The Rule of Four

of Michelangelo, it seems fair to cry foul. But even today, some of the prints from the Hypnerotomachia seem a little shocking.

Parades of naked men and women are only the beginning. Poliphilo follows a gaggle of nymphs to a springtime party-and there, hovering in the middle of the festivities, is the enormous penis of the god Priapus, the focal point of the entire picture. Earlier, the mythological queen Leda is caught in the heat of passion with Zeus, who is shown lodged between her thighs in the shape of a swan. The text is even more explicit, describing encounters too bizarre for the woodcuts. When Poliphilo is overcome with physical attraction to the architecture he sees, he admits to having sex with buildings. At least once, he claims the pleasure was mutual.

All of it fascinated my father, whose view of the book understandably shared little with Taft's. Instead of considering it a rigid, mathematical treatise, my father viewed the Hypnerotomachia as a tribute to the love of a man for a woman. It was the only work of art he knew that mimicked the beautiful chaos of that emotion. The dreaminess of the story, the unrelenting confusion of its characters, and the desperate wandering of a man in search of love all resonated with him.

As a result, my father-and, at the beginning of his research, Paul-felt that Taft's approach was misguided. The day you figure out love, my father told me once, you’ll understand what Colonna meant. If there was truly anything to be known about it, my father believed it must be found outside the book: in diaries, letters, family documents. He never told me as much, but I think he always suspected that there was a great secret locked inside the pages. Against Taft's formulations, though, my father felt it was a secret about love: an affair between Colonna and a woman below his station; a political powder keg; an illegitimate heir; a romance of the kind teenagers imagine before the ugly bride of adulthood comes and snuffs out childish things.

However much his approach differed from Taft's, though, when my father arrived in Manhattan for a research year away from the University of Chicago, he sensed that the two men were making great strides. Curry insisted that his old friend join them in their work, and my father agreed. Like three animals in a single cage, the men struggled to accommodate one another, circling in suspicion until new lines were drawn and new balances struck. Nevertheless, time was their ally in those days, and all three shared faith in the Hypnerotomachia. Like a cosmic ombudsman, old Francesco Colonna watched over and guided them, whitewashing dissent with layers of hope. And for a while, at least, the veneer of unity endured.

For more than ten months, Curry, Taft, and my father worked together. Only then did Curry make the discovery that would prove fatal for their partnership. By then he had gravitated out of the galleries and into the auction houses, where the larger stakes of the art world lay; and it was as he prepared his first estate sale that he came across a ragged notebook that had once belonged to a collector of antiquities, recently deceased.

The notebook belonged to the Genoese portmaster, an old man with a crabbed hand who made a habit of remarking on the state of the weather and his failing health, but who also kept a daily record of all goings-on at the docks in the spring and summer of 1497, including the peculiar events surrounding the arrival of a man named Francesco Colonna.

The portmaster-whom Curry called Genovese, for he never gave his name-gathered the rumors about Colonna circling through the wharf. He made a point of overhearing the conversations Colonna had with his local men, and learned that the wealthy Roman had come to Genoa to oversee the arrival of an important ship, whose cargo only Colonna knew. Genovese began bringing news of incoming ships to Colonna's day lodgings, where he once caught Colonna scribbling notes, which the Roman hid as soon as Genovese entered.

Had it been left at that, the portmaster's diary would've shed little light on the Hypnerotomachia. But the portmaster was a curious man, and as he grew impatient waiting for Colonna's ship to arrive, he sensed that the only way to discover the nobleman's intentions was to see Francesco's shipping documents listing the contents of the cargo. Finally he went to ask his brother-in-law, Antonio, a merchant who sometimes trafficked in pirated goods, if a thief might be hired to enter Colonna's lodgings and copy whatever could be found there. Antonio, in exchange for Genovese's help in another shipping scheme, agreed to help.

What Antonio found was that even the most desperate men would refuse the job upon mention of Colonna's name. The only one willing to do it was an illiterate pickpocket. As it happened, though, the pickpocket did his job well. He copied all three documents in Colonna's possession: the first was part of a story, which the portmaster found of no interest and never fully described; the second was a scrap of leather with a complicated diagram drawn on it, which was inscrutable to Genovese; and the third was a peculiar sort of map, consisting of the four cardinal directions, each followed by a set of units, which Genovese struggled in vain to understand. The portmaster was beginning to regret hiring the thief, when an event transpired that quickly made him fear for his life.

Upon his return home at night, Genovese found his wife weeping. She explained that her brother, Antonio, had been poisoned at dinner in his own home, his body discovered by an errand boy. A similar fate had befallen the pickpocket: while drinking at a tavern, the illiterate thief had been stabbed in the thigh by a passing stranger. Almost before the tavern keeper noticed, the man had bled to death, and the stranger had disappeared.

Genovese lived the following days in a sweat, hardly able to perform his duties at the docks. He never returned to Colonna's lodgings, but in his diary he recorded every useful detail of what the thief had found, and he waited nervously for the arrival of Colonna's ship, hoping the nobleman would depart with his cargo. His concerns became so dire that large merchant vessels came and went with hardly a mention. When Francesco's ship finally did come to port, old Genovese could hardly believe his eyes. Why would a nobleman trouble himself over such a trivial little bark, he wrote, this grubby runt-duckling of a boat? What could it be carrying that a man of quality would possibly give a dirty damn about?

And when he learned that it had come around Gibraltar, carrying goods from the north, Genovese was nearly apoplectic. He filled his little book with filthy swears, saying that Colonna was a syphilitic madman, and that only a dunce or a lunatic would believe that anything of value had ever come from a place like Paris.

According to Richard Curry, only two other entries referred to Colonna. In the first, Genovese recorded a conversation he overheard between Colonna and a Florentine architect who was the Roman's only regular visitor. In it, Francesco alluded to a book he was writing, in which he chronicled the turmoil of recent days. Genovese, still gripped with fear, made a careful note of it.

The second entry, made three days later, was more cryptic, but even more reminiscent of the letter I found with my father. By then, Genovese had convinced himself that Colonna was truly mad. The Roman refused to let his men unload the ship in daylight, insisting that the freight could only be moved safely at dusk. Many of the wooden cargo cases, the portmaster observed, were light enough to be carried by a woman or an old man, and he taxed himself to think of a spice or metal that would be shipped in this way. Gradually Genovese began to suspect that Colonna's associates-the architect and a pair of brothers, also from Florence-were henchmen or mercenaries in some dark plot. When a rumor seemed to confirm his fear, he feverishly wrote it down.

It is said that Antonio and the thief are not this man's first victims, but that Colonna has had two other men killed at his whim. I do not know who they are, and have not yet heard their names spoken, but I am sure it must be about this cargo of his. They learned of its contents, and he feared their betrayal. I am convinced of it now: fear is the thing that moves this man. His eyes betray him, even if his men do not.

According to my father, Curry made less of the second entry than of the first, which he believed might be a reference to the writing of the Hypnerotomachia. If true, then the story the thief had discovered among Colonna's belongings, the details of which Genovese never bothered to record, might have been an early draft of the manuscript.

But Tart, who by then was pursuing the Hypnerotomachia from his own angles, assembling huge catalogs of textual references into a concordance, so that every word of Colonna's could be traced to its origins, failed to see any possible relevance to the chicken-scratch notes the portmaster claimed to see Colonna keeping. Such a ridiculous story, he said, could never shed light on the profound mystery of the great book. He quickly treated the discovery the same way he'd treated every other book he'd read on the subject: as kindling for the fire.