 Ricci |
|||
|
"Ricci suggested that there were three main options for such memory locations. First, they could be drawn from reality-- that is, from buildings that one had been in or from objects that one had seen with one's own eyes and recalled in one's memory. Second, they could be totally fictive, products of the imagination conjured up in any shape or size. Or third, they could be half real and half fictive, as in the case of a building one knew well and through the back wall of which one broke an imaginary door as a shortcut to new spaces, or in the middle of which one created a mental staircase that would lead up to higher floors that had not existed before.." - The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci. New York: Penguin Books, 1984 |
|
||
|
Matteo Ricci was an artist, mathematician, geographer, writer, scientist, and Jesuit priest who traveled to China in 1582 and introduced several ideas and even whole fields of Occidental learning to the Orient, including Euclidean geometry and the rhetorical device called the Memory Palace, once ascribed to Cicero, but now supposed to be the work of an unknown Greek rhetorician. Ricci is a major historical figure in several domains: Chinese history, the history of missionaries and scientists within the Catholic church, the history of mathematics, and the history of geography. His fame relies not so much on the original scientific breakthroughs that he made, but instead on his ability to translate and disseminate huge amounts of knowledge between the Chinese and the Europeans. |
|||
|
|||
| Reliquary ©Scott Bodenheimer, September 12, 1997, revised November 26, 2003,d | |||
