How to remember the order

You can use the 'Roman room' memorisation technique. This involves remembering a place that you know well, such as your home, and imagining walking through it, looking at things.

    Imagine that you arrive at the door of your home. On the door is the letter 'A', and you are greeted by someone who lives there. This helps you to remember the article 'A' or the determiner(s); e.g. my Mother's.
    Imagine that you are happy to see each other. This helps you to remember the opinion adjective.
    Imagine the size of your home: is it big, small, or long?  This helps you to remember the size adjectives.
    Imagine that you go into your home and you see an object. Remember the shape of the object.
    Now imagine that you walk around your home; e.g. towards your room. Think of another object further from the door. Think of the age of that object; e.g. new or old.
    Move on to another object, this time a colourful one. Remember what colour it is.
    Move on to another object. This object should remind you of a foreign place; e.g. a picture of somewhere in China, or a souvenir from a holiday abroad. This is to help you remember nationality.
    Next imagine moving to another object, this time a religious one. Maybe you have a place for worshipping your ancestors, or a statue of Buddha.
    Next move to another object. This should be special because it is made of one material; e.g. a crystal ornament or a wooden statue.
    Finally move to a place where there is an object that is described with 2 words, and the first is a noun; e.g. a book shelf. Imagine that this is the end of your journey around your flat.

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE (1804-1864)   essay about 1860

I went this morning to the Uffizi gallery. I chiefly paid attention to the sculpture. There were many beautiful specimens of antique, ideal sculpture all along the gallery, Apollos, Bacchuses, Venuses, Mercurys, Fauns, with the general character of all of which I was familiar enough to recognize them at a glance. The mystery and wonder of the gallery, however, the Venus de' Medici', I could nowhere see, and indeed was almost afraid to see it; for I somewhat apprehended the extinction of another of those lights that shine along a man's pathway, and go out in a snuff the instant he comes within eyeshot of the fulfillment of his hopes. As I passed from one room to another my breath rose and fell a little, with the half-hope, half-fear, that she might stand before me. Really, I did not know that I cared so much about Venus, or any possible woman of marble. At last, I caught a glimpse of her through the door of the next room. It is the best room of the series, octagonal in shape and hung with red damask, and the light comes down from a row of windows, passing quite round, beneath an octagonal dome.

The Venus stands somewhat aside from the center of the room, and is surrounded by an iron railing, a pace or two from her pedestal in front, and less behind. I think she might safely be left to the reverence her womanhood would win, without any other protection. She is very beautiful, very satisfactory; and has a fresh and new charm about her unreached by any cast or copy. The hue of the marble is just so much mellowed by time as to do all for her that Gibson tries or ought to try to do for his statues by color, softening her, warming her almost imperceptibly, making her an inmate of the heart, as well as a spiritual existence. I felt a kind of tenderness for her, an affection, not as if she were one woman, but all womanhood in one. Her modest attitude, which, before I saw her I had not liked, deeming that it might be an artificial shame, is partly what unmakes her as the heathen goddess, and softens her into a woman. There is a slight degree of alarm, too, in her face; not that she really thinks anybody is looking at her, yet the idea has flitted through her mind, and startled her a little. Her face is so beautiful and intellectual, that it is not dazzled out of sight by her form. Me thinks this was a triumph for the sculptor to achieve. I may as well stop here. It is of no use to throw heaps of words upon her; for they all fall away, and leave her standing in chaste and naked grace, as untouched as when I began.

She has suffered terribly by the mishaps of her long existence in the marble. Each of her legs has been broken into two or three fragments, her arms have been severed, her body has been broken quite across at the waist, her head has been snapped off at the neck. Furthermore, there have been grievous wounds and losses of substance in various tender parts of her person. But on account of the skill with which the statue has been restored, and also because the idea is perfect and indestructible, all these injuries do not in the least impair the effect, even when you see where the dissevered fragments have been re-united. She is just as whole as when she left the hands of the sculptor. I am glad to have seen this Venus and to have found her so tender and so chaste. . . .

I paid another visit to the Uffizi gallery this morning, and found that the Venus is one of the things the charm of which does not diminish on better acquaintance. The world has not grown weary of her in all these ages; and mortal man may look on her with new delight from in fancy to old age, and keep the memory of her, I should imagine, as one of the treasures of spiritual existence here after. Surely, it makes me more ready to believe in the high destiny of the human race, to think that this beautiful form is but nature's plan for all womankind, and that the nearer the actual woman approaches it, the more natural she is. I do not, and cannot think of her as a senseless image, but as a being that lives to gladden the world, in capable of decay and death; as young and fair today as she was three thousand years ago, and still to be young and fair as long as a beautiful thought shall require beautiful embodiment. I wonder how any sculptor has had the impertinence to aim at any other presentation of female beauty. I mean no disrespect to Gibson or Powers, or a hundred other men who people the world with nudities, all of which are abortions as compared with her; but I think the world would be all the richer if their Venuses, their Greek Slaves, their Eves were burnt into quicklime, leaving us only this statue as our image of the beautiful. I observed today that the eyes of the statue are slightly hollowed out, in a peculiar way, so as to give them a look of depth and intelligence. She is a miracle. The sculptor must have wrought religiously, and have felt that something far beyond his own skill was working through his hands. . . .

We called at the Powers' yesterday [VR note: Hiram Powers, 1805-73, neo-classical sculptor working in Italy]. He was very cordial and pleasant, as I have always found him, and began immediately to be communicative about his own works, or any other subject that came up. There were two casts of the Venus de' Medici' in the rooms, which he said were valuable in a commercial point of view, being genuine casts from the mould taken from the statue. He then gave us a quite unexpected but most interesting lecture on the Venus, demonstrating it, as he proceeded, by reference to the points which he criticized. The figure, he seemed to allow, was admirable, though I think he hardly classes it so high as his own Greek Slave or Eva but the face, he began with saying, was that of an idiot. Then, leaning on the pedestal of the cast, he continued "It is rather a bold thing to say, isn't it, that the sculptor of the Venus de' Medici' did not know what he was about ? "

Truly it appeared to me so; but Powers went on remorselessly, and showed, in the first place, that the eye was not like any eye that Nature ever made; and, indeed, being examined closely, and abstracted from the rest of the face, it has a very queer look, less like a human eye than a half worn buttonhole! Then he attacked the ear, which, he affirmed and demonstrated, was placed a great deal too low on the head, thereby giving an artificial and monstrous height to the portion of the head above it. The forehead met with no better treatment in his hands, and as to the mouth, it was altogether wrong, as well in its general make as in such niceties as the junction of the skin of the lips to the common skin around them, in a word, the poor face was battered all to pieces and utterly demolished; nor was it possible to doubt or question that it fell by its own demerits. All that could be urged in its defense and even that I did not urge being that this very face had affected me, only the day before, with a sense of higher beauty and intelligence than I had ever then received from sculpture, and that its expression seemed to accord with that of the whole figure, as if it were the sweetest note of the same music. There must be something in this; the sculptor disregarded technicalities, and the imitation of actual nature the better to produce the effect which he really does produce, in somewhat the same way as a painter works his magical illusions by touches that have no relation to the truth if looked at from the wrong point of view. But Powers considers it certain that the antique sculptor had bestowed all his care on the study of the human figure, and really did not know how to make a face. I myself used to think that the face was a much less important thing with the Greeks, among whom the entire beauty of the form was familiarly seen, than with ourselves who allow no other nudity.

After annihilating the poor visage, Powers showed us his two busts of Proserpine and Psyche, and continued his lecture by showing the truth to nature with which these are modeled. Still insisting upon the Eve, and hitting the poor Venus another and another and still another blow on that unhappy feature, Mr. Powers turned up and turned inward and turned outward his own Titanic orb, the biggest, by far, that ever I saw in mortal head, and made us see and confess that there was nothing right in the Venus and everything right in Psyche and Proserpine. Powers has had many difficulties on professional grounds, and with his brother artists. No wonder! He has said enough in my hearing to put him at swords' points with sculptors of every epoch and every degree between the two inclusive extremes of Phidias and Clark Mills. . . .

Yesterday we went to the Uffizi gallery, and, of course, I took the opportunity to look again at the Venus de' Medici' after Powers’s attack upon her face. Some of the defects he attributed to her I could not see in the statue; for instance, the ear appeared to be in accordance with his own rule, the lowest part of it being about in a straight line with the upper lip. The eyes must be given up, as not, when closely viewed, having the shape, the curve outwards, the formation of the lids that eyes ought to have; but still, at a proper distance, they seemed to have intelligence in them beneath the shadow cast by the brow. I cannot help thinking that the sculptor intentionally made every feature what it is, and calculated them all with a view to the desired effect. Whatever rules may be transgressed, it is a noble and beautiful face, more so, perhaps, than if all rules bad been obeyed. I wish Powers would do his best to fit the Venus's figure (which he does not deny to be admirable) with a face which he would deem equally admirable and in accordance with the sentiment of the form.

were valuable in a commercial point of view