Forme e funzioni dell’immagine di memoria nel Cinquecento: due casi

The ars memoriae, that is to say the technique of collocating images linked to our memories which are then put into mental places set aside for this activity, has experienced several transfigurations during its long textual tradition, each of which has revealed a particular configuration, an intrinsic potentiality, and an elite field of action. The classical rules and examples related to the ars memoriae, as well as the profound reformulations they experienced in the Middle Ages, frequently appear e.g. in the rich mnemonic treatises of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, modulating themselves in different ways according to the characteristics of the cultural contexts where they were used. Variously they were adapted to new tasks, and, most of all, their memorial functions were made visible and evident thanks to the iconographic component that almost always characterized these texts. In this sense, a revolutionary role was played by the introduction of printing that helped Renaissance man to perceive the word as something that lives in a mainly visual and visually describable space. By that I mean that the systematic spatiality of the printed page has become progressively intertwined with the inner systematic spatiality established by the art of local memory. At the same time, the inner systematic spatiality established by the art of local memory consent to a more and more geometric and schematic perception and conceptualisation of the real world. Furthermore, movable type offers a material consistency to the traditional comparison between letters and images of memory, and increases the common elements between the two forms of knowing (art of memory and writing/reading). Above all, the images of a memory treatise explain the rules of the art of memory proposed in the text and, at the same time, help us to memorise the content of the text: they encode their rules as well as the odd things to be remembered. From this point of view, the meaning of the phrase image of memory should be extended and not limited only to real illustrations: it should also include images described in the text, and images which are moulded in the reader’s mind through metaphoric expressions, specific allegoric passages, or textual structures. In all such cases, whether real or mental, images can create a strong dialogue with the text they are linked to. Starting from these theoretical assumptions, this essay will focus, from a rhetorical point of view, on two texts of the art of memory that present three different forms of the relationship between icons and texts: 1) a didactic relationship (an image which is part of the work and which illustrates the text); 2) a referential relationship (an image which is not part of the work yet places the text into a real context). The images of memory that characterize these two texts also illustrate the two main functions carried out by the mnemonic imagination through its governing principles: 1) an inventorial function, namely to allow the memorization of words and concepts through an artificial image or a regular logical sequence of artificial images; 2) a hermeneutic function, namely to help the understanding both of the structure of an image (real or virtual) and of a space rhetorically built through the logical connections of images (real or virtual)