After Warburg's death in October 1929 and the
migration of the Institute to London in 1933, Brunian studies at the
Warburg Institute took a very different direction thanks to the research
of Frances Yates (1899-1981). While Warburg's interest in Bruno and
image-based thinking brought his philosophy towards the present, Frances
Yates' hypothesis of an Hermetic Bruno rooted his thought in a distant
and partly mythical past at the antipodes of modern times. Nevertheless,
while her Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964) takes a different path from that traced by Warburg, her other Brunian study, The Art of Memory (1966),
is perhaps her book closest to Warburg's preoccupations. Indeed the
history of mnemonics practices, by means of which mythological figures
lived from the Antiquity onwards as animated bearers of learning in the
intimacy of the human brain, had everything to interest Warburg. In fact
the Art of Memory was written in close consultation with Gertud Bing as confirmed by this excerpt from the preface:
Now that the Memory Book is at last ended, the
memory of the late Gertrud Bing seems more poignantly present than ever.
In the early days, she read and discussed my drafts, watching
constantly over my progress, or lack of progress, encouraging and
discouraging by turns, ever stimulating with her intense interest and
vigilant criticism. She felt that the problems of the mental image, of
the activation of images, of the grasp of reality through images –
problems ever present in the history of the Art of Memory – were close
to those which preoccupied Aby Warburg, whom I only knew through her.
Frances Yates expounded the first results of her
research on Bruno's art of memory in a seminar at the Warburg Institute
in 1952. She showed her reconstruction of the wheel described in the De
Umbris Idearum, Bruno’s first mnemonic work published in Paris in 1582.
The two wheels illustrated below are part of the same work and serve as
an introduction to using the larger wheel.
In the first fixed ring the practitioner will
assign a mythological or heroic figure to each letter. Bruno provides
some examples : A Lycaon; B Deucalion; C Apollo; D Argos ... (see
De Umbris Idearum, pp. 107 ff). The letters of the second ring correspond to an action or a scene associated with each figure
. The examples provided are: AA Lycaon at a banquet; BB Deucalion and pebbles; CC Apollo and Python; DD Argos and some cattle (
ibid,
p. 112). Thus rotating the first inner ring operates permutations
between the figures and their action. Further permutation occurs when
the third wheel is set in motion. It contains attributes or
enseignes
which can be easily passed from one figure to another. Bruno provides
only four examples and leaves the rest to the imagination of his reader.
These are : AAA, Lycaon at a banquet with a chain; BBB, Deucalion and
pebbles with a headband; CCC, Apollo and Python with a baldric; DDD,
Argos and some cattle with a hood. This way the systems makes it
possible to create combinations of letters representing words, acronyms
or syllables to be remembered by means of animated images mixing the
attributes and accustomed actions of familiar mythological figures.
BAA: B Deucalion A at a banquet A with a chain
MAD: M Perseus A at a banquet D with a hood
CAD: C Apollo A at a banquet D with a hood
COD: C Apollo O and Proserpina D with a hood
To approach the larger wheel Bruno advises his
reader that `...it is necessary to dilute the printed page into an
immense space'. The last section of De Umbris idearum describes
the content of the larger wheel over 40 pages. It consists of five
concentric rings divided into 150 rays each subdivided in 5 cells. On
the outer rings are numbers, letters, the name of inventors followed by
four more wheels of words corresponding to the categories of agent,
action, enseignes, attributes (adstans) and circumstance.
- Frances
Yates reconstruction of Giordano Bruno memory wheel from `De Umbris
Idearum' - Click the image to access full version (PDF 1.5 mb)
`How did the system work? By magic of course,
by being based on the central power station of the … images of the
stars, closer to reality than the images of things of the sublunar
world, transmitter of the astral forces, the `shadows’ intermediary
between the ideal world above the stars and the objects and events in
the lower world.’ (The Art of Memory, p. 223)
This interpretation, based on a misplacing of the
images of the planets, was first revised by Rita Sturlese in her
critical edition of the De Umbris of 1991 (pp. LXVIII ff.) and later by Francesco Torchia (‘La chiave delle ombre’, Intersezioni,
1, 1997, pp. 131-151).
Both scholars strip Bruno’s construction of its
magical character. According to Sturlese the wheel is in fact an adult
toy conceived to learn foreign words. Here each ray corresponds to a set
of syllables combining one consonant with one vowel. Thus
reconstructing a word with its phonetic constituents amounts to
combining the various elements of each section. The addition of the
images described in the last ring before the hub creates in the end a
mnemonic background by means of which new words can be remembered. For
instance to remember the word
Numeratore you should pick the
first syllable in the outer ring, NU, which corresponds to `Apis’; the
second syllable in the second ring, ME: `in tapeta ’; the third
syllable, RA, in the third ring: `deploratus’; the fourth syllable, TO,
from the 4th ring: `compedes’; and finally RE in the 5th ring. This last
ring provides a background against which to set the image thus
created: `…mulier super hydram tres cervices e quarum singulis septem
exiliunt capita habentem, vacuas antrorsum tendens manus’ (
De Umbris, p. 151
).
