Hypnerotomachia

A dream-journey through ruins, gardens and triumphal processions in pursuit of a beloved, printed in Venice in 1499 with woodcuts and a typography still studied by designers. Nobody is certain who wrote it; an acrostic formed by the initial letters of the chapters points to a Dominican friar named Francesco Colonna. Eight plates carry the dream's architecture and its classical ruins, from Piranesi's vast prisons and Canaletto's Roman forum to the elm forests of autumn and spring.