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The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, Image, Text, and Vernacular Poetics*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Rosemary Trippe
Rosemary Trippe*
Affiliation:
Johns Hopkins University
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Abstract

Illustration and text in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Venice, 1499) have been long considered intricately related yet the book's ornate, invented language has made study of such interaction difficult. This essay reconsiders their connections through a close analysis of two woodcuts and accompanying text in light of the poetical-rhetorical conventions of contemporary Petrarchan imitation in Italy. This reveals how Francesco Colonna visually and textually adapted, in a playful way, traditional subjects of vernacular lyric poetry: the beauty of the poet's beloved, and the lover's own emotions, characterized through metaphor and other tropes.

Type
Studies
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 55 , Issue 4 , Winter 2002 , pp. 1222 - 1258
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 2002

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Footnotes

*

This article revises material presented at a seminar held in Florence (June, 1998) at the Villa Spelman, The Charles S. Singleton Center for Italian Studies of The Johns Hopkins University. I thank Elizabeth Cropper for suggesting that I publish this material and her constructive advice. In addition to the two anonymous readers of RQ, I also wish to thank the following for their reading of this work in various stages and their very helpful suggestions and comments: Elena Calvillo, Charles Dempsey, Frances Gage, Megan Holmes, and Walter S. Melion. Photographs of the Hypnerotomachia were acquired with funds from a Sadie and Louis Roth Fellowship. The 1980 critical edition of Giovanni Pozzi and Lucia A. Ciapponi is used throughout. All translations from the Hypnerotomachiaare my own, as are those from other Italian texts, except as otherwise noted. Though Joscelyn Godwin's translation is unabridged, in the text relevant for this article there are some substantive differences between his rendering of Colonna's text and mine. I have attempted to reproduce Colonna's structure, which occasionally contains incomplete periods and clauses. In their commentary, Pozzi and Ciapponi also note instances where clauses beginning in one sentence are completed in another, and I have followed their direction in my translations.

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