Grand Tour
5278 Il Giardino di Polifilo
Texts by Silvia Fogliati, Davide Dutto
2002 / 120 PAGES.
Language: Italian edition
Thanks to a meticulous digital reconstruction, readers can wander through the flower-beds, woods and parterres full of flowers on the island of Citèra, the heart of the mysterious novel and most famous volume printed in the Renaissance, the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili.
The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, written by an author who today would be called experimental, was printed in Venice in 1499 by publisher Aldus Manutius. Bibliophiles still consider this incunabulum, with its difficult Grecian-Latin title, to be one of the most beautiful and valuable in the history of printed books. The epic poetry of the garden-book comes back to life in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: hedges of words are shaped like a boxwood hedge; typographical indents reproduce the shape of the objects described by the letter combinations. The use of the computer allowed the authors of this volume to reconstruct the Garden of Venus based on the obsessive description contained in Manutius’ incunabulum.