Francesco Colonna's weird, erotic, allegorical antiquarian tale, "Hypnerotomachia Poliphili", together with all of its 174 original woodcut illustrations, has been called the first "stream of consciousness" novel and was one of the most important documents of Renaissance imagination and fantasy. The author -- presumed to be a friar of dubious reputation -- was obsessed by architecture, landscape and costume (it is not going too far to say sexually obsessed) and its woodcuts are a primary source for Renaissance ideas.
“One part The Da Vinci Code, one part The Name of the Rose and one part A Separate Peace . . . a smart, swift, multitextured tale that both entertains and informs.”—San Francisco Chronicle NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Princeton. Good Friday, 1999. On the eve of graduation, two friends are a hairsbreadth from solving the mysteries of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, a Renaissance text that has baffled scholars for centuries. Famous for its hypnotic power over those who study it, the five-hundred-year-old Hypnerotomachia may finally reveal its secrets—to Tom Sullivan, whose father was obsessed with the book, and Paul Harris, whose future depends on it. As the deadline looms, research has stalled—until a vital clue is unearthed: a long-lost diary that may prove to be the key to deciphering the ancient text. But when a longtime student of the book is murdered just hours later, a chilling cycle of deaths and revelations begins—one that will force Tom and Paul into a fiery drama, spun from a book whose power and meaning have long been misunderstood. BONUS: This edition includes an excerpt from Dustin Thomason's 12.21. “Profoundly erudite . . . the ultimate puzzle-book.”—The New York Times Book Review
PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS BOOK IS ONLY THE 2ND HALF OF ONE SINGLE BOOK. IN ORDER TO HAVE A COMPLETE TEXT, READERS ARE SUGGESTED TO CONSIDER ALSO VOLUME I, AVAILABLE HERE http://bookstore.xlibris.com/Products/SKU-0081451017/default.aspx AFTER YEARS OF FIELD RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT, THIS IS A SECOND BOOK OF WHAT SEEMS TO BECOME A SERIES OF PUBLICATIONS. THE INTENT IS TO RECONSTRUCT THE ARCHITECTURE AND LANDSCAPES DESCRIBED IN THE HYPNEROTOMACHIA POLIPHILI WITH THE AID OF DIGITAL MEDIUMS. THIS ENIGMATIC INCUNABULUM WITH ITS 172 WOODCUTS, FIRST PUBLISHED IN VENICE IN 1499 BY THE VENETIAN PRESS OF ALDUS MANUTIUS, HAS FASCINATED HISTORIANS, PATRONS, AND ESPECIALLY ARCHITECTS EVER SINCE ITS ANONYMOUS PUBLICATION. A RENEWED INTEREST FOR THIS LEGENDARY RENAISSANCE TEXT HAS EMERGED WITH MODERN TRANSLATIONS READILY NOW AVAILABLE IN ITALIAN, ENGLISH, AND SPANISH, NOT TO MENTION ITS USE AS THE CENTRAL THEME FOR CALDWELL AND THOMASON’S BESTSELLER, THE RULE OF FOUR, NOW TO BECOME A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE. THE STORY BEGINS WITH POLIPHILUS, WHO FALLS ASLEEP AND DREAMS THAT HE IS SEARCHING FOR HIS LOST LOVE, POLIA. WHILE UNDER HER BELOVED SPELL, HE ENGAGES ON AN EROTIC PILGRAMAGE THROUGH ANTIQUITY, DISCOVERING INCREDIBLE ARCHITECTURE, GARDENS AND LANDSCAPES ALL ENVISIONED AND DESCRIBED IN MINUTE, TECHNICAL, AND ARTISTIC DESCRIPTION. PART TREATISE, PART NARRATIVE, THIS BOOK INTRODUCES A VAST ARRAY OF ARCHITECTURAL EXAMPLES AND LANDSCAPE DESIGNS WHICH WERE TOO VISIONARY FOR ITS TIME. WITH MORE THAN 160 ORIGINAL ARTWORK ILLUSTRATIONS, THIS WORK IS PRESENTED HERE AS AN ATTEMPT TO SHARE A NEW DECIPHERING OF THIS LABYRINTHINE TEXT AFTER YEARS OF OBSCURITY, BRINGING TO LIFE AND GIVING SIGNIFICANCE TO ITS FANTASTIC ARCHITECTURE AND ALLEGORICAL VISIONS.
Departing from the conventional genres of architectural writing, this book is a completely original reflection on the erotics of architecture. Perez-Gomez retells the love story of the famous Renaissance novel/treatise Hypnerotomachia Poliphili in late twentieth-century terms. The original work, long a cult book among architects, takes place in a forest. In the retelling, the forest has been replaced by the high- tech environment of appliances and airports. Both versions exist somewhere in the borderland between fiction, theory, and pornography.
The Naturalis historia by Pliny the Elder provided Renaissance scholars, artists and architects with details of ancient architectural practice and long-lost architectural wonders - material that was often unavailable elsewhere in classical literature. Pliny's descriptions frequently included the dimensions of these buildings, as well as details of their unusual construction materials and ornament. This book describes, for the first time, how the passages were interpreted from around 1430 to 1580, that is, from Alberti to Palladio. Chapters are arranged chronologically within three interrelated sections - antiquarianism; architectural writings; drawings and built monuments - thereby making it possible for the reader to follow the changing attitudes to Pliny over the period. The resulting study establishes the Naturalis historia as the single most important literary source after Vitruvius's De architectura.
"In this marvelous, learned, and friendly volume, Helen Barolini traces the contours of his career and reveals Aldus and the Aldine press in historical and cultural context; she admirably conveys the magic of an age in which the book as we know it was invented.
Covering 800 years of intellectual and literary history, Prica considers the textual forms of ruins. Western ruins have long been understood as objects riddled with temporal contradictions, whether they appear in baroque poetry and drama, Romanticism’s nostalgic view of history, eighteenth-century paintings of classical subjects, or even recent photographic histories of the ruins of postindustrial Detroit. Decay and Afterlife pivots away from our immediate, visual fascination with ruins, focusing instead on the textuality of ruins in works about disintegration and survival. Combining an impressive array of literary, philosophical, and historiographical works both canonical and neglected, and encompassing Latin, Italian, French, German, and English sources, Aleksandra Prica addresses ruins as textual forms, examining them in their extraordinary geographical and temporal breadth, highlighting their variability and reflexivity, and uncovering new lines of aesthetic and intellectual affinity. Through close readings, she traverses eight hundred years of intellectual and literary history, from Seneca and Petrarch to Hegel, Goethe, and Georg Simmel. She tracks European discourses on ruins as they metamorphose over time, identifying surprising resemblances and resonances, ignored contrasts and tensions, as well as the shared apprehensions and ideas that come to light in the excavation of these discourses.
