THE GOOD NEIGHBORS: WORDS AND IMAGES IN THE MS. 3368 OF THE SAINTE-GENEVIÈVE LIBRARY IN PARIS

The essay aims to explore some historical-conceptual junctures of the Early Modern literary culture, starting from the perspective of the meeting and interaction between words and images in the physical space of a manuscript and in the conceptual space of a mnemotechnical treatise. Therefore the article describes a richly illustrated manuscript of the Parisian library of Sainte-Geneviève (ms. 3368), which contains an Italian treatise on the art of memory from the mid-15th century. The semiotic, rhetorical and cultural strategies mobilized by the physical co-presence of a text and its figurative translation represent in fact the core of every mnemonic process. The illustrations visualize the result of the associative process that enables remembrance, whilst the text follows and breaks down the process in a linear way, normally mentioning the res memorandae and then the image that has to be visualized in the mind.

'So I began to move my memories, to place them round the cell, in the cracks of the floor, on the rustly handle of the slop bucket. By rights, such a small room could not serve the purpose. But I gave each spot a meaning, and as I populated it with the things I have been given to remember, the cell began to grow. It was like pushing the walls outwards with my hands. Now it has expanded to the horizon. To me, it is as grand as a power station. ' Hari Kunzru, Memory Palace The semiotic, rhetorical and cultural strategies mobilized by the physical co-presence of a text and its figurative translation represent the core of every mnemonic process. Since the ancient times but more intensively starting from the Middle Ages, organizing and educating memory means representing it concretely through mental structures which are preshaped by our experiences. 1 For this reason, mnemonists turn to the topography 70 and architecture of the real world in order to go through a mental space. The relationship between real spaces and interior spatiality is dialectic. In fact, the introjection of the topography and architecture of the real world evokes a rationalized mental space and leads to a representation of memory as an orderly and measured place. On the other side, the mnemonic techniques lead to a more geometric and abstract perception and conceptualization of the real space: Ma se averrà che la natura o l'arte quivi non abbia operato di maniera che si conoscano i luoghi a bastanza, imàginatene alcuno di quelle cose che hai vedute: come sarebbe altare, camera, o cosa tale. E se anco non sarà conceduto ad alcuno di poter discorrere e veder tutte le cose di dentro, a guisa di diligente architetto avertisca la varietà delle magioni e de i luoghi. 2 'If nature or art do not allow us to reach a sufficient knowledge of the real places, we need to create some imaginary places starting from the things we have seen: for example, an altar, a room, etc. And if we do not manage to see all the things present at one place, like a diligent architect we have to take into consideration the variety of houses and places. ' In the texts of art of memory we find a sort of canonical image of locus mnemonicus, which has mainly an architectonic design and constitutes a discriminating factor both for those who need to create such places ex novo as well as for those who only need to select them among already existing places. In the same way as 'the diligent architect'mentioned in the mnemotechnical treatise of Lodovico Dolce -traces the outline of a building in his mind, starting from the vision of several existing constructions or from the study of graphic design, a detailed conservation of the variety of each building space allows us for a plurality of solutions in the construction of the mnemonic place. In both cases, the writing of the space has necessarily to take into consideration the memories in order to characterize them in significant units and reassemble them in a new syntagmatic sequence. It is namely one of the main authors of ars memoriae of the sixteenth century, Giulio Camillo with his Discorso sopra Hermogene (Speech about Hermogen), who makes a comparison between the writing of literary texts and the design of buildings, and outlines the fact that in both cases the real construction of a space or of a text starts with the preparation of a mental model: Sì come l' architetto, non con sana mente si condurrebbe a fabricar alcun edificio con le pietre, ed altri semplici, se prima nella mente non avesse con belli e dotti pensieri fatta una mental fabrica: ad imitazion di cui, di fuori esercitasse le mani. Così di nuovo consiglio è da giudicare quello componitore, il quale a caso si dà a mettere insieme le parole, ed altri ornamenti, senza regger lo stile, secondo alcuna forma prima collocatasi nella mente. 3 'In the same way as an architect would not erect any building with stones and other components, if he had not done in his mind with nice and erudite thoughts a mental factory by imitating the work done by hands in the reality; so it is to be considered as weak that writer who starts writing his speech without supporting his style with a form or idea that he had put in his mind well in advance. ' In fact the rhetoric dimension of memory, characteristic of Greek sophistry and Latin oratory, underlines the principle of order as the cornerstone of its own dogmatic reflection, a principle that oversees the composition of well-defined places of memory and the creation -and management -of logical links connecting all these virtual spaces of the mind in a network of relationships which, in many aspects, can be compared to the syntax of linguistic discourse.
Starting from this point of view, I would like to introduce an anonymous manuscript of ars memoriae which supplies a good example for the mnemonic definition of space and for a productive cooperation between words and images. Here words and images become good neighbors and cooperate to build the complex rhetorical and cognitive mechanisms at work in an illustrated manuscript book.
The document is written in vernacular Italian, it is currently in the Parisian library of Saint Geneviève (ms. 3368) and most probably dates back to the fifteenth century. 4 Some linguistic characteristics make us think that the author could be from Venice, even if the most interesting aspect in this manuscript is not the textual component, which is simply an invitation to continuous exercise and a vulgarisation of the main classical rules about local memory (the straightforward paratactic structure of the treatise proceeds from the rules of loci [ff. 5v-6r] through to the twenty rules relevant to imagines [ff. 7r-v]), that we can find in many other mnemotechnical text of the fifteenth century. For example, we have many parallels with the Quattrocento Latin treatise of Jacopo Ragone, as stated by Sabine Seelbach. 5 Most probably Ragone is also the misser Iacomo from whose work the anonymous author/compiler of the manuscript states to draw the one hundred examples of loci listed on folii 2v-3v (da misser Iacomo vi l' [h]o tolti, 'I have taken them from miser Iacomo'). This identification is supported by the frequent parallels between the manuscript and Ragone's Latin text, to the extent that we could hypothesize a rewriting of his Regulae, if not a volgarizzamento proper. In the works of both Ragone and the anonymous, the technical aspect of ars memoriae largely dominates over the theoretical component, in line with a trend that is typical of fifteenth-century treatises, as argued by Paolo Rossi. 6 This art of memory is aimed at practical rather than at speculative activities: it offers a set of rules meant to be applied to the most diverse facets of material life. As a consequence, the number and range of examples largely outweighs the concise statement of general principles. The most significant difference between Ragone's treatise and the text transmitted by the manuscript concerns the choice of examples from the rule to memorize graduati nomi (literally names accompanied by a grade or title, cariche) on (f. 22r and ff.), examples which in most cases seem to attest to a direct interest in the institutions and administrative roles of the Republic of Venice.
The pragmatic dimension of this manuscript depends also by the original, constant and constitutive presence of illustrations, which are not only more numerous but also significantly less abstract and schematic than the ones commonly found in the tradition of art of memory. The hybrid nature of the manuscript unveils the inadequacy of the simple text (the figura literale, 'the verbal figure' , as stated by the author) to give a complete 72 definition of artificial memory without the participation of a visible image (the aparente imagine). The images of memory 'designed' in the text are already virtually iconic, in the sense that, despite adopting the linear and temporal order of verbal exposition, they condense the abstract principles of the ars in spatial articulations, which are then ready to become mental images in the mind of the reader-disciple, as well as concrete images on the page, in the form of the illustrations accompanying the text. In other words, a virtually ekphrastic component can be detected in the words that prescribe the construction of a memory image. The increasing complexity of the rules and the processes they involve is clearly reflected in the growing complexity of the illustrations. In fact, the illustration makes visible the result of the association process which enables the creation of memories. Each rule presented in the text finds its direct figurative translation and explanation in the image that always accompanies it.
Thanks to this didactic dimension the treatise can be considered as a textbook for the instruction of a person closely affiliated to the author, maybe the addressee of the treatise. Each image is then built according to the rules of composition of the images of memory that traditionally: (1) supply the most essential elements of an image; (2) create striking relationships among the elements of an image; and (3) collocate the elements of the image in an animated scene. In order to be didactically useful, illustrations must embody and display the rules they build on in a clear way. In this sense, their effectiveness is essential both to their construction per se (they should be effective as good memory images) and to their impact on the reader-viewer-disciple, who must be captured by the vividness of the specific figures and at the same time be enabled to single out the mnemonic pattern around which the image is built. The obsessive presence of human beings among the illustrations meets all these compositional requirements. The human body is a convenient place where a single res memoranda or a set of mnemonic images can be placed; at the same time it is the main and most efficient tool to represent a mnemonic content or to activate the necessary logical connections that allow the creation of memories: as well as individual body parts, memories and images of memory are intertwined with each other. Each morphological element (if the body is whole or partial, dressed or naked, static or in action, real or phantastic, alone or in relation with other human beings) and each semantic attribute (gestural expressiveness, physical characteristics, actions) allow us to consider the illustrations as textual spaces to be read or on which we can write. For example, the Fig. 1 illustrates the sentence Cesare al luogo della tavola d' abaco ('Caesar at the place of the abacus tablet' , f. 12v) and exemplifies the so-called modus similitudinis, here based on the similarity between the word cerese and the name Cesare; the cerese are evoked by the cup of cherries, while the abacus stands for the locus number 10.
The phenomena of constructing meaning and message, that take place in the passage from the text to the image and vice versa, guide also the reading of the work and mould it, constituting in themselves the case of a particularly complex form of reception. Furthermore, the human body is the most obvious and spontaneous image through which we can activate all the energy necessary to improve our natural strength of memory. This iconographic model enables a more natural empathy between mnemonist and mnemonic image and support the specific aim of our treatise which is to explain how a memory system works. The didactic purpose of the treatise is furthermore made clear through the image of the real learning subject to whom the author addresses his speech. On page 24v (Fig. 2), for example, we can see a man observing three columns, and on the top of them there are three mnemonic notes (which is what the text is talking about); the man is showing us his back, and his posture indicates how carefully he is looking at the columns, presenting himself as a symbol of the concept of concentration, if not a kind of portrait of the reader inserted in the page of the book. The man seems to remain outside the illustrated scene of memory and this underlines the visual relationship which should bind the mnemonist with his own images of memory.
The iconographic theme of the human body represents a primary mnemonic unit in our treatise but it is not always as an autonomous unit; on the contrary, it is very often integrated in a more structured syntactical system, which can be realized by simply placing side by side human figures, by creating dynamic relationships among them, or by arranging them in a syntagmatic structure (for example, the order given by the disposition of persons around a table) (Fig. 3). Here is the image of memory that should help the memorization of a sequence of three female names, embodied in three figures interacting surprisingly and violently: a flask thrown over, a knife and blood from the chest. If needed, for example due to a higher number of mnemonic images, other figures could be placed on the empty bench on the other side of the table, but they should not be made to perform any kind of possible interaction with the figures sitting on the opposite side of the table, in order to avoid potential confusion.
The most recurring and interesting example is given by the disposition of several persons inside an architectural scene designed according to a perspective order, which makes the four corners of the room more easily intelligible in the three-dimensionality typical of a mnemonic container (Fig. 4). The way the composition of the image is made depends on its structural function, or on a heuristic function. 7 The reading of each room has to be done circularly from left to right, starting from the foreground figures to the ones in the background, that is to say according to procedures of observation of a perspective space, where the movement of the eyes goes from the access point to the exit point of the picture. This architectonic order characterizes the art of memory from Cicero's house of memory to the rooms of memory described in the Jacobean England by Robert Fludd and John Willis. 8 Robert Fludd, for example, built the last big Theater of Memory in a period which was ready to remove the Renaissance imagery in favour of the scientific and logical method. His system of memory combines the mnemonic representation of virtues and vices of the Middle Age with the classical system of placing the image of things and persons in real spaces; but the most interesting aspect of Fludd's ars memoriae is the typology of memory place he chooses for his project of memorization of the real world: i.e., the stage (Fig. 5-7). 9 The illustrations represent a stage developed in perspective and characterized by three to five doors. 10 All the doors can be assembled on the central wall or displayed along the three walls of the scene. The images of memory, like actors, play on the stage. The point of view of this scene of memory arises from the auditorium and reduces the stage to a room of memory, where imaginary characters are acting thanks to the performing power of the theatrical practice. The illustrations that accompany Fludd's text show that the architectonic peculiarity of the stage is linked to the performing dimension of the mnemonic act. As we can see, the illustration of Fludd's stage contains also a chessboard floor, which has been introduced by the author for specific reasons. The mnemotechnic tradition -as confirmed by Lodovico Dolce's treatise -very often resorted to the structural order and logical mechanism of chess, in order to give a systematic nature to the planning of mental spaces and accuracy to the mnemonic rules: Nel giuoco de gli scacchi […] si fanno una parte neri un'altra bianchi, variandoli per lo scacchiere.
[…] e quando vorrai ricordarti il giuoco, per ciascun tratto ripon la sua imagine nel suo luoco, in guisa che se'l rocco bianco leverà il nero fingerai nelle tue imagini che un bianco parimente levi un nero. Ma con le regole dette di sopra potrai raccordarti agevolmente di qualunque cosa. 11 'The players in the game of chess are […] black and white, located on different parts of the chessboard.
[…] And when you wish to remember the game, for each part of it put its image in its own place so that in case the white tower eats the black one, you will pretend in your images that a white replaces a black one. Following these rules, you will be able to easily remember everything. ' A specific geometric composition of the stage offers to actors, chessplayers and mnemonists important points of reference for the management of his presence on the stage, at the same way the order perceived by the spectator enables the correct comprehension of the drama and supplies a mental model of ordered place. It is not by chance that such expedient was used also by the illustrator of Sainte-Geneviève manuscript (Fig. 8). These architectonic scenes have to be remembered in themselves and according to their content in the same way as the bodies which live in them. Every image of memory is considered as an action carried out by human and animal forms (real or virtual but always characterized by a sort of movement) inside an architectural scene that is harmoniously designed according to a strict perspective order. It is this order in turn that makes the four corners of the room, loci topically created to house the images of memory, more easily intelligible in the three-dimensionality typical of a mnemonic container. In this way the spatial depth, that does not allow the image to be reduced to a diagram, designs a space which can be both real and imaginary; and at the same time, it offers a visual representation of the metaphor of memory as a storage mechanism (thesaurus).
Theatre was a magical theatre, a cosmic theatre, a religious theatre, an actors' theatre, designed to give fullest support to the voices and the gestures of the players as they enacted the drama of the life of man within the Theatre of the World. These meanings might not have been apparent to all, but they would have been known to the initiated. His theatre would have been for Shakespeare the pattern of the universe, the idea of the Macrocosm, the world stage on which the Microcosm acted his parts. All the world's a stage. The words are in a real sense the clue to the Globe Theatre. ' 10 Fludd (1619: 55): 'Theatre is the place where all the actions of words, sentences and details of a speech or of some topics are displayed, exactly as in a public theatre where comedies and tragedies are played. ' 11 Dolce (2001: 190-191). On this mnemonic technique see: Di Lorenzo (1973); Murgia (2013).  Such double value is outlined also by the presence of a third imaginary level which contributes to the functioning of the mnemonic structure of the treatise. All of these rooms of memory are collocated in a further, and bigger, architectural place -defined by the author as 'the hotel of memory' -; an architectural place that supports their memorization through the principle of a visualized sequential order. In fact, on pages 4 and 5, we can see the frontal representation of an internal space containing 12 rooms, which are also designed according to the perspective rules and which are different from one another in the structure of the ceiling (with or without beams, dark or light), of the floor (checked, coloured floor boards, light, dark, etc.) and of the walls (with or without windows, coloured, made of wood or cloth, etc.) (Fig. 9). The rooms are also easily identified thanks to the sharp chromatic contrasts that bring each single unit inside the main structure into relief, and make the illuminated page a reference model for those who wish to configure their memory as liber mentalis, as it is stated in a further manuscript of the fifteenth century about memory, written in French and also located in the Parisian library of Sainte-Geneviève (ms. 2521). 12 Both the major hall of memory and the smaller rooms of memory seek to achieve a perspectival effect (i.e. a spatial effect through a perspectival foreshortening), and aim to suggest a kind of movement of the reader's gaze into the illustrated space of the manuscript.
On the whole, this illustration represents a real compendium of possible ways of visualizing the locus memoriae; and at the same time it is a predefined scheme of rooms ready to be filled with the concepts that the treatise is going to present. The text, accompanied by the main classical authorities, explains how to use the mental structure that is illustrated here, by placing and removing the images in the different rooms and stairs and repository that build it. Such a clear image, stated at the beginning of the treatise, is to be considered as a plan of memory that helps us to understand the instructions for the use of the art. The peculiarity of these sequential rooms, compared to the other rooms we will find at a later stage of the treatise, consists of the fact that they are empty and do not house any imaginary unit. They offer themselves as purely potential mnemonic tool. The author decides to represent the place where the mnemonic scene should take place, but not the mnemonic scene in itself, which has to be then mentally recreated and entered in this empty space by the reader. The possibility for the reader to become key player of a plastic scene of memory, and therefore active part of the mnemonic process, represents the main explanation of the success experienced by the architectonic metaphor of memory. 13 The reader of the treatise on artificial memory is asked: (1) to verify the functioning of the mental process, which has been theoretically defined; (2) to repeat the experience of imagination done by the author during the creation of the mnemonic rooms; and finally (3) to accompany the addressee along the didactic course given by the treatise. It seems therefore clear from the beginning that the author desires to achieve three main objectives: (1) to define in a clear and simple way the main rules of the local memory; (2) to help the memorization of those rules through examples of their functioning, which is then illustrated through images; and (3) to make these images available for further mnemonic use as prefabricated images of memory. We can see that the textual part of the treatise contributes to the achievement of the first objective only, while the other two purposes are entrusted completely to the iconographic component. 14 way-finding by organizing the structure of any composition as a journey through a linked series of stages, each of which has its own characteristic flow (its "mode" or "color"), but which also moves the whole composition along. And the "colors" or "modes" are like the individual segments of an aqueduct, carrying the water, yes, but changing its direction, slowing it down, speeding it up, bifurcating, as the water moves along its "route" or "way". For a person following the ductus, the "colors" act as stages of the way or ways through to the skopos or destination. Every composition, visual or aural, needs to be experienced as a journey, in and through whose paths one must constantly move. ' 14 See Bolzoni (2001: XVIII): 'The perception of words and mental faculties in terms of space and visualization is enormously expanded by the phenomenon of the printing press. This book analyses a paradoxical situation: a long phase of rich, but precarious, equilibrium. Techniques of memory reach their greatest development in a world in which their meaning and importance are gradually being stripped away from them by the development of technology, especially by the printing press. It is also interesting to point out that the final part of the treatise explains how to cancel the images of memory from the loci and hence make them free to store other images and other memories. The anonymous author describes four main ways to cancel images. We can, for example, free the locus and eliminate the old images of memory by removing them from the internal vision thanks to a black curtain; or by imagining trap doors, that suddenly fall open; we could also cover the old images of memory up with straw and setting them on fire, with a very interesting anticipation of George Orwell's memory holes; 15 or imagine a new character who enters the mental scene in an extreme frenzy and kills the old image of memory (Fig. 10). As a further confirmation of what has been stated before concerning the semantic value of the attributes of imagines and loci, please note that the cancelled images are here naked and therefore neither characterized by a precise mnemonic configuration nor linked to a specific memory. We have also another case of representation of a man: who is he? An ideal mnemonist? The commissioner of the treatise? At the same time, we will see how techniques of memory interact, often productively, with the new possibilities created by the printed word. Among other things, the printing press helps to expand that sense of the mirroring relationship between the mind and writing to which I have alluded, between mental places and textual places, between inner experience and the external world. Through a sometimes dizzying and illusionistic play of relationships, poems can be transformed into galleries, texts into palaces, collections into encyclopedias and castles inside the mind, and vice versa. ' As a conclusion, we can say that this peculiar treatise on art of memory is characterized by a quite complex structure and offers itself at the same time: (1) as a handbook that offers a set of rules to be memorized; (2) as a collection of images that show the possible final products of a memorization process and offers them to the immediate imitative reproduction; (3) as a two-dimensional structure which keeps a specific content of memory; and finally, (4) as the project of a mnemonic architecture that can be repeatedly re-built. This kind of visualisation of the mnestic processes leads the mnemonists to investigate the connections that the good neighbors words and images suggest to their imagination; and through it the place of memory -i.e. the conceptual model of the most varied architectures of knowledge -can be considered not only as a visual space but also as a manipulable and physical space of thought.