ABSTRACT
An architectural treatise and a love story. This is how the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, published in 1499, traditionally has been read. When the book became an object of academic scholarship, however, roughly in the 1870s, its interpretation took a strange twist. Attention turned almost exclusively to the architectural treatise, and the love story was dismissed as a corollary of secondary importance. In fact, some of this century’s most prominent renaissance scholars characterised the love story as a ‘dull unreadable romance,’ a ‘serious runnerup for the most boring book in Italian literature,’ and ‘the ridiculous manifestation of a madman.’ In Benedetto Croce’s opinion, ‘if this book had not been so serious and so long and boring, it might be interpreted as a caricature of humanism.’ The plot has, at best, been reviled as an unimaginative derivative of the classics in the courtly romance by Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Dante. At worst, it has been denounced as a thinly disguised plagiarism of an obscure 14th-century poem entitled Fimerodia by the otherwise unknown author Iacopo da Monte Pulciano.
