Hypnerotomachia Poliphili

Introduction
Typography
- Fonts
- Text and image
- Technopaegnia
Woodcuts
Cinematic visual logic
- Moving bodies
- Double page spread
- Filmic sequences
Architecture
Gardens and landscapes
Other editions
Mysterious messages
Eros and metaphor
Technical innovations
External links

Synopsis

Credits

  

Credits

Almost five hundred years after its publication in Venice, by publisher Aldus Manutius (1499), Hypnerotomachia Poliphili is enjoying an electronic re-emergence on the web. The Design Knowledge Systems of the School of Architecture, University of Technology of Delft, in collaboration with the MIT Press have produced a facsimile of the original edition in conjunction with the publication of Liane Lefaivre, Leon Battista Alberti's Hypnertomachia Poliphili: Re-Configuring the Architectural Body in the Early Italian Renaissance (ISBN 0262122049). The Electronic Poliphilo contains the integral text and illustrations, extracts and short references to Lefaivre's book. Web readers are invited to explore this new edition using interactive text and image navigational devices and a discussion group will be established. The text can be accessed either through the MIT Press's home page or the Design Knowledge Systems Group (DKS) Home Page at the Technical University of Delft.

CREDITS

  • Sinan Inanç   Site design
  • Asaf Friedman   Site design
  • Darlene Schopman   Technical assistent
  • Liane Lefaivre   Editor
  • Prof. Alexander Tzonis   Director of the DKS Research Group

Written by 1467 and printed at the press of the renowned early Renaissance Venetian publisher, Aldus Manutius, in 1499, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili is held among bibliophiles and book collectors to be the most beautiful book of all time and, for this reason, it is one of the most sought-after of all the incunabulae. It is celebrated as a masterpiece of typographical design and for its spectacular images.

More than just a beautiful object, the book has attracted the universal admiration of scholars for its scholarship, and for its identity as an erudite architectural treatise, equal if not superior to the other treatises of the Renaissance.

Liane Lefaivre attributes Hypnerotomachia, traditionally associated with a Francesco Colonna, to Leon Battista Alberti. The reason the attribution has not been made before is that architectural historians have tended in a reductive manner to focus on his purely architectural work and to disregard Alberti's multifaceted, indeed poliphilic side. The book is a unique document of Renaissance culture, a polemic of pacifistic civic humanism, feminism and sexual emancipation. It is also a unique document on the role of the body metaphor and dreamwork in creative architectural design.

 

[Home] · [Previous] · [The book]

 

Delft University of Technology and MIT Press.