Francesco Colonna

Francesco Colonna (1433–1527) was a Venetian Dominican friar, long identified as the author of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, the strange allegorical romance printed by Aldus Manutius in 1499 and often called the most beautiful book of the Renaissance. His name is nowhere on the title page, but the initial letters of the thirty-eight chapters spell out a Latin sentence declaring that "Brother Francesco Colonna greatly loved Polia." The friar's recorded life fits the dates, though some scholars have proposed a Roman nobleman of the same name. The book's language, a mixture of Italian, Latin and Greek, is as peculiar as its architecture.