FOOD FOR THOUGHT IS A SERIES IN WHICH TASTEMAKERS FROM DIFFERENT FIELDS CONSIDER THEIR KNOWLEDGE IN RELATION TO OLD MASTERS, ASKING HOW THEY MIGHT OFFER A FRESH PERSPECTIVE IN THE WAY ONE ENGAGES WITH THE ART OF THE PAST. FOR THIS ISSUE, CLASSICIST SHANE BUTLER contemplates the writings of an out-of-fashion 20th-century Italian scholar through the objects in his former Roman residence.
Let me open this post with a trigger warning (a practice, despite what its detractors would have you believe, at least as old as Ovid’s Metamorphoses, book 10, line 300). Are you superstitious? If so, then click away at once!
Still here? Well, don’t say I didn’t warn you! My subject is an Italian scholar and essayist whose very mention is still thought by some to bring iella, Roman slang for “bad luck,” or sfiga, a vulgar term for the same. In such circles he is invoked only as l’innominabile, “the unnameable,” with an apologetic laugh in which one sometimes detects a note of genuine nervousness.
Nevertheless, the present obscurity of Mario Praz (1896–1982) is due far more to the vagaries of taste than to superstition. Non-specialist Anglophone readers now mostly encounter him, if at all, in a translated work first published as An Illustrated History of Furnishing, from the Renaissance to the 20th Century, later remarketed as An Illustrated History of Interior Decoration, from Pompeii to Art Nouveau. Its hulking size, broad timespan, and colorful images make it easy to discount as a “coffee-table book.” But hints of more complex ambitions can be heard in Praz’s original title, La filosofia dell’arredamento, itself borrowed and translated from a remarkable essay published more than a century before, “The Philosophy of Furniture,” by none other than Edgar Allen Poe.
Poe’s attention to interior design, Praz explains to the uninitiated, is of a piece with his detective stories: study a house closely and you will learn much about the people who have lived (and died) there. In both regards, Poe was “the first physiognomist of the interior,” as philosopher Walter Benjamin once remarked, quoted by Praz. Of course, Poe’s interests might better be called psychological than philosophical; Praz, by contrast, like Plato long before him, lived decidedly in pursuit of “the beautiful” (to kalon in ancient Greek). And this, I suspect, is the quieter reason for his title’s homage to Poe. As Praz again and again reveals, beauty is best understood in relation, not to ugliness per se, but to horror.
This is nowhere clearer than in the opening pages of this book, which are surely some of the best that the prolific Praz ever wrote. He begins innocently enough, describing himself cataloguing the dusty library of a family friend, which, by a chain of associations, leads him to an eighteenth-century poem by William Cowper, part of which purports to be about a sofa. This leads, via a few further, lighthearted steps, to a sudden flashback:
Houses! How many epithets can be attached to the word “house.” At the end of the second World War, the most frequent adjective in Europe was “destroyed.” In Rome, thank God, the destruction wasn’t an omnipresent reality, but it was enough to go out of the city, one only had to leave Rome for Viterbo, as I did in those days. You crossed the Milvian Bridge, guarded by its stone saints; just as when you left the city in the old days, your imagination ran ahead of you, by habit looking forward to the villas with their gardens and to Viterbo itself, that ancient Italian city with its churches and its medieval quarter. You knew that the city had been badly hit, but your eyes had still not seen it; and the bullet-riddled houses along the road, the twisted carcasses of tanks and trucks were lost in the vast background of the stark Latium landscape with its severe and solemn lines, much as you had fixed it forever in your mind one remote day when, returning from Viterbo for the first time, the countryside at sunset presented an enchanted vision, as if created, modulated by the faint, insistent notes of a shepherd’s simple pipe (15).
The pastoral idyll is fully shattered once Praz reaches his destination:
[A]t Viterbo’s Roman Gate, the magic screen of memory was brutally torn away, and your mind was gripped by rubble, destruction, and horror. The visitor couldn’t proceed, or had to force his way forward over an uncertain, despoiled terrain, crossed by the impotent track of a little narrow-gauge railroad. “There are still four hundred victims under here,” you were told at the Florentine Gate, and wherever you looked, you could see only shattered, ruined buildings, the hollow orbits of windows, and fragments of walls, houses split in two, with the pathetic sight of some still furnished corner, dangling above the rubble, surrounded by ruin: pictures hanging on broken walls, a kitchen with the pots still on the stove and there, in what must once have been a drawing-room, a sofa (17).
Comparing the scene to “a collage by Max Ernst,” Praz returns with seeming nonchalance to Cowper: “I sing the sofa…” But the haunting is not quite over, as Praz rehearses a series of questions that only seem to be rhetorical, about whether “in the midst of the most desolate of horrors, what really matters, what is normal is still peace and goodness, the house and not the ruin, life and not death?” He closes the excursus on another image worthy of Ernst: “Who can choose to believe, with the Marquis de Sade, that Nature’s only aim is destruction, that destruction and death are the norm, that the mouth of our ancient Earth is red from devouring the fruit of her womb?” The key word is at the start: “Who can choose to believe,” or as the Italian has it, “Chi vorrà credere,” “Who will want to believe”? In other words, believing in beauty and life is an act of will that necessarily rejects mounting evidence to the contrary.
Weighty subjects for even the sturdiest of coffee tables! In fact, Praz’s seriousness as an art historian is even more readily apparent in other works, like his still authoritative catalogue and discussion of emblem books and the like, Studies in Seventeenth-Century Imagery, in two long volumes. A lighter rhetorical touch, but the synthesis of a lifetime of thinking, can be found in Mnemosyne: The Parallel Between Literature and the Visual Arts, the publication of Praz’s Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington in 1967. Praz’s oeuvre itself bridges the divide between visual and literary aesthetics, especially regarding English literature, the subject he taught at Rome’s La Sapienza from 1934 to 1966. Of his literary studies one can perhaps single out an early and long influential work, La carne, la morte, e il diavolo (1930), the English translation of which was retitled The Romantic Agony. Flesh, death, and devils also figure prominently among the more curious objects Praz collected, including wax figurines of saints and martyrs, which can still be seen in his recently restored (second) apartment in Rome. Praz’s collection and the apartment that originally housed it are the subjects of what arguably is his masterpiece, La casa della vita (The House of Life), first published in 1958.
But if Praz flings open the doors of his own house—and, more generally, the principles of his refined but unusual taste—to his readers, he necessarily discloses other aspects of himself and his life only between the lines. A brief marriage did lead to the birth of a daughter, and a couple of other actual or aspirational romances with women are mentioned in his correspondence and in The House of Life. But his broader oeuvre is filled with the protagonists of pre-Stonewall queerness, such as Vernon Lee, whom he met and admired (though their friendship and correspondence were sometimes tense), and John Addington Symonds, who also knew and sparred with Lee but died before Praz was born. Praz published several essays on each, including a review of the latter’s correspondence, which amply confirmed his homosexuality when first published in the 1960s. Praz’s most moving effort in this regard, however, is surely his explicit account of the brutal murder of Johann Joachim Winckelmann by a man who was either a thief or a sex worker or both. When Winckelmann, high priest of classicism, staggers down the stairs of an inn in Trieste with a blood-soaked rope around his neck that a maid mistakes for his own intestines, Praz depicts an infliction of horror on beauty even more jarring than that of the dangling sofa in the eviscerated house. But here too his gentle, flowing prose transforms the grim scene into a soaring Liebestod.
Astonishingly, Praz first published this essay in the explicitly Fascist periodical L’Italiano, in 1936; it later became a chapter in another major work, Gusto Neoclassico (On Neoclassicism), itself first published in 1940, one year into Fascist Italy’s alliance with Nazi Germany. On the one hand, a violent homoeroticism was hardly alien to Nazi-Fascism itself, despite its persecution of actual homosexuals. On the other, Praz was hardly alone in quietly accommodating himself to Fascist expectations; one can speculate that this included his 1934 marriage, which would have provided at least limited cover for his scholarly daring. Nevertheless, he did not fly entirely below the regime’s radar. In 1940 an anonymous group of students denounced him to the authorities for supposed Jewish ancestry, for being married to an Englishwoman, for offering English lessons no better than Berlitz (the once ubiquitous guides for language autodidacts), and, most seriously, for expressing “anti-Italian” views in his lessons. Tasked with investigating these charges, the Head of Philosophy and Rhetoric wryly reported back that the only truth in them was the existence of an English wife, which was hardly sufficient reason for censure.
Praz’s own wry humor served him to the end. Luchino Visconti’s 1974 film Conversation Piece stars Burt Lancaster as a retired American professor whose daily routine and art-filled Roman apartment are disrupted by the arrival of new neighbors, among them a handsome gigolo (played by Visconti’s own sometimes lover Helmut Berger) on whom he fixates. That Praz is the model is clear already from the title, borrowed from his 1971 Conversation Pieces, a study of family and other group portraits, often in richly bourgeoise interiors, before the advent of photography. (Driving home the point, such portraits fill the walls of the professor’s house.) Interviewed about his reaction, Praz objects primarily to the film’s suggestion that it is a retrospective documentary of his life: rather, he explains, it was prophetic of what came to be shortly after the film’s release (and thus, he playfully implies, on its inspiration). Asked, Praz further relates, by one of these newly intrusive neighbors for a signed copy of one of his books, he obliged with a dedication that greeted him as vicino di casa, ma lontano d’idee, “who lives next door but faraway in ideas.”
Why, finally, the reputation for bringing bad luck? One suspects that Praz’s still enigmatic queerness played no small part in his uneasy reception, perhaps already among the students who, in 1940, more prosaically denounced him for antifascism. Then there are his uncanny tastes as both writer and collector, which include not only genuine horrors (war, murder, martyrdom, etc.), but also the gentler hauntings of genres like the family portrait: snapshots of life that, accumulated into scholarly piles, begin to smell more and more of oblivion. Antiquarianism itself, of course, is frequently proximate to necromancy as deliberate “conversation” and communion with the dead. One way or another, however, the most conspicuous victim of Praz-related misfortune would seem to have been his own scholarly legacy. Surely the breaking of that particular curse is long overdue.