Objects in Review: Codex Seraphinianus

For nearly three years, from the late 1970s to the early 1980s, Italian industrial designer and artist Luigi Serafini spent most of his time in his Rome apartment.

It was an “ascetic” life, Serafini told Bird in Flight in 2015, similar to that of a monk or a hermit. But born from the solitude was Codex Seraphinianus, an illustrated encyclopedia unlike anything that had been published before.

“The Codex was not a project in the conventional meaning of the word,” Serafini said. “To me, it was a necessity—I just had to do it. You may call it inspiration, but I would rather compare it to a state of trance. When you are in a trance, it doesn’t matter how much time you spend doing a job—you feel involved and can’t stop until you finish it.”

There are a lot of unconventional things about Codex Seraphinianus. It cannot be read, or rather, its words are an invented language, its alphabet is a bizarro style of calligraphy. Its images defy interpretation: On the cover of the first edition (above), what appears to be a man and a woman in a bound embrace morphs into a singular alligator. 

For more than four decades, cryptographers and codebreakers have attempted to decipher Codex Seraphinianus to extract meaning from its nonsensical world. 

Serafini, however, has always been clear: there is nothing hiding in plain sight.

“People wouldn’t believe my game—they needed a legend based on some kind of hidden meaning,” Serafini said. “A hidden meaning in itself was not enough—they needed a hidden meaning that could be deciphered. I don’t believe in such tricks.”

Though Codex Seraphinianus resists meaning, Serafini searched for it in his own life before going on this artistic journey. In the late 1970s, he traveled across the U.S.—a journey he’s compared to On the Road. And like Sal Paradise, Jack Kerouac’s protagonist, Serafini saw the world through a different lens. “I thought about things,” he said. “I made conclusions, told stories, and listened to the stories of others; I was changing myself and people around me.”

On this road trip, Serafini had a breakthrough, an epiphany, a far-out moment that brought about a feeling of himself in the world: “I felt I was a piece of information that existed in a certain network—a network created by the need for communication among over 70 million young people, a network that generated itself, because I was also one of those 70 million.” 

Following the publication and success of Codex Seraphinianus—when the book was released in 1982, 5,000 copies were printed; in the secondary marketplace today, those first editions can be worth nearly $5,000—the concepts and the style of Serafini’s work can be seen in works spanning from books to films to video games. A Book from the Sky, for example, was published between 1987 and 1991 and is filled with language that resembles Chinese characters, but are in fact entirely meaningless. Director Guillermo del Toro’s sketchbook is filled with illustrations that could be mistaken for Codex Seraphinianus fanfic.

The surrealist logic—where meaning can exist and not exist at the same time—and the phantasmal scenes were something to be admired. For if a human could create something so deeply personal yet universally untranslatable, what does that say about us?

If a machine could do the same, what would that mean?