Giulio Camillo , Theater of memory
The most fascinating member of that last category is Guilio Camillo, an Italian philosopher who in the sixteenth century convinced Francis I of France to fund the construction of a "Theater of Memory" that would essentially be a physical representation of the sort of mental memory palaces that had been crucial to orators, philosophers, and others in the days before printing. His Theatre was talked of in all Italy and France; its mysterious fame seemed to grow with the years. Symbols of every domain of knowledge were to be installed inside. Once a spectator was initiated into the symbols’ meanings, he could step in and have a conspectus of all the wisdom in the universe.
Camillo's wooden memory palace was shaped like a Roman amphitheater, but instead of the spectator sitting in the seats looking down on the stage, he stood in the center and looked up at a round, seven-tiered edifice. All around the theater were paintings of Kabbalistic and mythological figures as well as endless rows of drawers and boxes filled with cards, on which were printed everything that was known, and--it was claimed--everything that was knowable, including quotations from all the great authors, categorized according to subject. All you had to do was meditate on an emblematic image and the entirety of knowledge stored in that section of the theater would be called immediately to mind, allowing you to "be able to discourse on any subject no less fluently than Cicero." Camillo promised that "by means of the doctrine of loci and images, we can hold in the mind and master all human concepts and all the things that are in the entire world." He pretends that all things that the human mind can conceive and which cannot be seen with the corporeal eye, after being collected together by diligent meditation may be expressed by certain corporeal signs in such a way that the beholder may at once perceive with his eyes everything that is otherwise hidden in the depths of his human mind.”
According to Frances A. Yates, Camillo used a form of a Vitruvian theatre in an attempt to explain material and time-bound existence. In his theatre, Camillo named the series from left to right after the planets (including the moon). Planets had several meanings in the Renaissance, especially in occult philosophy. They were also presentations of different concepts or transmutations between God and humankind, as well as a visible expression of the flow of time.
The Theatre, is to be understood in terms of time. It is a spatial representation of chronology - a kind of clock of epochs. I think we should understand that what he conceived was fundamentally a structure of conceptual relationships rather a building of wood or stone, and it is on that level that his work bears most fruit. In all, there are approximately two hundred distinct visual metaphors described in Camillo's plan, although there are no drawings, as such. When I initially read about them I was very taken with the richness of the symbolism and the layers of myth that was apparent.
For the time, Camillo expresses some radical views in L'idea del Theatro. He is sceptical, for example, that we should take as literally the idea that the world was created in seven days; he suggests that the earth moves; and, crucially, that the relationship of the sun to the earth does not agree with the prevailing religious and scientific orthodoxy.