Alchemical Hands in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili

Why It Matters for the Hypnerotomachia

Poliphilo is the HP's first-person narrator and dreamer. His name encodes the book's central ambiguity: 'lover of many things' (poly + philos) or 'lover of Polia.' His obsessive visual attention and learned digressions generate the HP's characteristic mode of architectural ekphrasis.

Why It Matters in Scholarship

Scholars have read Poliphilo variously as an authorial self-portrait (Casella and Pozzi 1959), as an Albertian architect-dreamer (Lefaivre 1997), and as a generic humanist everyman undergoing allegorical education (Priki 2016). His identity is inseparable from the authorship debate.

Key Passages / Evidence

• ... reflected in the order per realm, beginning with the Doric and culminating in the Corinthian in the third, symbolic of the feminine and Venus). Within the thematic transformation of... [O'Neill (Durham thesis)]
• <!-- Page 479 --> [L IB R O PR IM O ] [l] PAG. 3 Poliphilo incomincia la sua Hypnerotomachia ad descrivere et l’hora et il tempo quando gli apparve in somno di ritrovarsi in una quieta et... [Avesani et al. (Colonna studies)]
• ... of love in the realm of sentiment, or feeling, and that can, in this instance, initiate the soul into the heavens. It neither promotes the corporeal over the in-corporeal, or the metaphysical... [O'Neill (Durham thesis)]

Source Documents

Avesani et al. (Colonna studies); Lefaivre 1997 (Alberti attribution); O'Neill (Durham thesis); The_Narrative_Function_of_Hieroglyphs_in; Trippe 2002 (text-image); Word_Image_1998_jan_vol_14_iss_1_2_Griggs_Tamara_Promoting_the_past_The_Hypnerot