The Spenser Encyclopedia by Hamilton A. C.; & DONALD CHENEY & W.F.BLISSETT & DAVID A.RICHARDSON & WILLIAM W.BARKER

Author:Hamilton, A. C.; & DONALD CHENEY & W.F.BLISSETT & DAVID A.RICHARDSON & WILLIAM W.BARKER
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge

Hypnerotomachia Poliphili

Printed in Venice by Aldus Manutius in 1499, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili is ‘Poliphilus’ strife of love in a dream,’ a dream-vision highlighting the imagination as powerfully as does The Faerie Queene. The work is generally believed to be by Francesco Colonna (1433–1527), although his authorship is disputed. Published with extremely beautiful woodcuts by an unknown artist, it is in a prose made up of Italian, Latin, and Greek, thus belonging to an Hermetic tradition in which a mélange of languages simultaneously hides and expresses mysteries.

Poliphilus, in love with Polia, falls into a dream in which he loses his way in a wood, encounters strange adventures, and meets various allegorical figures through whom he comes to a nymph resembling Polia. Together they witness triumphs, go through love rituals in a temple of Venus, and are taken by Cupid to Cythera, where Polia tells her story after seeing a triumph of Cupid. As Poliphilus offers to embrace her, she vanishes, and he wakes alone on 1 May 1467.

Certain features are familiar from tradition, such as the wood, denoted by a tree catalogue comparable to FQ I i 8–9 (see also *gardens). Many others are unexpected, not least that the Dominican author reveals in an acrostic that ‘Fra Francesco Colonna desperately loved Polia,’ who herself is identifiable as a member of a Treviso family. Colonna also desperately loved art, particularly that of antiquity, and the Hypnerotomachia is full of rhapsodic descriptions of triumphs and works of art, especially ruins, such as temples, statues, and obelisks.

Its influence was strong and pervasive, with two French translations in 1546 and 1600, and a translation of the earlier part into English, dedicated to Sidney's memory (Hypnerotomachia: The Strife of Love in a Dreame tr R.D., 1592). It stimulated the taste for ruins and the fashion for emblems through what the Elizabethan translator calls its ‘Aegiptian Hyerogliphs’ (sig C3r). Text and woodcuts became a source for artists in France and Italy. There is plentiful evidence that it was popular in England (see ed 1973: vi–xvii). Jonson owned a copy (now in the British Library). Whether the English, still by and large provincial in their tastes in the visual arts, were responsive to the visual beauty of the book and its illustrations is debatable.

The Faerie Queene seems to echo the work, though precise links are hard to substantiate. Arguably, Spenser is indebted to Colonna for the singular importance of the triumph (Fowler 1970b:47–57) and for the arithmological stanza of II ix 22 (Cummings 1967; see *Alma). Colonna's taste for emblems would have been congenial to Spenser, though not his often frank eroticism. Probably a significant precedent for The Faerie Queene would have been the descriptions in which Colonna celebrates both physical beauty and a Platonic ideal, such as his account of Polia (ch II; ed 1980, 1:133ff; 1592: fols 77v–9) which, in this respect, can be compared with the account of Belphoebe in FQ II iii 21–31.

LUCY GENT

Francesco Colonna 1499 Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Venice; rpt London 1963 with intro by George Painter); Colonna ed 1592 Hypnerotomachia: The Strife of Love in a Dreame tr R.

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