ABSTRACT
Ill.1 (p.372): Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), Wheels of Memory, from De Umbris Idearum, Paris, 1582. Until Giordano Bruno, the Ars Memoriae was centred around the systematical classification of the knowledge of the world and the problem of inventing the mnemotechnical algorhythms for the remembrance of its semantic structure. With his Wheels of Memory, Bruno radicalised this principle by reintroducing the Ars Combinatoria of the Spanish writer and philosopher Ramon Llull (1232-1315), but now on a more complex, encrypted and hermetic level, which supposed the knowledge of a secret code, described by Bruno in his Clavis Magna – a text which unfortunately got lost and leaves us with the problem of finding the key to Bruno’s mystic system of five rotating concentric rings with 30 symbols each, which would allow us to decode the narrative of every single combination. See: Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory, Pimlico, London, 1992. See also essay 1, ‚The Battery’, notes: 55-8, p.73.
