Volume 30, Number 3 · March 3, 1983
From the House of Life
By Hugh Honour
An Illustrated History of Interior Decoration: From Pompeii to Art Nouveau
by Mario Praz, translated by William Weaver
Thames and Hudson, 396 pp., $75.00
Il mondo che ho visto
by Mario Praz
Adelphi Edizioni (Milan), 547 pp., 18,000 lire
Long before he died in Rome last March at the age of eighty-six, Mario Praz already seemed a figure apart. He stood alone among his contemporaries, and younger men as well, with a detachment that was ironical rather than defiant or disdainful. Although too urbane to be described as a maverick, a misfit, or a loner, he could never quite bring himself to 'fit in' and it was always from an idiosyncratic external viewpoint that he observed literature, art, and, indeed, life. His preoccupation with decadence and perversion, the deviant and the macabre, was that of a sophisticated but disinterested spectator.
Review, 4928 words
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