnerotomachia appeared in his own
 dissertation as evidence suggesting that one of the nymphs in
the famous Botticelli painting indeed represented Spring.
Warburg’s interest passed to his fellow scholars and succes-
sors at the Warburg Institute in London. Fritz Saxl identified it
as the source of the subject of a 1526 painting by Garofalo.35
Anthony Blunt assessed its role in seventeenth-century culture,
especially in France.36 Ernst Gombrich examined its impor-
tance in Rome, especially for Bramante.37 Frances Yates sug-
gested an inspiration for the work as “an artificial memory
gone out of control into wild imaginative indulgence.”38
Edgar Wind and others admired it as a Neoplatonic text
recalling Hermetic secrets and Orphic mysteries. The work’s
mix of disciplines and genres, and of ancient traditions with
modern, held a recurring appeal.39
Yet the Warburg circle hardly held a monopoly on
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Poliphilo. Literary and textual scholars, especially in Italy,
turned to issues of editing and interpretation. The two-volume
study by Maria Casella and Giovanni Pozzi discussed both
regional and stylistic features of the work’s language, as well
as its sources and the biographical information on the author.40
This was followed by a critical edition, and yet another edition
that devoted particular attention to the work’s vernacular
sources.41 By the late 1990s a full English translation had
appeared as well.42 In addition, a diverse range of art historians
and literary scholars took an interest in the book over the past
century, including two recent doctoral dissertations in the
history of art.43 This accumulated scholarship now allows for
a much more accurate discussion of the effect of the work’s text
and images on buildings, garden design, paintings, and other
features of visual culture. So too has its importance to the
writings of Rabelais as well as other French authors become
clearer. Developments in twentieth-century literature did not
seem to lead immediately to an appreciation by scholarly critics
of the author’s experiments with language and style, despite the
occasional comparisons to Finnegan’s Wake. Such barbs, fairly
common even in the mid-twentieth century, seem to have been
stilled in the last decades.
The identity of the author has been a question of recurring
interest. A few early readers speculated on the matter in the
margins. Apostolo Zeno had raised the issue already in the
eighteenth century with his evidence in support of Francesco
Colonna, the Dominican teacher associated with Ss. Giovanni
e Paolo in Venice. A number of scholars proposed alternatives.
An art historian in the 1930s suggested a Veronese antiquarian,
Felice Feliciano.44 Another argued, mainly on circumstantial
evidence, in favor of a Roman noble named Francesco
Colonna.45 Yet another claimed Leon Battista Alberti.46
Casella and Pozzi accumulated an abundance of documentary
evidence to support the traditional attribution to the Venetian
Colonna. Some dissent remains, with suggestions of possible
joint authorship,47 but most seem now to regard the issue as
resolved.
Notably absent from this scholarly assembly have been pro-
fessional historians. Despite the interdisciplinary nature of
Renaissance studies in general and the cross-disciplinary appeal
of the book itself, twentieth-century historians devoted but little
energy to its study. One reason may lie in the development of
these fields in the early part of the past century. Despite some
significant points of overlap with Warburg and his colleagues in
their career paths, many of the figures associated with the
historical study of Renaissance thought, notably Paul Oskar
Kristeller but also such figures as Ernst Cassirer and John
Herman Randall, Jr., worked mainly in departments of philo-
sophy. Their work focused on the more systematic segments of
Renaissance thought; literary fiction, whether poetry or prose,
tended to fall outside their fields of interest. This separation of
interests has remained through the twentieth century and
beyond.
Indeed, this absence caused some problems of verisimilitude
for the authors of The Rule of Four, the recent novel that
featured the Hypnerotomachia.48 One of them, Ian Caldwell,
had been a history major at Princeton and written his senior
paper on the work. So when they invented scholars in their
novel, it seemed natural to them to create two historians, one
the father of the narrator. These two rivals had both made the
work the center of their scholarship but with competitive and
contrary approaches; one sought codes and puzzles within the
work as keys to its meaning, while the other looked outside the
text for biographical information that would account for and
explain its significance. A third member of this group was an
art historian in the university museum. Yet though each histor-
ian supposedly developed a career of distinction, none of the
issues, publications, or projects that engaged them bears much
resemblance to the work of practicing historians.
Nonetheless, the authors worked within the approaches
taken by various readers and scholars over the years. One of
the historians followed the arguments of Maurizio Calvesi, who
had claimed that the author was a Roman nobleman. In the
novel, this attribution becomes the correct one. The other
historian pored over the book in the belief that it held coded
hidden messages, as had sixteenth-century French readers,
most notably Francois Béroalde de Verville. And indeed, in
the novel its hidden meanings are eventually deciphered. The
undergraduate protagonist did not find the philosophers’ stone,
however. The quarry turned out to conceal buried treasure, a
prospect more likely to engage the interest of modern leisure
readers: works of arts and letters hidden by the Roman author
to escape the bonfires of Florence led by Savonarola.
This literary work serves to point out, though perhaps not
intentionally, some differences among disciplines in the ques-
tions they have posed and answered with and about the
Hypnerotomachia over the past century and more. More recent
trends have been shifting the balance once again. The inquiries
often collected under the general rubric “book history” —
including histories of print, of publishing, and of reading —
are all undertakings that call for mixed disciplinary approaches.
So too, scholarly understanding of the nature of the humanist
movement changed and developed a great deal in the later
85
 decades of the twentieth century, in ways important for asses-
sing this work. Rosemary Trippe has argued that the work’s
first goals emphasized the involvement of the reader in acts of
interpretation, features central to humanist culture. It invites,
perhaps requires, active involvement. Brian Curran has exam-
ined its formative role in the Renaissance appreciation of
Egyptian culture, and for many others it represents a colorful
example of antiquarianism.49 Such focuses on cultural practices
not only suggest a rebalancing of disciplinary interests in
Hypnerotomachia, but also a greater appreciation of the ways
the work engaged with central features of Renaissance culture.
Among those central features were efforts to bring aspects of
the ancient past into any and all segments of modern life,
including time spent not just in formal study but also in leisure.
Humanist educators offered their students a guide to life; for
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many, leading such a life meant bringing the movement into
their social time and informal recreation as well as their scho-
larly and literary hours. The world of the studiolo and its
treasures and opportunities beckoned increasingly for the soli-
tary individual. So too, humanists of Colonna’s generation
sought to redefine social gatherings. They re-imagined the
dinner party, with humanists themselves serving as entertainers
for one another in the style of an ancient symposium as they
understood it, reciting Latin poetry that required very active
attention both for the poet who created it on the spot and for
the diners in the audience. They created academies to spend
afternoon and evening hours discussing poetry or natural phi-
losophy. The reading of texts such as the Hypnerotomachia was
another such practice. It called for very active engagement; the
reader needed to summon a breadth of linguistic knowledge,
familiarity with ancient texts, and current trends in antiquarian
scholarship. Rewards included the pleasure of recognition of
ancient statuary, architectural elements, classical vocabulary,
and philosophical learning. Readers could enjoy the thrill of
being in contact with a text that contained hidden messages,
perhaps including some still undeciphered. They could move
from the text to constructing or purchasing artifacts of their
own, whether (depending upon their means) a garden design or
a painting on the wall, or an emblem that they could use to
identify themselves as part of this cultural community. The
Hypnerotomachia thus still holds many rewards, if not perhaps
the key to actual buried treasure, for the historian as well as for
the other scholars in Renaissance Studies, especially for those
engaged with the histories of readers, writers, printers, and
interpretation.
NOTES
1 – Paola Cadelando, “Albo corvo rarior ovvero: alla ricera del Polifilo,” in
Verso il Polifilo 1499–1999, ed. Dino Cangrande (Venice: Biblioteca
Nazionale Marciana, 1998), 185–215; cited in Rosemary C. Trippe, “The
Hypnerotomachia Poliphili and the Image of Italian Humanism” (PhD diss.,
Johns Hopkins University, 2004), 1.
86 ANN E. MOYER
2 – Francesco Colonna, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: The Strife of Love in a Dream,
trans. Joscelyn C. S. Godwin (London: Thames & Hudson, 1999), xv.
3 – Brian Richardson, Printing, Writers, and Readers in Renaissance Italy
(Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 69, 171;
Maria Teresa Casella and Giovanni Pozzi, Francesco Colonna: biografia e opere,
2 vols (Padua: Antenore, 1959), 1.44–46, 88–89, 124, 153.
4 – Anthony Blunt, “The ‘Hypnerotomachia poliphili’ in Seventeenth-
Century France,” Journal of the Warburg Institute 1 (1938): 117–37, at 119.
5 – “Ego cum audio Poliphili historian statim dormio.” Girolamo Cardano,
De Rerum Varietate, in the chapter “Cum morborum superstituiosa,” cited in
Dorothea Stichel, “Reading the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili in the
Cinquecento: Marginal Notes in a Copy at Modena,” in Aldus Manutius
and Renaissance Culture: Essays in Memory of Franklin D. Murphy. Acts of an
International Conference, Venice and Florence, 14–17 June 1994, ed. David S.
Zeidberg and Fiorella Gioffredi Superbi (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1998):
217–36, at 217.
6 – Robert H. F. Carver, The Protean Ass: The Metamorphoses of Apuleius from
Antiquity to the Renaissance (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press,
2007), 187; B. Castiglione, Il libro del Cortegiano, ed. E. Bonora, comm.
P. Zoccola (Milano: Mursia, 1972).
7 – Stichel, “Reading the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili,” 236.
8 – Edoardo Fumagalli, “Due esemplari dell’Hypnerotomachia Poliphili di
Francesco Colonna,” Aevum 66, no. 2 (1992): 419–32, at 420–21.
9 – Apostolo Zeno, “n.t.,” Giornale de’ letterati d’Italia 35 (1732): 300–01;
Trippe, “The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili and the Image of Italian
Humanism,” 7; Fumagalli, “Due esemplari,” 423–24.
10 – Fumagalli, “Due esemplari,” 422–23.
11 – Fumagalli, “Tra descrizione e rappresentazione: due vignette dell’
Hypnerotomachia Poliphili,” in Lettere e arti nel Rinascimento: atti del X convegno
internazionale: Chianciano–Pienza 20–23 luglio 1998, ed. Luisa Rotondi Secchi
Tarugi (Florence: Franco Cesati Editore, 2000), 429–34.
12 – Stichel, “Reading the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili,” 224–28.
13 – Ibid., 228.
14 – Carver, Protean Ass, 193.
15 – Stichel, “Reading the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili,” 230–31.
16 – Brian A. Curran, “The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili and Renaissance
Egyptology,” Word & Image 14, no. 1–2 (1998): 156–85; Curran, The
Egyptian Renaissance: The Afterlife of Ancient Egypt in Early Modern Italy
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
17 – Tamara Griggs, “Promoting the Past: The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili as
Antiquarian Enterprise,” Word & Image 14, no. 1–2 (1998): 17–39.
18 – Giovanni Pozzi, “Les hiéroglyphes de l’Hypnerotomachia Poliphili,” in
L’Emblème à la Renaissance: Actes de la journée d’études du 10 mai 1980, ed. Yves
Giraud (Paris: Société d’édition d’enseignement supérieur, 1982), 15–27;
Nathaniel Wallace, “Architextual Poetics: The Hypnerotomachia and the
Rise of the European Emblem,” Emblematica 8, no. 1 (1994): 1–27; Liana
de Girolami Cheney, “Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili:
A Garden of Neoplatonic Love,” Discoveries: South-Central Renaissance
Conference News and Notes 21, no. 1 (2004): 3; Helen Barolini, Aldus
and his Dream Book: An Illustrated Essay (New York: Italica Press, 1992),
88–90.
19 – Liane Lefaivre, Leon Battista Alberti’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: Re-cognizing
the Architectural Body in the Early Italian Renaissance (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1997), 9.
20 – Maria Gabriella Adamo, “Dall’Hypnerotomachia Poliphili al Songe
de Poliphile,” Studi di Letteratura Francese (subseries of Biblioteca dell’Archivum
Romanicum, Serie I – Storia – Lett 19 (1992): 123–53.
21 – Dudley Wilson, “The Strife of Love in a Dreame, an Elizabethan
Translation of Part of the First Book of Francesco Colonna’s
Hypnerotomachia,” Bulletin of the Society for Renaissance Studies 4, no. 1 (1986):
41–53, at 42.
22 – Ibid., 44. For a less sympathetic discussion of the English version see
Donald Beecher, “The Tudor Translation of Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia,”
Cahiers élisabéthains 15 (1979): 1–16.
 23 – A. Kent Hieatt and Anne Lake Prescott, “Contemporizing Antiquity:
The Hypnerotomachia and Its Afterlife in France,” Word & Image 8, no. 4
(1992): 291–321.
24 – Blunt, “The ‘Hypnerotomachia poliphili’ in Seventeenth-Century
France,” 118.
25 – Ibid., 121, 126.
26 – Ibid., 124.
27 – Ibid., 117–37.
28 – Mario Praz, “Some Foreign Imitators of the Hypnerotomachia
Poliphili,” Italica 24, no. 1 (1947): 20–25.
29 – Catherine Maxwell, “‘Devious Symbols’: Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s
Purgatorio,” Victorian Poetry 31, no. 1 (1993): 19–40.
30 – April Oettinger, “Aby Warburg’s Nymph and the Hypnerotomachia
Poliphili: An Episode in the Afterlife of a Renaissance Romance,”
Explorations in Renaissance Culture 32, no. 2 (2006): 225–46, at 241.
31 – Albert Ilg, Über den kunsthistorischen Werth der “Hypnerotomachia Poliphili”
(Vienna: Braumüller, 1872).
32 – Francesco Colonna, Le Songe de Poliphile, ou Hypnérotomachie de frère F. Colonna
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littéralement traduit pour la première fois, avec une introduction et des notes par Claudius
Popelin, ed. Claudius Marcel Popelin-Ducarre (Paris: Liseux, 1883).
33 – G. Fisher, “Hypnerotomachia, the Strife of Love in a Dreame, Published by
John Busbie in 1592,” Notes and Queries Series 6, vol. 5, alt. no. 130 (1882): 497.
34 – Oettinger, “Aby Warburg’s Nymph.”
35 – Fritz Saxl, “A Scene from the Hypnerotomachia in a Painting by
Garofalo,” Journal of the Warburg Institute 1, no. 2 (1937): 169–71.
36 – Blunt, “The “Hypnerotomachia poliphili” in Seventeenth-Century
France.”
37 – E. H. Gombrich, “Hypnerotomachiana,” Journal of the Warburg and
Courtauld Institutes 14, no. 1/2 (1951): 119–25.
38 – Frances Amelia Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1966), 123.
39 – Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (London: Faber, 1958),
45.
40 – Casella and Pozzi, Francesco Colonna.
41 – Francesco Colonna, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, edizione critica, ed.
Giovanni Pozzi and Lucia A. Ciapponi (Padua: Antenore, 1964).
42 – Colonna, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: The Strife of Love in a Dream, trans.
Joscelyn C. S. Godwin (London: Thames & Hudson, 1999).
43 – April Oettinger, “The ‘Hypnerotomachia Poliphili’: Image and Text
in a Renaissance Romance” (PhD diss., University of Virginia, 2000);
Trippe, “The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili and the Image of Italian
Humanism.”
44 – A. Khomentovskaia, “Felice Feliciano da Verona comme l’auteur de
l’Hypnerotomachia Poliphili [1],” La bibliofilia 37, no. 4 (1935): 154–74;
Khomentovskaia, “Felice Feliciano da Verona comme l’auteur de
l’Hypnerotomachia Poliphili [2],” La bibliofilia 37, no. 5 (1935): 200–12;
Khomentovskaia, “Felice Feliciano da Verona comme l’auteur de
l’Hypnerotomachia Poliphili,” La bibliofilia 38, no. 1 (1936): 20–48.
45 – Maurizio Calvesi, “Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. Nuovi riscontri e
nuove evidenze documentarie per Francesco Colonna signore di
Preneste,” Storia dell’arte 60 (1987): 85–136.
46 – Lefaivre, Leon Battista Alberti’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili.
47 – Carver, The Protean Ass, 183–239; Ingrid D. Rowland, The Culture of the
High Renaissance: Ancients and Moderns in Sixteenth-century Rome (Cambridge;
New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 60–67. For summaries of
the debate, see ibid, 272–73, Trippe, The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, 6–14.
48 – Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason, The Rule of Four (New York: Dial
Press, 2004).
49 – Trippe, “The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili and the Image of Italian
Humanism;” Curran, “The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili and Renaissance
Egyptology;” Curran, Egyptian Renaissance.
87