Renaissance in Italy, Volume 4 (of 7) / Italian Literature, Part 1

by John Addington Symonds

For the student of Italian literature in its transition from the middle age to the Renaissance, the Hypnerotomachia has special and many-sided interest. It shows that outside Florence, where the pure Italian idiom was too vigorous to be suppressed, humanistic fashion had so far taken possession of the literary fancy as to threaten the very existence of the mother tongue. But, more than this, it represents that epoch of transition in its fourfold intellectual craving after the beauty of antiquity, the treasures of erudition, the multiplied delights of art, and the liberty of nature. These cravings are allegorized in a romance of love, which blends medieval mysticism with modern sensuousness. Like the style, the matter of the book is maccaronic, parti-colored and confused; but the passion which controls so many elements is genuine and simple. The spirit of the earlier Renaissance reflects itself, as in a mirror, in the Dream of Poliphil. So essentially is it the product of a transitional moment that when the first enthusiasm for its euphuistic pedantry and æsthetical rapture had subsided, the key to its most obvious meaning was lost. In the preface to the fourth French edition (1600), Beroald de Verville hinted that the volume held deep alchemistic secrets for those who could discover them. After this distortion the book passed into not altogether unmerited oblivion. It had done its work for the past age. It now remains an invaluable monument for those who would fain reconstruct the century which gave it birth.

The Hypnerotomachia professes to relate its author's love for Polia, a nun, his search after her, and their union, at the close of sundry trials and adventures, in the realm of Venus. Poliphil dreams that he finds himself in a wild wood, where he is assailed by monstrous beasts, and suffers great distress of mind. He prays to Diespiter, and comes forthwith into a pleasant valley, through which he wanders in the hope of finding Polia. At the outset of his journey he meets five damsels, Aphea, Offressia, Orassia, Achoe, Geussia, who conduct him to their queen, Eleuterilyda.[276] She understands his quest, and assigns the maidens, Logistica and Thelemia, to be his guides into the palace of Telosia. They journey together and arrive at the abode of Dame Telosia, which has three gates severally inscribed in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin characters with legends, the meaning whereof is God's Glory, Mother of Love, and Worldly Glory. Poliphil enters the first door, and finds the place within but little to his liking. Then he tries the third, and is no better pleased. Lastly he gains admittance to the demesne of Love's Mother, where he is content to Stay. Lovely and lascivious maidens greet him kindly; and while he surrenders to their invitation, one of his attendants, Logistica, takes her flight. He is left with his beloved Thelemia to enjoy the pleasures of this enchanting region.

Thus far the allegory is not hard to read. Poliphil, or the lover of Polia, escapes from the perils of the forest where his earlier life was passed, by petition to the Father of Gods and Men. He places himself in the hands of the five senses, who conduct him to freewill. Freewill appoints for his further guidance reason and inclination, who are to lead him to the final choice of lives. When he arrives at the point where this choice has to be made, he perceives that God, the world, and beauty, who is mother of love, compete for his willing service. He rejects religion and ambition; and no sooner has his preference for love and beauty been avowed, than the reasoning faculty deserts him, and he is abandoned to inclination.

While Poliphil is dallying with the nymphs of pleasure and his own wanton will, he is suddenly abandoned by these companions, and pursues his journey alone.[277] Before long, however, he becomes aware of a maiden, exceedingly fair to look upon, who carries in her hand a lighted torch. With her for guide, he passes through many pleasant places, arriving finally at the temple of Venus Physizoe. This maiden, though as yet he cannot recognize her, is the Polia he seeks, and on their way together he feels the influences of her love-compelling beauty. They enter the chapel of Venus, and are graciously received by the prioress who guards that sanctuary. Mystical rites of initiation and consecration are performed. Polia lays down her torch, and is discovered by her lover. Then they are wedded by grace of the abiding goddess; and having undergone the ceremony of spousal, they resume their wanderings together. They pass through a desolate city of tombs and ruins, named Polyandrion, where are the sepulchers and epitaphs of lovers. Here, too, they witness the pangs of souls tormented for their crimes against the deity of Love. Afterwards they reach a great water, where Cupid's barge comes sailing by, and takes them to the island of Cythera. It is a level land of gardens, groves and labyrinths, adorned with theaters and baths, and watered by a mystic font of Venus. Near the Tomb of Adonis in this demesne of Love, Polia and Poliphil sit down to rest among the nymphs, and Polia relates the story of their early passion.

It is here, if anywhere, that we come across reality in this romance. Polia tells how the town of Treviso was founded, and of what illustrious lineage she came, and how she vowed herself to the service of Diana when the plague was raging in the city. In Dian's temple Poliphil first saw her, and fainted at the sight, and she, made cruel by the memory of her vows, left him upon the temple-floor for dead. But when she returned home, a vision of women punished for their hard heart smote her conscience; and her old nurse, an adept in the ways of love, counseled her to seek the Prioress of Venus, and confess, and enter into reconcilement with her lover. What the nurse advised, Polia did, and in the temple of Venus she met Poliphil. He, while his body lay entranced upon the floor of Dian's church, had visited the heavens in spirit and obtained grace from Venus and Cupid. Therefore, the twain were now of one accord, and ready to be joined in bonds of natural affection. At the end of Polia's story, the nymphs leave both lovers to enjoy their new-found happiness. But here the power of sleep is spent, and Poliphil, awakened by the song of swallows, starts from dreams with "Farewell, my Polia!" upon his lips.

Such is the frail and slender basis of romance, corresponding, in the details of Polia's narrative, to an ordinary novella, upon which the bulky edifice of the Hypnerotomachia is built. This love-story, while it gives form to the book, is clearly not the author's main motive. What really concerns him most deeply is the handling of artistic themes, which, though introduced by way of digressions, occupy by far the larger portion of his work. The Hypnerotomachia is an encyclopædia of curious learning, a treasure-house of æsthetical descriptions and discussions, vividly reflecting the two ruling enthusiasms of the earlier Renaissance for scholarship and art. Minute details of inexhaustible variety, bringing before our imagination the architecture, sculpture, and painting of the fifteenth century, its gardens, palaces and temples, its processions, triumphs and ceremonial shows, its delight in costly jewels, furniture, embroidery and banquets, its profound feeling for the beauty of women, and its admiration for the goodliness of athletic manhood, are massed together with bewildering profusion. Not one of the technical arts which flourished in the dawn of the Renaissance but finds due celebration here; and the whole is penetrated with that fervent reverence for antiquity which inspired the humanists. Yet the Hypnerotomachia, though sometimes tedious, is never frigid. With the precision of a treatise and the minuteness of an inventory, it combines the ardor of impassioned feeling, the rapture of anticipation, the artist's blending with the lover's ecstasy. It is a dithyramb of the imagination, inflamed by no Oriental lust of mere magnificence, but by the fine sense of what is beautiful in form, rare in material, just in proportion, exquisite in workmanship.

Whether the Hypnerotomachia exercised a powerful influence over the productions of the Italian genius, can be doubted. But that it presents an epitome or figured abstract of the Renaissance in its earlier luxuriance, is unmistakable. Reading it, we wander through the collections of Paul II., rich with jewels, intagli, cameos and coins; we enter Amadeo's chapels, Filarete's palaces, Bramante's peristyles and loggie; we pace the gardens of the Brenta and the Sforza's deer-parks at Pavia; we watch Lorenzo's Florentine trionfi and Pietro Riario's festivals in Rome; Giorgione's fêtes champêtres are set for us in framework of the choicest fruits and flowers; we hear Ciriac of Ancona discoursing on his epigraphs and broken marbles; before our eyes, as in a gallery, are ranged the bass-reliefs of Donatello wrought in bronze, Mantegna's triumphs, Signorelli's arabesques, the terra-cotta of the Lombard and the stucco of the Roman schools, the carved-work of Alberti's church at Rimini, the tarsiatura of Fra Giovanni da Verona's choir-stalls, doorways from Milanese and chimneys from Urbino palaces, Vatican tapestries and trellis-work of beaten iron from Prato—all that the Renaissance in its bloom produced, is here depicted with the wealth and warmth of fancy doting on anticipated beauties.

Of the author, Francesco Colonna, very little is known, except that he was born in 1433 at Venice, that he attached himself to Ermolao Barbaro, spent a portion of his manhood in the Dominican cloister of S. Niccolò at Treviso, and died at Venice in 1527. Whether the love-tale of the Hypnerotomachia had a basis of reality, or whether we ought to regard it wholly from the point of view of allegory, cannot be decided now. It is, however, probable that a substratum of experience underlay the vast mass of superimposed erudition and enthusiastic reverie. The references to Polia's name and race; her epitaph appended to the first edition; the details of her narrative, which somewhat break the continuity of style and introduce a biographical element into the romance; the very structure of the allegory which assigns so large a part in life to sensuous instinct—all these points seem to prove that Poliphil was moved by memory of what had really happened, no less than by the desire to express a certain mood of feeling and belief. Such mingling of actual emotion with ideal passion in a work of imagination, dedicated to a woman who is also an emblem, was consistent with the practice of medieval poets. Polia belongs, under altered circumstances, to the same class as Beatrice. The hypothesis that, whoever she may have been, she had become for her lover a metaphor of antique beauty, is sufficiently attractive and plausible. If we adopt this theory, we must interpret the dark wood where Poliphil first found himself, to mean the anarchy of Gothic art; while his emancipation through the senses and Thelemia characterizes the spirit in which the Italians achieved the Revival. The extraordinary care lavished upon details, interrupting the course of the romance and withdrawing our sympathy from Polia, meet from this point of view with justification. Veiling his enthusiasm for the renascent past beneath the fiction of a novel, Francesco Colonna invests the lady of his intellectual choice, the handmaid of Aphrodite, evoked from the sepulcher where arts and sciences lie buried, with rich Renaissance trappings of elaborate device. Beneath those exuberant arabesques, within that labyrinth of technically perfect details, suave outlines, delicate contours devoid of content, a real woman would be lost. But if Polia be not merely a woman, if she be, as her name πολια seems to indicate, at the same time the vision of resurgent classic beauty, then the setting which her lover has contrived is adequate to the influences which inspired him. The multiform and labored frame-work of his picture acquires a meaning from the spirit of the goddess whom he worships, and the presiding genius of his age dwells in a shrine, each point of which is brilliant with the splendor which that spirit radiates.

It is, therefore, as an allegory of the Renaissance, conscious of its destiny and strongest aspirations in the person of an almost nameless monk, that we should read the Hypnerotomachia. Still, even so, the mark of indecision, which rests upon the many twy-formed masterpieces of this century, is here discernible. Francesco Colonna has one foot in the middle ages, another planted on the firm ground of the modern era. He wavers between the psychological realism of romance and the philosophical idealism of allegory. Polia is both too much and too little of a woman. At one time her personality seems as distinct as that of any heroine of fiction; at another we lose sight of her in the mist of symbolism. Granting, again, that she is a metaphor, she lends herself to more than one conception. She is both an emblem of passion, sanctified by nature, and liberated from the bondage of asceticism, and also an emblem of ideal beauty, recovered from the past, and worshiped by a scholar-artist.

This confusion of motives and uncertainty of aim, while it detracts from the artistic value of the Hypnerotomachia, enhances its historical importance. In form, the book has to be classed with the Visions of the middle ages—the Divine Comedy, the Amorosa Visione, and the Quadriregio. But though the form is medieval, the inspiration of this prose-poem is quite other. We have seen already how Francesco Colonna, traveling in search of Polia, prayed to Jupiter, and how the senses and freewill guided him to the satisfaction of his deepest self in the service of Beauty. It is in the temple of Venus Physizoe (Venus the procreative source of life in Nature) that he meets with his love and is wedded to her in the bonds of mutual desire.[278] Christianity is wholly, we might say systematically, ignored. The ascetic standpoint of the middle age is abandoned for another, antagonistic to its ruling impulses. A new creed, a new cult, are introduced. Polia, whether we regard her as the poet's mistress or as the spirit of antiquity which has enamored him, is won by worship paid to deities of natural appetite. In its essence, then, the Hypnerotomachia corresponds to the most fruitful instinct of the Renaissance—to that striving after emancipation which restored humanity to its heritage in the realms of sense and reason. Old ideals, exhausted and devoid of vital force, are exchanged for fresh and beautiful reality. The spirituality of the past, which has become consumptive and ineffectively lapse of time and long familiarity, yields to vigorous animalism. The cloister is quitted for the world, religious for artistic ecstasy, celestial for earthly paradise, scholasticism for humane studies, the ascetic for the hedonistic rule of conduct. Criticised according to its deeper meaning, the Hypnerotomachia is the poem of which Valla's De Voluptate was the argument, of which Lorenzo de' Medici's life was the realization, and the life of Aretino the caricature. If it assumes the form of a vision, reminding us thereby that the author was born upon the confines of the middle ages and the modern era, it deals with the vision in no Dantesque spirit, but with the geniality of Apuleius. Allegory is but a transparent veil, to make the nudity of natural impulse fascinating. As in Boccaccio, so here the hymn of il talento, simple appetite, is sung; but the fusion of artistic and humanistic enthusiasms with this ground-motive adds peculiar quality, distinctive of the later age which gave it birth.