MEMORY, PLACES AND SPATIAL INVENTION IN 1 3TH AND 14TH-CENTURY ITALIAN PAINTING

This article investigates the history of the art of memory in the late Middle Ages and Early Renaissance in Italy, and its bearing on the pr oduction of material images. After mapping the stages of the rediscove ry of antique Roman techniques of images and places, it examines the r elation of these memory techniques to the transformation of pictorial space that takes place in mural painting at the end of the 13th and be ginning of the 14th century. The mental habit of locating images into places leads to a new awareness of the figural interaction between arc hitectural and pictorial space, in turn responsible for such ensembles as the Higher Church of Assisi or Giotto's Scrovegni Chapel in Padua: images and architecture are there combined to create a ''region for m emory'', resulting in a pictorial plane with a new spacious quality, a nd allowing viewers to experience their surroundings as a physical ext ension of mental space. This moment in the history of images is not a ''primitive'' version of perspectiva artificialis, but a type of image with its own coherent set of principles, explaining both the need.for ''illuionistic'' space and its limits, and accounting for the ''phant astical'' quality of space in 14th century Italian painting.