“Poliphilo’s strife of love in a dream”: a romance in which the dreamer wanders through ruins, palaces and gardens in search of his beloved Polia. Its 172 woodcuts of buildings, knots, topiary and fountains made it a pattern book for the gardens of the Renaissance.
The book was printed by Aldus Manutius in Venice in December 1499 and is one of the most admired books of the early press, for its type and its woodcuts. Its author is not named on the title page, but the first letters of its chapters spell out a sentence saying that Brother Francesco Colonna loved Polia, and most scholars accept a Dominican friar of that name in Venice as the author, though a Roman nobleman of the same name has also been proposed.
The story is a vehicle for descriptions of architecture: a pyramid with an obelisk, a ruined temple, baths, a palace, gardens of glass and of silk, and at the end of the first book the island of Cythera, the realm of Venus. The island is circular and laid out in concentric rings: woods on the outside, then meadows, orchards and flower gardens divided into compartments by hedges and walks, with topiary of clipped box, myrtle and cypress, knots of herbs in intricate patterns, pergolas and pools, and at the centre an amphitheatre round the fountain of Venus. The book’s architecture is measured: the narrator gives the dimensions and proportions of what he sees.
Its gardens are dreams, but their parts (the compartments, the knots, the clipped figures, the water at the centre of a geometrical plan) are those the Italian garden used over the next century, and the woodcuts were copied in France and England. A partial English translation appeared in 1592 as The Strife of Love in a Dream.
The book, part by part
I Book I: Poliphilo’s dream
The dark wood, the great pyramid and gate, the palace of Queen Eleuterylida and its gardens, the choice of the three gates, the meeting with Polia, the triumphs, the temple of Venus, and the voyage to the island of Cythera with its gardens and fountain.
Rules: The garden island of Cythera
II Book II: Polia’s account
Polia tells the story from her side; the dream ends as Poliphilo wakes.