Giulio Camillo's Memory Theatre

One of the references brought by Renata La Rocca is the Giulio Camillo's Memory Theatre.

In a letter written by Viglius to Erasmus, both comtemporary of Camillo, they said that Camillo has constructed an Amphitheatre, a work of wonderful skill, into which whoever is admitted as spectator will be able to discourse on any subject no less fluently than Cicero and that he pretends that all things that the human mind can conceive and which we cannot see with the corporeal eyes, after being collected together by diligent meditation, may be expressed by certain corporeal signs in such a way that the beholder may at once perceive with his eyes everything that is otherwise hidden in the depths of the human mind. And it is because of this corporeal looking that he calls it a theatre.

Giulio Camillo Delminio was one of the most famous people of the sixteenth century, primarily because of his construction of a life-size model of a theater. His Idea del theatro(Venice, 1550) was published in ten editions by 1584. As Frances Yates has shown, Camillo belonged to the Hermetic-kabbalistic tradition initiated by Pico della Mirandola. His theater was actually a memory building representing the order of eternal truth and depicting the various stages of creation, from the first cause through the angels, the planetary spheres, and down to man. The theater's basic planetary images were talismans receiving astral power that could be channeled and operated through the agency of the theater. By mastering the proportions of universal harmony whose memory was preserved in the theater's structure, the operator could harness the magical powers of the cosmos. (in: Kabbalah, Magic, and Science, The Cultural Universe of a Sixteenth-Century Jewish Physician. Harvard University Press, 1988, p.113)

references:
The Art of Memory, Frances Yates
The Renaissance of the Theater of Memory, Peter Matussek
The Memory Theatre of Giulio Camillo, Written and Directed by Matthew Maguire, Sets and installations by Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio.
Tetsuro Nagata, Computing an Identity