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They inspired, mingling with these two other elements, a literature both in England, France, and Italy, in which the three elements, the saintly, the chivalrous, and the Greek heroic, have become one and undistinguishable, because all three are human, and all three divine; a literature which developed itself in Ariosto, in Tasso, in the Hypnerotomachia, the Arcadia, the Euphues, and other forms, sometimes fantastic, sometimes questionable, but which reached its perfection in our own Spenser's "Fairy Queen" perhaps the most admirable poem which has ever been penned by mortal man.
Like the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili of Francesco Colonna, of which it was doubtless the prototype, the Alcandros of Filarete, though never carried beyond the first volume, is an amazing and wearisome display of the author's archæological learning.
The greatest names in Venetian architecture are Polifilo, who wrote the Hypnerotomachia, the two Bons, Rizzo, Sansovino, the Lombardis, Scarpagnino, Leopardi, Palladio, Sammicheli, and Longhena. In the following notes I have tried to mention the place of practically every rio and every calle so that the identification of the buildings may be the more simple.
And the aged Titian had gone back even a step farther than Giorgione; the group of Antiope with Jupiter in the guise of a Satyr is clearly a reminiscence of a Nymph surprised by a Satyr one of the engravings in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili first published in 1499, but republished with the same illustrations in 1545.
As the consequence of this profuse expenditure of loving care on every detail, the monuments of architecture belonging to the earlier Renaissance have a poetry that compensates for structural defects; just as its wildest literary extravagances the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, for instance have a charm of wanton fancy and young joy that atones to sympathetic students for intolerable pedantries.
The whole effect is that of one thing pleasant to look upon, agreeably appealing to our sense of unity, charming us by grace and repose; not stimulative nor suggestive, not multiform nor mysterious. We are reminded of the temples imagined by Francesco Colonna, and figured in his Hypnerotomachia Poliphili.
Fallerina, Alcina, Armida, Acrasia, all imitated from the original Calypso, are not strong and splendid god-women, living among the fields and orchards, but dainty ladies hidden in elaborate gardens, all bedizened with fashionable architecture: regular palaces, pleasaunces, with uncomfortable edifices, artificial waterfalls, labyrinths, rare and monstrous plants, parrots, apes, giraffes; childish splendours of gardening and engineering and menageries, which we meet already in "Ogier the Dane" and "Huon of Bordeaux," and which later poets epitomized out of the endless descriptions of Colonna's "Hypnerotomachia Poliphili," the still more frightful inventories of the Amadis romances.
The first book ever printed in Venice is here: Cicero's Epistolæ, 1469, from the press of Johannes di Spira, which was followed by an edition of Pliny the Younger. A fine Venetian Hypnerotomachia, 1499, is here, and a very beautiful Herodotus with lovely type from the press of Gregorius of Venice in 1494. Old bindings may be seen too, among them a lavish Byzantine example with enamels and mosaics.
He loves Greek gems, and Persian carpets, and Elizabethan translations of Cupid and Psyche, and the Hypnerotomachia, and book-binding and early editions, and wide- margined proofs. He is keenly sensitive to the value of beautiful surroundings, and never wearies of describing to us the rooms in which he lived, or would have liked to live.
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