It is impossible to place Giordano Bruno's De Imaginum, Signorum et Idearum Compositione in the straitjacket of one of the many categories and types of treatises, fictions, poems, and other genres of writing in which the clear-minded Renaissance rhetoricians and followers of Aristotle and Cicero thought that all types of speculative and creative activities could be divided.

The very personal and original nature of Giordano Bruno — his iconoclastic and rebellious nature that throughout a short and tumultuous life set him apart from and against the major religions of the time, and against most other established cultural and political institutions — should discourage from the start any attempt to “define” the De Imaginum... Compositione in any way other than as a fascinating and engrossing multi- and intermedia work whose symbolism is not to be read with the eyes of the body but with the eyes of the mind.

It is to be explored, searched, perused with the same amazement and wonder with which one would walk thorough a labyrinth, or inside a pyramid. The result of the experience is not going to be greater understanding — if by understanding we mean the rational, scientific and pragmatic type of understanding that we are commonly taught in philosophy courses — but an initiation into arcane mystery.

— Manfredi Piccolomini

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