The Memory Theatre of Guillio Camillo
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 aMemory 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.
Camillo had transformed the Art of Memory into a practical means for construction. Frances A. Yates writes of this transformation: .
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].
(Taken from http://www.wendtroot.com/spoetry/folder6/ng6211.html)
