Alchemical Hands in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili

The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, published by Aldus Manutius in Venice in 1499, is among the most celebrated and least understood books of the Italian Renaissance. Written in a macaronic blend of Italian, Latin, Greek, and pseudo-hieroglyphs, and illustrated with 172 woodcuts of extraordinary refinement, it tells the story of Poliphilo's dream-journey through ruined temples, enchanted gardens, and allegorical processions in pursuit of his beloved Polia.

This project documents the readership of the HP — not just the text itself, but what five centuries of readers did with it. James Russell's PhD thesis (Durham, 2014) conducted a world census of annotated copies, finding that readers as diverse as Ben Jonson, Pope Alexander VII, Benedetto Giovio, and anonymous alchemists left extensive marginalia recording their encounters with the text. This site presents Russell's findings alongside photographs of two annotated copies, a bibliography of HP scholarship, a dictionary of essential terminology, and the full documentation of how the platform was built.

• 674 manuscript images catalogued
• 282 annotations extracted from Russell's thesis
• 431 image-reference matches (431 high confidence, 0 low/provisional)
• 11 annotator hands identified
• 116 works in bibliography (39 in our collection)
• 65 scholar profiles
• 101 dictionary terms
• 85 timeline events

Content on this site has varying levels of verification:

• Verified: Signature maps, collation formulae, and image cataloging are deterministic and correct.
• High confidence: Siena O.III.38 image matches use explicit recto/verso naming.
• Low confidence: BL C.60.o.12 matches assume sequential photo numbers equal folio numbers. The BL copy is the 1545 edition; the signature map is based on the 1499. Manual verification needed.
• Unreviewed: Scholar summaries, dictionary definitions, and hand attributions were generated with LLM assistance and have not been verified by a domain expert. These are marked with Unreviewed badges.

The site is generated from a SQLite database (db/hp.db). To rebuild all pages:

python scripts/migrate_v2.py        # Schema migration (idempotent)
python scripts/seed_dictionary.py   # Dictionary terms (idempotent)
python scripts/build_site.py        # Generate all HTML + JSON
                

Individual pipeline steps:

python scripts/init_db.py           # Initialize DB schema
python scripts/catalog_images.py    # Catalog manuscript images
python scripts/build_signature_map.py  # Build signature map
python scripts/extract_references.py   # Extract refs from thesis PDF
python scripts/match_refs_to_images.py # Match refs to images
python scripts/add_hands.py         # Add annotator hand profiles
python scripts/add_bibliography.py  # Add bibliography and timeline