Published : 2025-07-14

The Reality of Dream: Zbigniew Makowski and Hypnerotomachia Poliphili

Abstract

Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, one of the most beautiful Renaissance books, published in the Venetian printing house of Aldo Manuzio in 1499, has a multi-level dream structure. In the dream, the eponymous “struggle for love” is carried out by Poliphilo, who is seeking his beloved Polia. On the formal plane, the reality of the dream is translated into a complex semantic play between word and image. The aim of the article is to draw attention to the inspiring role played by Hypnerotomachia in the work of Zbigniew Makowski (1930–2019), for whom it was a constant point of reference, especially in the 1970s and 1980s, and to inscribe the phenomenon in a broader cultural context. The article also discusses the significance of Francesco Patrizi’s (1529-1597) treatise Della poetica for Makowski’s art. He used the concept of meravigilia as the effect of the possible and the impossible coming together to build his own, somewhat surrealist method of intense, direct impact on the viewer.

Keywords:

Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, Zbigniew Makowski, Francesco Patrizi, sign, merveilleux, surrealism



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Roczniki Humanistyczne · ISSN 0035-7707 | eISSN 2544-5200 | DOI: 10.18290/rh
© The Learned Society of the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin & The John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Faculty of Humanities

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