The Art of Memory

A mnemonic system developed in ancient Greece and Rome and elaborated through the Middle Ages and Renaissance, in which the practitioner memorizes material by placing vivid images in the rooms of an imagined building and then 'walks' through the architecture to retrieve them. Cicero describes it. Quintilian formalizes it. The medieval rhetoricians and Renaissance humanists — Giordano Bruno most spectacularly — extended it into vast memory theaters encoding philosophical systems. The technique works because the mind's capacity for spatial imagination is more powerful and more reliable than its capacity for abstract recall. Images, placed in locations, become retrievable because the locations give them a structure that abstract storage cannot provide. Calvino invoked the art of memory in his memo on visibility to describe how the inner cinema functions — and to warn that the cinema atrophies when the external supply of images replaces the internal architecture.