Giulio Camillo

Biography

Camillo was born around 1480 in Friuli, in the north-east of Italy, and probably spent his childhood in Portogruaro. He took his family name, Delminio, from the birthplace of his father, in Dalmatia (in present-day 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 Andrea 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 (although Erasmus and Viglius did not show much affection for Camillo's mysticisms) and worked with the painter Titian. He was part of the cultural circle that included Pietro Aretino and Pietro Bembo and had personal ties with the architect Sebastiano 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 Ladin. Throughout this time he also worked on his ideas for the Theatre.

Camillo is believed to have held a chair of Dialectics at the University of Bologna from around 1521 to 1525; he attended 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 Francis, in which his ideas for the Theatre were outlined. He impressed Francis 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. 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

Camillo's published output is small and L'Idea del Theatro is his most well-known work. L'Idea del theatro (The Idea of the Theater), opens with a warning concerning an ancient tradition of esoteric writing:

The most ancient and wisest of writers have always been accustomed to recommending to their writings the secrets of God under obscure veils, so that they be not intended, unless by those who (as says Christ) have ears to hear--i.e. who by God are elected to intend his own most saintly mysteries. And Melissus [of Samos] says that the eyes of vulgar wills [animi] cannot suffer the rays of divinity. That is confirmed with the example of Moses...

Elsewhere Camillo notes that:

"By the ancients thus it was custom that those same philosophers who taught and showed to dear disciples profound doctrines, having clearly declared them, would cover them with fables, so that the covers they made would keep the doctrines hidden: so that they would not be profaned".

At the end of the chapter titled "Le Gorgoni", Camillo identifies the faculty of "intending" with the "practical intellect" ("intelletto prattico"), which is elsewhere explicitly distinguished from the "acting intellect" ("intelletto agente"), as well as from Cicero's "the force of intelligence," which is vulgarly referred to as "ingenuity". In Camillo's "Theatro" each "image...will signify for us intelligible things that cannot fall under the senses, but that we can only imagine or intend illuminated by the acting intellect". While "Intellect is of the spirit", the "acting intellect" (Aristotle) is said to correspond to Plato's "mind" ("mente") and Augustine's "superior part" ("portion superiore"). In virtue of this intellect, we can "intend". The practical intellect, on the other hand, indicates "possessing" ("possedere") by "having already apprehended". In short, there are "three intellects" in us: 1) a "possible" ("possibile") or "passive" ("passibile") intellect, or ingenuity entailing the "ability" to intend; 2) the intellective faculty per se, or "intending" as "practical intellect"; and 3) the "active intellect" that makes us intend, just as the Sun allows us to see all things beneath it. Camillo argues against "philosophers ignorant of God" who identify the "active intellect" with human reason, insofar as this one is usually absent from men, who are merely capable of it. The "active intellect" must reside safely and eternally "in God", so as to safeguard man's capacity to reason. As other ancient mythic "images" or "symbols," that of the three "Gorgoni" is used to protect the verities of the mind, or "the mystery of truth" ("il mistero della verita') from being profaned. By casting the principle of reason in the authoritative form of God, philosophers who do not ignore God defend reason from being turned into an instrument of the physical senses below it.

Camillo and Erasmus

Desiderius Erasmus, the philologist, probably met Camillo in Venice around 1506-9. Erasmus mentions "sharing a mattress" with Camillo as well naming him in his satirical Ciceronianus (1528). Erasmus was scathing of Camillo's work, and in a letter dated 5 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".

Camillo’s response to Erasmus, Trattato dell’ Imitatione, written in Paris, was published in the year of Camillo’s death, 1544.

Art of memory

Giulio Camillo, posthumously, was referred to by a number of artists and writers, including Achille Bocchi, Ludovico Ariosto and Jean-Jacques 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), Carlota Caulfield (2003), and Hilary Mantel (2009); visual artists Jean Dubuffet (1977) and Bill Viola (1985); and composer John Buller (2003).