Alchemical Hands in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili

Temple reads the HP's opening Dark Forest and subsequent ruined city as expressions of Renaissance political topography, connecting Poliphilo's disorientation to broader humanist anxieties about foreign domination and Italian cultural identity. He argues that the text's landscape settings operate dialectically between topography and political ideology, drawing on traditions of Etruscan revival under the Medici and papal renovatio under Julius II. The article proposes that the HP's layered model of fictive topography may have influenced early sixteenth-century mytho-historiographical descriptions of Rome, opening the HP into the history of political geography.