Codex Seraphinianus

In three years of isolated existence, from 1976 to 1978, the artist Luigi Serafini wrote and created miniatures for an intriguing and anomalous Codex. Its surprising plates are annotated and coded in flowing characters that suggest a Semitic language. A vast illustrated encyclopaedia of an imaginary world, the Codex Seraphinianus belongs to that rich range of accomplishments and mirages that includes Pliny's Natural History, the Speculum Maius of Vincent de Beauvais and the great Encyclopédie of Diderot and d'Alembert. Preceded by the words of Italo Calvino, who wrote a commentary about it for FMR, included here as a preface, the astonished reader ventures into colourful illustrations and glossed-over commentaries, as if they were rooms of the museum of an alien civilisation, perhaps having the impression of listening to the wordless music of knowledge, for once enjoying the grandeur of the book, like a child who does not yet know the civil science of reading. Second edition.