CONFERENCE: Longing for Languages of Love with Gregor Meinecke and Alana Siegel
Tuesday September 8th, 2026
The Longing Languages of Love event explored the layers of language, art, and interpretation within the Renaissance text Hypnerotomachia Poliphili.
Longing for Languages of Love, an event centered on the Renaissance text Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, attributed to Francesco Colonna. First published in Venice in 1499, the book follows Poliphilo through a dreamlike journey in search of his beloved, Polia. His journey unfolds through elaborate gardens, architecture, monuments, mythology, and symbolism, while the book itself combines an unusual form of language, with intricate woodcut illustrations. Its complexity has made it a work that continues to invite both scholarly study and artistic interpretation.
Gregor Meinecke examined the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili through an art-historical lens, focusing on its images, anonymous woodcut artists, and the scholarship that has developed around the work. He encouraged attendees to look carefully at the relationship between the written text and its visual elements, showing how small details can influence the way a historical work is read. His discussion also placed the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili within a broader tradition of literary and artistic works in which written language and imagery work together. He drew connections to other works, including Dante’s Divine Comedy, demonstrating how texts can create visual worlds that extend beyond the words on the page and shape how readers imagine and interpret them.
Gregor’s discussion highlighted the importance of looking beyond the surface of a familiar work. By examining the details of the illustrations and the questions surrounding their creation and interpretation, he showed how scholarship can continue to uncover new possibilities within a centuries-old text. His approach reflected his broader interest in the material presence of writing and its relationship to Renaissance visual culture.
Alana Siegel brought the text into a much more contemporary setting through her multiform work The Temple of Love. Combining poetry and photography, her presentation drew from her own relationship with the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili and explored what happens when a reader returns to a work at different moments in life. For Alana, the text written in Latin, Arabic, Italian, Hebrew, and Greek offered something that could continue to change alongside the person reading it, allowing different words, images, and ideas to become meaningful at different points in time. Rather than treating the text solely as a historical artifact, she used it as a starting point for thinking about love, heartbreak, longing, memory, and the ways language can take on new meaning through personal experience.
By choosing to connect personally with individual words and their visual qualities, Alana drew attention to details that might otherwise go unnoticed. In her presentation, she shared photographs of small, easily overlooked moments and objects, showing how much can be found in details that people often pass by without a second thought. Her photography and poetry created a dialogue between these fragments of the Renaissance text and her own experiences, inviting the audience to see familiar elements through a new lens. Her concept of the “beautiful observer” further emphasized the importance of slowing down and paying attention, demonstrating how even the smallest details can become meaningful when we take the time to truly notice them.
The two presentations revealed how a single work can continue to create new forms of study more than five centuries after its publication. Gregor’s research examined how the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili has been constructed, illustrated, and interpreted within its historical context, while Alana used its language and imagery as material for a contemporary artistic work shaped by memory and personal experience. Their conversation showed how scholarship and creative practice can meet around the same text without requiring it to have only one interpretation.
The evening opened the discussion to the audience, with questions from attendees and scholars contributing to the conversation. In this setting at Il Palmerino, the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili became more than a Renaissance book being studied; it became a point of connection between art history, literature, photography, poetry, and contemporary experience. The event ultimately encouraged those present to look more closely at how we read, observe, and find meaning in works that continue to speak across centuries.
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