Nel laboratorio della fantasia: Giordano Bruno tra filosofia e arte della memoria

Abstract

Giordano Bruno’s art of memory moves away from the classical model consisting of places and images. The first change is in the use of places, whose structure has been linked to the logical form of memory data, so that the form of, i.e., a memory palace will be the same as that of a memorized book, so that the number and size of floors, rooms, and places correspond to its sections, chapters, and paragraphs. The second point is the introduction of Lull’s ars combinatoria as applied to the images. Thanks to this device it is possible to manipulate memory signs and manage their meanings. This happens by the use of subiectum adiectivum that helps increase the versatility of both places and images. The aim of these innovations is to make the fantastic world work like the external one, which produces beings by adding form to matter (or in fantasy, meanings to imagination) and perpetually changes everything in order to bring out all possibilities (its fantastic counterpart is the shift of meanings by their signs). The inner imaginative sphere will be so changed in a visual laboratory able to imitate nature, by offering a new method of refining knowledge and a tool for bringing man close to the divine core of nature through the experience of the whole and variable complexity of the infinite universe.