Scope and Contents

Schwenger provides a critical analysis of the book, "Codex Seraphinianus" by Luigi Serafini (a work held by the Sackner Archive) . -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Scope and Contents The artist aka Luigi Serafini writes the text in a flowing yet indecipherable script and illustrates it with vibrantly colored pictures of fantastic creatures, plant life, and machines. This is an extremely unusual presentation for a trade edition book.The Codex is divided into eleven chapters, partitioned into two sections. The first section appears to describe the natural world, dealing with flora, fauna, and physics. The second deals with the humanities, the various aspects of human life: clothing, history, cuisine, architecture and so on. Each chapter seems to treat a general encyclopedic topic. The topics of each separate chapter are as follows: "¢The first chapter describes many alien types of flora: strange flowers, trees that uproot themselves and migrate, etc."¢The second chapter is devoted to the fauna of this alien world, depicting many animals that are surreal variations of the horse. The horse is a hoofed mammal, a subspecies of one of seven extant species of the...

Scope and Contents

This print was taken from the artist's Codex, a book held by the Sackner Archive. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.