Poliphili columna

[Ian White]

I'm trying to find out if the sentence quoted here could be or be intended as a hexameter. It was written by an Italian near the end of the 15th century. It is notorious among students of the Italian Renaissance, being an acrostic formed by initial letters of the chapters of a book (Hypnerotomachia Poliphili).
Though I have long been working on this topic, I myself am no kind of expert in the relevant languages or the relevant disciplines.

Poliam frater Franciscus Columna peramavit.

Polia is a girl's name. Columna is generally taken to be the author's surname, in Italian Colonna. One scholar has argued on the other hand —from the ancient source of the unusual verb peramavit— that the word Columna here is in the ablative not the nominative, meaning the instrument with which Franciscus peramavit. That scholar's suggestion is that columna means the column of initial letters. This seems to me unlikely, but I note that columna could have a slang use which would be very apt, if very rude. There are other jokes of this kind in the text of the book.
My question: Is it at all possible that the line was intended to scan as a hexameter like this?
—uu | —— | —— | — uu| — uu| — u
That would require columna to be ablative? The question is not whether such a scansion is classically correct, but whether it could have been acceptable to a 15th century writer.

 

[Bitmap]

I don't think so. It's not only all the troubles with the vowel lengths that speak against it, but also the fact that it ends in a 4-syllable-word.

 

[Ian White]

Thanks. I guess Columna itself is a fatal obstacle, with the second syllable surely long.

 

[Bitmap]

Another obstacle would be that the hexametre wouldn't have a decent caesura.

People in the Renaissance were actually pretty well-informed about Latin ... that's why I would find it so hard to believe that this supposed to be an hexametre ... but I can understand what you're trying to investigate!

 

[Ian White]

The probable author was a friar often working as a classical schoolmaster.
While I'm about it, perhaps I should check another thing which in contrast I felt pretty sure of. The book contains a sculpted scene with an inscription of Jupiter making a joke about Cupid's complaint at having himself got burnt by the spark from Psyche's lamp. Jupiter is saying
Perfer scintillam, qui caelum accendis et omnes!
The author himself refers to this as "questo monostichon"; which I translate as "This one-liner". For the line itself I tried to reproduce the hexameter form I felt confident of noting:
"You, put up with the spark, who heaven and everyone kindle!"
There are a lot of other (I guess competent) Latin verses in the book. An introductory one in hendecasyllabics, and three in heroic couplets: for translating all these I used English metres. Then there is a shorter hendecasyllabic epitaph at the end:
F oelix Polia, quae sepulta vivis
C laro Marte Poliphilus quiescens
I am fecit vigilare te sopitam.
This also forms an acrostic FCI, taken to stand for Franciscus Columna Invenit. Here I have struggled to write corresponding hendecasyllabics in English; many versions attempted, here the last so far:
F ortun’d Polia thou that buried livest:
Combat shone, and Poliphilo at peace now
In awakeness has made thee stay while slumbered.
I'm glad I don't have to make an English hexameter of the acrostic I was asking about.

Thank you again for disposing of my question.

 

[Bitmap]

The probable author was a friar often working as a classical schoolmaster.
While I'm about it, perhaps I should check another thing which in contrast I felt pretty sure of. The book contains a sculpted scene with an inscription of Jupiter making a joke about Cupid's complaint at having himself got burnt by the spark from Psyche's lamp. Jupiter is saying
Perfer scintillam, qui caelum accendis et omnes!
The author himself refers to this as "questo monostichon"; which I translate as "This one-liner". For the line itself I tried to reproduce the hexameter form I felt confident of noting:
"You, put up with the spark, who heaven and everyone kindle!"
There are a lot of other (I guess competent) Latin verses in the book. An introductory one in hendecasyllabics, and three in heroic couplets: for translating all these I used English metres. Then there is a shorter hendecasyllabic epitaph at the end:
F oelix Polia, quae sepulta vivis
C laro Marte Poliphilus quiescens
I am fecit vigilare te sopitam.
This also forms an acrostic FCI, taken to stand for Franciscus Columna Invenit. Here I have struggled to write corresponding hendecasyllabics in English; many versions attempted, here the last so far:
F ortun’d Polia thou that buried livest:
Combat shone, and Poliphilo at peace now
In awakeness has made thee stay while slumbered.
I'm glad I don't have to make an English hexameter of the acrostic I was asking about.

Thank you again for disposing of my question.

First things first, your translation of that hexametre is pretty good

But what you write also shows that the person you're talking about had a decent amount of experience in Latin poetry, and would have been very unlikely to think that the line you mentioned in your first post would actually constitute a Latin hexametre.