Barbara Keller-Dall'Asta. Heilsplan und Gedachtnis: Zur Mnemologie des 16. Jahrhunderts in Italien.

Heidelberg: Universitatsverlag C. Winter, 2001. Pbk. 336 pp. index. illus. bibl. 46 [euro]. ISBN: 3-8253-1030-2.

Memory and the plan of salvation: in its extreme simplicity the title of this interesting and intense essay gives a perfectly clear idea of the coordinates that trace the outline of Barbara Keller-Dall'Asta's in-depth study of some testimonies of the fortune enjoyed by the art of memory in the Italian Renaissance. The deep syncretism of Renaissance culture exposes the art of memory, as any other discipline of knowledge, to natural and inevitable intersections with the main philosophical, religious, and social issues of the sixteenth century. This is why the author took great care to dwell here and restore the "debts" of the ars reminiscendi to figures of thought (Denkfiguren) which postulate relationships between the intellect of human microcosm and the intellect of divine macrocosm; relationships which, according to memorial dynamics, can also spread in the form of a reminiscent recovery of the archetypal Truth and Knowledge precisely in a time when human and divine were one unique thing. In fact the rationalistic and pre-scientific Aristotelianism, Lullo's hermeneutics, and the kabbalistic Neoplatonism represent different aspects of the analysis of man's status corruptionis after his original sin, and of his longing for restitutio in integrum that, although developed in different forms, always presents the memory function as one of its main active principles.

The philosophically-oriented mnemologies of the sixteenth century seem to take part in a humanistic salvation plan regarding "original knowledge" (knowledge of the pre-original-sin period) by receiving the inheritance of the different classical and medieval expressions of the ars memoriae and, as Barbara Keller-Dall'Asta shows in the first part of her study, providing it with new sense, new energy, and new perspectives. The rhetoric dimension--typical to the Latin mnemonic precepts (Cicero, Quintilian, and the Rhetorica ad Herennium)--emerges in the Renaissance treatises through the order principle that regulates the composition of well-defined memory-places and the creation, as well as the management, of the logical connections that relate all these places in a net of relationships similar to the syntax of the linguistic discourse: the most fertile inheritance received from the loci system in the Renaissance mnemonic is its heuristic predisposition that will be applied to the more complex projects of a topic that is as conservative as it is inventive. The other main inheritance of the classical art of memory is the principle of association (Aristotle) and the dialectic between inside and outside (soul vs. body, intellect vs. passion, description vs. metaphor) which is triggered by its most powerful expression, the analogy, playing a crucial role in the sixteenth-century debate between emulatio and imitatio: what is essential here is the idea of an indirect communication, of a sign which always refers to another, and this as much as in the common discursive and poetical praxis (where things are not directly represented but are evoked in a metaphorical, metonymical, and allegorical manner) as in more esoteric experiences of the evoking of a secret knowledge (ars notoria, numerology, and kabbalah). Above all the author insists on the readiness of the linguistic sign to be constantly translated into different languages, transcoded in images, but also broken, manipulated, and therefore given a new meaning (i.e., the rebus technique); and in this readiness, which has been discussed theoretically and tested by the Renaissance arts of memory, we can find traces of a clavis universalis (adamitic language) to the "original knowledge."

The complex intertwine in mnemonic field of all these issues is faced by Barbara Keller-Dall'Asta in its philosophical peculiarity with extreme terminological and conceptual accuracy and through the analysis of three sixteenth-century treatises which give evidence of the different cultural perspectives considered in that intertwine. Franciscan Filippo Gesualdo's Plutosofia (Padua, 1592) stresses the new orientation of memory as subject of a new philosophical theory of knowledge and, as a consequence, its role in the process of intellectual and spiritual man's ascent to the Supreme Truth: the loss of an absolute memory after the original sin can be in fact replaced by the mnemonic practice of meditatio, which turns each sensorial event into an intelligible event and goes therefore from multiplicity to oneness. The book Thesaurus artificiosae memoriae (Venice, 1579) by the Dominican Cosma Rosselli proposes, on the other hand, a plan of salvation which aims to give the human intellect and memory a rich system of signs (series repraesentationum) through which we can catalogue reality and create new knowledge: an effective visualization of the mnemonic way of functioning of this system is given by the architectural model of civitas sancta, local structure with high heuristic value. The last example is the more famous Idea del Theatro (Venice, 1550), a description of the complex utopian project of universal knowledge, alchemic transmutation, and human deification suggested by the orator, poet, and kabbalist Giulio Camillo Delminio: the analogical net of elements--which here is made up according to the composing principle from the cosmogony and put in a real, mental, and metaphorical space--represents the highest interaction of memoria and inventio as well as one of the most radical experiments of knowledge per signa.

Apart from the analysis of the peculiarity of these texts and of the intellectual depth of their authors, Barbara Keller-Dall'Asta also dwells on the relationship of these memorial experiences to the main cultural and religious issues of the time; and this is evident in the vast and updated bibliography (not the only merit of this study) that arises in the author's notes and points out the intellectual dialogue sustained by the author with many scholars, not only German, who have for some years been searching forms, meanings, and relations of the Renaissance art of memory in order that they too (in their turn) rescue an all-but-marginal page of western culture from oblivion.

ANDREA TORRE

Scuola Normale Superiore

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