Luigi Serafini's Codex Seraphinianus

The fantastical world of Italian artist Luigi Serafini, born in 1949 and still living in Rome. 

A forest somewhere, in some place,
maybe over the rainbow

I discovered a whole new world recently when visiting my granddaughter Julia and her oldest son Philip, my great-grandson, now 15 years old. He talked about something called the Codex, an encyclopedia of some kind, and he especially liked the drawings. They are weird, these odd scribbles and things, made-up things. Like weird plants, weird animals and birds, weird machines. Hmm, really?  I had no idea what Philip was talking about.

When I got home I messaged his mom to send me more information. What is this book? She said it was called The Codex Seraphinianus. Strange name. I did some research and reading. It didn't take long to realize I had gotten lost in a very unusual, to say the least, fantasy world that was incomprehensible and fascinating at the same time. 

The Codex Seraphinianus is an encyclopedia of people, places and things that exist only in the mind of its creator, Luigi Serafini. It's nothing like the other Codex we know, the one by Renaissance artist and genius Leonardo Da Vinci, which is a collection of his scientific writings and illustrates the link between art and science.  No, this is different. Maybe its title contains some hints. It's peculiar. It's  graphic. It's a combination of the author's name and, ahem, something else. It was created to sound like Latin so it would be taken seriously, which is so amusing in itself, this parody, this play on words. 

Serafini's Codex, as it's called for short, was first published in 1981. That's a longer time ago than I thought. I learned that it became a "cult classic," has been republished several times since then, and that it continues to feed a vast underground of admirers and followers right up to Philip's generation.  

Serafini, who lives in Rome, is an artist, designer, and architect. He spent years creating a make-believe language for his encyclopedia, a sort of flowing script with lots of curly ques and flourishes that looks like a free-floating form of Sanscrit to me. Some reviewers have called it asemic: it looks like writing, but you can't read it.

So the first thing to know about Serafini's Codex is that you cannot read this book. You just look at it and enter into a fantastical place you've never been before. I went to the Library to look through it.  It was strange. It  felt like being embedded in a Salvador Dali painting, actually many Dali paintings, getting into his dripping watches out on a limb in a strange dreamscape. 

What in the world? Whose world?

The second thing is that the people, places and things described in this encyclopedia are also invented. The Codex is wildly imaginative. The made-up language describes made-up people, places and things. Yes, I see what Philip was saying. The illustrations are amazing and weird, drawn in colored pencils, detailed, amusing and sometimes even scary. These fantastical visuals resemble nothing that we would want to look up in any real encyclopedia, but you can't help but be drawn into a surreal enchantment.  Serafini credits the decorative gothic painter Carlo Crivelli and the Surrealists with informing his style. "I have many masters. I really believe in masters. Really, it's very difficult to say what master gave me more than others," he says.  The surrealist masters stand out for me. 

Taken together, the visuals you don't recognize and the language you can't read, add up to a powerful imaginative experience that transports you to another realm. Readers, especially younger readers, are inexplicably mesmerized by this encyclopedia of arcane knowledge you don't need to consult for any reason, except that it's a fun+++ art experience. 

Serafina, now 72, began creating his Codex in the mid-1970s, and I would hazard to guess, maybe under the influence of something!  According to a 2020  Insider article, Serafini spent "two and a half years drawing like a hermit" while wearing out the grooves of a vinyl copy of Mozart's "The Magic Flute."  That was "the soundtrack of the Codex," Serafini said. "I almost broke it."  

His publisher finally forced him to put his pencil down. The Codex was published in 1981, and republished several times after that.

One critic calls Serafini's work  "a cross between a field guide to alien flora and fauna and an assembly manual for bizarre biomechanical devices, like something you'd find on a shelf in Dr. Strange's library – an arcane artifact that's recognizably a book, just not one from our reality."

A panel from a French exhibit of Serafini's work in October 2020

Why has this fanciful encyclopedia of Serafini's world that exists only in his mind, as creative and wonderful as it is, become a cult classic?  Maybe this psychotherapist, Douglas Hofstadter, has an answer. 

At Serafini's house in Rome. He is still writing,
still drawing, so there's no end to his Codex either. 

"On top of dreaming up a magnificently mysterious curly script in which all the articles were written (readable only by inhabitants of that world, sad to say, yet beautiful to behold by outsiders like us earthlings), he painted hundreds of fantastic, surreal scenes that would have sent chills up and down the spines of such madly possessed magicians as Hieronymus Bosch, Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, and M. C. Escher. Without any doubt, Luigi Serafini belongs in the ranks of those immortal geniuses, each of whom was gifted with a unique brand of deliciously demonic inventivity. Serafini matches them all at every level and in every dimension. I tip my hat with boundless admiration to this marvelous thinker, miraculous creator, and magistral artist."  Douglas Hofstadter

So, Philip.  Why do YOU like this book you can't read and that you find strange and weird?  "I don't know. It has do with the mystery of it, and the drawings." 

"Lots of people think the made-up language could be an actual language," he says. "There's lots of discussion online about it." 

Why would they think that? "Well, it might have grammatical rules or something. Also, the drawings are the coolest things ever and the art is unique. Where else can you find this information, Nana?"

Some Sources:  

1.  https://birdinflight.com/media/luigi-serafini-on-how-and-why-he-created-an-encyclopedia-of-an-imaginary-world.html

2.  https://contentcatnip.com/2018/09/21/book-review-codex-seraphinianus-by-luigi-serafini/

3.  https://newsrnd.com/life/2020-09-29-france-pays-homage-to-the--codex-seraphinianus-.rJeUvLYgUP.html   A 2020 exhibition in Southern France. 

4.  https://www.insider.com/codex-seraphinianus-luigi-serafini-interview-40th-anniversary-edition-2021-11

5.  https://www.wired.com/2013/10/codex-seraphinianus-interview/

6.  https://www.openculture.com/2017/09/an-introduction-to-the-codex-seraphinianus-the-strangest-book-ever-published.html  two pages from this weird Encyclopedia of a fantasy world

7.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Leicester

8.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Seraphinianus  "The Codex is an encyclopedia in manuscript with copious hand-drawn, colored-pencil illustrations of bizarre and fantastical flora, fauna, anatomies, fashions, and foods....The illustrations are often surreal parodies of things in the real world, such as a bleeding fruit and a plant that grows into roughly the shape of a chair....Others depict odd, apparently senseless machines, often with delicate appearances and bound by tiny filaments. Some illustrations are recognizable as maps or human faces; while others (especially in the "physics" chapter) are mostly or totally abstract. Nearly all of the illustrations are brightly coloured and highly detailed."  

Wikipedia also describes the structure of the book. "The book is in eleven chapters, in two sections. The first section appears to describe the natural world of flora, fauna and physics. The second deals with various aspects of human life, including garments, history, cuisine and architecture. Each chapter seems to address a general encyclopedic topic, as follows:

1. Types of flora: strange flowers, trees that uproot themselves and migrate, etc.
2. Fauna (animals), including surreal variations of the horse, hippopotamus, rhinoceros and birds
3. An apparently separate kingdom of odd bipedal creatures
4. Physics and chemistry (generally considered the most abstract, enigmatic chapter)
5. Bizarre machines and vehicles
6. The humanities: biology, sexuality, aboriginal peoples, including some examples with plant life and tools (e.g. pens, wrenches) grafted onto the human body
7. History: people (some only vaguely human) of unknown significance, with their times of birth and death; scenes of historical and possibly religious significance; burial and funereal customs
8. The Codex's writing system (which is to say, the – or probably, a – writing system of the world (if a world it is) from which the codex originates, or which it documents), including punctuation marks, the text being written, and experiments performed upon the text
9. Food, dining practices, garments
10. Bizarre games, including cards, board games and athletic sports
11. Architecture."