Hypnerotomachia Poliphili by Colonna, Francesco - 1998

Two volumes, 23 x 15 cm. Blue cloth with labels to spines; bound-in ribbon markers. White laid paper dust jackets with transparent plastic protectors. Blue clothbound slipcase with bound-in ribbon. Italian. Riproduzione dell'edizione aldina del 1499. Introduzione, traduzione e commento di Marco Ariani e Mino Gabriele. Volume 1 is a facsimile of Venice, 1499; Volume 2: critical essays, notes, translation (into modern Italian), commentary, indices. "The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili has long been considered the most legendary and enigmatic architectural book ever written. Since its publication [by Aldus Manutius] in 1499, it has fascinated architects and historians with its vast display of architectural knowledge and its erudite reading of the related arts of landscape, engineering, painting,and sculpture. Its 172 wood engravings … qualify it as the first illustrated architectural book in the history of printing." (1) From a somewhat different point of view, the Hypnerotomachia has also been described as "that somewhat scurrilous and certainly paganized book of the pursuit of love …, the most glorious book of the Renaissance, profusely illustrated and beautifully ornamented, which to this day remains a mystery, a text of symbols and bizarre jargon in various languages and dialects." (2) As the title itself might indicate, and as Joscelyn Godwin points out in the introduction to his 1999 English translation, "There are few passages of the book that are not to some degree erotic, if we allow that Eros-Cupid-Amor is the god who fires us with the desire for beauty of every kind." (3) And Carl G. Jung places the book's attraction in a still larger context: "Like every real dream, the Hypnerotomachia is Janus-headed; it is a picture of the Middle Ages just beginning to turn into modern times by way of the Renaissance – a transition between two eras, and therefore deeply interesting to the wolrd of today, which is still more transitional in character." (4) English readers without Italian will want the Godwin translation; the Adelphi is the modern Italian critical edition, notable for its sumptuous production and its exhaustive commentaries and scholarly apparatus. (1) Liane Lefaivre, Leon Battista Alberti's Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Cambridge, Mass., 1997), dust jacket flap. (2) Helen Barolini, Aldus and His Dream Book (New York, 1992), 91. (3) Francesco Colonna, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, The Strife of Love in a Dream, trans. J. Godwin (New York, 1999), Introduction (vii). (4) C. G. Jung, Foreword to Linda Fierz-David, The Dream of Poliphilo (Dallas, 1987), xiii-xiv.