Memory in the Renaissance, Art of

Abstract

The art of memory derives its name from the Greek myth of Mnemonise, daughter of Uranus and Gaea. It aims to allow individuals to remember things, words, and concepts. It is based on a use of places and images easily identifiable by the imagination.

In the Renaissance, this art has an extraordinary impact. In the fifteenth century, the best-known book of the art of memory is Phoenix seu artificiosa memoria by Peter Tommai of Ravenna, a book published in Venice in 1491. This book greatly influences the treatises of this kind throughout the Renaissance and assumes an important role also in the reflection of Giordano Bruno. Peter Tommai’s text is built on the tradition of Cicero. More than on searching for “places,” he insists on the role played by the images.

Especially in the sixteenth century, the function and the significance of the art of memory begin to mutate. After meeting with the tradition of Lullism (which had known great success in the Middle Ages, especially in the Franciscan order), the art of memory becomes primarily a “clavis universalis” of reality. It aims to decipher the world as a whole and penetrates its secrets. The art of memory becomes, therefore, a “cosmology.”

At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the original purpose of the techniques of artificial memory is completely mutated. On the one hand, the art of memory loses all contact with the dialectic, rhetoric, and medicine, becoming a “pansophia”: a universal knowledge that can decipher the “alphabet of the world”; an “encyclopedic” theatre that has the ambition to be the “mirror” of reality. On the other hand, already starting from intellectual experiences of Ramo, Bacon, and Descartes, the original meaning of this art radically changes, making his entrance into the context of modern logic.