Volume 3, Number 9 · December 17, 1964
Spoils
By Michael Levey
An Illustrated History of Furnishing
by Mario Praz
Braziller, 396 pp., $25.00
The House of Life
by Mario Praz
Oxford, 360 pp., $10.00
Although the second of these two books is a sort of autobiography, the two produce a surprisingly homogeneous effect. Both are not so much concerned as positively obsessed with interior decor, down to the minutest detail of ormolu lion-claw table legs and waxen flowers under glass domes. Both are written in the same allusive, digressive manner, plentifully sprinkled with quotations, especially from English literature (ranging from Langland to Francis Thompson). Some of the same anecdotes appear in both books. Above all, both exhale a strong sense of the faded past, as if petals dropped by Proust and Pater had been dried and preserved in an old muslin bag before being scattered over the pages. Well may the reader fall into a daze, if not a doze, as he stirs the pot-pourri, wondering which is the history of furnishing and which the history of Praz. Both books are handsomely illustrated and presented. It is the larger and more opulent volume that is the history of furnishing; the other is concerned rather with the history of the furnishing of the author's flat in Rome. His own tendency to fly to the literary allusion is infectious when one attempts to define the tone of the two books, with their melancholy feeling for vanished lives, their weakness for obscure royal ladies of the past, and the often trumpery relics of such people's existence:
Review, 2120 words
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