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Rizzoli, 2013

This is not a book review. Let's get that out of the way. Reviewing a book implies comparison, a benchmarking against other books, , and Luigi Serafini'sCodex Seraphinianus is utterly unique in every way. It is a book unlike any you've ever seen before. With nearly 400 large format pages of weirdly fantastic images, it is an encyclopedic field guide to an imagined world, one that exists solely in the mind of its Italian architect and artist creator and his readers.

Though to say that the Codex Seraphinianus can be read is a mischaracterization. The vibrant images that fill each page of the codex are indeed accompanied by textual descriptions, as one might expect in any field guide, however the text is written in no Earthly language, or any that's been able to be deciphered since the first publication of the Codex in 1981. What's more, Serafini is steadfast in his assertion that there is no meaning to the beautiful script he inscribes throughout the Codex but that which is ascribed to it by the book's readers.

Like something from the mind of Salvador Dali or M.C. Escher, the images contained within the Codex Seraphinianus challenge readers' notions of what is real and what is possible. The book is inhabited by all manner of bizarre creatures - human legs out of which grow birds nests, umbrellas, flora and fauna dreamed up over the course of years, all of which populate the alien landscape of Serafini's fertile mind. Some of my favorite pages contain not merely images, but a documentation of processes in which Serafini's creations are involved.

Several panels illustrating how a crop of fountain pens is planted, fertilized and harvested to appear in a final panel as element of jewelry worn by the growers; another page illustrating the origin of chairs, and several that illustrate events in Serafini's imagined world - a circus, an athletic contest, a funeral - all unearthly

The Codex is frequently described as a descendant of a similarly strange text, the Voynich Manuscript. The Voynich Manuscript, like the Codex, is filled with illustrations - of plants, animals, people and cosmological signs - and accompanied by what is thought to be asemic writing, writing that has no meaning but that derived by the reader. It dates back to the 15th century and its author is unknown, which is unlike the Codex, as Luigi Serafini is very much alive and will happily tell you whatever it is you'd like to know about the Codex.

Numerous editions of the Codex Seraphinianus have been published since 1981; the latest, published in October 2013 by Rizzoli, contains two completely new chapters and also comes with a small pamphlet, the "Decodex," in which Serafini briefly explains (in seven languages) how he came to write the Codex, including the nature of the script.

"I was 27 years old and was using colored pencils and a sketch pad to draw several hybridized human bodies ith prostheses in the shape of claws, a bicycle wheel, and a fountain pen, as if I were at the cyborg-nude figure drawing school of some Academy of Spatial Fine Arts."

Serafini goes on to describe the emerging work as something akin to an "atlas of comparative anatomy which needed, more than anything, some sort of textual accompaniment in order to give his other-worldly images a semblance of meaning.

"So I began scribbling lines that twisted and curved in curlicues and arabesques. And from that tangle of ink I slowly distilled a calligraphy complete with upper and lower case letters, punctuation and accents. It was a script that contained the dream of many other types of scripts."

Serafini relates how he completed the Codex and holed up in his scriptorium for the next three years. His otherwise believable history of the tome's creation is imbued with a bit of magic as he describes listening to the stories of the pigeons who alighted on his windowsill and claims that the ultimate creator of the Codex was a stray white cat, the thoughts of whom Serafini merely channeled into his work.

Whether the fantastically alien images and accompanying script came from Luigi Serafini or from the mind of the white cat, they are beautiful and this book is without a doubt the most strange and surreal works of art you will ever pick up. Though the text be indecipherable, the Codex Seraphinianus will hold you rapt for however long you allow it.



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