# Due trattati dell’Eccellentissimo M. Iulio Camillo: l’uno delle materie, che possono venir sotto lo stile dell’eloquente: l’altro della imitatione



**Autore:** Camillo Giulio

**Dati editoriali:** Colophon: Venice, Giovanni Farri & Brothers, [15]44

**Codice archivio:** 175

**Prezzo:** 3200.00 USD

**Stato commerciale:** Disponibile

**Link ufficiale:** https://www.govirarebooks.com/products/due-trattati-dell-eccellentissimo-m-iulio-camillo-l-uno-delle-materie-che-possono-venir-sotto-lo-stile-dell-eloquente-l-altro-della-imitatione

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## Descrizione accademica e analisi

4to (199x148 mm). 48 leaves. Collation: A-M4. Farri’s woodcut device on the title page. Colophon on l. M4r. Errata printed in italics on l. M4r-v. Diagram printed in red and black on l. C4r. Rebound in old cardboards, spine reinforced in vellum with inked title. Copy skilfully and lightly washed, inner and lower margins of the title page and corresponding leaf carefully repaired without affecting the text. First edition, first issue featuring Farri’s device on the title page (a subsequent issue or variant is known with the device of the publisher Paolo Gherardo, the crowned eagle above a book), of the two treatises, published posthumously in the very year of Giulio Camillo’s death. The book belongs to the earliest phase in which Camillo’s thought passed from manuscript and oral circulation into print, and it predates by six years the first edition of the Idea del theatro, published in Florence by Lorenzo Torrentino in 1550. At Camillo’s death in Milan on 15 May 1544, a substantial portion of his intellectual production still circulated in manuscript, dictation, lectures, and courtly or humanistic networks. The Due trattati therefore belong to the earliest stage in the posthumous construction of Camillo as a printed author. In 1552, Lodovico Dolce republished the two works in Di M. Giulio Camillo tutte le opere, issued at Venice by Gabriele Giolito de’ Ferrari and Brothers, together with the Discorso in materia del suo theatro, the Lettera del rivolgimento dell’huomo a Dio, the Idea, two orations, and the poems. Further printings followed in 1554 and 1555. In 1560 Giolito produced a substantially enlarged two-volume collection, followed by later editions in 1566-67, 1568, 1579, 1580, and 1584. The 1544 Due trattati therefore predates the editorial consolidation of Camillo’s corpus. The two treatises belong to different moments in Camillo’s career and were not originally conceived as a pair. The second treatise, Della imitatione, is chronologically the earlier one. It emerged from the major controversy over Ciceronian imitation reignited by Erasmus’s Ciceronianus of 1528. Camillo was personally involved in this intellectual environment: he knew Erasmus and moved within humanistic networks that also touched the Aldine world. The text did not originally take the form of a treatise, but rather of an oration intended for Francis I of France. The version transmitted in the 1544 first edition lacks its original opening section; this mutilated state was already recognized by the early learned tradition and is confirmed by modern scholarship. Camillo’s position is more sophisticated than a simple injunction to reproduce Cicero’s vocabulary. Successful imitation depends instead upon grasping the model’s forms, structures, loci, and rhetorical artifices, assimilating the generative principles of discourse rather than merely reproducing words. The problem of imitation thus becomes one of structural analysis and reconstruction. The first treatise (Trattato delle materie che possono venire sotto lo stile dell’eloquente) printed in the volume was composed after the Della imitatione and is certainly later than the accession of Ercole II d’Este to the duchy of Ferrara on 31 October 1534. The work explicitly functions as a captatio benevolentiae toward the Este duke and reflects a moment in which Camillo, while still linked to the French court and to the Cardinal of Lorraine, was probably seeking new Italian patronage. Its central question is the organization of the **“matters” available to eloquence**. Camillo’s interest is not merely taxonomic: he seeks to determine which contents can be reduced to sufficiently ordered categories to become retrievable and usable in rhetorical invention. The learned tradition, already with Apostolo Zeno, connected the treatise with a sonnet by Camillo written for Ercole II’s accession to the lordship of Ferrara. Of particular importance is the full-page diagram printed on l. C4r, identified as “il secondo artificio”. The diagram materializes a characteristically Camillian mode of thought: discourse is decomposed, ordered, and spatialized. Graphic disposition makes visible the relationship between categories, loci, and rhetorical artifices. It is precisely this movement from verbal sequence to the visual configuration of knowledge that links the Due trattati to the more famous project of the Memory Theatre. The Idea del theatro appeared only in 1550, six years after Camillo’s death. The generally accepted first edition was published in Florence by Lorenzo Torrentino, with editorial intervention by Lodovico Domenichi; two further Venetian editions appeared in the same year. The Theatre was conceived as a structure capable of representing and making available a vast organization of knowledge through places, images, cosmological correspondences, and hierarchies. Rather than passively watching a spectacle, the user would ideally occupy the vantage point from which the order of knowledge became visible. The Due trattati are therefore essential because they reveal the operational side of that same ambition: matters → classification of content; loci and artifices → analysis of structures; memory → retrieval; imitation → recombination; eloquence → generation of new discourse. The Theatre is thus inseparable from Camillo’s rhetoric: universal memory exists in order to make knowledge available for invention and expression. The connection with artificial intelligence is historically productive, but it must be stated with precision. Giulio Camillo did not “anticipate AI” in a technical sense, nor is there a direct genealogical line leading from his Theatre to modern computers. What strikingly links his project to several central problems of computing and AI is rather the underlying question: How should knowledge be represented and organized so that it can be efficiently retrieved and recombined? Camillo attempts to construct a form of externalized memory. Knowledge is not to remain dispersed in the mind or in books; it is to be transformed into a system of places, symbols, and relations that permits movement from general category to specific content. In contemporary terms, with all the necessary differences, we recognize problems analogous to those of knowledge representation, knowledge graphs, semantic indexing, and retrieval. The Trattato delle materie addresses first of all the problem: What units of knowledge should be organized? The Della imitatione addresses instead the problem: How can reusable structures be identified in existing texts so as to generate new discourse? The conceptual sequence may be represented as: corpus → classification → structures and relations → retrieval → recombination → generation. A modern language model of course works through mathematical, statistical, and computational techniques completely alien to Camillo; its representations are not consciously arranged rhetorical loci but distributed structures learned from data. Yet on the level of the history of intellectual problems, the analogy is remarkable. Even closer to the modern architecture of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is the principle that the production of effective discourse depends not upon indiscriminate possession of information, but upon the ability to retrieve the relevant matter at the right moment and combine it according to suitable structures. This comparison is not merely a modern rhetorical flourish. Peter Matussek has explicitly studied Camillo’s Theatre within the history of human-computer interfaces, showing how its twentieth- and twenty-first-century afterlife inspired digital memory theatres and new reflections on the visualization and interaction of knowledge. The relationship can therefore be formulated rigorously in the following terms: Camillo did not invent an intelligent machine; he conceived a cultural machine for human intelligence, designed to externalize the order of knowledge, facilitate its retrieval, and enable new combinations. From this perspective, the Due trattati of 1544 may be even more revealing than the Idea del theatro for a deep history of AI. The Idea primarily describes the architecture of memory; the Due trattati reveal its potential productive operation: organizing knowledge and transforming it into language. The historical genealogy should therefore be understood as a genealogy of problems, not of technologies: Ramon Llull → Renaissance arts of memory → Giulio Camillo → encyclopaedism and combinatorics → Leibniz → symbolic logics and universal languages → computational knowledge representation → AI. Giulio Camillo, called Delminio (Portogruaro, c. 1480/1485 – Milan, 15 May 1544), was a rhetorician, theorist of memory, man of letters, and one of the most original and celebrated intellectual figures of the Italian Renaissance. The sources do not agree perfectly on the year of his birth; his death in Milan on 15 May 1544 is securely established. His formation belongs to the humanistic culture of northern Italy. He studied rhetoric and logic, immersed himself in classical literature, and increasingly engaged with Neoplatonism, Christian Cabala, the arts of memory, and combinatorial traditions that sought to unite eloquence, philosophy, and the universal organization of knowledge. Camillo’s fame spread above all through teaching and conversation. He frequented major intellectual circles of the period and had connections with figures such as Pietro Bembo, Pietro Aretino, Titian, Erasmus, Paolo Giovio, and Girolamo Muzio. His reputation, however, rested above all upon the mysterious Memory Theatre, a project to which he devoted decades of work. In France the Theatre attracted the attention of Francis I, who financially supported Camillo’s attempt to develop it for royal use. The structure was intended to permit the orderly contemplation of a symbolic representation of the universe and of human knowledge, transforming the ancient ars memoriae into something far more ambitious: a visible and potentially operational encyclopaedia. The physical structure itself has not survived. What remains are contemporary testimonies, manuscripts, and especially the posthumous publications that preserve fragments of its conception. During the final months of his life, Camillo entered the orbit of Alfonso d’Avalos, Marquis del Vasto, and in Milan once again expounded his system; Girolamo Muzio left one of the liveliest accounts of these late demonstrations. (treccani.it) Camillo died in Milan on 15 May 1544, before he had personally organized a definitive corpus of his writings. This explains the profoundly posthumous and editorial nature of his printed legacy. The Due trattati appeared in the same year; the Idea del theatro in 1550; in 1552 Lodovico Dolce constructed the first Giolito collection of his works, and in 1560 the corpus was further expanded.

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## Bibliografia di riferimento

Edit 16, CNCE8706; USTC, 818093; B. Weinberg, ed., Trattati di poetica e retorica del Cinquecento, Bari, 1970, I, Della imitatione, pp. 159-185; Trattato delle materie, pp. 318-356; Topica, pp. 357-407; G. Stabile, Camillo, Giulio, detto Delminio, in: “Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani,” vol. 17, Rome, 1974, s.v.; L. Bolzoni, The Gallery of Memory. Literary and Iconographic Models in the Age of the Printing Press, Toronto, 2001, pp. 23-82; K. Robinson, A Search for the Source of the Whirlpool of Artifice: The Cosmology of Giulio Camillo, Edinburgh, 2006; P. Matussek, Inventing Interfaces: Camillo’s Memory Theater and the Renaissance of Human-Computer Interaction, in: “Renaissance Futurities: Science, Art, Invention”, Oakland, 2019, pp. 41-64 (this study is particularly important for a contemporary reading because it follows the afterlife of Camillo’s Theatre into digital experiments and models of human-computer interaction, without claiming any anachronistic direct descent of computing from Camillo); P.G. Bietenholz, ed., Contemporaries of Eramsus, Toronto-Buffalo-London, 1985, I, pp. 248-250.

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