Mario Praz

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Mario Praz (born September 6, 1896 in Rome ; † March 23, 1982 ibid) was an Italian literary scholar ( English studies ) and art historian. He is known for a standard work on black romance Love, Death and the Devil .

Life

Praz was the son of the bank clerk Luciano Praz and Giulia Testa di Marsciano (died 1931), the daughter of a count. After the death of the father in 1900, the mother married the doctor Carlo Targioni in 1912.

Praz studied at the University of Bologna during the First World War and then at the University of Rome , where he graduated in law in 1918. In 1920 he graduated from the University of Florence with a degree in literature . In 1923 he went to Great Britain on a scholarship, where he first worked in the British Museum and from 1924 as Professor of Italian Studies (Italian culture) at the University of Liverpool . In 1928 he gave the British Academy's annual Italian Lecture on Macchiavelli . From 1932 to 1934 he taught Italian Studies at the University of Manchester . From 1934 he taught as a professor of English at the University of Rome (La Sapienza) until his retirement in 1966. From 1969 he lived in the Palazzo Primoli near Piazza Navona, since 1995 a museum.

In 1934 he married the British literary scholar Vivyan Leonora Eyles (1910 to 1984), with whom he had the daughter Lucia Praz (born 1938). Her apartment in Palazzo Ricci in Rome was a meeting place for European intellectuals in the 1930s. They separated in 1942 (she complained he was more interested in furniture than her) and the marriage ended in divorce in 1947. In 1953 he was married to Perla Cacciguerra in his second marriage. In 1962 he was knighted in England ( KBE ).

His book on Black Romanticism was one of the first interdisciplinary works that combined the history of literature, art and music. Among other things, he coined the term horror vacui in relation to overloaded Victorian art and explores erotic-morbid topics, for example in the works of Gustave Flaubert , Marquis de Sade , Oscar Wilde , Charles Baudelaire and Algernon Swinburne, such as the subject of femme Fatal . As an art historian, he dealt with emblem research , neo-classicism , interior architecture and design (interior decoration, furniture). He edited books on Giovanni Piranesi and Antonio Canova and translated the writings of Walter Pater into Italian.

Honors

In 1960 Praz received the Antonio Feltrinelli Prize . The Accademia dei Lincei he belonged since 1952 as corresponding member, for socio nazionale (full member), he was elected 1966th In 1969 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

Fonts

  • Love, death and the devil. Die Schwarze Romantik , dtv, Munich 1963 (Italian original: La carne, la morte e il diavolo nella letteratura romantica , Società editrice La Cultura , Milano-Roma 1930, English translation: The Romantic Agony , Oxford University Press 1933)
  • The Hero in Eclipse in Victorian Fiction , Oxford University Press 1956
  • Mnemosyne: The parallel between Literature and the Visual Arts , Princeton University Press 1970 (AW Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC 1967)
  • An Illustrated History of Interior Decoration from Pompei to Art Nouveau , Thames and Hudson, London 1964 (Italian: La filosofia dell arredamento: i mutamenti nel gusto della decorazione interna attraverso i secoli dall antica Roma ai nostri tempi , Milan, Longanesi 1964)
  • An Illustrated History of Furnishing from the Renaissance to the 20th Century , New York, G. Braziller 1964
  • The House of Life , Oxford University Press 1964 (Italian: La Casa della Vita , Mondadori, Milano 1958, autobiography)
  • Editor and introduction to: Giovanni Piranesi : Magnificenza di Roma , Edizione Il Polifilo, Milano 1961 (English edition: The Magnificence of Rome , Hartcourt, Brace 1962)
  • Studies in Seventeenth-Century Imagery , 2 volumes, The Warburg Institute, London 1939, 1947, 2nd edition, Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, Roma 1964, 1974 ( Emblem research, Italian edition: Studi sul concettismo , Florence, Sansoni 1946)
  • Francesco Pianta 's bizarre carvings, in Essays in the History of Art presented to Rudolf Wittkower , Volume 2, London, Phaidon 1967
  • Sceni di conversazione: Conversation Pieces , Rom, U. Bozzi 1971 (English edition: Conversation Pieces: a survey of the informal group portrait in Europe and America , Pennsylvania State University Press 1971)
  • Gusto Neoclassico , Sansoni, Firenze 1940 (English edition: On Neoclassicism , Evanston, Illinois, Northwestern University Press 1969)
  • Il giardino dei sensi. Studi sul manierismo e il barocco , Milan, Arnoldo Mondadori, 1975. German: The garden of the senses. Views of Mannerism and the Baroque , Frankfurt am Main, S. Fischer, 1988.
  • L'opera completa del Canova , presentazione di Mario Praz, Rizzoli, Milano 1976

literature

  • Vittorio Gabrieli (Ed.): Friendship's Garland: Essays presented to Mario Praz on his Seventieth Birthday , Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, Roma 1966 (with list of publications)
  • Vittorio Gabrieli (Ed.): Bibliografia degli scritti di Mario Praz , Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, Roma 1967, 2nd edition 1997 (Sussidi Eruditi 19)
  • Patrizia Rosazza-Ferraris: Museo Mario Praz: inventario topografico delle opere esposte , Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, Roma 2008
  • Marc Fumaroli : When rereading Mario Praz , in: Sinn und Form 1/2010
  • Masolino d'Amico:  Praz, Mario. In: Raffaele Romanelli (ed.): Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani (DBI). Volume 85:  Ponzone-Quercia. Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, Rome 2016.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Annuario ANL 2011, p. 494.
  2. ^ American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Book of Members ( PDF ). Retrieved April 21, 2016
personal data
SURNAME Praz, Mario
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Italian literary scholar and art historian
DATE OF BIRTH September 6, 1896
PLACE OF BIRTH Rome
DATE OF DEATH March 23, 1982
Place of death Rome