The strangest book of the Italian Renaissance — a man's dream of walking through classical antiquity in search of the woman he loves — rebuilt as one continuous world you can walk, with the scholarship beside you and a complete new English translation underneath.
Thirteen wonders in one continuous garden — the dark wood, the great portal, the queen’s court, the three doors, the triumphs, the Polyandrion, the crossing, and the theatre of Venus on Cythera. W A S D to walk, drag to look, digits to jump between stations. As you approach a wonder its commentary rises to meet you.
The plot in twelve scenes, narrated from the 1499 text, with Polia and the nymphs to guide you. At each wonder you choose how Poliphilo meets it — in wonder, desire, melancholy or dread — and the light of the scene answers your choice. No commentary here; this one is the game.
The whole book, station by station: all thirty-eight chapters and both parts, from the dark wood to Polia’s epitaph — including Book II, in which Polia takes the telling away from Poliphilo and contradicts him. 253 commentary notes under nine lenses you switch on and off, and the 1499 woodcut at every stop that has one.
Robert Dallington’s Strife of Loue in a Dreame (London, 1592) is the only public-domain English the book has ever had, and it stops dead partway through chapter XVII, in the middle of a sentence, at the word Mustulento. Facsimile page 193 of 467
Everything after that — the rites in the Temple of Venus, the ruined Polyandrion and its epitaphs, the whole of Cythera with its circular gardens and the unveiling of the goddess, the awakening, and all of Book II in which Polia tells her own side — has existed in English only under copyright. So this project translated it: 275 facsimile pages, chapters XVII to XXXVIII and the closing matter, made from the Italian of the 1499 Aldine, published here beside the original page by page, and released CC0. Joscelyn Godwin’s 1999 translation is in copyright and was never consulted.
Italian beside English, page by page, with a confidence note and a list of doubtful readings on every page, so any reader can check the work.
101 of the book’s own words — architecture, gardens, the parts of the soul that answer to beauty — grouped by topic and defined.
What the nymphs, Polia and the other figures look like, and which Renaissance painting each modelling decision is answerable to.
Every utterance in the book — fifty of them — with the occasion of each, and the three long stretches where he says nothing at all.
Twenty-five plates: the 1499 woodcuts themselves, beside the Renaissance and early-modern paintings each part of the world is answerable to — Botticelli’s Graces, the Capitoline Venus, Dürer’s line, the Roman de la Rose. Every entry carries its provenance and its licence.
No asset here has a single hard-coded look. Trees, the elephant, the figures, the statues, the water and the ornament each carry a registry of named variants — from the founding primitives through painted panels to an imported CC0 marble scan — and you choose which one the world is drawn with, from any mode.
_column, _entablature, _frieze, _steps) composed into buildings, canvas-generated textures for carved and painted surfaces, billboard impostors for the painted figures. One imported glTF model — a CC0 Capitoline Venus.AudioContext is ever constructed, so the page cannot make a sound.CylinderGeometry, which caps itself at the top and lidded the whole basin. A kerb is a ring, not a disc. The same bug was then found twice more elsewhere. Measure, don’t guess.?v=N chain. A module imported as ?v=1 from one file and ?v=2 from another is two different modules with separate state — which is how the asset-variant registry silently did nothing for a while.?v= covers, so returning visitors got new JavaScript with old styles.A digital humanities project: the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili — printed by Aldus Manutius in Venice in 1499, illustrated with 168 woodcuts, and never fully translated into public-domain English until now — rebuilt as a place you can walk, with its scholarship attached and its text finished.
The initial letters of its chapters spell Poliam frater Franciscus Columna peramavit — “Brother Francesco Colonna loved Polia greatly.” Which Francesco Colonna that was is still argued over.
Source on GitHub · The translation · Poliphilo speaking · Enter the garden