Though Ricci’s devotion to the art of memory is apparent, Ricci was perhaps even more renowned for his work on mathematics and cartography. As with the practice of calligraphy, in which you move from the beginning to the end, as with the fish who swim along in ordered schools, so is everything arranged in your brain, and all the images are ready for whatever you seek to remember. Turn to the right and proceed from there. Once your places are all fixed in order, then you can walk through the door and make your start. Matteo Ricci wrote in his treatise on the art of memory: approximates something of this process-each object would immediately and sequentially bring to mind the things committed to memory. As you imagine yourself walking through this space-perhaps Giacometti’s The Palace at 4 A.M. Into each of these rooms of this memory palace you would mentally place a collection of objects which would stand for what you intend to remember through some metonymic process.
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This distinction certainly involves technologies-mnemotechnique and printing-but it is not confined to them.” These techniques-technologies even-of memory were almost always variations on a similar theme involving the mental construction of an imaginary memory palace-a grand structure made up of a series of rooms each distinguished by unique architectural features like arches of columns.
As Mary Carruthers argues in The Book of Memory, “Medieval culture was fundamentally memorial, to the same profound degree that modern cultures in the West is documentary. Ricci presented a theory of mnemotechnics that had proven itself a dominant intellectual force for centuries in Europe. In this work, Ricci laid out the classical system of artificial memory, said to originate with the Greek poet Simonides (“Xi-mo-ni-de” to his audience), a series of cognitive techniques designed to artificially extend what was seen as the natural human memory. Ricci wrote his first book in Chinese in 1595-a book of maxims culled from classical and ecclesiastical texts-and the following year he published a small book on the art of memory for a prince of the Ming dynasty, the governor of Jiangxi province. He would spend the next 27 years in China, until his death in 1610. Matteo Ricci, a Jesuit missionary who had studied in Rome, arrived Macau in 1583.