Architecture and Memory

The studioli of the ducal palaces at Urbino and Gubbio, Italy,demonstrate architecture's capacity to transact between the mental and physicalrealms of human experience. Constructed between 1474 and 1483 for the militarycaptain Federico da Montefeltro and his young motherless son, the studioli may bedescribed as treasuries of emblems: they contain not things but images of things,rendered with remarkable perspectival exactitude.These small,image-filled chambers reflect how architecture and its ornament equipped aquattrocento mind with metaphors for wisdom and methods for statecraft andintellectual activity. Drawing on the densely layered imagery in the studioli andtext sources readily available to the Urbino court, Robert Kirkbride examines theposition of the studioli in the Western tradition of the memory arts, consideringhow architecture bridged the mathematical arts, which lent themselves to mechanicalpursuits, and the art of rhetoric, a discipline central to memory and eloquence.As subtle ramifications of material and mental craft, thestudioli provided ideal methods for education and prudent governance, extending anancient legacy of open-ended models that were conceived to activate the imaginationand exercise the memory. At the time of their construction, the studioli representedthe leading edge of technologies of visual representation and offer a case study ofhow contemporary advances in interactive technologies reactivate and transformancient metaphors for thought and learning.