Event #31

It is today, in the age of the Internet and of the triumph of imagery, that we are best able to understand the century-old tradition of the art of memory, which reaches its most spectacular expression during the Renaissance. As was the case, for instance, with the theatre of memory created by Giulio Camillo, an eccentric character who was both despised for being a charlatan and worshipped as a divine being. A poet and a master in rhetoric, a magician and an alchemist, a mystic and a libertine, friend of Titian and Lorenzo Lotto, throughout his life Camillo chased his dream: a theatre of memory capable of housing all of the knowledge and secrets of beauty – an artificial mind linking memory and invention. Centuries later, in the 20^th century, a similar dream spreads among immigrants to the United States: take Marino Auriti’s Encyclopedic Palace, or the fantastic cathedrals and utopian cities by Achilles Rizzoli, depictions of the interior life of those they held dear.