From the January 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
Mario Praz, it seems fair to say, had strong feelings about decoration. In his illustrated history of the subject – published in 1964 – the Roman scholar and collector wrote of the horror he would occasionally experience on visiting the home of a good friend for the very first time: ‘It was like turning over one of those ivory figurines carved by the German artificers of the Renaissance, which show a lovely woman on one side and a worm-ridden corpse on the other.’ For Praz, le style c’est l’homme même – or, more specifically, la casa è l’uomo.
Evidently he was satisfied with the self-portrait offered up by his own home, which for his final 13 years was an apartment on the top floor of the Palazzo Primoli near Piazza Navona: he entrusted it on his death in 1982 to the Italian state, complete with the large collection of neoclassical furnishings, objects and art that he had assembled obsessively over his lifetime. Having first welcomed visitors as a house museum in 1995, the apartment was closed in recent years for structural restoration and conservation of part of the collection, reopening in 2024.
To the right of the doors leading from the studio to Praz’s bedroom, a European view hangs betwen one of the many watercolours of interiors and, above, a portrait of the poet Ugo Foscolo (c. 1813) by François-Xavier Fabre. Photo: © Oskar Proctor
Francesca Condò, director of the museum since 2021, sees this refreshed incarnation as an opportunity to introduce more people to a literary lion whose vast bibliography as an Anglicist alone included titles on the Elizabethans, John Donne, the Romantics, and the Victorian novel – who had, as the art critic John Russell put it, ‘read everything, looked at everything and forgotten nothing’. ‘His critical approach,’ Condò says, ‘was very modern for the time in Italy. In his work he made connections between the different arts, to put them on the same level and to recreate the mood of a period.’
What, then, of the various neoclassical moods he created in his home? The first of the apartment’s suite of nine rooms is painted a buttery yellow that conjures the tinkle of teacups in a Regency breakfast room. This is in fact the galleria – named for the balustraded mezzanine Praz had put up along two sides to accommodate some 15,000 books (this library, which includes elephant folios on the ruins of Baalbek and Palmyra, and volumes by Robert Adam, Letarouilly and other neoclassical luminaries, is now housed downstairs with the Fondazione Primoli). White and gold cabinetry summons up the splendour of the French empire, as do a veritable bevy of long-necked swans carved in wood or marble or picked out in needlework. Here, very clearly, is the author of Gusto neoclassico (1940) putting his knowledge and passion into practice. The room’s rich yellow is repeated in a painting hanging above a saffron sofa; an exemplar for Praz, it depicts Queen Isabella of Naples in her apartment at Capodimonte – though in such paintings of interiors, which thrilled this collector, he saw the human figure as merely ‘an accessory […] that allows the furniture, the household objects, to be themselves the real dramatis personae’.
Move on through the space – passing a sensuous statue of Cupid that Praz once caught his maid kissing – and you start to get a sense of Praz as ‘an explorer of the darker byways of 19th-century life and letters’, as the art historian Hugh Honour described him. In the arsenic-green studio, where he wrote at a large Empire mahogany desk decorated with bronze griffins, an elegantly symmetrical display of pictures is made up in large part by wax portraits. Enter the rose-hued dining room and after a while you might notice a pair of painted-terracotta German figurines in court dress watching over the table; each has one half of their face and body stripped of clothes and flesh to reveal the skeleton beneath. Behind these memento mori is a copy of Pierre-Paul Prud’hon’s Justice and Divine Vengeance Pursuing Crime (1808), the scene’s victim sprawled deathly-pale under a full moon. Nearby, beneath a sideboard sits a Regency mahogany wine cooler in the form of a sarcophagus. As Praz might have wished his guests – Buon appetito!
On one of the studio wax portraits hang below a family portrait of Jean-Baptiste-Frédéric Desmarais. To its right is Johann Heinrich Stürmer’s painting Mr Robertson’s Mr Robertson’s Parachute Descent. Below the pictures is an Empire pianoforte made by Érard, with two painted wooden vase stands in sphinx form. Photo: © Oskar Proctor
In 1933 Praz published in English his best-known work, The Romantic Agony, a study of erotic sensibility in the literature (and art) of Europe in the late 18th and 19th centuries; with sections on Sade, Satanism, Swinburne and ‘Le Vice Anglais’, it caused something of a stir in the literary world at the time. Its more explicit Italian title from 1930 is La carne, la morte e il diavolo (‘Flesh, death and the devil’) – areas of interest or reference that you see creeping out, here and there, in his collection, or seeping into his writing on interiors. In An Illustrated History of Interior Decoration, baffled by the undecorative ‘squalor’ in which some learned art historian lives, Praz wonders: ‘does he accept the house as a hairshirt that secretly and pleasurably makes his thighs bleed?’ Yet he himself, wrote Honour, who knew Praz personally, was no Swinburne. ‘His preoccupation with decadence and perversion, the deviant and the macabre, was that of a sophisticated but disinterested spectator.’
If ‘the house is the man’, it was only natural that Praz would write the closest he came to an autobiography in the form of a discursive tour of his home. The House of Life, published in 1958, is structured room by room, with each work of art or piece of furniture acting as a sort of Proustian madeleine for its owner. At the time, Praz was living in Palazzo Ricci on Via Giulia. When, in 1969, the Ricci family put the palazzo up for sale, he found a home for himself in Palazzo Primoli – a building that already contained the Museo Napoleonico and the Fondazione Primoli, of which he was president (thus guaranteeing him low rent). Here, Praz reinstalled his beloved collection as closely as possible to its previous arrangement at Palazzo Ricci – even going so far as to reassemble the bedroom of his daughter, Lucia, who was now in her thirties and had not lived with Praz since the age of four. The House of Life still serves as a companion text, then – even if it reveals the milestones of its author’s existence in a haphazard and patchy manner.
In a corner of the library, a bust of the opera singer Giulia Grassi – lover of both Napoleon and the Duke of Wellington – seems to be looking for her reflection in a convex mirror topped by an eagle finial. Photo: © Oskar Proctor
Praz was born in Rome in 1896, scraping into the century he would come to worship. He spent his early childhood in Switzerland, where his father was a translator for a bank. After the latter’s death, Praz and his mother moved to the house of his grandfather, Count Alcibiade Testa di Marsciano, in Florence (the family’s coat of arms, ‘lovingly embroidered’ by his mother, hangs above the door of an anteroom in Palazzo Primoli). From there he went on to study law in Bologna and then Rome, where he also studied English and the 19th-century English poets. In 1918 Praz returned to Florence for a postgraduate degree in literature and philology (and a thesis on Gabriele d’Annunzio). Around this time, Praz writes, the seed of his ‘mania’ for the Empire style was planted when his stepfather gave him a chest of drawers from that era.
It was also in this period that the young scholar made the acquaintance of Violet Paget, pen name Vernon Lee – a formative figure in his career and, as someone who had known Walter Pater and the Pre-Raphaelites, a direct connection to the world Praz would examine in The Romantic Agony and other work. By a typically circuitous route in The House of Life, a French globe-form chandelier hanging in Lucia’s bedroom brings Praz to his friendship with Lee. He explains how, to please Lucia as a little girl, he had added crystal drops to the chandelier so that they would catch the morning light and sparkle. This makes him think of a visit to the house of the literary critic Charles Du Bos in Paris – where, it seems, crystal-drop chandeliers were plentiful. To find the date of said visit, Praz looks through a filing cabinet of correspondence – from Du Bos, from Benedetto Croce and others, until finally we get to a bundle of letters from Lee. It was she, he explains, who introduced him to the English-speaking literary world, and to the world of villa-dwelling Brits around Florence, whose existences he had always imagined ‘as resembling those of the gods described in Tennyson’s Lotus Eaters’.
Later on in the 1920s, when Praz was lecturer in Italian at the University of Liverpool and had apparently hit a low point, Lee sent the ‘dear boy’ an amusingly bracing letter of encouragement: ‘What gave me so much pleasure in our late conversations is that […] a real self, and an interesting, spontaneous self was emerging out of the pathetic little bundle of book-impressions which had hitherto been Mario Praz in my eyes.’ ‘Also,’ she goes on, ‘for Heaven’s sake dance, go to parties even if they bore you (you will find some person to flirt with even in Liverpool!)’.
It was in England that Praz met his future wife, Vivyan Eyles, who was a lecturer in Italian at Manchester. In 1934 the married couple moved to the apartment in Palazzo Ricci, Praz taking up the post of professor of English language and literature at the University of Rome, which he would keep for more than 30 years. In 1938 Lucia, their only child, was born.
A sofa in an alcove of the galleria offers up a sorry marital tale. The late 19th-century mahogany frame, Praz writes, came from the house of General La Fayette. Meanwhile the embroidered yellow-ground back – featuring a pair of swans with a swag of flowers beneath a classical female head – was a design Praz had borrowed from a panel in the music room of the Hôtel Beauharnais in Paris. Vivyan began the needlework for this two-year labour until, Praz writes, ‘I abdicated my position as a man for the first time on that fatal day when, not satisfied with the way in which my wife had worked a rose, I took it upon myself to instruct her.’ Having ‘managed to make a rose less like a cabbage than hers had been’, Praz goes on to finish the work himself. In his mind at least, this episode seems to have signalled the initial unravelling of the relationship; Vivyan left Praz in 1943, returning to England and taking their daughter with her.
In the alcove of the galleria portrait miniatures and a portrait of Mario Praz’s mother hang above a late 19th-century French sofa in mahogany. Praz and his wife Vivyan embroidered the cover based on a design from the music room of the Hôtel Beauharnais in Paris. Photo: © Oskar Proctor
When Praz published an updated edition of The House of Life in 1979, with an extra chapter dedicated to the Palazzo Primoli, he quoted Cyril Connolly’s pronouncement of the work as ‘one of the dullest books I have ever read; it has a bravura of boredom, an audacity of ennui that makes one hardly believe one’s eyes’. Many, this reader included, will beg to differ. No doubt there are diversions and digressions that can happily be skipped over, according to taste. But it’s hard to find dull the kind of writing that, for example, compares Bloomsberries such as Lytton Strachey’s perverse pleasure in the Victorian knick-knacks they derided to ‘making love with a prostitute in one’s grandmother’s bed’. His sense of humour, often self-effacing – as demonstrated by his inclusion of Connolly’s skewering critique – is never far from the surface, and even his footnotes give a sense of Praz as an incorrigible collector of foibles as much as fauteuils (‘Emilio Cecchi told me of a very parsimonious old lady who had a box with this label on it: “Useless pieces of string”’). Nor did his psychological interest in interior decoration stop at self-examination: ‘If subjected to psychoanalysis, the character of the collector does not come out well […] there is certainly something profoundly egoistical and limited in him, something positively avaricious.’ (Perhaps there is a little of self-flagellating Swinburne in him after all…).
Praz leant in to the more bizarre aspects of neoclassicism, so that ‘the house, like a forest, is full of strange, lurking creatures, eagles, lions, one-footed swans, sphinxes, sirens, tortoises’. (Practically the only modern works of art in the apartment are two sphinx paintings by the Surrealist Leonor Fini, who had got to know and admire Praz – as he did her – when she lived in Rome during the Second World War.) At several points in The House of Life, Praz notes some image or figure in his collection considered by others to bring bad luck – a relief of Juno with her peacock, for instance, or an owl carved on the pediment of a bookcase. He does not mention, however, that he himself was feared as a malocchio, or someone with the ‘evil eye’. Writing for the New York Times in 1983 about her life in Rome, Muriel Spark puts an amusing slant on this: ‘Naturally, everyone noticed when Mario Praz was present at a party, and waited for the disaster. There was usually a stolen car at the end of the evening, or someone called away because his uncle had died.’ One night when Spark was at the Rome Opera and rain started pouring through the roof, ‘I looked round instinctively for Mario Praz. Sure enough, there was our dear Malocchio sitting under the afflicted spot.’
The mahogany Jacob bed came from Fontainbleau. A Madonna and Child paitning attributed to Corrado Giaquinto hangs under a baldaquin. Photo: © Oskar Proctor
Wherever this unfortunate reputation came from – a watch broken in his childhood, possibly, or the fact that he had a slight limp and a squint – it clearly didn’t put everyone off. Condò shows me his visitors’ books – bought in England, lined with marbled endpapers – which Praz started in 1949. The first page of the first album is signed by the Surrealist artist Fabius von Gugel, along with Saul Bellow. Ever the self-archivist, Praz indexed the first two volumes, listing the names of greatest significance. Among them are Bernard Berenson, Ingrid Bergman, Truman Capote, Roberto Longhi, Osbert Sitwell, W.H. Auden, Harold Acton, Liliane de Rothschild and Marella Agnelli. Princess Margaret, naturally, took a whole page for herself. She visited in 1974, the year Visconti brought out his film Conversation Piece, in which Burt Lancaster played ‘the Professor’, a solitary collector of art and antiques based on Praz.
The last name in the visitors’ book, in 1982, is the American photographer Milton Gendel, who for a while lived in the apartment below. The picture he took of Praz on that visit, a month before the latter’s death, now occupies a table in the galleria. Seemingly mid thought, the 86-year-old sits flanked by the swans of his embroidered sofa – a collector inseparable from his surroundings. The House of Life ends with Praz looking into an eagle-topped convex mirror , the room and its furnishings reflected around him. ‘I see myself as having myself become an object and an image,’ he writes, ‘a museum piece among museum pieces.’ La casa è l’uomo.
From the January 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.