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

Synopsis of L. Lefaivre’s
Leon Battista Alberti’s
Hypnerotomachia Poliphili

Written by 1467 and printed at the press of the renowned early Renaissance Venetian publisher, Aldus Manutius, in 1499, The 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 because of its perfected Bembo typeface, that went on to become the standard for the next five hundred years, (pp.10-14) its typographical design feats in shaping the text to assume rounded, angular and zigzag contours (pp.135-136), its 172 spectacular woodcuts (pp.14-17), and its integration of text and images (pp.17-18). It went through many foreign language editions.

More than just a beautiful object, the book has attracted the universal admiration of scholars for its high standards of scholarship, in particular the philological and archaeological matters related to architecture. Indeed, it contains an erudite architectural treatise (pp.34-43) that is equal if not superior to the other treatises of the Renaissance, including the most erudite of all, Leon Battista Alberti’s De re aedificatoria, as well as one on Renaissance ars topiaria and garden design.

The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili is a unique textual hybrid. In addition to a treatise, it is also a romanzo d’amore in the tradition of Giovanni Boccaccio. If scholars have lavished praise upon the treatise, they have, on the contrary, dismissed the love story as boring and derivative. (pp.9-10). Liane Lefaivre argues, however, that it is much more important than previously believed because of its unsuspected eroticism. Of course, the eroticism of the illustrations has been the subject of censorship (pp.66-75). A closer reading reveals that it is the central device not only informing the woodcuts and structuring the plot of the story, but bringing together the seemingly different parts of the book including the scholarly ones. In fact the erotic is indissassociable from the erudite and the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, as its title suggests, is a kind of polemical erotic manifesto, applied not only to persons but to a whole way of life. At a time when chastity is the major building block in the construction of femininity, one third of the text is taken up with what is probably the first defense of a woman, Poliphilo’s beloved, Polia, to express her sexuality (pp.62-64) but, of all the erotic themes in the book the most remarkable is surely that aimed at the metaphor of the buildings as the embodiment of Polia (pp.64-66).

Why has the eroticizing metaphor of the architectural body been overlooked? Several reasons, but partly because of its difficult, polyglot, Joycean prose (pp.87-96) Indeed, it is choked with Latin and inscription in Greek, and laced with a smattering of Hebrew, Arabic and many fanciful hieroglyphics. Adding to the obscurity of the text is the mystery surrounding its author. So far, attribution have focused on two Francesco Colonnas, one a Dominican monk living in Venice, the other a Roman baron (pp.98-109)

Liane Lefaivre attributes the Hypnerotomachia to Leon Battista Alberti ( p.112-184). 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. She finds traces of Alberti’s authorship, what Alberti himself referred to as "sprinklings," in the presence of the great linguistic and literary sophistication of the book, of the expertise in geometry and engineering, of the mechanical inventions, of the obsession with perspective and the cinematic representation of movement, and the polemic defense of pacifistic civic humanism. One reason he would have written this book would have been to supplement his De re aedificatoria, composed almost twenty years earlier, before he actually entered the practice of architectural design first hand. From this point of view, the Hypnerotomachia is a treatise on architectural creativity and the all important role of dreamwork in this process (pp.46-57; 168-171).

The one aspect for which there is no precedent in the work of Alberti is the erotic architectural body. In order to be understood, it must be seen in a broad context of the history of the body metaphor in architecture, extending from the period preceding the early Renaissance to the time then the Hypnerotomachia was being composed, one where the dominant mentality of contemptus mundi is being turned upside down, in favor of a generalized amor mundi and libido aedificandi, that is when the representations of buildings are reconfigured from dangerous bodies to marvelous bodies, divine bodies and, finally, humanist bodies. This process of re-cognition of the architectural body is crucial to the rise of humanist architecture and culture. (pp.185-end)

Leon Battista Alberti's Hypnerotomachia Poliphili
Re-Cognizing the Architectural Body in the Early Italian Renaissance
by Liane Lefaivre
The MIT Press