{"id":17694,"date":"2014-03-24T15:45:18","date_gmt":"2014-03-24T15:45:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/mario-praz-1896-1982-was-a-historian-of-art-and\/"},"modified":"2014-03-24T15:45:18","modified_gmt":"2014-03-24T15:45:18","slug":"mario-praz-1896-1982-was-a-historian-of-art-and","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/mario-praz-1896-1982-was-a-historian-of-art-and\/","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>Mario Praz (1896-1982) was a historian of art and literature. Among literary scholars and art historians, he is best known for a book translated into English as \u201cThe Romantic Agony.\u201d It is an erudite and sensible study of themes of death, sexual idiosyncrasy, Satanism, sadism and other horrors in romantic literature. In one passage Praz discusses \u201cThe Picture of Dorian Gray,\u201d claiming that Oscar Wilde failed to construct an atmosphere of anguish in that novel. This is because in the middle of the book\u2019s most horrifying passages, Wilde suddenly forgot about the plot and started to describe nearby objects \u2014 a pair of lemon-yellow gloves, for example, or a gold-latten matchbox. Praz sees this approach as decadent and superficial, and points out that the author\u2019s main interest is \u201cdecorative.\u201d Ironically, Praz\u2019s other well-known work is titled \u201cAn Illustrated History of Interior Decoration.\u201d This book is one of the best examples of the kinds of books that address the need to discover the ties that bind artists and thinkers to the places in which they live. Praz takes great pleasure in guiding us on an illustrated tour of the inner worlds of artists and writers, exploring the rooms and objects that surround them, and never failing to entertain us, to educate us and to arouse our curiosity.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<div class='attribution'>From the entry on the Mario Praz museum in <a href=\"http:\/\/nyti.ms\/1lU9RBa\">&ldquo;Small Museums&rdquo; by Orhan Pamuk, tr. Ekin Oklap, NY Times T Magazine, 23 March 2014<\/a> (via <a class=\"tumblr_blog\" href=\"http:\/\/hangingfire.tumblr.com\/\">hangingfire<\/a>)<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Mario Praz (1896-1982) was a historian of art and literature. Among literary scholars and art historians, he is best known for a book translated into English as \u201cThe Romantic Agony.\u201d It is an erudite and sensible study of themes of death, sexual idiosyncrasy, Satanism, sadism and other horrors in romantic literature. In one passage Praz [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"quote","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17694","post","type-post","status-publish","format-quote","hentry","category-words","post_format-post-format-quote"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6PWot-4Bo","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17694","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17694"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17694\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17694"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17694"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17694"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}