Giulio Camillo

Giulio Camillo detto Delminio (* 1480 in Portogruaro ; † 1544 in Milan ) was an Italian scholar, famous for his theater of wisdom or memory theater, a wooden building in which all the knowledge of the world was to be stored through mnemonic images like in an encyclopedia . In this theater, of which he had created a wooden model for use by one or two people, the viewer stood on the stage, and symbols for all things of creation were placed on the theater tiers . Titian actually painted such a symbol - an allegory of time.

Giulio Camillo was born in 1480 (according to other sources 1484) and was perhaps originally called Bernardino. He studied a. a. at the University of Padua Rhetoric and Logic . He also devoted himself to studying the Hebrew language , Kabbalah, and Neoplatonic philosophy. The King of France supported his work on the Memorial Theater financially, but prevented a publication of the description of the whole thing, which appeared only after Giulio Camillo's death.

Works

• Il Teatro della Sapientia, 1530
• L'idea del Teatro, 1550
• De L'Imitation

Impact history

Giulio Camillo not only had a great influence on his contemporaries like Samuel Quiccheberg , the nestor of museum studies, but also on interface designers and computer artists . In 1966 the book The Art of Memory by Frances Yates was published , which Giulio Camillo brought back to the consciousness of scientists and artists. The computer is seen as a modern form of memory theater, alongside memory theater as physical and virtual installations.

literature

• Frances A. Yates : Memory and Recall. Mnemonic from Aristotle to Shakespeare. 3. Edition. Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 1994, ISBN 3-05-002617-0 ( Acta humaniora ).

Web links

• Kate Robinson: Giulio Camillo's L'idea del Teatro ( Memento of October 14, 2006 in the Internet Archive )
• Peter Matussek: The Perfomative Turn - Knowledge as Acting , in: Digitale Transformationen , Heidelberg 2004