Staging the Emotions in Giulio Camillo’s Theatre: Syncretism, Embodied Cognition and the Arts of Memory

Abstract

This paper examines a long-neglected aspect of Giulio Camillo’s oeuvre: the role of the emotions and their systematic symbolisation via foot imagery in L’Idea del Theatro (1550) and De l’humana deificatione (c. 1542). A twofold hypothesis is suggested: on the one hand, Camillo’s negative association of feet with the emotions stems from his syncretic reading of Kabbalah and Christian theology; on the other, this conceptual blending is supported by the embodied cognitive dynamics intrinsic to the arts of memory’s imagines agentes in the tradition of the Rhetorica ad Herennium.