Machina spiritalis

In the foyer of the "Giovanni da Udine" the exhibition "Deus ex machina" which traces the history
of the theater through that of the stage machinery has recently been admired: periatti, elevators,
winches and other ingenious devices. With great intuition, the exhibitors have added to the
theatrical devices some examples of literary machines: in the last sector of the exhibition they
were able to admire a reconstruction of the combinatorial frame described by Swift in Gulliver's
Travels (if they use Laputa's academics to produce knowledge in a completely random way),
the Cent mille milliards de poèmes by Queneau (ten sonnets with interchangeable verses, so as
to produce ten to the fourteenth), two poetic compositions by Luc Etienne on tapes by Moebius
(in this case it is the topological distortion to produce poetic oddities), and some hints to the
permutative experiments of Oulipo (the famous Ouvroire de Littérature Potentielle who also had
Italo Calvino among its members). Excellent the idea, rather poor and not very perspicuous the
realization, which was reduced to the simple juxtaposition of two themes worthy of being
investigated in their interconnections.

I certainly do not pretend to be able to reconstruct the history of the relationship between theater,
literature and machines, and of a mechanical conception of the arts, but I would like to illustrate
a chapter that moreover concerns us closely: a Friulian chapter. It was Eugenio Battisti who
pointed out that "the most ancient design to date of a model, at least, of regular theater with wings,
and with a central moving platform for transformations" is due to Giovanni Fontana, a singular
figure of physician and scientist (one a sort of fifteenth-century Leonardo) who in his Bellicorum
instrumentorum liber sketched the "sibling templum sane" reproduced next (Fig. 1). Now, among
the works of the Fountain the Secretum de thesauro experimentorum ymaginationis hominum is
also preserved, in which appear various projects of combinatorial machines, concentric disks,
cylinders, rolls that allow the permutation of the writing elements (single letters or words): a
realization engineering of the Lulliano dream. But the relationship between the theater of the first
treatise and the devices of the second is not just contiguity: the Secretum is in fact a mnemonics
or, to put it with Battisti, "the project of a compact database of knowledge" in which in some
respects prefigures the building of Friuli Giulio Camillo, which in the form of "Theater of memory"
conceived and to some extent built around 1530 the first hypertextual (and multimedia, and
interactive) encyclopedic repertoire of history: a great combinatorial machine, in which the dreams
of the Renaissance pansophy, the Ficinian hermetism, the Lullian projects, the phalian kabbalistic
practices (also used for the production of poetic texts!) and - who knows? - some suggestions
received from Giovanni Fontana, of whom we know that around 1438 he was hired in Udine as a
physician (the stay was unpleasant, among other things, due to the lack of libraries). About
seventy-five years later, Giulio Camillo taught in Udine, and I like to think that in our city the
"theatrical" projects of both have matured, connected perhaps to the memory that Fontana's
activity could have been preserved.

But to understand how in the "Theater of memory" in many ways we identify theatrical machine
(or, as I will say, theater-machine) and text machine will be necessary some news on its creator
and on the cultural field that expressed it. Born in 1480 in Portogruaro (in historic Friuli, therefore),
after having completed his studies in Venice and Padua, Giulio Camillo was a master of
"humanity" in San Vito, Udine and Pordenone, before moving to the University of Bologna as a
professor of rhetoric, and from here in France, called to you by the sovereign Francis I who, to
secure the theater, financed him munificamente. Friend of Erasmus of Rotterdam, of Serlio, of
Bembo, of Aretino, of Titian, he was authoritative presence in the most remarkable cultural circles,
academies, esoteric circles, religious cenacles, elaborating a conceptual syncretistic system that
was structured in the system of his Theater .
Work in progress of his entire life, Camillo's invention has roots in the rhetorical art and the
memorized techniques used by it. From the modest project of giving the speaker a repertoire of
quotations (above all Ciceronian) ordered alphabetically, Camillo went in search of an
accommodation free from linguistic peculiarities (and therefore universal usability) resorting to
anatomy and astrology to catalog the different topics in correspondence with the various parts of
the micro and the macrocosm (human limbs, zodiacal signs) according to analogical criteria. So
far nothing particularly original: the ancient and medieval encyclopedism experienced numerous
similar examples.

But then, here's the brilliant idea: the realization of a mnemotechnical hardware. The art of
classical memory prescribes the construction of a mental building in which to distribute the parts
of the speech to be memorized; ideally retracing the places to which they are entrusted, it will be
possible to retrieve them from memory in the desired order. The effectiveness of the method can
be strengthened with association expedients: the loci are characterized by imagines agentes ,
figures of strong emotional-evocative charge (horrifying, erotic, bizarre) that are indelibly imprinted
in the memory.Camillo thought his theater as a material realization of the imaginary mnemonic
buildings: a theater, in fact, where the universal knowledge was distributed on a sevenfold
staircase divided into seven sectors: forty-nine places of memory (a further seven-year scan led
to three hundred and forty-three) marked with images. For them Camillo appealed to Francesco
Salviati and to Titian: of the latter two hundred and one watercolors kept at the Escurial together
with a copy of the Idea of the Theatro (the operetta dictated shortly before his death to the Muzio,
which unfortunately briefly describes the building Camillian) were lost in the fire of 1671
(practically nothing remains of the Theater, which had arrived, as I will say, at an advanced stage
of construction).

The Theater's system responds to classificatory and magic-numerological requirements at the

same time; the sequence of steps mirrors an emanationist cosmology of the Neoplatonic type,
the sectors are placed under the sign (and the influence) of the planetary gods, corresponding to
seven angels and the seven lower sephirot of the Jewish Cabala. Neoplatonism, hermetism,
kabbalism and alchemy come together in a pansytic system that makes the encyclopedia
camilliama, as Yates, Walker and Bolzoni have shown, also a great talisman and an instrument
of "deification" for those who use it.

But the esoteric aspects of the Theater (for which the figure of Camillo assumes the features of
the Renaissance "magician", not without suspicions of charlatanism), however evocative they are,
are of little relevance here. From the point of view adopted, we are not yet dealing with a singular
archive, ordered according to an original classification system, with keys of an iconic and symbolic
nature. What makes me believe that the theater was a real machine, a computer capable of
combinatorial operations, is not only the explicit reference, in the writings of Camillo, to an
"artificial rota" that makes one think of the wheels of the ars magna of Lullo and to those that the
Cabala uses for the alphabetic permutations (temurah), but also the spirit of his rhetorical
theorisations and some of his literary performance: in my essay La Lucrezia anagrammata and
the programmed cosmos , merged with others in artificial Anima . The Magic Theater by Giulio
Camillo (publisher Aviani 1993) I highlighted how Camillo adapted the anagrammatic operations
implemented by Pico Cabalista to a poetic mechanism.

In short, I am convinced that in Camillo, and not in Giordano Bruno, as Frances Yates would have
it, the first grafting of the lullism on the classical memorial ars is due . The great English historian
could not realize it for having wanted to reconstruct the Camillo Theater according to a Vitruvian-
Palladian model (semicircular, with inversion of spatial relations: the spectator contemplates from
the scene what is arranged on the steps); instead it had to have a circular shape and be provided
with rotating elements susceptible to radial combinations (Barbieri even thinks of a three-
dimensional mechanics, to Rubik's cube). Many testimonies speak of an amphitheater : among
them the decisive one of Viglio Zwichem, Erasmo's correspondent, who in 1532, in Venice, was
admitted by Camillo in a wooden building presented to him as an "artificial mind and soul". Of his
structure I think the memory is preserved in the "temple of painting" of Lomazzo, which explicitly
refers to Camillo.

Of course it may seem risky to think of the mechanization of such a bomb, but remember that
Nero's Golden Domus was already equipped with a revolving zodiacal dome, think of the watches
of Lorenzo della Volpaia, who conceived Marsilio Ficino's idea to realize a great cosmic talisman,
think of the robots attributed to Leonardo. And at least the small-scale models would certainly
have been able to simulate the theater's combinatorial schemes.

Therefore, he finds full confirmation of what with extraordinary acumen he had already guessed
Giuseppe Marchetti who, in Friuli. Men and times(1959!) Wrote that the Theater "was not a book
and it was not a simple device: it had to be a set of repertoires or files containing a kind of universal
encyclopedia, ordered according to astronomical or cabalistic or mystical or magical reports.
individual parts had to be arranged on the circular wall of an amphitheater-shaped room, and
connected to each other by mirrors or other mechanical devices.The apparatus had to promptly
offer to those who used it everything that was known or could be said on a any argument (that is
to say how much the writers of all time have said), expressing themselves in a language like any
of the most evolved, and according to the style and the phraseology of an era or of a chosen
author, and with all the subsidies of images, tropes, adjectives, synonymy that can offer a
nomenclator: something, so to speak, that preceded in a certain way those "electronic brains"
which sometimes deals with the periodical press of today".

Looking at the new frontiers of information technology and telematics, we can now be more
precise: with his Theater Camillo he created a hypertextual machine ante litteram, a total
encyclopedia and a noetic (and poetic) combinatorial machine, generating potential of the library
of Babel. I have highlighted these aspects in the essay on the organization of knowledge from
Renaissance mnemonics to computer science and, with the contribution of Daniele Cortolezzis,
in the one on The Theater of Memory as hypertext (also collected in artificial Anima ) claiming
that the Camillian system, by matching the gnoseological structure with the cosmological scheme
(ontological and axiological at the same time) pre-modern deserves consideration as a possible
model for a hierarchical organization of knowledge that avoids the inconveniences of the alleged
"anarchic" freedom of the rhizomatic Web and at the same time maintains the combinatorial
dynamism of true hypertext. I also pushed myself to dream of a virtual theater in which the system
of knowledge organized in cyberspace had its own "topical" evidence. And with satisfaction I see
the Camillian sites appear on the Internet, and the history of information technology goes back
more and more to more remote roots than the Leibnizian and Pascalian ones usually indicated.

But in order not to depart too much from the initial idea, I would like to conclude by underlining
the links between the Camillian building and the actual theater. I have already said and motivated
as to the opinion of Yates, who imagines for the Teatro della memoria the classic Vitruvian
structure taken up by Palladio - which of the work of Camillo certainly had knowledge - I prefer
that of the amphitheater. In any case, one of his influences has been identified from time to time
in the theater of Sabbioneta, in the theaters of the floating world of the Compagnia della Calza, in
the court of the Cornaro court in Padua. A supporter of the idea of the combinatorial device, the
aforementioned Barbieri imagines the Theater as a stage machine, a sort of great periatto similar
to Robert Fludd's machital spiritalis: a pyramid made up of seven overlapping and revolving
heights, on which they could have place real theatrical actions. After moving the scene (it should
be said!) In England, I will still remember that Yates attributes Camillian debts to Shakespeare's
Globe Theater in order to arrive, with a leap of centuries, in our day and show how, for a sort of
historical justice, alongside the computer, the theater also participates in the rediscovery of Giulio
Camillo. On the initiative of the CUT, a round table on Memory of the theater and theaters of
memory was held a couple of years ago in Trieste. On that occasion a CD of Carlo Infante was
presented presenting a multimedia encyclopedia, still under development. of the theater
organized according to the memory locations of the Globe Theater! Also in Trieste, for the month
of February, the Miela theater has Magic Fluids scheduled, a series of events (conferences,
concerts, film and video projections, performances) inspired by the figure of Giulio
Camillo. And Giulio Camillo is the title of the theatrical work that Emil Hrwatin, a young brilliant
director from Ljubljana, will stage for the Piccolo Teatro in Milan. I hope that even Udine wants
and knows how to pay tribute to Camillo, perhaps in that theater to which his name would be
much better than that of Giovanni da Udine.