Category: Industrial & Technological art

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post  509

The images presented here today are related to graphical memory, ars
memorativa, the technique of aiding the storage (and retrieval!) of info in the
human brain.  This was accomplished  by mnemonic devices that associated the
location of the data with a striking or jarring or geometric image, all
structured in such a way that the correlation of the continued image would
relate to more and deeper remembered information, one bit leading to the next,
expanding into other bits, and so on, in a kind of fractal way.  The visual tools held a space for the data;
they were a constant structure into which information could be poured, allowing
for chains of info to be formed and retrieved. 
And so by the effort of visualizing the structure of where the memories
where (supposed to be) the user would be able to recall them by simply
remembering their placement, and since the structure built on itself, one
memory would lead to the next, and so on, a cascade of rushing memories.

Giordano Bruno (who I wrote a little about here some time ago) established
his system in 1582 based upon the concentric circles of Raymond Lull, grouping the
circles with symbols and letters and other designs,. Forming tighter cells of
memory, much in line with the long practices of the later Hermeticists. 

Part of the goal, it seems to me, was to be able to not only recall this
information, but to be able to get it out of the way, so to speak, to be able
to put all of the factual stuff necessary to think in a safe place so that real
thinking could be done.  Bruno was one of
those who tried to go beyond the veil of the known by having a clear,
orerdly mind.  Also, the process of
getting there—to the point where you have a lot of info loaded into these
memory spaces—involved lots of quiet time, or meditation, or deep thought, or
something, which also led in that inexorable way to a finer modality of
thinking.  (Jeff, Laura?) Perhaps it was
a mode of composition that could only come after long, deep meditation and
memory exercises.

Certainly this approach to though/logic/rhetoric/composition is nothing
new.  Ancient it is, really.  This sort of process reaches way back to the Egyptians,
and to Cicero‘s
De oratore
(Bk II 350-360), and the Rhetorica
ad Herennium, (ca. 90 BCE), and Quintilian‘s
Institutio Oratoria (Bk XI), and (of
course) Aristotle
 On The Soul
and On Memory and
Reminiscence; to the delightful Matteo Ricci
 A Treatise On Mnemonics
and to Simonides of Ceos, Saint Thomas Aquinas and Cosmos Rossellius
Theasurus artificosae memoria (1579).;
to Jacobus Publicius, Oritoriae artis epitome,  Peter of Ravenna, Phoenix, sive
artificiosa memoria,  and to Johannes
Romberch, Congestorium artificiose memorie. 
And
these are examples that don’t get us even out of the 16^th century. 

Some of the writers listed above used memory devices that were architectural in style, or showed levels of the heaven and earth as memory place-holders, or used the human body and body parts to elegantly display to the mind where the memory was hiding on the body.  I’ve included one example from Johannes Romberch–who used city and architectural images in addition to a wide assortment of astronomical, alphabetical and geographical devices–because it is an extremely early depiction of a bookstore (in the upper right, “bibliopola”).

The practice of the art of memory was taken by some groups as a sort of religious experience–as a matter of fact even in the late 18th century the Quakers thought enough of the practice to want it banned, leading as it did to too much thought on matters that were far strewn from religious tolerances.  Some of the ars memoria practices, like those of Lull, were too far removed into the spheres of the esoteric and astrologic to do much good for the Straight & True believer.  The great historian of memory, Frances Yates in The Art of Memory, says the following about Lull:

“Lullism had a vast diffusion which has only recently
begun to be systematically studied. Owing to the core of Platonism, and
of Scotist Neoplatonism, within it, it formed a current which, not
acceptable to many in the ages dominated by scholasticism, found itself
in a much more welcoming atmosphere at the Renaissance. A symptom of
the popularity that it would gain in the full Renaissance is the
interest accorded to it by Nicholas of Cusa. In the full Neoplatonic
stream of the Renaissance, stemming from Ficino and Pico, Lullism took
a place of honor. Renaissance Neoplatonists were able to recognize in
it notions very congenial to them and reaching them from mediaeval
sources which, unlike the humanists, they did not despise as barbarous.

“There is even, at the heart of Lullism, a kind of interpretation of astral influences
which would have aroused interest in the age of Ficino and Pico. When
the Art is done on the level coelum, it becomes a manipulation of the
twelve signs of the zodiac and the seven planets, in combination with B
to K, to form a kind of benevolent astral science, which can be worked as astral medicine, and which, as Lull points out in the preface to his Tractatus de astronomia,
is a very different matter from ordinary judicial astrology…. Lullism
thus establishes itself at the Renaissance as belonging with the
fashionable philosophy, and becomes assimilated to various aspects of
the Hermetic-Cabalist tradition. ”  (p. 187-8)

Be that as it may, I do have a soft place for Bruno, the defrocked Franciscan who met his end in flames*.  He may have actually been of great value to the birth of modern science, perhaps not–he did seem to have the idea of the infinite universe and the idea of the fluidity of time and space, along with some other stuff (see extended reading) that rubbed the Catholic fur in the wrong direction.  Needless to say, the Church’s foundation felt threatened by Bruno’s cosmological beliefs, and found that the best thing to do about dealing with superior and scientific thinking to their own was to burn the author.