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The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (‘The Strife of Love in a Dream of Poliphilo’) — first published in Venice in December 1499 — has long been regarded (particularly by art critics and bibliophiles) as one of the great glories (and curiosities) of Western civilization. This chapter argues that the Hypnerotomachia is probably the most remarkable piece of prose fiction to emerge in the 15th century and deserves an honoured place in the Western Canon between the Decameron and Gargantua and Pantagruel. It is also the work of Renaissance literature that displays most exuberantly its debts to Apuleius.

The hypothetical ‘fair book’ is the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, architectural fantasy, philological nightmare, and ‘impossible, erudite, silly romance’. Michael Leslie notes, in his contribution to a volume of essays devoted to the work, that the Hypnerotomachia is universally recognized as a ‘book’ rather than simply as a ‘text’. Lucy Gent describes the Hypnerotomachia as occupying ‘a kind of hinterland between a classical realist past, already being investigated by early archaeologists, and the printed page’. In the context of this book and its project, the Hypnerotomachia has a metatextual status; it is both text and object and as such, its existence leaves traces and tantalizing gaps; it functions as a kind of metaphor for the lost gardens and lost fountains of early modern England on its own terms, but also in relation to the other texts that are the subjects of this book.

This chapter discusses the romance in Hypnerotomachia in the order in which it unfolds. The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, or ‘The dream-love-conflict of Poliphilus’, is divided into two books. Although the romance's dream-vision frame encompasses both its books, they are of vastly disparate lengths and quite different in tone and aesthetic. As Joscelyn Godwin, the translator of the first complete English edition, points out, as well as being shorter, the second book has no descriptions of works of art or architecture. Apart from its realistic illustrations, its interest is psychological rather than aesthetic, as it relates to the thorny history of Poliphilo and Polia's love', while in their introduction to the Italian critical edition of the Hypnerotomachia Giovanni Pozzi and Lucia Ciapponi observe that the two parts definitely reflect two distinct literary experiences, but add that they are badly joined together by an extremely banal narrative device.

Vitruvianism offered Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones more than a set of rules. Even a cursory consideration of the early collaborative masques and entertainments – in which formal Vitruvian elements are mixed with ruins and pyramids in an overall mood which seems to take its cue from romance rather than the architectural treatises – reveal that they took at least some part of their inspiration from the less-formal tradition of Vitruvian thinking. This chapter examines the influence of one work – Francesco Colonna's romance, the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili – which Jonson and Jones used as a common imaginative resource in the shaping of their early masques and entertainments. They used it because it offered them a narrative (from which Jonson could draw segments and adapt them to his own purposes), as well as ceremonies, hieroglyphs, striking visual images, and a statement of Vitruvian theory couched in literary terms that both poet and architect would have found congenial.

The first book of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, and indeed the romance as a whole, reaches its climax at the Fountain of Venus. The Fountain of Venus epitomizes the symbolic polysemy of the fountain, while the Fountain of Adonis appropriates and reinvents its syncretic possibilities for narratological and structural ends. This fountain at the centre of the Hypnerotomachia's final locus amoenus has a function which is at once both reflexive and transformative, epitomizing a principle in which all the fountains of the text to some extent participate. It suggests ways of seeing and ways of reading that colour what follows it, and also that which has come before. Like the veil of the Fountain of Venus, the surface of water, and the page itself, the Fountain of Adonis is a blank, endlessly informable space, a place to think about love, art, and imagination; a place where, through these last, desire can be realized, and death can be transcended.

One of Philip Sidney's most striking additions to his revised Arcadia is his description of a not dissimilar setting to the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili's Fountain of Adonis, and his adaptation of Colonna's fountain acts as a sophisticated and suggestive frame to the subsequent action and concerns of his romance in ways that have hitherto not been elucidated. The figure of Aeneas and its associations in Sidney's other give garden and gallery, and the ensuing action of the romance, provide a particular moral colour. The qualities Sidney attributes to Aeneas are those desirable in any exemplary ruler and in any epic hero: the appearance of Aeneas so near the beginning of the Arcadia, albeit as a baby, transformed into a fountain in a garden of love that has been taken straight out of a romance, must surely be interpreted with reference to Sidney's treatment of him in the Defence.

The erotics of ruins is the focus of this chapter. It examines the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, an important text in Renaissance humanism not only because of its prominent treatment of ruins but also because it is one of the more poignant essays on how rekindling a relationship to the classical past is an enterprise fraught with a Petrarchan frustration. Traditionally translated as The Strife of Love in a Dream, the text recounts the phantasmagorical journey of Poliphilo as he searches for his Polia amidst a made-up world of Greek, Roman, Egyptian, and Etruscan antiquities.

Chapter 5 begins with the early 1490s rise of the Aldine Press at Venice and De Aetna’s place in relation to Aldo Manuzio’s print experimentation through the 1501 introduction of his libelli portatiles (“portable little books”). The interaction between theme and typographic form in De Aetna, between Pietro’s Etna adventure and the novelty of Manuzio’s own print venture, unites author and printer in a mutually reinforcing mode of self-display and aesthetic alignment. Bernardo Bembo complicates this vision of type form as a physical picturing of Pietro in particular – unless Bernardo is seen to be similarly pictured, father like son, in a distinctive familial sharing of print script. Bernardo was demonstrably interested in the interplay between textual form and content explored earlier in Chapter 5 and demonstrated in the chapter’s end by appeal to Petrarch, and also to a portrait that Bernardo possibly commissioned: Leonardo da Vinci’s Ginevra de’ Benci.