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The MARIO PRAZ MUSEUM IN ROME

Magazine Antiques, Oct, 2001 by John Cornforth

To those who would choose Mario Praz's books An Illustrated History of Interior Decoration or The House of Life as essential for survival on a desert island, a visit to his former apartment in the Palazzo Primoli on via Zanardelli in Rome, now a museum, is one of the bonuses of a visit to that city. However, the apartment takes time to appreciate, and seeing it again for the first time since I paid a call on Professor Praz in the 1970s, I had to admit to initial disappointment. Only gradually did it reveal its subtleties and the way it worked on several levels at once.

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At the simplest, its intimate crowded rooms offer a welcome contrast to the grandeur of Roman museums and palaces, while for those fascinated by the illustrations in his books, it provides the chance to see a number of them in the original. For those who enjoy The House of Life, the apartment offers the chance to see many of the objects, if not the setting in the Palazzo Ricci on via Giulia, which he described in that book.

In 1969 Praz moved to via Zanardelli, to the apartment above the Museo Napoleonico in the Fondazione Primoli, of which he was the president. The spaces in the apartment are decidedly awkward, and it was a challenge for him to rearrange his possessions to create a new work of art, as can be seen in his sketches for the rooms. It was a challenge full of complexities as well as lessons about decoration and the way objects can be used to transform space.

A small vestibule leads into a long, tall, narrow, but not quite rectangular room with four windows. It has the character of an anteroom, suggesting that more spacious rooms lie beyond, not just smaller ones. Praz was faced with making this room not only his salone but also part of his library So he constructed an upper gallery with shelves along the long inner wall, leaving just sufficient space to hang the pair of ormolu and glass Empire chandeliers that give the room the air of grandeur and sumptuousness he felt so desirable (see P1 I).

Below the gallery he divided the long wall into three sections with two Empire chimneypieces and overmantels (neither of them pairs) flanking a central painted bookcase with a sofa recess that he had had made for his old apartment in 1934. Against the window wall he placed three busts of women, first a marble of a lady with startling "giraffe" curls that stands on a column and beckons one to come in; then a second marble of a lady looking forward and placed slightly lower than the first on a bracket; and finally, on an even lower pedestal, a terracotta bust by the French sculptor Joseph Chinard (P1. III). Thus he created a Borrominian false perspective that corrected the faults in the plan of the room. In the center of the wall inside the door he hung, rather low, Queen Maria Isabella of Naples in Her Apartment in the Palace of Capodimonte, painted in 1836 by Vincenzo Abbati (P1. IV). This creates the illusion of a view back into the salone and into the past, as if looking back 150 years into a room that had inspired his own arrangement. If this sounds like a far-fetched interpretation, The House of Life was an autobiographical escape from life, and Praz's apartment suggests that the years around 1800 came to have a greater reality for him than his own time.

At the far end of the Galleria, as he called the long room, are two doors that offer puzzling, contrasting views. The one on the left gives onto a low library where again he played with space by using a small bronze Empire chandelier to answer the glittering pair in the Galleria. The door on the right affords a vista through his darker studio to his bedroom with double doors at the end. Above, the gallery disappears into an upper opening into the studio. Praz's playing with perspective continues in the studio and bedroom in the way he arranged his pictures and furniture on the long walls. After a space for adjustment just inside the doors he made symmetrical groups, giving formality and focus to difficult spaces. Also in the studio, he created a contrast between the dense massing of paintings and waxes under the gallery, which express his "preference for things abundantly and wonderfully bejeweled," and the pictures on the end wall, which increase in size so that they play up the drama of the room (see Pls. V II and VIII).

He also played odd tricks with reality, because the walls of the studio are painted a green that is the same as the background of an early nineteenth-century picture of a lady with a harp, a piano, and a settee like the one in the recess in the bookcase next door. In front of the picture he placed a real harp, and on the long wall he placed an Erhard piano that he never played but that takes the place of a chimneypiece in the room (P1. VI). Close by it hangs a Neapolitan family group of 1818 by Raffaele Mattioli that shows a girl playing a piano. Everything is thought out and goes beyond mere decoration, because, as he wrote: "the ultimate meaning of a harmoniously decorated house is...to mirror man, but to minor him in his ideal being; it is an exaltation of self."

The MARIO PRAZ MUSEUM IN ROME

Magazine Antiques, Oct, 2001 by John Cornforth

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