Jacques Gohory’s Copy of the Poliphile (1546): A First Analysis of His Handwritten Marginalia

Abstract

The Baillieu Library contains a copy of the most beautiful book of the fifteenth-century, Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Venice, 1499). Styled as an allegorical dream, this humanist and architectural novel, written in a convoluted Italian, mixed with Latin and Greek, is renowned for its typographical design and its splendid woodcuts. The Baillieu also owns a copy of the first French translation, Hypnerotomachie (Paris, 1546), by Jean Martin. Embellished with figures which adapt some woodcuts of the 1499 edition, and enriched by others, the book is one of the great printing achievements of the period. Martin offers a very clever translation of the almost unintelligible Latinat..