ROSSELLI, Cosimo.

by Cosimo Rosselli

£3,950 · Offered by Sokol Books

.First edition of this fascinating and wonderfully illustrated treatise on memory, utilising visual aids including Heaven, Hell, and the celestial spheres illustrating a memory system inspired by Dante s Divine Comedy anatomical and zoological illustrations, and tables of contemporary objects and rebuses, as well as Persian and Hebrew alphabets, and an alphabetical sign language employing the hands. The author was a Dominican friar from Florence who died the year before this work, apparently his only output, was published. This copy has been extensively annotated by a contemporary, likely monastic reader, including four alphabetical memory lists, of ecclesiastical dignities, place names, body parts and corporeal qualities, and instruments and apparatuses... . . ..The Ars memoriae or art of memory has a history stretching to antiquity; the Greek poet Simonides is supposed to have invented it to memorise poems. Aristotle wrote extensively on memory, which the medieval scholastics understood as necessary for comprehension by the intellect and a useful tool for use in disputations. The Renaissance humanists, similarly, via Cicero and Quintilian, understood memoria as one of the five crucial parts of rhetoric. Rosselli s work precedes the most famous Renaissance works of memory, by the Italian polymath Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), by several years. Bruno s earliest book of memory, De umbris idearum, published in 1582, included a Dantesque vision of Hell, the celestial and terrestri

• Binding: Hardcover

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