Describes the revival of interest in the pagan, mythological imagination during the Renaissance, the influence on the arts of imagery based on classical mythology, and the troubled co-existence of this pagan culture with official Christianity.
Exactly 500 years after its first publication by the great Venetian printing house Aldus Manutius, Francesco Colonna's weird, erotic, allegorical antiquarian tale, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, was translated into English and reprinted in full, together…