Hypno what? A dreamer’s vision and the reader’s nightmare

Abstract

Splendidly illustrated and published at the renowned presses of Aldus Manutius in 1499, the Hypnerotomachia Polifili has attracted much interest from art, architectural, garden, and print historians, but precious little from students of literature. Hardly anyone reads it, and those who have usually complain bitterly about a brain-numbing experience. This bizarre romance by a “relaxed” Venetian monk, beginning with its nearly unpronounceable Greek title, is in a language all its own, an artificial idiolect close to incomprehensible. Ironically, while eccentric to any literary canon, the book fuses eclectically those very classics from whose company history has banished it. In addition to such ancients as Pliny, Vitruvius, Ovid, and Apuleius, Polifilo’s love story reflects an encyclopedic medieval heritage ranging from late antique Neoplatonism and Christian curriculum authors to the great Trecento trio Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. Although produced in a Renaissance era of humanism with the latest in print technology, as literature it belongs to the past. Cast as a dream vision, with the author’s name concealed in an old-fashioned acrostic, these curious pages are not only nearly impenetrable, they are a cultural anachronism, a cul-de-sac soon bypassed by Ariosto’s enormously popular Orlando furioso, mainstream renewals of Boccaccio’s seductive fiction, and the Cinquecento cult of Petrarchismo.