ABSTRACT
GIULIO Camillo, or Giulio Camillo Delminio to give him his full name, was one of the most famous men of the sixteenth century. 2 He was one of those people whom their contemporaries regard with awe as having vast potentialities. His Theatre was talked of in all Italy and in France; its mysterious fame seemed to grow with the years. Yet what was it exactly? A wooden Theatre, crowded with images, was shown by Camillo himself in Venice to a correspondent of Erasmus; something similar was later on view in Paris. The secret of how it really worked was to be revealed to only one person in the world, the King of France. Camillo never produced the great book, which he was always about to produce, in which his lofty designs were to be preserved for posterity. It is thus not surprising that posterity forgot this man whom his contemporaries hailed as ‘the divine Camillo’. The eighteenth century still remembered him, 3 rather patronisingly, but thereafter he disappeared, and it is only in recent years that some people 4 have begun to talk again of Giulio Camillo.
