The Gallery of Memory: Literary and Iconographic Models in the Age of the Printing Press

by Lina Bolzoni, Jeremy Parzen (Translator)

Lina Bolzoni's impressive study of the memory culture of sixteenth-century Italy appears here for the first time in English translation. Since its original incarnation as La stanza della memoria: Modelli letterari e iconografici nell'et� della stampa, published by Einaudi of Torino in 1995, Bolzoni's study has been praised by critics and ranked with the classic texts in its field - those by Paolo Rossi, Frances Yates and Mary Carruthers.

The book takes as its starting point a striking paradox: that the antique tradition of the art of memory - created by an oral culture - reached its moment of greatest diffusion during an age that saw the birth of the printed book. Bolzoni's examination of this phenomenon, in which archaic and modern elements came together in a precarious equilibrium, reveals the profound ties that existed at the time between memory and creativity, and between words and images.

Drawing on the multiplicity of practices that relied on techniques of memory, Bolzoni presents diagrams, cipher alphabets, rebuses and emblemlike pictures characteristic of the late-Medieval and early-modern periods, indicating their use for literary games and preaching. In doing so, she skilfully reconstructs a particular mentality, a way of apprehending words and images that was of central importance for a long period of time but that has since been forgotten.

Genres: History, Art, Nonfiction, Renaissance

336 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

Reviews

[Karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

this book (originally published in Italian as La stanza della memoria: Modelli letterai e iconografici nell'età della stampa) is a brilliant study of the memory arts beginning with its inception in oral tradition through its evolution in the age of the printing press. I was particularly intrigued by her exploration of ciphers, memory wheels, rebuses, and literary games. She presents an in-depth look at Giulio Camillo who wanted to encompass all knowledge within his Memory Theatre (L'Idea del Theatro). Bolzoni says of Camillo's ambition, "To build the theatre of memory would mean celebrating the entire imagination, of imaginatio, to build the images of memory would mean recreating the world..." (As an aside, I must ask ask what is the aim of the internet is if not similar in scope and ambition?)

Bolzoni's requires close reading and a deep interest in the history of the memory arts, but it rewards the reader many times over. As Bolzoni summarizes it, "[T]he allusions to Camillo open an important window onto how the art of memory and collecting interact, mirror each other...the culmination of the long story that we have watched unfold in the course of our study...that is to make the mental and physical places overlap, to map the mind and the map of things coincide."

We should also perhaps also keep in mind Korzybski's caution that the A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness.