Mario Praz

Italian anglist, art collector, art historian, journalist and writer (1896-1982)

Mario Praz: The Scholar Who Catalogued Desire

In 1930 a professor of English literature in Rome published a book proposing that the Romantic movement had been driven less by liberty and moonlight than by cruelty, morbidity and erotic obsession. *La carne, la morte e il diavolo nella letteratura romantica* — the flesh, death and the devil — reached English readers three years later as *The Romantic Agony*, and it has never stopped being argued about. Its author spent the next half-century demonstrating that the same forensic method worked just as well on sofas.

A Roman Boyhood, and an Indirect Education

Praz was born in Rome on 6 September 1896. His father, Luciano Praz, a bank clerk, died in 1900, when the boy was three. His mother, Giulia Testa di Marsciano, who survived until 1931, married the physician Carlo Targioni in 1912; the stepfather lived until 1954. The schooling that followed was circuitous. Praz spent 1914–15 at the University of Bologna, took a law degree at the University of Rome in 1918, and only afterwards, in 1920, completed a doctorate in literature at the University of Florence. The legal training left its fingerprints on everything he wrote. The mature Praz reads like a prosecutor assembling a case: citation piled on citation, precedent on precedent, until a pattern the reader had never noticed becomes impossible to unsee.

The English Years

Italy gave him his doctorate; England gave him his subject. Praz became a special lecturer in Italian studies at the University of Liverpool, where he remained through the 1920s, and from 1932 to 1934 taught Italian studies at the Victoria University of Manchester. The immersion in English letters was total, and it turned him into that rare creature, a foreigner who reads a national literature better than most of its natives. In March 1934 he married Vivyan Leonora Eyles, a lecturer in English literature at Liverpool and the daughter of the novelist Margaret Leonora Eyles. Their daughter Lucia was born in 1938. The marriage did not hold: the couple separated in 1942 and divorced in 1947. In 1953 Praz met Perla Cacciguerra, whom he called Diamante, and to whom he remained attached.

In 1934 he returned to Rome as Professor of English Literature at the university, a chair he held until 1966 — thirty-two years at the centre of Italian anglistica.

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The Romantic Agony

The book that made him is a survey of decadent, erotic and morbid themes running through late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European literature. What distinguished it was not the observation that the Romantics were interested in cruelty — readers of Sade and Byron had noticed — but the sheer accumulative weight of Praz's evidence and the refusal to treat the material as a scandalous footnote. Sadism, the fatal woman, the beautiful corpse, the tainted hero: these were not aberrations at the edge of Romanticism but its engine. Crucially, Praz did not confine himself to books. He traced the impulse through literature, painting and music together, producing one of the first genuinely interdisciplinary studies of the arts to bring art history properly into the argument. That structural decision, more than any single interpretation, is what later scholars inherited.

Emblems, Images, and the Warburg Orbit

Praz's second monumental achievement is less read and more used. *Studies in Seventeenth-Century Imagery* (1939) is a systematic catalogue of the emblem book and the personal device — the Baroque habit of yoking a motto to a picture to make a compressed moral argument. It was published under the auspices of the Warburg Institute, whose project of reading images and texts as a single evidentiary field was Praz's project too. The same year he published *Studi sul concettismo*, on Baroque conceit. These are reference works in the strictest sense: books other scholars cannot do their work without.

Furniture as Social History

In 1964 Praz published *An Illustrated History of Interior Decoration from Pompeii to Art Nouveau*, alongside *La filosofia dell'arredamento*. The argument was radical in its quiet way: that furnishings are tangible artefacts of social history, and that a room, properly read, testifies as reliably as a diary. He assembled centuries of visual representations of domesticity and treated them as evidence rather than decoration. The term *horror vacui* — the dread of empty space that produces the crowded interior — is inseparable from his name. In 1967 he delivered the A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, published as *Mnemosyne: The Parallel Between Literature and the Visual Arts*, the fullest statement of his lifelong conviction that the two disciplines are describing the same thing in different notations.

The House of Life

*La casa della vita* (1964), translated as *The House of Life*, is the strangest of his books and possibly the most personal: a catalogue of the decorative arts he had collected in his Rome apartment, arranged autobiographically, each object accompanied by anecdote until the inventory becomes a memoir. It is a collector explaining himself through his possessions, and Edmund Wilson called it a masterpiece. Not everyone agreed. Cyril Connolly pronounced it "one of the most boring books I have ever read."

Why Mario Is Called a Genius

The faculty involved is not theoretical invention but something rarer and harder to fake: total recall across an implausible span of material, joined to the nerve to say what the pattern means. Praz had read the whole of two literatures and looked at most of the pictures, and he could hold a French novel of 1835, an English poem of 1819 and an Italian emblem book of 1620 in the same field of attention long enough to see what connected them. Edmund Wilson thought he would be known to posterity as one of the best Italian writers of his time and judged *The House of Life* a masterpiece; Wylie Sypher praised his literary contribution; his interdisciplinary method became standard practice in the study of interior decoration and image-text scholarship.

The honest counter-case is real. Praz was a synthesist rather than a theorist: he built no system, coined no method others could apply mechanically, and his authority rests on erudition that cannot be transmitted. Pattern-hunting on his scale invites the charge of flattening — of finding the fatal woman everywhere because he was looking for her. And his prose could exhaust even sympathetic readers, as Connolly's verdict attests. What survives is not a theory but a demonstration: that a sufficiently well-stocked mind, refusing the boundaries between disciplines, can make visible a structure nobody had described.

Afterlife

Praz was appointed Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1962, an unusual honour for an Italian critic and a measure of what England thought it owed him. He died in Rome on 23 March 1982. His apartment in the Palazzo Primoli, the room-by-room argument that had become *The House of Life*, was preserved as the Museo Mario Praz — a scholar's proof of his own thesis, left standing so that visitors can read a life from its furniture.