The Art of Memory

The Three Latin Sources for the Classical Art of Memory

The classical art of memory—based on placing vivid images on mentally visualized architectural loci—is transmitted to Western tradition through three Latin sources: the anonymous Ad Herennium, Cicero’s De oratore, and Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria, each of which reflects different attitudes toward the strange inner discipline Simonides supposedly invented after identifying banquet victims by their remembered seats.

• Simonides of Ceos is credited with inventing the art of memory by observing that orderly arrangement—specifically remembering who sat where at a banquet—enables identification and retention; he inferred that mental images placed on ordered loci could systematically preserve any content.
  • The story in Cicero’s De oratore has Simonides called away from a banquet before the roof collapses, allowing him to identify the crushed bodies by their remembered positions.
  • Simonides also discovered that the sense of sight is the strongest of all the senses, making visual memory images the most powerful mnemonic tool.
• The Ad Herennium, written circa 86–82 BC by an unknown Roman rhetoric teacher, is the only complete Latin treatise on the classical art of memory and served as the primary source for both the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, giving detailed rules for places and two kinds of images: memory for things (memoria rerum) and memory for words (memoria verborum).
  • Rules for places specify that loci should be moderately lit, not too large or small, spaced about thirty feet apart, and memorized in deserted buildings to avoid distracting impressions.
  • Images for things should be striking, unusual, actively gesturing, beautiful or hideous, sometimes stained with blood or wearing crowns—the so-called imagines agentes—because emotional intensity fixes memory.
  • The Ad Herennium was wrongly attributed to Cicero throughout the Middle Ages, giving it enormous authority as ’the Second Rhetoric of Tullius.'
• The specimen images in Ad Herennium—including a sick man in bed with a defendant holding a cup, tablets, and a ram’s testicles—illustrate how composite human figures with accessories encode the ’things’ of a legal case, demonstrating a world of intense inner visualisation alien to modern readers.
  • The cup reminded of poisoning, the tablets of the will, and the ram’s testicles (testes) of the witnesses—a mnemonic pun.
  • Memory for words images used famous actors Aesopus and Cimber being costumed for Iphigeneia to recall the words ‘Atridae parant’—a striking off-stage scene that stimulates recall through emotional vividness.
• The artificial memory is established from places and images.
• Cicero in De oratore endorses the artificial memory with enthusiasm, describing men of ‘almost divine’ memory such as Metrodorus of Scepsis, and connects trained oratorical memory with Platonic philosophy by suggesting that the soul’s vast memorial powers are evidence of its divinity.
  • Cicero met both Charmadas and Metrodorus of Scepsis, whose memories were ‘almost divine,’ and reported that they said they wrote down what they wished to remember in certain places by means of images, as if inscribing letters on wax.
  • In the Tusculan Disputations Cicero uses the technical terms memoria rerum and inventio—parts of rhetoric—to argue the divinity of the soul, transposing rhetorical categories into Platonic theology.
• Quintilian, while giving the clearest rational account of the mnemotechnic—using rooms of a house as places and anchors or weapons as images—is skeptical of its practical value for oratory and dismisses Metrodorus of Scepsis as a vain boaster, representing a more rationalist tradition that would resurface in Renaissance educational reform.
  • Quintilian explains that places work because experience shows a location does call up associated memories—an empirical rationale absent from the more mystical treatments of the art.
  • He prefers learning from visualizing the actual written tablet or manuscript page rather than constructing elaborate imaginary buildings.
• Cicero’s De inventione, by defining memory as one of the three parts of Prudence (alongside intelligentia and providentia), created the theological hinge that would later allow medieval scholastics to move the art of memory from rhetoric into ethics, making it a moral and religious duty.
  • The Middle Ages paired De inventione (‘First Rhetoric’) with Ad Herennium (‘Second Rhetoric’) as both by Tullius, allowing a neat syllogism: memory is a part of Prudence (First Rhetoric); the artificial memory improves natural memory (Second Rhetoric); therefore practicing artificial memory is a part of virtue.

The Art of Memory in Greece: Memory and the Soul

Greek philosophical treatments of memory—from Simonides through Aristotle and Plato to the Neoplatonists and Hermetic writers—invest the mnemonic tradition with profound metaphysical significance, setting the stage for Renaissance occult transformations by connecting the art of memory with the soul’s nature, divine ascent, and Egyptian wisdom.

• The Parian Chronicle (circa 264 BC) records Simonides as ’the inventor of the system of memory-aids,’ confirming that he took a notable step in codifying mnemonic rules that had likely existed in oral tradition, probably triggered by the transition from oral to written culture in which formal codification became necessary.
  • Simonides was also credited by Plutarch with being the first to equate the methods of poetry with painting, the comparison later summed up by Horace as ut pictura poesis—both resting on the primacy of the visual sense that also underlies the art of memory.
• Aristotle’s De memoria et reminiscentia provides the philosophical justification later used by scholastics to legitimate the artificial memory: because the soul never thinks without a mental image (phantasma) and because reminiscence proceeds by association and ordered starting-points comparable to memory loci, Aristotle’s psychology appeared to endorse the Tullian rules.
  • Aristotle distinguishes memory (passive retention of past impressions, shared with animals) from reminiscence (active, rational recollection unique to humans), and the scholastics would place artificial memory under the higher faculty of reminiscence.
  • The De memoria passage in which Aristotle says ‘some men use places for the purposes of recollecting’ was read by Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas as a direct endorsement of the Tullian mnemonic loci.
• For Plato, memory is not a rhetorical technique but the very ground of all knowledge: the soul before its descent into the body knew the Ideas, and all learning is recollection (anamnesis) of those eternal forms, making the wax-tablet metaphor for memory an image of the soul’s contact with transcendent reality.
  • In the Phaedrus, Socrates contrasts the deep Egyptian wisdom of inner memory with the shallow Greek invention of external writing, which produces only ’the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom.’
  • This Platonic view of memory as anamnesis of the Ideas became the philosophical basis for Renaissance occult memory systems like Camillo’s Theatre, which sought ’eternal places’ for ’the eternal nature of all things.’
• Metrodorus of Scepsis used the twelve signs of the zodiac and their thirty-six decan images as his memory place system, giving 360 ordered loci; this celestial memory system was later invoked by every Renaissance occultist who used astral imagery in memory, making Metrodorus the classical authority for magical celestial mnemonics.
  • “L. A. Post suggested that Metrodorus grouped ten artificial loci under each decan figure, giving a numerically ordered and easily located set of memory places.” —L. A. Post
  • Quintilian called Metrodorus a vain boaster while Cicero called his memory ‘almost divine’—a disagreement reflecting the fundamental tension between rational mnemotechnics and mystical memory.
• Augustine’s famous meditation on memory in the Confessions—with its ‘spacious palaces,’ treasure-houses of images, and search for God hidden within—reflects the mind of a trained rhetor whose vast architectural memory was organised by the classical art, and whose elevation of memory to one of the three powers of the Trinity-reflecting soul gave the art its highest possible religious sanction.
  • Augustine describes memory as ‘campos et lata praetoria memoriae’ (fields and spacious palaces of memory) and calls its contents ’thesauri’—exactly the language of the orator’s definition of memory as the ’treasure-house’ of rhetoric.
  • By making Memory, Understanding, and Will the three powers of the soul that image the Trinity, Augustine conferred supreme honour on memory and implicitly elevated the art of memory to a quasi-theological discipline.

The Art of Memory in the Middle Ages

The medieval transformation of the classical art of memory—driven chiefly by Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas—shifted the art from rhetoric into ethics by making it a part of the cardinal virtue of Prudence, recommending ‘corporeal similitudes’ of spiritual intentions in place of the original orator’s mnemonic images, and thereby connecting the invisible inner art with the proliferation of religious imagery in medieval culture.

• Martianus Capella’s De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii transmitted a compressed version of the artificial memory to the Middle Ages as part of the scheme of the seven liberal arts, but Alcuin’s dialogue for Charlemagne shows that by the Carolingian era the actual rules of places and images had been lost, replaced only by advice to ‘avoid drunkenness.’
  • Martianus recommended the Quintilianist method of memorising from a carefully prepared page—murmured in the night when silence aids concentration—more than the full imagines agentes system.
  • Alcuin had access only to the De inventione and Julius Victor, neither of which gave the full memory rules, leaving Charlemagne without the artificial memory despite his inquiry about further precepts.
• Albertus Magnus in De bono was the first to conflate the rules of Ad Herennium with Aristotle’s De memoria et reminiscentia, arguing that artificial memory belongs not to the sensitive faculty of mere memory but to the rational faculty of reminiscence, thereby providing scholastic justification for the art as a part of Prudence.
  • Albertus defends the Ad Herennium’s imagines agentes—‘remarkably beautiful or hideous, dressed in crowns and purple, stained with blood or smeared with paint’—on the grounds that ’the wonderful moves the memory more than the ordinary,’ and that fables and metaphors move the soul more strongly than literal descriptions.
  • His commentary on De memoria et reminiscentia contains a startling vision of ‘some ram, with huge horns and testicles, coming towards us in the darkness’—a memory image transformed into a mysterious nocturnal apparition, suggesting Albertus was beginning to ‘occultise’ the classical art.
• Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Theologiae (II, II, 49) gave four memory precepts that became canonical for all subsequent memory practice: use unusual corporeal similitudes; arrange them in order; cleave to them with solicitude (his significant mistranslation of solitudo as sollicitudo); and meditate frequently—a formulation that moralised and devotionalised the classical rules.
  • Aquinas’s key justification for using images in memory—that ‘simple and spiritual intentions slip easily from the soul unless linked to corporeal similitudes because human cognition is stronger in regard to the sensibilia’—was quoted on the opening pages of printed memory treatises for the next two centuries.
  • By misreading solitudo (solitude of place) as sollicitudo (solicitude of attention with affection), Aquinas transformed a practical mnemotechnical rule into a devotional instruction to ‘cleave with affection’ to memory images.
• Boncompagno da Signa’s Rhetorica Novissima (1235) represents the pre-scholastic pietistic context in which artificial memory was already being interpreted as concerning the remembrance of Paradise and Hell, with virtues and vices listed as ‘memorial notes’ for directing oneself in the paths of remembrance—a tradition Albertus and Thomas probably found already established.
  • “Boncompagno declares: ‘WE MUST ASSIDUOUSLY REMEMBER THE INVISIBLE JOYS OF PARADISE AND THE ETERNAL TORMENTS OF HELL.’” —Boncompagno da Signa
  • His list of ‘memorial notes’ includes wisdom, ignorance, pride, humility, audacity, fear, magnanimity—a virtue-and-vice schema that foreshadows later memory treatises organizing Hell and Heaven as memory place systems.
• The scholastic recommendation of artificial memory as part of Prudence was institutionally connected to the Dominican Order’s mission of learned preaching, making the art of memory a tool for memorising and delivering sermons on virtues, vices, and the roads to Heaven and Hell—a moralised, Christianised version of the ancient orator’s technique.
  • Albertus Magnus trained at the Dominican house in Bologna during the period when the Bolognese school of dictamen was active, suggesting probable contact between Dominican memory practice and the mystical rhetorics of that tradition.
  • Bartolomeo da San Concordio, a Dominican of Pisa writing before 1323, gave Thomist memory rules in Italian under the virtue of Prudence in his ethical treatise Ammaestramenti degli antichi, associating the art with a vernacular audience of devout laymen.

Mediaeval Memory and the Formation of Imagery

The scholastic recommendation of artificial memory as a part of Prudence generated a vast, largely invisible proliferation of imagery as devout laymen and artists laboured to form corporeal similitudes of virtues and vices, and this inner art of memory is proposed as a major but unrecognised factor in the formation of Giotto’s frescoes, Dante’s Divine Comedy, and the broader medieval flowering of religious imagery.

• In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the Thomist art of memory spread beyond preachers to devout laypeople who were encouraged to memorise virtues and vices through corporeal similitudes in Italian, as shown by ethical works like the Rosaio della vita (1373) which was explicitly provided with an Ars memorie artificialis for memorising its lists of virtues and vices.
  • Two fifteenth-century Florentine codices associate the Rosaio della vita, the Ammaestramenti degli antichi, and the Italian translation of Ad Herennium’s memory section together, showing that these pious ethical treatises were designed to be memorised by the artificial memory.
  • Albertus Magnus stated the artificial memory pertains both ’to the moral man and to the speaker’—not only preachers but any devout layman should use it.
• Giotto’s frescoes of virtues and vices in the Arena Chapel at Padua (c. 1306) may owe their unprecedented animation, variety, and carefully differentiated backgrounds to the influence of scholastic artificial memory, which demanded striking corporeal similitudes placed on differentiated loci—the imagines agentes transposed from the inner memory to the outer wall.
  • The care with which Giotto’s figures stand out from their backgrounds, the variety of those backgrounds, and the grotesque expressiveness of figures like Envy and Folly all accord with the memory rule that images must stand clearly on their loci and must be strikingly beautiful or hideous to stimulate emotional retention.
  • The Last Judgment dominating the end wall of the Arena Chapel frames the virtue and vice images on the side walls, confirming the connection with Boncompagno’s insistence on remembering Hell and Heaven as the primary exercise of artificial memory.
• The English friars John Ridevall and Robert Holcot used elaborate invisible ‘pictures’—memory images not intended to be externalised—as practical mnemonics for memorising and delivering sermons, with Ridevall’s image of the hideous, blind, trumpet-proclaimed harlot Idolatry being a textbook imagines agentes designed to remind of the points of a sermon.
  • A mnemonic verse summing up the features of Ridevall’s image of Idolatry—‘Mulier notata, oculis orbata, aure mutilata, cornu ventilata, vultu deformata et morbo vexata’—shows the classical mnemonic condensed into a memorable formula for the preacher.
  • Holcot placed the image of Cupid on the text of the prophet Hosea as a memory cue for his moralised expansion of that passage—a striking example of using pagan imagery as inner memory images for Scriptural commentary.
• Dante’s Divine Comedy can be read as a supreme example of a scholastic artificial memory: its three canticles correspond to the three parts of Prudence (memoria, intelligentia, providentia); its ordered places in Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise function as memory loci with striking imagines agentes on them; and as a summa of corporeal similitudes it remembers the complex moral scheme of salvation.
  • Ludovico Dolce in 1562 explicitly recommended that ’the ingenious invention of Virgil AND DANTE will help us much’ for remembering the places of Hell in the art of memory, distinguishing punishments according to the nature of sins.
  • The scheme of Hell as an artificial memory was explicitly represented in Dominican memory treatises like Romberch’s, where Hell was divided into memory places with inscriptions noting the sins punished there—the same principle as Dante’s architecture of sin and punishment.
• Petrarch’s Rerum memorandarum libri (c. 1343–5), organised around the parts of Prudence and including explicit references to the artificial memory, established him as an authority in the memory tradition—he was cited for centuries as an important teacher of the art—though his work is really a humanist-flavoured scholastic ethical treatise designed for memorisation.
  • Under memoria as a part of Prudence, Petrarch writes ‘Memory is of two kinds, one for things, one for words’—the technical terms of the classical art—and refers to Themistocles’ refusal to learn the artificial memory, showing his awareness of the tradition.

The Memory Treatises

The printed memory treatises of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries—especially those of Publicius, Peter of Ravenna, Romberch, and Rossellius—represent both the survival and the degeneration of medieval artificial memory into elaborate games and visual alphabets, while simultaneously transmitting the scholastic tradition, establishing Dantesque artificial memory of Hell and Heaven, and preparing the way for Renaissance occult transformation.

• Johannes Romberch’s Congestorium artificiose memorie (1520) exemplifies the Dominican memory tradition at its most elaborate: quoting Thomas Aquinas on nearly every page, it combines three types of place systems (cosmic-Dantesque, zodiacal after Metrodorus, and real buildings), visual alphabets for ‘memory for words,’ and an encyclopaedic programme for memorising all sciences through human figures with inscriptions on them.
  • Romberch’s Grammar—a figure of old Grammatica covered with visual alphabet inscriptions for memorising arguments about whether grammar is a universal or particular science—is the key illustration of how personifications of the liberal arts when used as memory images have inscribed on them the subject matter associated with them.
  • Romberch’s Dantesque diagram shows the spheres of the universe marked with ‘L.PA’ (Paradise), ‘L.P’ (Earthly Paradise), ‘PVR’ (Purgatory), and ‘IN’ (Hell) as the cosmic memory places of the ars rotunda.
• Peter of Ravenna’s Phoenix (1491) popularised the art as a lay mnemotechnic by demonstrating its practical utility—he claimed to remember the whole of canon law, two hundred Ciceronian speeches, and twenty thousand legal points by memorising over one hundred thousand loci in churches visited during his travels—bringing the art out of its monastic and scholastic setting.
  • Peter of Ravenna’s suggestion that a girl dear to him in youth (Juniper of Pistoia) served as a stimulating memory image provoked the Puritan William Perkins, two generations later, to condemn the ’libidinous images’ of the artificial memory as morally dangerous.
• The discovery in 1491 by Raphael Regius (following Lorenzo Valla) that Ad Herennium was not by Cicero broke the medieval alliance between the First and Second Rhetorics of Tullius, but writers in the Dominican memory tradition—Romberch, Rossellius, and even Bruno—consistently ignored this finding and continued to attribute the work to ‘Tullius.’
  • Giordano Bruno in a work on memory published in 1582 still introduced a quotation from Ad Herennium with the words ‘Hear what Tullius says’—a mark that he came out of the Dominican memory tradition that treated humanist philology with indifference.
• Erasmus’s lukewarm attitude to the artificial memory (echoing Quintilian) and Melanchthon’s outright ban on mnemotechnical devices in favour of simple learning by heart represent the humanist and Protestant educational reaction against the art, setting up the opposition between image-based and imageless memory that would explode in the Brunian-Ramist controversy.
  • “Erasmus held that ’the best memory is based on three most important things, namely study, order, and care’—exactly paraphrasing Quintilian and dismissing the classical art of places and images.” —Erasmus
  • For humanist educators the art of memory was a medieval and scholastic art, associated with the friars and their sermons, and with a Ciceronianism that had wrongly attributed Ad Herennium to the master.

Renaissance Memory: The Memory Theatre of Giulio Camillo

Giulio Camillo’s Memory Theatre—a wooden structure divided by seven planetary gangways with seven gates each, stocked with images and drawers of Ciceronian speeches—represents the first great Renaissance transformation of the classical art of memory into an occult Hermetic system: by placing the images of the planetary gods on ’eternal places’ grounded in the Sephiroth, Camillo created a magical instrument for the divine man to grasp the universe from above.

• Camillo’s Theatre reverses the classical theatre: instead of an audience watching a stage, a single ‘spectator’ stands where the stage would be and gazes outward at the seven grades of the auditorium loaded with images on seven times seven decorated gates—a deliberate inversion that makes the memory building a world viewed from above rather than a performance space.
  • Viglius Zuichemus, writing to Erasmus in 1532, described the wooden Theatre as large enough for two people to enter together, filled with images and ’little boxes’ containing papers with Ciceronian speeches, and its inventor as stammering with excitement while expounding it.
  • Camillo called his Theatre by many names—‘a built or constructed mind and soul,’ ‘a windowed one’—saying that it allowed the beholder to perceive at once with his eyes everything otherwise hidden in the depths of the human mind.
• The seven grades of Camillo’s Theatre represent seven stages in the unfolding of the world from First Causes: the Banquet of Ocean (creation of simple elements), the Cave of the Nymphs (mixed elements), the Gorgon Sisters (the interior man created in God’s image), Pasiphe and the Bull (the soul joining the body), the Sandals of Mercury (natural human operations), and Prometheus (all arts and sciences).
  • The seven planetary series ascending through these grades produce compound meanings: Cybele as earth moves from simple element (Banquet) through mixed element (Cave) to arts of earth such as geometry and agriculture (Prometheus), while the same image takes on new meanings at each grade.
  • The Sol or Sun series is the most important: a pyramid represents the Trinity on the Banquet grade; the central Sun series expresses Ficino’s hierarchy of light from God to Generation and reflects Ficinian solar magic throughout.
• Camillo grounds his Theatre in both the Corpus Hermeticum’s account of the Seven Governors who create and govern the world, and in the Cabalist Sephiroth, treating the planetary images as the celestial manifestation of supercelestial divine measures—making the memory building a vehicle for the divine man to descend and ascend through the three Cabalist worlds.
  • Camillo quotes Pimander on the Seven Governors who ’envelop with their circles the sensible world’ and comments that since the divinity produced these seven measures they were ‘always implicitly contained within the abyss of the divinity.’
  • He assigns Sephiroth and angels to each of the seven planets—for example, Sol corresponds to Tipheret and the angel Raphael—connecting the Theatre to the Christianised Cabalism of Pico della Mirandola.
• The ‘secret’ of the Theatre is that its basic planetary images are intended as inner talismans—inner versions of the magic statues of the Asclepius through which Egyptians drew divine powers into animated statues—and Camillo’s own interpretation of this magic is artistic: a perfectly proportioned image becomes animated with spirit just as a perfectly proportioned statue becomes alive.
  • “Camillo stated in a discourse about his Theatre that ‘when [sculptors] had brought some statue to the perfect proportions it was found to be animated with an angelic spirit: for such perfection could not be without a soul’—interpreting the magic of the Asclepius’s animated statues as an effect of perfect proportion.” —Giulio Camillo
  • The Venetian Pietro Passi in 1614 accused Camillo of the error of believing celestial influences could descend into statues of perfect proportion, confirming that contemporaries understood the Theatre’s magical pretensions.
• The gulf of mutual incomprehension between Viglius-Erasmus and Camillo in the Theatre represents a fundamental split in the Renaissance between the rational humanist tradition and the irrational occult tradition—and it was in the occult tradition, not in humanist education, that the art of memory found its new and vigorous life.
  • Viglius apologised to Erasmus for ‘offending his serious ear with trifles’ before reporting on the Theatre, anticipating the Erasmian reaction—and Erasmus was indeed strongly against all magical short cuts to memory.

Camillo’s Theatre and the Venetian Renaissance

Camillo’s Theatre belonged organically to the Venetian Renaissance—to its Ciceronian oratory, its impresa culture, its Vitruvian architectural revival, and its Hermetic academies—and represents a new plan of the psyche in which Renaissance Hermetic man believes his divine mens can reflect and control the universe, constituting an inner change from which outward Renaissance achievements derived their energy.

• The Venetian Accademia degli Uranici, founded in 1587 by Fabio Paolini, confirms that Camillo’s Theatre remained a central reference point for late-Renaissance Hermetic thought: Paolini’s Hebdomades elaborates the complete theory of Ficino’s magic in a Venetian setting and applies it to oratory, envisioning a ‘planetary oratory’ that through the magical memory’s sevenfold structure would have effects on hearers analogous to those of ancient music.
  • Paolini’s academy worked to apply the seven-fold Hermetic structure of Camillo’s Theatre to Hermogenes’s seven Ideas of good oratory—the magical forms of speech were to draw down planetary powers just as Ficinian music drew down astral spiritus.
  • Paolini quotes long passages from L’Idea del Theatro in the Hebdomades, suggesting the book served as the theoretical foundation the divine Camillo had never himself provided.
• Camillo’s Theatre was connected to Vitruvian architectural theory: the classical theatre, as described by Vitruvius and reconstructed by Palladio in Barbaro’s commentary, was designed in accordance with astral proportions—four equilateral triangles inscribed within the circle of the theatre corresponding to astrological trigona—and Camillo adapted this cosmologically meaningful building to his mnemonic purposes by transferring imagery from the stage doors to imaginary gates in the auditorium.
  • The Teatro Olimpico, designed by Palladio and erected at Vicenza in the 1580s, with its elaborately decorated frons scaenae, was the culmination of the same Vitruvian revival in which Camillo’s Theatre participated.
• Ariosto’s mention of Camillo in Orlando furioso and Tasso’s discussion of him as the first since Dante to show that rhetoric is a kind of poetry confirm that the Theatre was not merely an occult curiosity but was taken seriously by the two greatest Italian poets of the sixteenth century as a significant contribution to the theory of imaginative expression.
  • Ariosto called Camillo ‘he who showed a smoother and shorter way to the heights of Helicon’—treating the memory system as a path to poetic inspiration.

Lullism as an Art of Memory

The Art of Ramon Lull—a combinatory system of revolving geometrical figures based on Divine Dignities or Names of God, intended to be used by all three powers of the soul—constitutes a radically different kind of ‘artificial memory’ from the classical art, abstract and imageless rather than visual and emotional, but became assimilated in the Renaissance to Cabalism and Hermetism, and it was the grand aim of Renaissance thinkers to combine this imageless Lullist art with the image-rich classical art.

• Lull’s Art is based on Divine Dignities or Names of God (Bonitas, Magnitudo, Eternitas, etc.), designated by letters B to K, which descend through all grades of creation from the supercelestial world of God and angels through the celestial world of planets and zodiac to the elemental world—making the Art a universal science applicable to any subject because based on the actual structure of reality.
  • The combinatory figure of the Art consists of concentric circles inscribed with the letters B to K revolving to produce combinations; this ars combinatoria in its simplest form made Lullism look like a precursor of systematic logical combination to Renaissance thinkers.
  • Lull described his art as used by three powers of the soul: as intellectus (art of knowing truth), as voluntas (art of directing will toward truth), and as memoria (art of remembering truth)—but Lullian artificial memory meant memorising the procedures of the Art itself, not storing images on loci.
• Lull’s Liber ad memoriam confirmandam, written at Pisa c. 1308, deliberately excludes the imagines agentes of the Tullian tradition, giving only the Aristotelian rule of frequent repetition as the method of artificial memory—a pointed contrast with the Dominican art of memory then being vigorously promoted in Pisa by Bartolomeo da San Concordio, suggesting Lull consciously rejected the scholastic transformation of the classical art.
  • The Liber refers three times to a ‘Book of the Seven Planets’ as essential for confirming memory—probably the Tractatus de astronomia in which Lull applied his Art to astral medicine using the seven planets as the framework, suggesting that the planetary seven was the ground of Lullian memory as it was to be of Camillo’s Theatre.
• Pico della Mirandola’s identification of the Cabalist ars combinandi with the ars Raymundi, and the subsequent Pseudo-Lullian De auditu kabbalistico (falsely attributed to Lull), ensured that in the Renaissance Lullism was perceived as a Christian Cabala—a fusion that made Lull attractive to Hermetic-Cabalist philosophers and made it seem plausible to use magic images of the stars on Lullian combinatory wheels.
  • The pseudo-Lullian alchemical works, accepted as genuine throughout the Renaissance, further transformed ‘Lull’ into a Renaissance Magus versed in alchemy, Cabala, and occult arts—a figure radically different from the actual missionary logician of thirteenth-century Majorca.

Giordano Bruno: The Secret of Shadows

Bruno’s De umbris idearum (1582), dedicated to Henri III of France, presents a Hermetic art of memory in which magic astral images of the stars—decans, planets, moon mansions, and horoscope houses—are placed on Lullian combinatory wheels to form a unified memory system through which the divine man can grasp the universe from its celestial causes and achieve mystical unification of all appearances in the One.

• Bruno’s memory system in Shadows consists of four concentric wheels of 150 images each (30 divisions × 5 vowel subdivisions): the central wheel carries 150 astral images of decans, planets, moon stations, and horoscope houses derived from Agrippa’s De occulta philosophia; surrounding wheels carry images of the vegetable-animal-mineral world, a set of adjectives, and on the outer wheel 150 human figures representing inventors of all human arts and sciences from Rhegima (bread from chestnuts) to Simonides (the art of memory).
  • The inventors’ wheel passes through technology (Erichtonius the chariot, Pyrodes fire from flint), magic and religion (Circe, Zoroaster, Pharphacon the necromancer), art and music, writing (Theut-Hermes, inventor of letters), astronomy, philosophy (Plato ‘on the ideas’), Lull (‘on the nine elements’), and finally ‘Ior.’ (Iordanus Brunus) ‘in clauim & umbras’—Bruno places himself on his own memory wheel as the inventor of the system.
  • The astral images are the ‘shadows of ideas’—nearer to reality than the objects of the lower world, they are intermediaries between the supercelestial Ideas and the sublunary world, and by imprinting them on memory the adept can organise knowledge from above.
• The thirty ‘intentions of the shadows’ and thirty ‘concepts of ideas’ prefixed to the memory system in Shadows constitute a mystical philosophy of unification: starting from the One God and passing through the problem of how the unity behind appearances can be grasped through their ordered images, these mysterious sayings describe the religious aim of the memory system—to achieve the vision of the One Light through organising the multiplicity of appearances on the celestial level.
  • The system aims at what Bruno calls memorising ‘all from all’—that is, from the higher celestial images all the contents of the lower world will arrange themselves in memory because all descend from those higher forms.
  • The philosophical position is essentially the same as that of Bruno’s Italian dialogues: in De la causa he writes ‘it is by one and the same ladder that nature descends to the production of things and the intellect ascends to the knowledge of them.’
• Bruno’s combination of the classical art of memory with Lullism was achieved by placing magic images of the stars on the revolving wheels of the Lullian combinatory figures—an ‘occultising’ of both arts simultaneously, turning the imagines agentes into inner talismans and the Lullian wheels into conjuring devices for contacting celestial powers.
  • Bruno replaced Lull’s B to K with thirty letters representing what he called Lullian Dignities cabalised as Sephiroth—deriving his ’thirty’ from some combination of magical tradition (a thirty-lettered Name of God in Greek magical papyri) and Cabalistic numerology.

Ramism as an Art of Memory

Peter Ramus abolished the art of memory with its places and images and substituted ‘dialectical order’—the arrangement of subjects in descending classification from generals to specials, memorised from printed epitomes—as the sole true art of memory, motivated both by Quintilian’s rational critique and by a Protestant iconoclasm that regarded the stimulation of the imagination through striking images as morally dangerous.

• Ramus knew the classical art of memory precisely in order to refute it: in his Scholae in liberales artes he quotes Quintilian’s preference for ‘dividing and composing’ over places and images and concludes that his dialectical method IS the art of memory that Quintilian preferred—making Ramism a conscious replacement for, rather than ignorance of, the ancient art.
  • “Ramus stated: ’the true art of memory is one and the same as dialectics’—identifying the Ramist method of logical classification with the art of memory, so that memorising an epitome of a subject IS practicing artificial memory.” —Peter Ramus
  • The first Ramist epitome ever printed was an analysis of Penelope’s complaint in Ovid—explicitly intended to enable memorisation of the twenty-eight lines—and immediately followed by Ramus’s argument that this dialectical analysis ‘replaces all other doctrines ad memoriam confirmandam.’
• Ramus’s hostility to images in memory was connected to Protestant iconoclasm: in his theological work On the Christian Religion he quotes the Old Testament prohibition of graven images (Deuteronomy 4) and attacks Catholic image-worship, and the same religious impulse that drove outer iconoclasm—smashing statues in churches—also drove the inner iconoclasm of removing the imagines agentes from memory.
  • The extraordinary success of Ramism in Protestant England may be partly explained by this correspondence: just as reformers smashed images in church buildings, Ramism smashed the inner images in the memory buildings of the art—making a ‘Protestant artificial memory’ based on abstract order.
• Despite its radical opposition to occult memory, Ramism shares significant structural features with both Lullism and the scholastic art: its insistence on descending from generals to specials echoes the Lullian ascent and descent on the ladder of being, and its emphasis on order inherits the Thomist and Aristotelian memory principles—making Ramism part of the same search for method that also animated the occult memory tradition.
  • Ramus’s own philosophical background contains mystical Neoplatonic elements: he traces ’true dialectic’ to a pristine pre-Aristotelian Socratic wisdom, uses the image of Homer’s golden chain from earth to heaven, and extols his method as a Neoplatonic mystery of ascent from shadows to light.

Giordano Bruno: The Secret of Seals

Bruno’s Seals, published in London in 1583 as the first act of his English mission, presents thirty memory ‘seals’ representing every possible occult memory technique, culminating in a ‘Seal of Seals’ that reveals his memory art as the operative discipline of a Hermetic religion of Love, Art, Magic, and Mathesis in which the imagination is the sole instrument of truth and the Magus who has organised his memory on the celestial level achieves union with the soul of the world.

• The thirty Seals in Bruno’s English publication systematically exhaust every possible approach to occult memory: mnemotechnical devices (visual alphabets, alphabetical figures, memory objects), astrological systems (horoscope houses as loci, the zodiac as the Chain of memory), Lullian combinations (the Tree, the Ladder), and Cabalist permutations—showing an almost scientific compulsion to try every available method in search of an operative unified system.
  • Seal 12 ‘Zeuxis the Painter’ reveals the connection with Shadows by stating that ’the images of Teucer the Babylonian supply me with the indications of three hundred thousand propositions’—confirming that the decan images of the astral magic system in Shadows are also operative in Seals.
  • The ‘Field and Garden of Circe’ Seal represents the most explicitly magical system, in which elemental compounds mutate through seven planetary houses within the psyche after successful invocation of the planets.
• The Seals ‘Zeuxis the Painter’ and ‘Phidias the Sculptor’ present Bruno’s theory of imaginative creation: true poets, painters, and philosophers are all one because all work through the forming of significant images in the fantasy—a Renaissance theory of creativity rooted in the memory tradition’s insistence that to think is to speculate with images.
  • “Bruno states: ‘Whence philosophers are in some ways painters and poets; poets are painters and philosophers; painters are philosophers and poets. Whence true poets, true painters, and true philosophers seek one another out and admire one another.’” —Giordano Bruno
  • The ‘Phidias’ Seal describes the sculptor of the inner memory ‘sculpturing the rough and formless stone as though by subtraction’—an image resembling Michelangelo’s description of releasing the form latent within the marble block.
• The Seal of Seals, the culmination of the Seals volume, reveals the religious character of Bruno’s art of memory: it describes the grades of mystical knowing, insists on the primacy of the imagination as the sole cognitive faculty, defines four guides to the inner religion (Love, Art, Mathesis, Magic), and presents Simonides as a mystagogue who initiated the adept’s ascent through the stars to the vision of the One Light.
  • Bruno equates Thomas Aquinas with Zoroaster and Paul of Tarsus as having achieved the highest grade of ‘contraction’—the mystical experience—demonstrating that his admiration for Aquinas was as a Magus and mystic, not as a scholastic.
  • The four guides—Love, Art, Mathesis, Magic—precisely anticipate the structure of the Italian dialogues written in England: Love is the Eroici furori, Art the memory systems, Mathesis the cosmology, Magic the Hermetic religion of the Spaccio.
• Bruno’s assault on Elizabethan England through the publication of Seals—flung at Oxford in a provocative address describing himself as ’the waker of sleeping souls’—and his disciple Dicson’s simultaneous dispute with Cambridge Ramists, made the art of memory the central battleground of a fundamental religious and cultural conflict between the Hermetic occult tradition and Protestant Puritanism.
  • Bruno dedicates Seals to Mauvissière, the French ambassador at whose house he lived, keeping up the French-English connection established by Camillo’s Theatre—another Italian brings a memory ‘secret’ to the vicinity of the French court and then crosses to England.

Conflict between Brunian and Ramist Memory

The 1584 controversy between Alexander Dicson—Bruno’s Scottish disciple who published a Brunian art of memory presenting Hermetic Egyptian wisdom through memory—and William Perkins—a Cambridge Ramist who attacked the ‘impious artificial memory’ of the ‘Scepsians’—reveals that the art of memory had become a flashpoint for the deepest cultural, religious, and philosophical conflicts of the Elizabethan Renaissance.

• Dicson’s De umbra rationis (1584) presents the Hermetic Egyptian context of occult memory through dialogues in which Mercurius Trismegistus opposes the superficial dialectical Greek Socrates (satirising Ramus): the Egyptian King Thamus condemns Theutates’s invention of letters as destroying true inner memory, and Mercurius quotes the Hermetic regeneration treatises to describe the experience of the man who has achieved the true ‘inner writing’ of Hermetic memory.
  • The ‘duodenarius’ (twelve punishments of matter from Corpus Hermeticum XIII) is said to be driven out by the ‘denarius’ (ten divine powers) in the Hermetic regenerative experience—a direct quotation from the Hermetic regeneration treatise inserted into the dialogues introducing an art of memory.
  • Dicson even denies that the Greek Simonides invented the art of memory, arguing that it was the Egyptians who invented it—a maximally provocative claim in the context of the debate.
• William Perkins in the Antidicsonus (1584) identified the core issue: against the ‘Scepsian’ use of the zodiac in memory and the ‘animation of images’ that arouses carnal passions, he defended the Ramist dialectical method as the only moral, Christian, and rational art of memory—explicitly associating image-based memory with Catholic superstition and Puritan iconoclasm.
  • Perkins’s later Warning against the Idolatrie of the Last Times makes explicit that inner images are as forbidden as outer idols: ‘A thing faigned in the mind by imagination is an idol’—directly applicable to the memory images of the classical art.
  • Perkins calls Romberch, Rossellius, Nolanus (Bruno), and Dicsonus together as the ‘Scepsians’ to be repelled, showing that he perceived Bruno as the real initiator of Dicson’s impious art.
• Philip Sidney’s position at the centre of both Ramist and Brunian influences—accepting Dee as teacher, allowing Dicson to attend him, receiving Bruno’s dedications, while also being identified with Temple’s Ramist dialectics—reflects the characteristic ambiguity of the Elizabethan Renaissance, which Sidney resolved in the Defence of Poetrie through a defence of the imagination against Puritanism that is closer to Bruno than to Ramus.
  • A 1592 state paper described Dicson as ‘master of the art of memory, and sometime attending on Mr. Philip Sidney, deceased’—confirming that Bruno’s foremost English disciple was in Sidney’s household.
  • Sidney alludes approvingly to local memory in the Defence of Poetrie, comparing the order of a poem to well-memorised memory loci—an endorsement of image-based memory incompatible with strict Ramism.

Giordano Bruno: Last Works on Memory

Bruno’s later memory works—the Figuration of Aristotle, the Thirty Statues, and the last published Images (1591)—represent increasingly ambitious attempts to combine the classical art, Lullism, and talismanic magic in total encyclopaedic systems, while the Thirty Statues also show Bruno at the height of his powers as a Renaissance artist sculpting within memory tremendous mythological figures that embody his entire philosophy.

• The Lampas triginta statuarum (Thirty Statues, c. 1588) presents Bruno’s philosophy not as abstract argument but as a series of mythological memory statues to be formed within the imagination: APOLLO as the MONAD or One, SATURN as Beginning and Time, PROMETHEUS as Efficient Cause, MINERVA as the divine mens and the art of memory itself—making the statues both philosophical statements and magical inner images through which the Magus contacts cosmic powers.
  • Bruno introduces the Statues by claiming to revive ’the use and form of ancient philosophies and of the earliest theologians who used not so much to veil the arcana of nature in types and similitudes as to declare and explain them . . . more easily accomodated to memory’—justifying mythological memory images through the Thomas Aquinas principle that spiritual intentions need corporeal similitudes.
• Bruno’s De imaginum signorum et idearum compositione (Images, 1591), his last published work, combines twenty-four architectural memory theatres with nine fields and thirty cubicles (the ‘square’ art) with twelve celestial figures of the Olympian gods as magicised talismanic images (the ‘round’ art)—a system potentially reflected in Campanella’s City of the Sun, suggesting a common source in Dominican memory tradition at Naples.
  • The diagram of the system appears to show a round celestial system enclosing a square arrangement of memory rooms—a building reflecting the upper and lower worlds, with the inscription THEATRUM ORBI visible on its central element.
  • Campanella repeatedly stated that his City of the Sun, with its round central Sun temple surrounded by concentric walls painted with all knowledge, could be used for ’local memory’ as a quick way of knowing everything ‘using the world as a book.’
• The hypothesis that Bruno’s memory systems may be the origin of ‘speculative’ Freemasonry and Rosicrucianism—organisations using symbolic architecture as a vehicle for ethical and mystical teaching—deserves serious historical investigation, since the symbolic use of columns, arches, and proportional geometry in these secret societies resembles the use of architectural memory in Bruno’s occult systems.
  • The Rosicrucian Fama (1614) speaks of mysterious rotae and a sacred vault whose walls, ceiling, and floor are divided into compartments with figures and sentences—resembling an occult memory room.

The Art of Memory and Bruno’s Italian Dialogues

Bruno’s Italian dialogues written in London—the Cena de le ceneri, Eroici furori, and Spaccio della bestia trionfante—are literary works generated by his occult memory systems: the street journey to the ‘Supper’ is a memory system on London places, the love emblems of the Eroici furori are memory images charged with affect, and the Spaccio’s moral reform through the forty-eight constellations is a Hyginean memory order for a Hermetic sermon on virtues and vices.

• The Cena de le ceneri’s journey through London streets—down Butcher Row, by boat on the Thames, back to the Strand, through crowds at Charing Cross, to an unidentified house near Whitehall—is best understood as a memory system using London places to organise the themes of the debate about the Copernican Sun, announced by Bruno’s invocation at the start of the narrative: ‘And thou, Mnemnosyne mine, who art hidden beneath the thirty seals and immured within the dark prison of the shadows of ideas, let me hear thy voice.’
  • Bruno told the Venetian Inquisitors that the ‘Supper’ was held at the French embassy—confirming that the journey was not literally through London streets but was a memory system using recognizable London places.
• The Spaccio della bestia trionfante uses the forty-eight constellations of the sky as a memory order—following Romberch’s advice that Hyginus’s Fabulae provide an easily memorized memory order—to organise a Hermetic sermon on virtues and vices; the personified planetary gods who conduct the reform of the heavens are the ‘statues’ of Bruno’s occult memory system, while the explicit defence of the magical religion of the Asclepius transforms what began as a scholastic virtue-and-vice memory exercise into a manifesto for the return of Egyptian religion.
  • Romberch’s Dominican memory treatise specifically mentions Hyginus’s Fabularum liber as providing ‘an easily memorised order’ for memory—connecting the Spaccio directly to the Dominican memory tradition in which Bruno was trained.
  • The speech by Momus against the ‘idle sect of pedants’ who claim salvation by faith alone while despising good works is the closest thing in the Italian dialogues to an explicit attack on Protestant doctrine—delivered safely from the French embassy in London.

The Theatre Memory System of Robert Fludd

Robert Fludd’s memory system in the Utriusque Cosmi Historia (1619), dedicated to James I, combines an ‘ars rotunda’ using talismanic planetary images with an ‘ars quadrata’ using stages of real public theatres as memory rooms—a Brunian occult memory system of the last Renaissance type, distinguished from Bruno by retaining Christianised Trinitarian Hermetism and illustrating its ’theatres’ with what is actually a stage of the Globe theatre.

• Fludd makes a fundamental distinction between the ‘round art’ (using magically animated celestial images—effigies of stars, gods, virtues and vices thought of as daemonic—organised on the zodiac as the ‘common place’) and the ‘square art’ (using images of corporeal things in real buildings), insisting that the round art is infinitely superior because ’natural’ while the square art is ‘artificial,’ and that only real—not fictitious—buildings must be used in the square art.
  • The round and square arts are combined in Fludd’s system: multiple ’theatres’ (stages) containing five-door and five-column memory places are placed in the zodiac, organically affiliated to the celestial system and magically activated by it—exactly the combination Bruno attempted in Images.
• Fludd illustrates his memory ’theatres’ with an engraving of a multilevel stage—showing three ground-level doors (including great hinged central doors opening to display an inner room), a battlemented terrace, a projecting bay window chamber, and column bases in the foreground—which Bernheimer in 1958 identified as showing recognizable Shakespearean stage features though he misidentified it as a complete theatre rather than a stage.
  • “Fludd explicitly states ‘I call a theatre (a place in which) all actions of words, of sentences, of particulars of a speech or of subjects are shown, as in a public theatre in which comedies and tragedies are acted’—confirming that he is using a real public theatre stage in his memory system.” —Robert Fludd
  • Fludd insisted strongly throughout his memory treatise that only ‘real’ and not ‘fictitious’ places should be used in the square art—meaning the stage shown must be a real building.
• John Willis’s Mnemonica (1618), published in London the year before Fludd’s memory volume, also uses sets of identical ’theatres’ or ‘repositories’ as memory rooms with columns and color-coded doors—suggesting that Fludd may have encountered this English memory system and ‘occultised’ it into his magical combination of round and square arts, or that both reflect a common tradition of theatrical memory rooms.
  • Willis’s sane example of using a ‘golden theatre’ to remember market tasks—a countryman pouring wheat into a golden-eared bushel, husbandmen whetting scythes with golden blades—shows exactly the classical imagines agentes technique applied to practical life in a theatrical memory room.

Fludd’s Memory Theatre and the Globe Theatre

The stage shown in Fludd’s memory system is the second Globe Theatre (rebuilt 1613), presented as seen from below the painted ‘heavens’ looking toward the tiring house wall, with mnemonic distortions (imaginary side walls and five feigned columns) masking the real stage; once these distortions are removed the engraving reveals features of the Globe—five entrances, three at ground level and two above, the chamber relationship to the terrace, and the subsidiary scenic constructions—that have not been available from any other visual source.

• The Fludd engraving represents not a complete theatre but the back wall (tiring house wall) of the Globe stage as seen from below the painted ‘heavens’ that projected from the third tier: the viewer stands on the stage looking toward the frons scaenae, unable to see the third tier because the stage cover projects above, and seeing instead the two lower levels with their three ground-floor and two upper-level entrances—the five cinque portae that form the memory loci of the system.
  • The diagram of the zodiac placed on the facing page of the book—which, when the book is closed, covers the stage engraving—represents both the magical ‘heavens’ of the ars rotunda that activates the theatres placed in it, and the literal painted ‘heavens’ of the Globe stage whose underside showed the zodiac.
  • Chambers had suggested there ought to be five entrances at the Globe corresponding to the five doors of the classical frons scaenae; the Fludd engraving confirms this but shows the classical five redistributed across two levels—three below and two above—adapting the classical stage to a multilevel theatre.
• The Fludd engraving solves the long-debated problem of the relationship between the chamber and the terrace at the Globe: the chamber projected forward beyond the terrace rather than sitting behind it, with the battlemented terrace running through the chamber on either side and the projecting bay window extending over the main stage—making possible both window scenes and fully opened upper inner stages.
  • The corbelled projecting window over a great gate was a familiar feature of Tudor gatehouse architecture, as at Hengrave Hall (1536) and Bramshill (1605–12)—suggesting the tiring house wall was designed to present the appearance of the entrance to a great contemporary mansion, easily convertible to castle or city gate.
  • Two subsidiary ’theatres’ shown by Fludd—one- and two-level stages of stone and wood—reflect moveable scenic constructions used on the Globe stage to represent simultaneously different localities (a Capulet orchard, rival military camps), solving another long-debated staging problem.
• The shapes of the five column bases shown in Fludd’s engraving (round, square, hexagonal, square, round) provide, in conjunction with Mrs. Thrale’s eighteenth-century description of the Globe as ‘hexagonal in form without, round within,’ and Vitruvius’s rule that the astrological trigona determine theatre proportions, the basis for a new plan of the Globe based on a hexagon without, a circle within, and four inscribed triangles determining the positions of entrances—a design reflecting the Renaissance conviction that the theatre should embody the proportions of the world.
  • The Globe with its stage at the east end (as indicated by Fludd’s diagram of the ‘heavens’ with ‘Oriens’ at the top), its hexagonal outer form, circular galleries, and four inscribed triangles reflects the same aspiration as Renaissance church architecture: to embody in the building the proportions of the macrocosm as an image of God.
  • John Dee’s preface to Billingsley’s Euclid (1570) provided English readers—including the carpenter James Burbage who built the first Theatre in 1576—with Vitruvian architectural theory including the musical character of the ancient theatre and the principle that the architect works out in his ‘minde and Imagination’ perfect ideal forms which the carpenter’s hand then executes.

The Art of Memory and the Growth of Scientific Method

The art of memory survived the Renaissance transformation into the early modern era not as a mere mnemotechnic but as a major factor in the emergence of scientific method: Bacon reformed it toward classification of nature, Descartes reflected on how causes might organize images, and Leibniz’s universal characteristic—including the infinitesimal calculus—emerged directly from the Renaissance tradition of combining the classical art of memory with Lullism, making Leibniz the seventeenth-century heir to the Brunian project of a universal organon based on significant images.

• Francis Bacon knew the art of memory thoroughly, practiced it (his Gorhambury gallery may have served as a memory system), accepted its fundamental principles (emotionally striking images reduce intellectual to sensible things), and proposed reforming it from ostentatious rhetorical display to useful scientific purposes—particularly the classification and arrangement of natural history particulars to assist inductive inquiry.
  • “Bacon accepted the classical principle that ‘Emblems bring down intellectual to sensible things; for what is sensible always strikes the memory stronger’—preserving the core of the Thomist and classical art while directing it toward natural philosophy rather than rhetoric or devotion.” —Francis Bacon
  • In the Sylva Sylvarum Bacon connects the mnemonic power of active images with ‘force of imagination’ tricks used by conjurers—showing that he still saw the ancient connection between mnemonic imagery and magical manipulation of attention.
• Descartes, prompted by reading Lambert Schenkel, proposed that memory could be reformed by organising images in dependence on causes rather than on arbitrary architectural places—suggesting that if one understands the causes all vanished images can be found again through the impression of the cause, a proposal that inadvertently resembles the principle of occult memory which similarly claimed to organize all images from celestial causes.
  • Descartes dismissed Ramon Lull’s art as useful only for ‘speaking without judgment of those things of which one is ignorant,’ and Bacon similarly condemned it as ‘a method of imposture’—yet both thinkers were influenced by principles implicit in Lullism and the memory tradition.
• Leibniz’s universal ‘characteristica’—the project to assign notae or significant characters to all essential notions and combine them in a calculus that would solve all problems—emerges directly from the Renaissance tradition of combining the classical art of memory with Lullism: the De arte combinatoria (1666) explicitly mentions Bruno among modern Lullists, and Leibniz’s preoccupation with assigning ’natural’ characters nearest to reality echoes the memory tradition’s search for images ‘closest to things.’
  • Leibniz himself said that the germ of his later thinking was in the Dissertatio de arte combinatoria, and Couturat concluded that ’there is no doubt that his most famous invention, that of the infinitesimal calculus, arose from his constant search for new and more general symbolisms’—making the invention of the calculus traceable to the tradition of significant notation descending from the art of memory.
  • In the Fundamenta calculi ratiocinatoris, Leibniz meditates on the search for true characters, passing in review John Dee’s Monas hieroglyphica, the signs of alchemists and astronomers, Chinese and Egyptian hieroglyphs, and the Adamic language—the whole range of the Renaissance occult tradition of significant signs—before concluding that only mathematical notation achieves what they sought.
• The memory tradition’s transformation into scientific method preserved not only its logical and classificatory impulses but also its religious and philanthropic dimensions: just as Bruno’s Seal of Seals revealed a religion of Love, Art, Magic, and Mathesis, Leibniz’s universal calculus was conceived as an instrument for religious reunion, the pacification of sectarian differences, and the extension of charity—making the seventeenth-century heir to the Brunian project a philosopher of universal brotherhood as well as a mathematician.
  • Leibniz’s introduction to the arcana of his encyclopaedia describes it as containing ‘a general science, a new logic, a new method, an Ars reminiscendi or Mnemonica, an Ars Characteristica or Symbolica, an Ars Combinatoria or Lulliana, a Cabala of the Wise, a Magia Naturalis’—a description indistinguishable from the bombastic title-pages of Bruno’s memory books.