Giulio Camillo

Giulio Camillo (c. 1480 – 1544) was an Italian philosopher. He is best known for his ‘theatre’, described in his posthumously published work ‘"L’Idea del Theatro"’.

Biography

Giulio Camillo was born around 1480 in Friuli, in the north east of Italy. His childhood was probably spent in Portogruaro. He took his family name, Delminio, from the birthplace of his father, in Dalmatia, in what is now Croatia. He studied philosophy and jurisprudence at the University of Padua in the years around 1500, and subsequently taught eloquence and logic at San Vito, an academy in Friuli. In 1508, he was involved in the short-lived Accademia Liviana at Pordenone. The Academy attracted an eclectic mix of brilliant and radical thinkers. Here, Camillo would have come in contact with astronomer and physician, Girolamo Fracastoro, and the poets, Giovanni Cotta and Antonio Navagero.

Around the first decade of the sixteenth century, Camillo lived in Venice where he was in close contact with some of the most influential writers and artists of Europe. He stayed near the house of the famous printer, Aldus Manutius, in the Sestiere di San Polo, in the centre of the city. He knew the philologist Desiderius Erasmus and worked with the painter, Titian. He was part of the cultural circle that included Aretin and Bembo and had personal ties with the architect, Serlio, and his family. During this time, Camillo spent considerable care in charting regional differentiations in the Friulian dialect and was a champion of the local use of Italian, rather than Latin. Throughout this time he also worked on his ideas for the Theatre. [ See Bolzoni, Lina, Il teatro della memoria:studi su Giulio Camillo (Padua: Liviana, 1984); 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), pp.23-82; Yates, Frances, The Art of Memory (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966), chapters 6 & 7; Robinson, K., A Search for the Source of the Whirlpool of Artifice: the cosmology of Giulio Camillo (Edinburgh: Dunedin Academic Press, 2006). ]

Camillo is believed to have held a chair of Dialectics at the University of Bologna from around 1521 to 1525, and is known to have been at the Coronation of Charles V in 1529.

In 1530, Camillo journeyed to Paris at the invitation of Francis I of France. He produced a manuscript titled Theatro della Sapientia, in 1530, for François, in which his ideas for the Theatre were outlined. He impressed François and was given funds to develop his ideas, remaining in France till around 1537.

Eventually, remuneration from Francis I began to dry up and Camillo decided to return to Italy for good. During the latter part of 1543, or very early in 1544, he accepted an offer to go to Milan. Here, after much persuasion, Camillo finally dictated his plan of the Theatre. The manuscript was completed early in February 1544. Three months later, on the 15th of May, Camillo died. L’ Idea del Theatro was finally published in 1550, in Florence, by Lorenzo Torrentino.

L’Idea del Theatro

According to Camillo, L’Idea del Theatro was about ‘the eternal nature of all things’. [Camillo, Giulio, L’Idea del Theatro (Florence: Lorenzo Torrentino, 1550), pp.10-11. ] The book is arranged in seven sections that chart the creation of the world. Camillo speaks of a system that, as he says, makes ‘scholars into spectators’. 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. [L’idea del Theatro, p14.]

Camillo believed the world was made of ‘primary matter’. This primary matter was sometimes called ‘hyle’; it is the material of all that is manifest. Camillo thought that by reducing knowledge into its constituent parts, you could come closer to comprehending hyle, the original essence, and consequently understand what makes the world tick. Likewise (but in reverse) through comprehending the universe, you would understand its essential ingredients. His key to this was in the creation of a symbolic system that both represented the essence of material, as well as the relationships between the essences that allowed the universe to maintain its being. The ‘idea of the Theatre’ was fundamentally a structure of conceptual relationships rather than a building of wood or stone, and it is on that level that Camillo’s work bears most fruit. The Theatre is to be understood in terms of time and space - a spatial representation of chronology.

The entire Theatre, says Camillo, rests on Solomon’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom. On the Seven Pillars rest the planets, which govern, or administrate, ‘cause and effect’. Camillo names these planets: the moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. He omits the name of the earth. Arranged in an ascending order from the planets, and affected by their influence, are a further six levels, which, broadly speaking, represent a gradual development from nature to art. These upper levels are named: The Banquet, The Cave, The Gorgons, Pasiphae, The Sandals of Mercury and Prometheus. The Banquet and the Cave, are the most ‘elemental’ of the levels; these are the levels where creation first began. The levels of the Gorgons, and Pasiphae, are where the ‘inner’ man is revealed in relation to the cosmos; these levels are part nature, part art. The levels of the Sandals of Mercury and Prometheus are concerned specifically with man as an active agent within the world, or art and man.

Camillo and Erasmus

Desiderius Erasmus, the philologist, probably met Camillo in Venice around 1506-9. Erasmus mentions ‘sharing a mattress’with Camillo [Cum Petro Phaedra, cuius eloquentiam tum Roma pro Cicerone mirabatur, mihi fuit propinqua familiaritas, cum Iulio Camillo me nonnunquam eadem iunxit culcitra. Opus Epistolarum Des. Erasmi Roterdami, Ed. H.M. Allen, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1937) Ep 3032: 219-222. See also Yates, pp. 129-34; Robinson, pp.40-53. ] as well naming him in his satirical "Ciceronianus" (1528). Erasmus was scathing of Camillo’s work, and in a letter dated 5th July 1532 talks about the Theatre in terms of it being able to excite as great a ‘tragedy in study’ as that which ‘Luther produced in religion’. [‘Amphiteatrum nae tu scite depinxisti, opus profecto tali Rege dignum. Nunc haud admiror si quosdam male habuit meus Ciceronianus. Hinc videlicet, hinc illae lacrymae. Equidem illis istam gloriam non inuideo, sed vereor ne molitores isti non leuiorem trageoediam excitent in studiis quam Lutherus excitauit in religione.’ Allen Ep:2682:8-13.]

Camillo’s response to Erasmus, Trattato dell’ Imitatione, written in Paris, was published in the year of Camillo’s death, 1544. [Camillo Delminio, Giulio, Due Trattati ... l'uno delle Materie, che possono uenir sotto lo stile dell'eloquente: l'altro della Imitatione, (Venice: Nella stamperia de Farri, 1544). See Testo di Dell'imitazione, trattato di Giulio Camillo detto Delminio). For an English translation, see Robinson, ‘A Search for the Source of the Whirlpool of Artifice’ (University of Glasgow PhD thesis, 2002), pp. 182-205.]

Art of memory

Giulio Camillo, posthumously, was referred to by a number of artists and writers, including Bocchi, Ariosto and Rousseau. More recently his work has been interpreted in terms of a tradition of ‘Theatres of Memory’, for example in Frances Yates’s influential book, "The Art of Memory" (1966). This tradition has inspired artists from many disparate disciplines, amongst them, the writers, Ted Hughes (1992) and Carlota Caulfield (2003); visual artists, Jean Dubuffet (1977) and Bill Viola (1985); and composer John Buller (2003). [Hughes, Ted, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being (London: Faber & Faber, 1992). Caulfield, Carlota, trans. Mary G. Berg, The Book of Giulio Camillo, (InteliBooks Publishers, 2003). Dubuffet, Jean, Theatre De Memoire, unlimited edition print, 1977. Bill Viola.Theatre of Memory 1985. John Buller. Proenca/Theatre of Memory. Sarah Walker. BBC Symphony Orchestra. Cond. Mark Elder. 2003. B00009W8NZ.]

References

*Camillo Delminio, Giulio, "L’idea del Theatro", (Florence: Lorenzo Torentino, 1550)

*"Tutte le opere" [With a preface by Lodovico Dolce.] (Venice: G. Giolito de Ferrari, & Fratelli, 1552).

*"Due Trattati ... l'uno delle Materie, che possono uenir sotto lo stile dell'eloquente: l'altro dell’ Imitazione", (Venice: Nella stamperia de Farri, 1544).

*"L’idea del Teatro e altri scritti di retorica", Ed. Lina Bolzoni, (Turin: Edizioni RES, 1990).

Bolzoni, Lina, "Il teatro della memoria:studi su Giulio Camillo" (Padua: Liviana, 1984)

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), pp.23-82

Yates, Frances, "The Art of Memory" (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966), chapters 6 & 7.

Robinson, K., "A Search for the Source of the Whirlpool of Artifice: the cosmology of Giulio Camillo" (Edinburgh: Dunedin Academic Press, 2006)