A bird that means an idea

Horapollo, a codex bought on Andros in 1419, and the idea that a figure could stand for a word.

From “Alessandra’s world”: the places, people and books of the novel, told with their sources.

Woodcut from a French edition of 1543: “When they wished to indicate God… they painted an eagle”. In the Greek, the bird is a hawk. Orus Apollo de Aegypte, Paris, Jacques Kerver, 1543. Boston Public Library, via Internet Archive. Public domain.

In June 1419, on the island of Andros, a Greek codex was bought. Inside was a rare book, Horapollo’s “Hieroglyphica”, which read the signs of Egypt as figures with meaning: a bird for “god”, a snake biting its own tail for “the world”.

The codex passed through the hands of the Florentine traveller Cristoforo Buondelmonti, reached Florence and ended up in Niccolò Niccoli’s library. Today it is in the Biblioteca Laurenziana. Very few people read it in those years, but the idea that a figure could stand for a word was already going round among humanists.

It is the Florence of the Medici, the Florence that will one day come for Alessandra. Read the entry on the website →