Guilio Camillo Describes the "Theater of Memory"

Six years after his death Italian philosopher Guilio Camillo's L'Idea del Theatro was posthumously published in Florence in 1550 by Dutch-Italian humanist printer Lorenzo Torrentino. In this work Camillo described an imaginery theater of memory with a theoretical audience of one, in which the structure of the stage and the audience of a traditional theater were reversed. A structure analogous to the rising tiers of seats in a traditional theater became the stage, and the audience of one would be located in the place of the traditional stage.

Camillo's Theater of Memory consisted an imaginary semi-circular stage with seven tiers, divided by seven isles and fronted by seven columns. His memory theater was then divided into forty-nine areas, each associated with a symbolic figure from mythology. All knowledge would be archived on different levels of the semi-circular memory theater, to be retrieved through mental associations with images and symbols.

Camillo presented his memory theater as a scheme for organizing and remembering knowledge rather than an actual structure. According to artist Kate Hamilton, "The painter, Titian, worked with Camillo. He painted a series of drawings to accompany Camillo's L'Idea del Theatro. Sadly, these images perished in a fire at El Escorial in 1671."