Aldus and His Dream Book.

Aldus Manutius (ca. 1450-1515) has been celebrated for half a millennium for his systematic publication of the core of ancient Greek works. He came to Venice and publishing relatively late in life, and then, from 1494 to his death, produced editions of Aristotle and Homer; Thucydides, Plutarch and Herodotus; Lucian, Demosthenes, Plato, and Pindar; and Aristophanes, Sophocles, and Euripides. With his left hand he published a score of Latin authors, including Cicero, Virgil and Lucretius, and works in Italian and Latin by Bembo, Petrarch and of course Erasmus.

In 1499 he published, seemingly hors de serie in every way, a heavily-illustrated fantasy by a thoroughly disreputable cleric. It comprised a multilingual dream sequence in pagan terms, not disdaining verbal and pictorial descriptions of dismemberments by Cupid and phallic worship of Pan. The Hypnerotomachia Polifili ("The Strife of Love in a Dream"), contains over 200 woodcuts of very high quality in its 200 folio leaves of text; the artist remains unknown but admired. Its attractive Roman typeface remains one of Aldus's and the era's finest creations.

Helen Barolini and her publisher, aided by the Aldus Corporation (of PageMaker, the desktop publishing program), have desired "to capture the spirit and classic beauty of its design" by reproducing all the illustrations and some of the actual pages with an essay on Aldus Manutius and the Hypnerotomachia. The illustrations are reproduced in their original order, and the modern pages are laid out imitating the original format: paragraphs all in capitals, for example, or terminating in inverse pyramids.

It is an engaging idea, and the result is suggestive. We can be grateful for an attractive souvenir at a reasonable price, allowing the pleasurable frisson of the initial contact with the fascinating images and attractive page-layouts of the original. Further examination, however, frustrates or disappoints at almost every turn.

The images are the best part, and their fullness and original clarity of line perforce make the book appealing; but where the original was a folio, the present book is half the size. Though original editions are said to have been "consulted," no specific citation or library acknowledgment is made for the reproduction; and the distortion of some pages (e.g., rectos of p. 169 ff.) is so evidently not what most rare book libraries would allow that it seems likely a facsimile was used as the basis for this work. The illustrations appear cramped, and the reduced reproductions of type pages are especially muddy.

The essay is brief and breezily appreciative, and tends to repetition or non sequitur as the imitative page layouts require. It bows to scholarship with spotty footnotes to both recent and outdated works. Symonds' massive 1886 treatise is cited once for a cultural aside, but attributions to Aldus are undocumented. Martin Lowry (1979) demonstrated that Aldus had not in fact ever used Bessarion's Greek manuscripts in the Marciana Library, that Aldus went to Venice for very hard-headed business reasons, and that his innovation of italic type had little to do with the prices of his books; but Barolini without comment adheres to older conventional wisdom on these and other points. Nicolas Barker on Aldus' Greek types (1985) is in the References but unused; likewise Harry Fletcher's 1988 monograph. Only three pages explicate the Hypnerotomachia's text itself, primarily in Jungian terms. There is a useful table listing all the illustrations. Very good facsimiles are expensive and rare, and for some purposes an inexpensive version may be suitable.

Peter S. Graham RUTGERS UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES