Giulio Camillo Theatre Of Memory
Denisha Padley
Camillo imagined the theater as a wooden structure formally based on the Vitruvian description of the Roman theater from the De Architectura. However, he reversed the canonical relationship between audience and stage, because he conceived the theatre for a single spectator located on the stage.
The theater is divided into seven cloves and is structured on seven levels of steps defining forty-nine areas, each one associated with a symbolic figure from mythology, from the Cabal or from hermeticism.
For a long time, Camillo looked for a patron capable of carrying out his project and physically building his wooden theatre. Probably, only a wooden model was finally realized, as testified by a letter from Viglius van Aytta, an emissary of Erasmus of Rotterdam.
English historian Frances Yates wrote a long and detailed description and interpretation of the Theatre of Memory in her famous book The art of memory published in 1966. More recently, other historians of Medieval and Renaissance art and literature have renewed the interest on the subject of Camillo and the Art of Memory.
Each of the six upper grades has a general symbolic meaning represented by the same image on each of its seven gates. We have shown this on the plan by giving the name of the general image for a grade at the top of all its gates, together with the characters of the planets, indicating to which planetary series each gate belongs.
Hmm. When I hear the number 7, my mind always tends toward the chakras and not the sephirot, but I suppose since the top three represent the crown or godhead, then the lower seven on their own have significance. As always, thoughtful and interesting post.
Thank you once again for posting a profound magical carrot which I used to as a starting point for my own treasure hunt in the pursuit of personal growth. Memory, imagination and curiosity are key factors in personal growth and are rarely mentioned as being so.
I have had a long fascination with memory and have posted a lot in the past on the subject. But I think the idea of the theatre in relation to memory is truly brilliant.
I agree with your point entirely. Thank you very much for stopping by and commenting.
Camillo is described as most learned in the mystical traditions of the Hebrews which are
called Cabala, and profoundly versed in the philosophies of the Egyptians, the
Pythagoreans, and the Platonists.
Camillo says such explanation of the world: the forest (human world), the slope(heaven) and the hill (divine god). The summit give us the clue, how to deal with our life. From this height we can have a distinct vision of the world of the nature, thus the theatre is this world of nature, which can be seen also from the stars and from supercestial fonts of wisdom beyond them.
To conclude Camillo was able to bring forward( at least to some extend since his work was never finished) the art of memory in the Renaissance period. He turns the classical art of memory into an occult art.
Giulio Camillo Delmino was one of the most famous thinker in the sixteenth century, however he had been completely forgotten by the eighteenth. His claim to such a transitory fame lies in his construction of a Memory Theater, of which only a short, eighty-seven page book, L'idea del Theatro (1550), explaining its construction and function remains. This theatre was a wooden structure which was first presented in Venice and then in Paris, and was the talk of Europe at the time.
Various accounts describe the structure as a building which would allow one or two individuals at a time within its interior. The insides were inscribed with a variety of images, figures, and ornaments. It was full of little boxes arranged in various orders and grades. Upon entering the Theater, the spectator will be able to discourse on any subject no less fluently than Cicero [1] as he stands on a stage looking out towards the auditorium where the images are placed among seven pillars or grades. Each grade representing the expanding history of divine thought. In the first grade there were the 'seven essential measures' depicted by the 'seven known planets' which were the First Causes of creation and from which all things depended. The highest grade of the Theatre was the seventh level, which was assigned to all the arts, 'both noble and vile,' and is represented by Prometheus who stole the technology of fire from the gods.
The emotionally striking images of classical memory, transformed by the devout Middle Ages into corporeal similitudes, and transformed again into magically powerful images. The religious intensity associated with mediaeval memory has turned in a new and bold direction. The mind and memory of man is now 'divine', having powers of grasping the highest reality through a magically activated imagination [2].
Camillo never finish his Memory Theatre, nor did any of his constructions survive to the seventeenth century. Yet the attempt was felt. In her book, Theatre of the World, Yates points towards the construction of the Globe Theatre in Shakespeare's day, of having been the result of Camillo's influence through the works of two Elizabethan hermetic philosophers and magi, John Dee and Robert Fludd. A copy of Camillo's L'Idea del Theatro was in Dee's famous library, and undoubtedly known among the learned in England at the time [3].
One also wonders what the connection between these ideas and the Kunst- und Wunderkammern of the sixteenth and seventeenth century might be? The 'wonder-cabinets' of this period were eclectic collections of oddities, which displayed man-made objects inspired by the new sensibilities of science and contemporary works of art along side with curious and exotic objects of natural history (often from the New World), and supposed relics of religious significance, folklore and antiquity. The 'wonders of God' were systematically arrayed with the 'wonders of man' and arranged in a cabinet or tableaux: the examination of which, would shock the viewer into a new conception of reality and wonder for the divine expressions of God. Three hundred and some odd years later, the collages of Cubism, Futurism and Dada would have a similar effect and wake the viewer up to a new artistic reality of space and time.
These early, esoteric collections evolved into larger displays which were prototypical to the modern museums which emerged in the nineteenth century. The Theatrum Anatomicum in Leiden in 1590 for example, housed a large array of skeletons arranged in a circular amphitheater, that were re-articulated to depict moral lessons from the Bible. In other Wunderkammern of the era, were arranged all sorts of curiosities such as pieces of the ark of Noah, rhinoceros horns, mechanical devices which appeared animated, shrunken heads, Madonnas made from feathers, Javanese costumes, elephant's teeth, etc., any sort of object which would suggest unfamiliarity. They would capture the eye and the imagination by being placed out of context and in a pre-Linnean order to accent their strangeness [4].
4. An entertaining study of a modern Wunderkammern with references to the vintage representations, can be found in Lawrence Weschler's Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology (New York: Pantheon Books, 1995). The next step in Wunderkammern is the World Wide Web, and for which the Museum of Jurassic Technology has a site.
The memory palace was imaginary, of course, and once the speech or the story it had been designed to recall was over, it was emptied of its contents. The orators of antiquity would then ready their memory palaces for new occupants: devising new rooms, and colonnades as a new narrative structure required, seeking out new imagines to stimulate new memories. And in this way the old memory palace would have changed into a new one, ready to stimulate the mind to tell a new story. Like a folk tale, handed down by oral tradition, like a historic building, preserved and altered by each iteration of transmission, the memory palace evolved in the mind of the orator in response to evolving circumstances.
Giordano Bruno
Giordano Bruno, a dominican monk, left the convent where he learned the Art of Memory and wandered throughout Europe telling the secrets of the Art to all who would listen to him including the King of France. Bruno, following the teaching of Neoplatonists, thought that learning the Art gave magic powers: this was the Hermetic Art of Memory.
Medieval methods of the Art differed very little from those of the classical world, but certain changes in the late Middle Ages helped lay the foundations for the Hermetic Art of Memory of the Renaissance. One of the most important of these was a change in the frameworks used for memory loci. Along with the architectural settings most often used in the classical tradition, medieval mnemonists also came to make use of the whole Ptolemaic cosmos of nested spheres as a setting for memory images. Each sphere from God at the periphery through the angelic, celestial and elemental levels down to Hell at the center thus held one or more loci for memory images.
Bruno's mnemonic systems form, to a great extent, the high-water mark of the Hermetic Art of Memory. His methods were dizzyingly complex, and involved a combination of images, ideas and alphabets which require a great deal of mnemonic skill to learn in the first place. Hermetic philosophy and the traditional images of astrological magic appear constantly in his work, linking the framework of his Art to the wider framework of the magical cosmos. The difficulty of Bruno's technique, though, has been magnified unnecessarily by authors whose lack of personal experience with the Art has led them to mistake fairly straightforward mnemonic methods for philosophical obscurities.
A central example of this is the confusion caused by Bruno's practice of linking images to combinations of two letters. Yates' interpretation of Brunonian memory rested largely on an identification of this with the letter-combinations of Lullism, the half-Cabalistic philosophical system of Ramon Lull (1235-1316). While Lullist influences certainly played a part in Bruno's system, interpreting that system solely in Lullist terms misses the practical use of the combinations: they enable the same set of images to be used to remember ideas, words, or both at the same time.
c80f0f1006