Leon Battista Alberti's "Hypnerotomachia Poliphili": Eros, Furore and Humanism in the Early Italian Renaissance Book

Winner of the 8th Annual AIA International Architecture Book Award for History Winner of the 1997 Association of American Publishers Best New PSP Book (Literature and Language) The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili has long been considered the most legendary and enigmatic architectural book ever written. Since its publication in 1499, it has fascinated architects and historians with its vast knowledge of architecture and its erudite reading of the related arts of landscape, engineering, painting, and sculpture. Its 172 wood engravings, many of which represent buildings, qualify it as the first example of an illustrated architectural book in the history of printing. Because of its dense, almost Joycean prose--a polyglot concoction of Latin, Greek, and vernacular Italian, with a smattering of Hebrew, Arabic, and hieroglyphics--the book has received relatively little analysis. Liane Lefaivre offers the closest critical-theoretical reading to date, placing it within both the historical context of the quattrocento and the rethinking of the metaphor of the architectural body. Part fictional narrative and part scholarly treatise, the book is an extreme case of erotic furor, aimed at everything--especially architecture--that the protagonist, Poliphilo, encounters in his quest for his beloved, Polia. Among the instances of the book's manifesto-like character is Polia's tirade defending the right of women to express their own sexuality, probably the first sustained argument of this type, which lifts the book's erotic theme from the realm of ribaldry to the more daring one of sexual politics. Lefaivre is the first to attribute this strange, dreamlike book definitively to none other than the arch-rationalist Leon Battista Alberti. Intended as his final text, she argues, the book is the legacy of a humanist passionate about his life's work, a treatise on the role of dreamwork in design by one of the most creative minds of the Renaissance, and a manifesto in defense of humanism by a man who had been fired by an anti-humanist pope after a thirty-year career in the papal service.Read More