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Giulio Camillo's L'idea del Teatro

Kate Robinson (Classics: University of Glasgow)
1

Giulio Camillo's L'idea del Teatro, or, The Idea of the Theatre, - is a slim book that was
published in the middle of the sixteenth century. L'idea del Teatro, once it eventually
got to print - and this took a long time and came about in a very circuitous fashion was a popular work, going through a number of re-editions in Florence and Venice. In
fact, the collected writings of Giulio Camillo were published again, as recently as 1990.
[1]

In his time, Camillo was a famous man, and subsequently his work was referred to by a
number of writers and artists during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
including Ariosto and Rousseau. And he has inspired a number of contemporary
artists, including, for example the writer Umberto Eco ( Teatro magico di Giulio
Camillo, 1998), the composer John Fuller (The Theatre of Memory, Proms, 1981) and
the video artist, Bill Viola (The Theatre of Memory, video installation, 1985). I began
my work on Camillo in 1998. As a practising sculptor, my first response was visual,
and I have included with this paper a number of images that were directly inspired by
the text of Camillo's L'idea.

And yet, despite his fame, Camillo has certainly not been without his critics. He was at
the centre of a long and bitter feud with Erasmus. The historian, Tiraboschi, writing in
1824, said that Camillo's Theatre was a "vain and incredible thing".[2] Within the last
fifty years, he has variously been called the "peak of absurdity" [3], "an
amusing...imposter",[4] and most recently the "great actor of the Renaissance".[5]
Perhaps Camillo provoked such a mixed response because L'Idea del Teatro is such an
unusual book. Essentially about the planets and the layout of the heavens, it also
touches on medicine, myth, philosophy, theology and social commentary. The
broadness of Camillo's scope, in itself, however, was not necessarily unique. Other
writers of the period were equally wide-ranging in their treatment of themes. What
marks out Camillo is his reliance on the visual image - on the sign - to reveal his
meaning. L'Idea contains over two hundred distinct visual metaphors, which are
graphically described in text, although there are no drawings, as such. Interesting
parallels can be made with the book and Renaissance hieroglyphic and emblematic
systems. L'Iidea del Teatro is an intensely visual book.

Throughout the Medieval period and during the Renaissance, complex conceptual
visual memory systems were constructed in order to enable the recall of information.
[6]Very often, these conceptual systems would be based on the idea of imagining an
environment and filling this imaginary space with strange visual signs/objects - these
could be sculptures, or people, or as one famous treatise on memory said: an image
should be grotesque - stained with blood, or clad in a purple cloak, or humorous - in

order for it to stay lodged in the mind. These visual mnemonic signs themselves
became more and more multi-layered and self-referential. L'idea del Teatro is a book
that describes one of these complex memory systems, and, as its title suggests, used
the concept of a Theatre in which to place its multifarious signs.

Elephant at the level of Mercury

L'idea del Teatro: image by KR
Giulio Camillo was born in Friuli, in the north east of Italy, very close to Venice, in
around 1480. He made his living as an orator and teacher of rhetoric. His manuscript
work includes treatises on language, focusing on differentiations and nuances of form.
He promoted the use of his local Friulian dialect, and was involved in a long-running
debate on innovation versus imitation. [7] Printing had just been invented, and was in
full swing at this time.[8] By the year 1500, when Camillo was twenty, Venice had as
many as 417 printing houses. Venice is not a large town, and by my estimate that figure
says that maybe around ten percent of the whole population was specifically devoted to
developing this new medium. Giulio Camillo, however, never had a book published in
his lifetime. I believe that this may have been because he was distrustful of some of the
developments being made in printing at the time. He was not alone in this. A number
of the intellectual luminaries of the day also felt that certain knowledge should be
reserved for the use of a chosen few, and not made known to the public at large. The
publication of Copernicus's text, for example, about the arrangement of the solar
system, was, famously, delayed until the very weeks before he died.
5

Camillo devoted years of his life to developing "The Theatre". Rumours and gossip
spread about the creation of this "mind and soul, artistically wrought",[9]although it is
debatable whether Camillo actually constructed anything tangible. When he was
between forty and fifty years old, Camillo took up an invitation from the King of
France, Franois 1st, to live in Paris. Word had spread from Italy of Camillo and his
Theatre, and Franois - who was a very wily, shrewd man, and who had a keenly
developed aesthetic sense - was keen to get a piece of the action. By all accounts
Camillo seemed to have had a productive time in the city, and Franois paid him a
hefty fee to research and develop his theories. He was given a comparable amount, in
fact, as had been awarded by Franois to Leonardo da Vinci. Franois only made one
stipulation: Camillo must not tell his "secret" to anyone else but himself - the King.
Camillo remained true to this condition right up until the months before he died.

Camillo stayed in Paris for about seven years, but eventually, the funds from the King
began to dry up and Camillo decided to return to Italy. We do not know how much of
his ideas he had clarified by this time, but certainly Camillo had not divulged his
theory to anyone else at this point. During the latter part of 1543, or very early in 1544,
he accepted an offer brokered by his agent, Girolamo Muzio, to go to Milan. Here, in
Milan, at the court of the Marchese del Vasto, after much persuasion, Camillo finally
dictated his great idea to Girolamo Muzio. Muzio transcribed everything that Camillo
said over the course of seven days and nights. The manuscript was completed early in
February 1544. Three months later, on the 15th of May, Camillo died.

Muzio and the Marchese del Vasto, however, even though they had gone to great
lengths to persuade Camillo to divulge his secret ideas to them, decided not to publish
Camillo's manuscript, and L'idea languished. It was not until six years later that it was
to receive a wider public, when the manuscript arrived at the printers, and L'idea del
Theatro was finally published in 1550, in Florence, by Lorenzo Torrentino.

Celestial Streams
L'idea del Teatro: image by KR
8

So, what was in L'idea del Theatro? What did it contain to convince Muzio and del
Vasto to delay its publication, though they had gone to such lengths to attain the
manuscript? The work is about the creation of the world and the layout of the
heavens. Written in Italian, the book is arranged in seven sections in which Camillo
speaks of a system that, as he says, makes "scholars into spectators".[10]He is
imagining a "theatre" in its original sense - as a place in which a spectacle unfolds:
"Following the order of the creation of the world, we shall place on the first levels the
more natural things...those we can imagine to have been created before all other
things by divine decree. Then we shall arrange from level to level those that followed
after, in such a way that in the seventh, that is, the last and highest level shall sit all
the arts...not by reason of unworthiness, but by reason of chronology, since these were
the last to have been found by men."
The Theatre, then, 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.

The entire Theatre, says Camillo, rests on Solomon's Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Placed
above the Pillars of Wisdom, are the planets. Above these are a further six levels.
There are the levels of the Banquet and the Cave - these are about nature and the
elements, about the primeval creation of things. Then there are the levels of the
Gorgon and Pasiphae - both ancient Greek mythical motifs - which are about spiritual
man and nature. And then there are the levels of "The Sandals of Mercury" and
Prometheus - which are to do with art and man, or man using technology - which was
everything from making windmills, to creating viaducts or sewing. Camillo was
writing at a time when encyclopaedias were being created and it was thought that it
was possible to collate every known fact about the world, and that everything was
cosmically connected. So inside his astronomical world system we not only get
theories about planetary arrangement but also about how the planets affect our health
and every other aspect of our lives.

10

Camillo describes doorways placed on each of the levels beneath which the scholar, or
spectator, may view images to represent, and to remember, salient features of that
position within the arrangement. Behind the doorway to "Banquet" on the first level,
for instance, "we shall find the Breadth, or...Magnitude of Being, made in the shape of
a pyramid", which Camillo says symbolizes "the Father, the Word...and the Holy
Spirit", as well as "a representation of Pan", whose body was meant to represent the
supercelestial, the celestial and the inferior world, and "the Fates", symbols of "the
beginning...the effect and of the end" of an event.

11

The naming of the levels in effect creates a kind of grid system to the whole plan. It is
a grid system to enhance memory, and also to affect the interpretation of a given
symbol or image - a kind of grid of meaning. But rather than what we would now have
- a Cartesian graph, for example, based on numeric values - the values in Camillo's
scheme are based on language and myth. This is not to say that Camillo did not value
number itself. Camillo's philosophy and working method was based on the conviction
that the sum total of all things - all material, every topic - as well as every word, was
reducible to a number of finite elements. He was attempting a synthesis of the two - a
synthesis between mathematics and verbal/visual language. In Camillo's scheme,
rather than saying "doorway b3" you could say "the doorway at Mercury on the level of
the Cave".

12

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 - if obscure - in Camillo's schema. It was obvious that Camillo was trying
to describe something very complex and that the work was multi-layered. I remember
being drawn to the Theatre because I really felt as though Camillo was telling a story,
not in the way that a narrative painting might tell a story, but in the sense that there
were connections between each of the images, across the space of the Theatre, that he
intended the viewer to pluck images from across the entire network of the Theatre and
use them to reconstruct, reassemble, a meaningful pattern - a three-dimensional
visual language.

Proteus at the level of the Neptune

L'idea del Teatro: image by KR
13

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.

14

L'idea was dictated to Muzio only a matter of months after Nicolaus Copernicus's
Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres was published in 1543. In the Revolution of the
Heavenly Spheres Copernicus proved mathematically, for the first time, that the sun,
and not the earth, was at the centre of the universe. Camillo and Copernicus may in
fact have met in the early years of the fifteenth century at either the universities of
Bologna or Padua. While I am not suggesting that Camillo's work can be described in
the same terms as a mathematical astronomer, there is, I believe, a heliocentric core to
Camillo's L'idea. If Camillo had a "secret", known only to the King of France, it was
that the sun had pride of place in the universe.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------[1] Camillo Delminio, Giulio, L'idea del Teatro e altri scritti di retorica (Turin: Edizioni RES, 1990).
[2] Quoted in Wenneker, Lu Beery, An Examination of L'idea del Teatro of Giulio Camillo, including an
annotated translation, with special attention to his influence on Emblem Literature and Iconography
(Unpublished PhD Thesis: University of Pittsburgh, 1970), p102.
[3] Bolgar, The Classical Heritage, (Cambridge University Press, 1954), p.434.
[4] Levi (Ed), Collected Works of Erasmus 6 Ciceronianus (University of Toronto Press, 1986), n.308,
pp.562-563.
[5] Giulio Camillo Delminio De L'Imitation, translated into French by Francoise Graziani with
introduction and notes by Lina Bolzoni, (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1996).

[6] See Carruthers, Mary, The Book of Memory (Cambridge University Press, 1990); Bolzoni, Lina, trans.
Jeremy Parzen, The Gallery of Memory: Literary and Iconographic Models in the Age of the Printing
Press (University of Toronto Press, 2001); Yates, Frances, The Art of Memory (London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1966).
[7] This concerned the European wide debacle, instigated by Erasmus, on "Ciceronianism". For a history
of Ciceronianism, see Sandys, J.E. Harvard Lectures on the Revival of Learning (Cambridge University
Press, 1905). For discussions about Camillo's and other responses see G.W. Pigman, III "Imitation and
the Renaissance Sense of the Past: The Reception of Erasmus' Ciceronianus", Journal of Medieval and
Renaissance Studies 9 (1979): 155-77; Watson, Elisabeth See, Achille Bocchi and the Emblem Book as
Symbolic Form (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
[8] Johann Gutenberg is accredited as the first printer, with the first Bible in Latin in Mainz, Germany,
in 1450, igniting the revolution in print that was to change the whole world.
[9] From a description of the Theatre in a letter to Erasmus from Zwichem, 8th June 1532. See Allen,
Erasmus' Epistles: 2632, 2682, 2657, 2716, 2810 and 3032.
[10] Camillo Delminio, Giulio, L'idea del Teatro (Florence: Torrentino, 1550): 14.
eSharp issue: autumn 2003. Kate Robinson 2003. All rights reserved. ISSN 1742-4542.
University of Glasgow
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