The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili and the Elizabethan landscape entertainments

Abstract

The many doubts concerning the authorship of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, responsibility for its illustrations, and the circumstances whereby it reached the Aldine Press, have fostered a particular kind of approach in modern criticism of the book. As can be seen in other essays within this collection, our inability to answer convincingly some of the more standard questions about a work of art in this case has encouraged us to situate the Hypnerotomachia principally in broad cultural terms, to interpret it as the product of its age and society rather than as, first and foremost, the idiosyncratic work of an individual. This tendency has been encouraged by the fact that the Hypnerotomachia is universally recognized as a ‘book’ rather than simply as a ‘text’, enjoying a status as a physical object, a word and image combination, that still has to be argued for in connection with many other works. The creation of ‘books’ is, with rare exceptions, collaborative; and their study is essentially ‘sociological’.