eSharpGiulio Camillo's L'idea del TeatroKate Robinson (Classics: University of Glasgow)

1 Giulio Camillo's L'idea del Teatro, or, The Idea of the Theatre, - is a slim book that waspublished in the middle of the sixteenth century. L'idea del Teatro, once it eventuallygot to print - and this took a long time and came about in a very circuitous fashion -was a popular work, going through a number of re-editions in Florence and Venice. Infact, the collected writings of Giulio Camillo were published again, as recently as 1990.[1]

2 In his time, Camillo was a famous man, and subsequently his work was referred to by anumber of writers and artists during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,including Ariosto and Rousseau. And he has inspired a number of contemporaryartists, including, for example the writer Umberto Eco ( Teatro magico di GiulioCamillo, 1998), the composer John Fuller (The Theatre of Memory, Proms, 1981) andthe video artist, Bill Viola (The Theatre of Memory, video installation, 1985). I beganmy work on Camillo in 1998. As a practising sculptor, my first response was visual,and I have included with this paper a number of images that were directly inspired bythe text of Camillo's L'idea.

3 And yet, despite his fame, Camillo has certainly not been without his critics. He was atthe centre of a long and bitter feud with Erasmus. The historian, Tiraboschi, writing in1824, said that Camillo's Theatre was a "vain and incredible thing".[2] Within the lastfifty years, he has variously been called the "peak of absurdity" [3], "anamusing...imposter",[4] and most recently the "great actor of the Renaissance".[5]Perhaps Camillo provoked such a mixed response because L'Idea del Teatro is such anunusual book. Essentially about the planets and the layout of the heavens, it alsotouches on medicine, myth, philosophy, theology and social commentary. Thebroadness of Camillo's scope, in itself, however, was not necessarily unique. Otherwriters of the period were equally wide-ranging in their treatment of themes. Whatmarks out Camillo is his reliance on the visual image - on the sign - to reveal hismeaning. L'Idea contains over two hundred distinct visual metaphors, which aregraphically described in text, although there are no drawings, as such. Interestingparallels can be made with the book and Renaissance hieroglyphic and emblematicsystems. L'Iidea del Teatro is an intensely visual book.

4 Throughout the Medieval period and during the Renaissance, complex conceptualvisual memory systems were constructed in order to enable the recall of information.[6]Very often, these conceptual systems would be based on the idea of imagining anenvironment and filling this imaginary space with strange visual signs/objects - thesecould be sculptures, or people, or as one famous treatise on memory said: an imageshould be grotesque - stained with blood, or clad in a purple cloak, or humorous - in

order for it to stay lodged in the mind. These visual mnemonic signs themselvesbecame more and more multi-layered and self-referential. L'idea del Teatro is a bookthat describes one of these complex memory systems, and, as its title suggests, usedthe concept of a Theatre in which to place its multifarious signs.

Elephant at the level of MercuryL'idea del Teatro: image by KR

Giulio Camillo was born in Friuli, in the north east of Italy, very close to Venice, inaround 1480. He made his living as an orator and teacher of rhetoric. His manuscriptwork includes treatises on language, focusing on differentiations and nuances of form.He promoted the use of his local Friulian dialect, and was involved in a long-runningdebate on innovation versus imitation. [7] Printing had just been invented, and was infull swing at this time.[8] By the year 1500, when Camillo was twenty, Venice had asmany as 417 printing houses. Venice is not a large town, and by my estimate that figuresays that maybe around ten percent of the whole population was specifically devoted todeveloping this new medium. Giulio Camillo, however, never had a book published inhis lifetime. I believe that this may have been because he was distrustful of some of thedevelopments being made in printing at the time. He was not alone in this. A numberof the intellectual luminaries of the day also felt that certain knowledge should bereserved for the use of a chosen few, and not made known to the public at large. Thepublication of Copernicus's text, for example, about the arrangement of the solarsystem, was, famously, delayed until the very weeks before he died.

5 Camillo devoted years of his life to developing "The Theatre". Rumours and gossipspread about the creation of this "mind and soul, artistically wrought",[9]although it isdebatable whether Camillo actually constructed anything tangible. When he wasbetween forty and fifty years old, Camillo took up an invitation from the King ofFrance, Franois 1st, to live in Paris. Word had spread from Italy of Camillo and hisTheatre, and Franois - who was a very wily, shrewd man, and who had a keenlydeveloped aesthetic sense - was keen to get a piece of the action. By all accountsCamillo seemed to have had a productive time in the city, and Franois paid him ahefty fee to research and develop his theories. He was given a comparable amount, infact, as had been awarded by Franois to Leonardo da Vinci. Franois only made onestipulation: Camillo must not tell his "secret" to anyone else but himself - the King.Camillo remained true to this condition right up until the months before he died.

6 Camillo stayed in Paris for about seven years, but eventually, the funds from the Kingbegan to dry up and Camillo decided to return to Italy. We do not know how much ofhis ideas he had clarified by this time, but certainly Camillo had not divulged histheory to anyone else at this point. During the latter part of 1543, or very early in 1544,he accepted an offer brokered by his agent, Girolamo Muzio, to go to Milan. Here, inMilan, at the court of the Marchese del Vasto, after much persuasion, Camillo finallydictated his great idea to Girolamo Muzio. Muzio transcribed everything that Camillosaid over the course of seven days and nights. The manuscript was completed early inFebruary 1544. Three months later, on the 15th of May, Camillo died.

7 Muzio and the Marchese del Vasto, however, even though they had gone to greatlengths to persuade Camillo to divulge his secret ideas to them, decided not to publishCamillo's manuscript, and L'idea languished. It was not until six years later that it wasto receive a wider public, when the manuscript arrived at the printers, and L'idea delTheatro was finally published in 1550, in Florence, by Lorenzo Torrentino.

Celestial StreamsL'idea del Teatro: image by KR

8 So, what was in L'idea del Theatro? What did it contain to convince Muzio and delVasto to delay its publication, though they had gone to such lengths to attain themanuscript? The work is about the creation of the world and the layout of theheavens. Written in Italian, the book is arranged in seven sections in which Camillospeaks of a system that, as he says, makes "scholars into spectators".[10]He isimagining a "theatre" in its original sense - as a place in which a spectacle unfolds:

"Following the order of the creation of the world, we shall place on the first levels themore natural things...those we can imagine to have been created before all otherthings by divine decree. Then we shall arrange from level to level those that followedafter, in such a way that in the seventh, that is, the last and highest level shall sit allthe arts...not by reason of unworthiness, but by reason of chronology, since these werethe last to have been found by men."

The Theatre, then, is to be understood in terms of time. It is a spatial representation ofchronology - a kind of clock of epochs. I think we should understand that what heconceived was fundamentally a structure of conceptual relationships rather a buildingof wood or stone, and it is on that level that his work bears most fruit.

9 The entire Theatre, says Camillo, rests on Solomon's Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Placedabove the Pillars of Wisdom, are the planets. Above these are a further six levels.There are the levels of the Banquet and the Cave - these are about nature and theelements, about the primeval creation of things. Then there are the levels of theGorgon and Pasiphae - both ancient Greek mythical motifs - which are about spiritualman and nature. And then there are the levels of "The Sandals of Mercury" andPrometheus - which are to do with art and man, or man using technology - which waseverything from making windmills, to creating viaducts or sewing. Camillo waswriting at a time when encyclopaedias were being created and it was thought that itwas possible to collate every known fact about the world, and that everything wascosmically connected. So inside his astronomical world system we not only gettheories about planetary arrangement but also about how the planets affect our healthand every other aspect of our lives.

10 Camillo describes doorways placed on each of the levels beneath which the scholar, orspectator, may view images to represent, and to remember, salient features of thatposition within the arrangement. Behind the doorway to "Banquet" on the first level,for instance, "we shall find the Breadth, or...Magnitude of Being, made in the shape ofa pyramid", which Camillo says symbolizes "the Father, the Word...and the HolySpirit", as well as "a representation of Pan", whose body was meant to represent thesupercelestial, the celestial and the inferior world, and "the Fates", symbols of "thebeginning...the effect and of the end" of an event.

11 The naming of the levels in effect creates a kind of grid system to the whole plan. It isa grid system to enhance memory, and also to affect the interpretation of a givensymbol or image - a kind of grid of meaning. But rather than what we would now have- a Cartesian graph, for example, based on numeric values - the values in Camillo'sscheme are based on language and myth. This is not to say that Camillo did not valuenumber itself. Camillo's philosophy and working method was based on the convictionthat the sum total of all things - all material, every topic - as well as every word, wasreducible to a number of finite elements. He was attempting a synthesis of the two - asynthesis between mathematics and verbal/visual language. In Camillo's scheme,rather than saying "doorway b3" you could say "the doorway at Mercury on the level ofthe Cave".

12 In all, there are approximately two hundred distinct visual metaphors described inCamillo's plan, although there are no drawings, as such. When I initially read aboutthem I was very taken with the richness of the symbolism and the layers of myth thatwas apparent - if obscure - in Camillo's schema. It was obvious that Camillo was tryingto describe something very complex and that the work was multi-layered. I rememberbeing drawn to the Theatre because I really felt as though Camillo was telling a story,not in the way that a narrative painting might tell a story, but in the sense that therewere connections between each of the images, across the space of the Theatre, that heintended the viewer to pluck images from across the entire network of the Theatre anduse them to reconstruct, reassemble, a meaningful pattern - a three-dimensionalvisual language.

Proteus at the level of the NeptuneL'idea del Teatro: image by KR

13 For the time, Camillo expresses some radical views in L'idea del Theatro. He issceptical, for example, that we should take as literally the idea that the world wascreated in seven days; he suggests that the earth moves; and, crucially, that therelationship of the sun to the earth does not agree with the prevailing religious andscientific orthodoxy.

14 L'idea was dictated to Muzio only a matter of months after Nicolaus Copernicus'sRevolution of the Heavenly Spheres was published in 1543. In the Revolution of theHeavenly Spheres Copernicus proved mathematically, for the first time, that the sun,and not the earth, was at the centre of the universe. Camillo and Copernicus may infact have met in the early years of the fifteenth century at either the universities ofBologna or Padua. While I am not suggesting that Camillo's work can be described inthe same terms as a mathematical astronomer, there is, I believe, a heliocentric core toCamillo's L'idea. If Camillo had a "secret", known only to the King of France, it wasthat the sun had pride of place in the universe.

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[1] Camillo Delminio, Giulio, L'idea del Teatro e altri scritti di retorica (Turin: Edizioni RES, 1990).

[2] Quoted in Wenneker, Lu Beery, An Examination of L'idea del Teatro of Giulio Camillo, including anannotated translation, with special attention to his influence on Emblem Literature and Iconography(Unpublished PhD Thesis: University of Pittsburgh, 1970), p102.

[3] Bolgar, The Classical Heritage, (Cambridge University Press, 1954), p.434.

[4] Levi (Ed), Collected Works of Erasmus 6 Ciceronianus (University of Toronto Press, 1986), n.308,pp.562-563.

[5] Giulio Camillo Delminio De L'Imitation, translated into French by Francoise Graziani withintroduction and notes by Lina Bolzoni, (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1996).

[6] See Carruthers, Mary, The Book of Memory (Cambridge University Press, 1990); Bolzoni, Lina, trans.Jeremy Parzen, The Gallery of Memory: Literary and Iconographic Models in the Age of the PrintingPress (University of Toronto Press, 2001); Yates, Frances, The Art of Memory (London: Routledge andKegan Paul, 1966).

[7] This concerned the European wide debacle, instigated by Erasmus, on "Ciceronianism". For a historyof Ciceronianism, see Sandys, J.E. Harvard Lectures on the Revival of Learning (Cambridge UniversityPress, 1905). For discussions about Camillo's and other responses see G.W. Pigman, III "Imitation andthe Renaissance Sense of the Past: The Reception of Erasmus' Ciceronianus", Journal of Medieval andRenaissance Studies 9 (1979): 155-77; Watson, Elisabeth See, Achille Bocchi and the Emblem Book asSymbolic Form (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

[8] Johann Gutenberg is accredited as the first printer, with the first Bible in Latin in Mainz, Germany,in 1450, igniting the revolution in print that was to change the whole world.

[9] From a description of the Theatre in a letter to Erasmus from Zwichem, 8th June 1532. See Allen,Erasmus' Epistles: 2632, 2682, 2657, 2716, 2810 and 3032.

[10] Camillo Delminio, Giulio, L'idea del Teatro (Florence: Torrentino, 1550): 14.

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