Spatializing Knowledge: Giulio Camillo’s Theatre of Memory (1519-1544)
Giulio Camillo Delminio (1480-1544) was an Italian Renaissance polymath. His most famous project, started in ca.1519 and carried on until his death, was “The Theatre of Memory,” an ideal architectural structure destined to “tener collocati e a ministrar tutti gli umani concetti, tutte le cose che sono in tutto il mondo” (“locate and administer all human concepts, everything which exists in the whole world”), as he wrote in his treatise L’idea del theatro.
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.