Horapollo and the Hieroglyphica: the Egypt dreamed by the Renaissance

In 1419 the Florentine traveller Cristoforo Buondelmonti bought on the island of Andros a Greek manuscript destined to change the European imagination. It was the Hieroglyphica attributed to Horapollo, a work in two books that claimed to explain the meaning of the sacred Egyptian signs. Brought to Florence, the text entered humanist circles and became for more than three centuries the main key, however misleading, to the script of the pharaohs.

Who was Horapollo

The author is shrouded in uncertainty. The Greek text declares itself to be a translation, made by a certain Philip, of an original written in Egyptian by Horapollo of the Nile. Many scholars link it to an Egyptian grammarian named Horapollo who lived between the fourth and fifth centuries AD, but the identification is not secure. What is certain is that the work arose at a time when real knowledge of hieroglyphs was already disappearing.

The Hieroglyphica describe a sign and explain its meaning through moral or natural reasons. The serpent biting its own tail stands for the universe, the hawk represents the divine or height, and so on. Some explanations preserve a genuine memory of the signs' value, but the approach is allegorical: each image becomes a concept to contemplate, not a sound to read. It was exactly what the humanists wished to find.

Ficino, Aldus and the lure of symbols

Marsilio Ficino, commenting on Plotinus, maintained that the Egyptian priests used not letters but whole images, able to enclose a thought in a single glance. Plotinus himself, in the Enneads, had praised the sages of Egypt for expressing wisdom through figures. The Hieroglyphica seemed to confirm this view and turned it into a cultural programme: writing in images meant drawing closer to the language of ideas.

In 1505 Aldus Manutius published in Venice the first printed edition of the Greek text, soon followed by Latin translations. As early as 1499 Aldus had printed the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, attributed to Francesco Colonna, an allegorical romance full of inscriptions in mock hieroglyphs. Albrecht Dürer illustrated a Latin translation prepared by Willibald Pirckheimer for Emperor Maximilian I, who had himself portrayed surrounded by signs inspired by Horapollo.

From emblems to Kircher

The fashion for hieroglyphs gave birth to a new literary genre, the emblem book. Andrea Alciato's Emblematum liber, published in Augsburg in 1531, combined motto, image and short poem in a way that recalled Horapollo's examples. In 1556 Pierio Valeriano published in Basel his own Hieroglyphica, a vast encyclopaedia of the symbolic meanings of animals, plants and objects, which went through many reprints.

The last great heir of this tradition was the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher, who between 1652 and 1654 published in Rome the Oedipus Aegyptiacus. Kircher correctly sensed the link between Coptic and ancient Egyptian, but his translations of hieroglyphs, read as theological mysteries, proved entirely imaginary after Champollion's decipherment. Kircher had also interpreted the obelisks of Rome, such as the one Bernini placed on the Fountain of the Four Rivers in Piazza Navona.

Today the Hieroglyphica are of no use for reading Egyptian, but they remain a precious document for the history of ideas. They show how a culture can build an entire symbolic language from a misunderstanding, and how that misunderstanding nourished the art, architecture, heraldry and philosophy of the European Renaissance, leaving visible traces in the obelisks and decorations of Italian cities.