The Syncretic Culture in "Hypnerotomachia Poliphili" by Francesco Colonna

Abstract

The certainty that values common to different civilizations, nations and religions exist stands at the base of the syncretic literary and philosophical streams of Italy of the 15th century. The concepts contained in the Hypnerotomachia match with the vision of culture where two different worlds coexis t and complete each other: the world of antiquity and the contemporary world, the Christian and the non-Christian world. The certainty that the Christian world may not exist without the Greek culture, the world of Latin -based culture without the Hebrew and the Arab culture, is related to the search for the universal language of humanity which is the subject of the era’s philosophers’ and writers’ research. Their goal was to merge the ancient, biblical and oriental tradition. This article focuses on the ques tion of the Arab inscriptions present in the Hypnerotomachia; they are also the first printed text in Arabic.