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| attributed to Francesco Colonna Hypnerotomachia Poliphili published by Aldus Manutius in Venice 1499 woodcuts attributed to Benedetto Bordone Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
"Certain other works produced during the Quattrocento are relevant to the development of theory in Italy. The most important is the curious and celebrated romance attributed to Fra Francesco Colonna, entitled Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, first published by Aldus Manutius in 1499 in an edition principally famous for its woodcuts. Colonna, who was born in 1433, was a monk in the monastery of SS Giovanni e Paolo in Venice and also for a time at his native Treviso. The Hypnerotomachia is dated 1467, but the author probably went on working at it till the date of its publication. This romance is of interest because it is the only work dealing with the Fine Arts produced in Venice during the Quattrocento, and therefore the only direct clue to the views which the Venetians held about aesthetics at that time.
A very large element of Gothic survives in the painting and architecture of Venice in the late fifteenth century; for the Gothic tradition was too deeply established to be completely dislodged by the cult of antiquity which spread to Venice from Florence and Rome. The classical style was taken up, but it was treated in a romantic and irrational spirit. Painters like Mantegna imitated ancient statues with enthusiasm, but they combined what they derived from them with a Gothic emotionalism. Architects such as the Lombardi used the classical orders, but in combination with Gothic structure and with an almost oriental uses of rich marbles.
The same mixture of medieval and classical elements appears in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. In form it is a Gothic romance, of the type of the Roman de la Rose, but taken more directly from the Amorosa Visione of Boccaccio. The wanderings of the unhappy lover Poliphilus in search of his Polia are accompanied by all the adventures and allegories traditional in the romances of the Middle Ages. But the author has used this medieval form to express above all his overwhelming passion for antiquity. Every episode, every allegory is dressed up in classical phraseology. The language and names are a bastard mixture of Italian, Latin, and Greek; the buildings described are in the ancient manner; the monuments are covered with Latin or Greek inscriptions, or with hieroglyphics which the author painstakingly transcribes and explains; every ceremony is dedicated to a classical god or goddess.
The author evidently set himself to recreate an atmosphere which he believed to be ancient. But his method and, indeed, his whole attitude to antiquity are fundamentally different from that of a Florentine Humanist like Alberti. Whereas the latter is rational and severely archaeological, Colonna interprets his knowledge of antiquity imaginatively, with no great regard for accuracy of detail. He is not interested in the philosophical and moral ideas of the ancients; he wishes only to take from antiquity those elements which will help him build up a dream; and this dream, one feels, became for him more important than the ordinary conduct of life. His view is summed up in the sub-title of the book: Ubi humana omnia non nisi somnium esse ostendit [in which it is shown that all human things are but a dream].
But the dream which he spun was a very sweet one, in which he could enjoy all those things which were unattainable to him in real life. Among these is the ideal of perfect love, which is expressed in a very strong erotic element throughout the book. This is usually discreetly clothed in allegory, but the covering is sometimes of the thinnest and the symbolism of the most direct kind.
The author's imaginative attitude also extends to matters of pure archaeology, in which he seems not to bother about either accuracy or consistency. When he describes the ritual which is performed in the various temples which Poliphilus visits, there is often a strong tinge of Christian usage; so that, for instance, the attendants in the temple of Venus say 'So be it' at the end of each prayer. The architectural descriptions, which are the most important part of the book from the present point of view, do not contain the same mixture of non-classical elements, but, compared with Alberti's business-like analyses, they are fantastic and irrational. At first sight the author seems to be very precise in the giving of dimensions, which he piles up for every building that he describes. But these are apparently not supplied for the benefit of an architect who might wish to carry out the schemes, but merely to give the reader an impression of vast size and elaboration. The buildings are so fantastic that few have attempted to put Colonna's ideas into execution.
One of the most remarkable of the buildings which he describes is the great monument crowned with an obelisk [directly below]. Colonna's description is evidently a free imaginative version of ancient accounts of the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, but with many elements of his own invention. The base of the building was a block forty paces high on a square of 1,200 paces. On this was built a pyramid of 1,400 steps, crowned by a cube of stone on a side of four paces, which supported a huge obelisk, in a single shaft fourteen paces high. Finally the whole monument was topped by a great statue of gilded bronze, representing Occasio, so arranged that it was turned on its axis by the wind, with a terrifying noise. There is in this description something of the fear which men of the Middle Ages felt before the vast ruins of Roman times; but it is combined with an intense desire to recreate their glories, though only in the imagination."
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| attributed to Francesco Colonna Hypnerotomachia Poliphili - The Pyramid published by Aldus Manutius in Venice 1499 woodcuts attributed to Benedetto Bordone Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
"In many cases, however, Colonna shows a different view about the remains of antiquity. Many of the buildings which he describes are in a state of ruin, and in talking of them he betrays a romantic feeling quite unlike the serious archaeological approach of the early Quattrocento Florentines. Brunelleschi and Alberti, for instance, spent much time on the study of the remains of ancient Rome, but only in order to find out what they had been like when they were complete. For them the ruins were a school for the modern builder. Colonna takes an actual delight in the fact that they are ruins and not complete buildings. He describes their decay with real feeling, and makes them an excuse for reflections on the frailty of human life and love, and on the destructive passage of time. When Poliphilus comes upon the ruins of Polyandrion [directly below], the ancient temple of Pluto, Polia says to him: 'Look a while at this noble relic of things great in the eyes of posterity, and see how it now lies in ruins and has become a heap of fragments of rough and humpy stones. In the first age of man it was a splendid and magnificent temple . . .' Colonna is in fact here indulging in that sentimental and melancholy delight in ruins as symbols of the impermanence of things which became so fashionable at a later date, particularly in the eighteenth century."
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| attributed to Francesco Colonna Hypnerotomachia Poliphili - The Ruins of Polyandrion published by Aldus Manutius in Venice 1499 woodcuts attributed to Benedetto Bordone Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
"The Hypnerotomachia was not of great use to architects who wished to learn about the methods and structure of ancient buildings, but to the painters, sculptors, engravers, and maiolica painters it was an endless source of themes. The hieroglyphics which Colonna describes were perhaps the most popular part of the book, and Aldus set the fashion by taking one representing a dolphin curled round an anchor as his printer's mark. Other parts were also borrowed. Some painters, for instance, copied the subjects on the reliefs which Poliphilus finds in his wanderings; others illustrated scenes from the story in paintings. In these various ways the novel could be of use to all those who felt that antiquity was a sort of ideal existence which could be reconstructed in imagination. For those whose approach was more sharply archaeological or more severely moralizing it was not of much service."
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| attributed to Francesco Colonna Hypnerotomachia Poliphili - Figure of Leda and the Swan on triumphal car drawn by elephants published by Aldus Manutius, Venice 1499 woodcuts attributed to Benedetto Bordone Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| attributed to Francesco Colonna Hypnerotomachia Poliphili - Priapian Rite published by Aldus Manutius in Venice 1499 woodcuts attributed to Benedetto Bordone Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| attributed to Francesco Colonna Hypnerotomachia Poliphili - Obelisk and Elephant published by Aldus Manutius Venice 1499 woodcuts attributed to Benedetto Bordone Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
"Bernini seems to have had a description from the Hypnerotomachia in mind when he designed the fountain outside S. Maria sopra Minerva with the elephant carrying an obelisk on its back . . ."
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| Gianlorenzo Berninni Study for Elephant with Obelisk ca. 1632 wash drawing Royal Collection, Windsor |
– quoted paragraphs on Francesco Colonna's mighty book are by Anthony Blunt, from Artistic Theory in Italy, 1450-1600 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940)