COLONNA, FRANCESCO

(ca. 1433-1527)

   Italian writer and Dominican friar, educated in Dominican schools and at the University of Padua. The work for which he is remembered, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499), is a vaguely allegorical romance, written in a language that is neither normal Italian nor Latin but seems to be the author's own invention, based on the Venetian dialect, but blending in words taken from Latin and even from Greek. Although contemporaries discovered what they thought were profound mysteries in the book, its literary success rested in large part on the elegant and evocative woodcut ilustrations that the publisher of the first edition, the Venetian printer Aldus Manutius, added to the text. It was reprinted in 1545 and thereafter repeatedly, both in Italy and abroad.