Full Name: Procacci, Ugo
Gender: male
Date Born: 1905
Date Died: 1991
Place Born: Florence, Tuscany, Italy
Place Died: Florence, Tuscany, Italy
Home Country/ies: Italy
Subject Area(s): Renaissance
Institution(s): Università degli Studi di Firenze
art historian of technical process in Renaissance art
Sinopie e affreschi. Milan: 1961.
KMP, 39
Contributors: Lee Sorensen
art historian of technical process in Renaissance art
Full Name: Prior, Edward S.
Other Names:
Gender: male
Date Born: 1852
Date Died: 1932
Home Country/ies: United Kingdom
Subject Area(s): architecture (object genre), Medieval (European), and sculpture (visual works)
Medievalist art and architectural historian. Nikolaus Bernard Leon Pevsner characterized him as, “the best English interpreter of the Gothic style.”
A History of Gothic Art in England. London: G. Bell and Sons, 1900; An Account of Medieval Figure-Sculpture in England. Cambridge, University Press, 1912; The Cathedral Builders in England. London: Seeley and Co/New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1905; Eight Chapters on English Medieval Art: a Study in English Economics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922.
Pevsner, Nikolaus. Matthew Digby Wyatt: the First Cambridge Slade professor of Fine Art: an Inaugural Lecture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950, p. 23; Watkin, David. The Rise of Architectural History. London: Architectural Press, 1980, pp. 105-108.
Medievalist art and architectural historian. Nikolaus Bernard Leon Pevsner characterized him as, “the best English interpreter of the Gothic style.”
Full Name: Prime, William Cowper
Gender: male
Date Born: 1825
Date Died: 1905
Place Born: Cambridge, Washington, NY, USA
Place Died: New York, NY, USA
Home Country/ies: United States
Career(s): educators
Princeton University (“College of New Jersey”) art historian. Prime was the son of Nathaniel Scudder Prime, a Presbyterian minister and headmaster of Washington Academy, Cambridge, NY, and Julia Ann Jermain (Prime). The family moved to Sing Sing (now Ossining, NY), where Nathaniel directed the Mount Pleasant Academy. The younger Prime graduated with a law degree from Princeton (then known as the College of New Jersey) in 1843. He practiced as an attorney in New York City, 1843-53. In 1851 he married Mary Trumbull of Stonington, CT. During the Civil War, when the New York Journal of Commerce was closed down in 1861 for treasonous reporting (“disloyal conduct”), David Marvin Stone, persuaded Prime to edit the paper and hold the concomitant presidency of the Associated Press. Prime was responsible for concluding the news association war of 1866, a rift between east and west newspapers. He left the paper and AP presidency in 1869, retaining significant holdings in the newspaper. Prime’s first books were on his extensive travels, with titles such as Boat Life in Egypt and Nubia (1857), Tent Life in the Holy Land (1857), and I Go A-fishing (1873). Throughout his career, Prime had amassed various collections. He initially focused on coins, the on to early illustrated books and medieval woodcuts. Together with his wife they collected old porcelain. Prime published Coins, Medals and Seals in 1861, and Pottery and Porcelain in1878. Prime was an early exponent of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He both a trustee and vice-president of the Museum. In 1882, Prime announced he was willing to donate his porcelain collect to the College of New Jersey. Prime’s interest in establishing an art department at Princeton led him and McClellan to author a pamphlet for the university, The Establishment of a Department of Art Instruction. The pamphlet suggested that an art department should make no distinction between high and low art. In 1883, Princeton established a department of art (but no building), and Prime and Allan Marquand were made full professors. In 1884 he became a professor of the history of art and gave his first classes in 1885. However, even though his name appeared in catalogs, Prime stopped giving lectures only a few years later, perhaps because the College has lost interest in housing his porcelain collection. In his later years he acted as literary executor to McClellan.
Passio Christi. Die kleine Passion. The Little Passion of Albert Durer Reproduced in Fac-simile. New York: J. W. Bouten, 1868; Pottery and Porcelain of All Times and Nations, with Tables of Factory and Artists’ marks for the Use of Collectors. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1878.
Lavin, Marilyn Aronberg. The Eye of the Tiger: The Founding and Development of the Department of Art and Archaeology, 1883-1923, Princeton University. Princeton, NJ: Department of Art and Archaeology and Art Museum, 1983, p. 10; Rosewater, Victor. “Prime, William Cowper.” Dictionary of American Biography. New York: C. Scribner’s sons, 1928-1936; Prime, William Cowper. Later years. New York, Harper & brothers, 1854.
Princeton University (“College of New Jersey”) art historian. Prime was the son of Nathaniel Scudder Prime, a Presbyterian minister and headmaster of Washington Academy, Cambridge, NY, and Julia Ann Jermain (Prime). The family moved to Sing Sing (
Full Name: Priest, Alan
Gender: male
Date Born: unknown
Date Died: unknown
Home Country/ies: United States
Subject Area(s): art theory, Gothic (Medieval), and Medieval (European)
Career(s): clergy
Priest continued and refined the analysis of Wilhelm Vöge. His essay on the masters of the west facade of Chartres cathedral, 1923, follow A. Kingsley Porter was the first important venture into the history of Gothic sculpture [in the United States] (Branner).
“The Masters of the West Facade at Chartres.” Art Studies 1 (1923).
“Alan Priest.” Chartres Cathedral: Norton Critical Studies in Art History.New York: W. W. Norton, 1969, p. 149.
Priest continued and refined the analysis of Wilhelm Vöge. His essay on the masters of the west facade of Chartres cathedral, 1923, follow A. Kingsley Porter was the first important venture into the hist
Full Name: Prichard, Matthew Stewart
Other Names:
Gender: male
Date Born: 04 January 1865
Date Died: 15 October 1936
Place Born: Keynsham, Bath and Northeast Somerset, UK
Place Died: Great Hampden, Buckinghamshire, UK
Home Country/ies: United Kingdom
Subject Area(s): Byzantine (culture or style)
Career(s): curators
Museum curator and exponent of Byzantine art. Prichard’s parents were Charles Henry Prichard, a merchant, and Mattie Stewart (Prichard) (d. 1881). He attended Marlborough College in 1883 and graduated from New College, Oxford, 1887 with a law degree. He practiced briefly London. In 1892 he came under the spell a group of predominantly homosexual Oxford-educated esthetes living at Lewes House, Sussex, centered around the wealth Bostonian Edward Perry “Ned” Warren (1860-1928), his partner John Marshall (1862-1928). Warren introduced Prichard to his brother, Samuel Dennis Warren (-1910), then president of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, who appointed Prichard museum secretary in 1902. Prichard worked as a classical antiquities specialist for the museum and, by 1904, assistant director. He developed a disdain for the artificial arrangement and display of objects in museums and their appeal to the wealthy, a theme he would carry with him his life. Through the MFA he met the art collector Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840-1924) and the Japanese museum curator and artist Okakura Kakuzo (1862-1913), the latter instilling in him an appreciation of oriental art. In 1905 he also met the British art historian Roger Fry, then a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in Boston impressing Fry with his singular ideas of museums and knowledge of oriental art. Prichard’s views on museology, which ran counter to most institutional collecting naturally led to conflicts. Ultimately the board of trustees dismissed him in 1907 for demanding the removal of the museum’s plaster casts of classical sculpture. Prichard left the U.S., living for Europe. In Italy he discovered Byzantine art at San Marco and Ravenna, an art genre which, for the rest of his life, he would inspire collectors, artists and scholars to pursue. He met and maintained a correspondence with the Italianist Bernard Berenson. He settled in Paris at the end of 1908. In Paris he toured the Louvre with Fry. He also met the art collectors Michael Stein (1865-1938) (Gertrude Stein’s oldest brother) and his wife, Sarah (1870-1953), who introduced him to Henri Matisse the following year; the two developed creatively from one another. Prichard introduced Matisse to Byzantine art and he, in turn, became a devotee to the artist (Matisse did a drypoint of Prichard in 1914). Prichard made the acquaintance of the nineteen-year-old Georges Duthuit, who became Prichard’s most important pre-war disciple. Prichard adopted the art philosophy of Henri Bergson (1859-1941) as personal esthetic, disparaging Western art’s traditional verisimilitude in favor of decoration. An alluring personality, he imparted his esthetic to many, including the art critic (and future son-in-law of Matisse), Georges Duthuit, Fry and the poet T. S. Eliot (1888-1965). In 1910, he visited the seminal exhibition of Islamic art in Munich. The show also caught the eye of others he inspired, particularly Whittemore, who was on hand to nurse Prichard through a long illness recovery in Paris the same year. Prichard was caught in Germany when World War I was declared in 1914 and was interned as an enemy citizen in Ruhleben, a POW camp. He remained there until the War’s end, having food sent to him by his American friends (the U.S. was not yet a participant in the War). The confinement affected Prichard dramatically. He settled in London in 1918, and after briefly working for a government committee on prisoners, developed a new coterie of followers at the Gargoyle Club, holding morning discourses on aesthetics (Pope-Hennessy) to David Tennant, the club’s owner, and (future V&A and Met curator) John Pope-Hennessy. Prichard organized a conference at the Taylor Institution, Oxford, in 1919. The conference lectures appeared in 1921, one of his few published writing on art. In the 1930, he supported and anonymously wrote portions of the first and second preliminary reports on the Byzantine mosaics in Hagia Sofia organized by Whittemore. He suffered a heart attack at his brother’s home in 1936 and died. His personal papers consist of letters to Mrs. Gardner and notebooks, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and notebooks at the Bibliothèque Byzantine, Fonds Thomas Whittemore, Paris. Though Prichard’s career as a professional art historian was limited to brief work in a museum and ghost-written reports on Byzantine art, his influence on art historians and developers of the discipline was immense. A charismatic teacher religious and in later years, profoundly anti-materialistic, his interests in both art and Byzantium were intensely spiritual.
“Current Theories of the Arrangement of Museums of Art.” ; Greek and Byzantine Art (1921), is the text of a conference given at the Taylor Institution, Oxford, in 1919; [anonymous contributions] and Whittemore, Thomas, et al. The Mosaics of St. Sophia at Istanbul: Preliminary Report on the Year’s Work, 1931-1932: The Mosaics of the Narthex. Paris: Byzantine Institute of America, printed by J. Johnson at the Oxford University Press, 1933, The Mosaics of St. Sophia at Istanbul: Preliminary Report on the Year’s Work: Second Preliminary Report, Work Done in 1933 and 1934: the Mosaics of the Southern Vestibule, 1936.
Prichard, Matthew Stewart. [unpublished notebooks]. Boston, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Archives; Prichard, Matthew Stewart. [manuscript notebooks]. Paris, Collège de France, École des Langues Orientales Vivantes Bibliothèque Byzantine, Fonds Thomas Whittemore; Ketchum, John Davidson. Ruhleben: a Prison Camp Society. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965, p. 260; Hadley, Rollin van N., ed. The Letters of Bernard Berenson and Isabella Stewart Gardner, 1887-1924, with Correspondence by Mary Berenson. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1987, pp. 381, 444, 624; Labrusse, Rémi. “Prichard, Matthew Stewart.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; Sox, David. Bachelors of Art: Edward Perry Warren and the Lewes Brotherhood. London: Fourth Estate, 1991 pp. 167-186; Pope-Hennessy, John. Learning to Look. New York: Doubleday, 1991, pp. 273-274; Nelson, Robert. Hagia Sophia, 1850-1950: Holy Wisdom Modern Monument. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004, pp. 156-161.
Contributors: Lee Sorensen
Museum curator and exponent of Byzantine art. Prichard’s parents were Charles Henry Prichard, a merchant, and Mattie Stewart (Prichard) (d. 1881). He attended Marlborough College in 1883 and graduated from New College, Oxford, 1887 with a law degr
Full Name: Preziosi, Donald
Other Names:
Gender: male
Date Born: 1941
Place Born: New York, NY, USA
Home Country/ies: United States
Subject Area(s): architecture (object genre), Classical, and sculpture (visual works)
Career(s): educators
Architectural- and art historian of the classical-era; professor, University of California, Los Angeles (1986-). Preziosi was the son of Romulus M. Preziosi and Mary Fazioli (Preziosi). He attended Fairfield College, Fairfield University in Connecticut, graduating in 1962 with degrees in English and Classics. He continued at Harvard University, receiving a master’s degree the following year in Linguistics. He was a Charles Eliot Norton Fellow at Harvard, 1964-65, and taught at the American School, Athens (Harvard Traveling Fellow) between 1965-1966 and at Yale University, beginning in 1967 (through 1973). His Ph.D. in art history was granted at Harvard in 1968. In 1973 he was appointed assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He was awarded an NEH Fellowship for 1973-74. After an visiting professorship at Cornell, 1977-78, he became an Associate Professor at the State University of New York, Binghamton, in1978 (through 1986) where he acted as chair of the department of art history. His Semiotics of the Built Environment appeared in 1979, a strong example of a linguistic approach to architecture. Preziosi was a Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA), National Gallery of Art for 1981-82. After another visiting appointment at Indiana University, 1985, he joined the faculty of the University of California, Los Angeles in 1986. At UCLA he developed the art history critical theory program and the UCLA museum studies program. In 1989, his Rethinking Art History: Meditations on a Coy Science, his critique of the discipline of art history, appeared. He was a visiting professor at the Centre d’Histoire et Theorie d’Art, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris from 1991 and from that year on the Board of Directors of UCLA’s Paris Program in Critical Theory. In 1992 he delivered a paper on ethnicities at the National Gallery of Art conference on “Shaping of American Museums of Art. In the fall of 1993 he was the Cass Gilbert and Hill Distinguished Visiting Professor, University of Minnesota. In 1995 Preziosi received an Oxford University Resident Fellowship. Preziosi authored the essay on “Collecting/Museums” in the Critical Terms in Art History (1996). After being named emeritus professor at UCLA, he served as the 2000-2001 Slade Professor of Fine Arts at Oxford, delivering the annual Slade Lectures “Seeing Through Art History,” published as the Brain of the Earth’s Body: Art, Museums, and the Phantasms of Modernity (2003). Preziosi was among those art historians trained in linguistics whose numbers also included Norman Bryson, although Preziosi’s work was less heavy-handed than Bryson’s. His critique on the methods of art history, Rethinking Art History, came at a critical time when the discipline was examining its origins and destiny. In later years he became an advocate for gay studies in art history.
[dissertation:] Minoan Palace Planning and its Origins. Harvard University, 1968; Minoan Architectural Design: Formation and Signification. New York: Mouton, 1983; Rethinking Art History: Meditations on a Coy Science. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989; edited, The Art of Art History: a Critical Anthology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998; edited, with Claire Farago. Grasping the World: the Idea of the Museum. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004; edited, with Bierman, Irene A., and Abou-El-Haj, Rifa’at Ali. The Ottoman City and its Parts: Urban Structure and Social Order. New Rochelle, NY: A. D. Caratzas, 1991; Architecture, Language and Meaning: the Origins of the Built World and its Semiotic Organization. The Hague: Mouton, 1979; Brain of the Earth’s Body: Art, Museums, and the Phantasms of Modernity. [Slade Lectures, 2001]. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003; The Semiotics of the Built Environment: an Introduction to Architectonic Analysis. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979; “Constructing the origins of art.” Art Journal 42 no. 4 (Winter 1982): 320-5; “Museology and Museography.” Art Bulletin 77 (March 1995): 13-15; “Putting Up (with) Meaning.” Oxford Art Journal 13 no. 2 (1990): 121-4; “In the Temple of Entelechy: the Museum as Evidentiary Artifact.” Studies in the History of Art 47 (1994): 165-71.
“Champs des recherche: Donald Preziosi.” Université Laval website. http://www.fl.ulaval.ca/hst/visio/preziosi.htm; Donald Preziosi CV. http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/humnet/arthist/fac/preziosi/preziosi.htm;
Architectural- and art historian of the classical-era; professor, University of California, Los Angeles (1986-). Preziosi was the son of Romulus M. Preziosi and Mary Fazioli (Preziosi). He attended Fairfield College, Fairfield University in Connec
Full Name: Previtali, Giovanni
Gender: male
Date Born: 1934
Date Died: 1988
Place Born: Florence, Tuscany, Italy
Place Died: Naples, Campania, Italy
Home Country/ies: Italy
Subject Area(s): Italian (culture or style), Italian Renaissance-Baroque styles, and Renaissance
Italianist, Giotto and Bellori scholar. Previtali came from a family of prominent musicians, his father was the conductor Fernando Previtali (1907-1985) and his mother the daughter of the conductor Vittoria Gui (1885-1975). He studied art history under Roberto Longhi. He assumed the editorship of Longhi’s magazine, Paragone. In 1961 he was appointed to the University of Messina. In 1964 he published a pioneering study of reception of medieval art, La fortuna dei primitivi dal Vasari ai neoclassici. He followed this with his 1967 Giotto e la sua bottega, a book placing Giotto in the context of his followers. Though he agreed with his other Italian colleagues, Longhi, Pietro Toesca and others that the St. Francis cycle was Giotto’s conception but not his accomplishment, his book framed the question in terms of his specific accomplishment, rather than, as viewed by Richard Offner, a question of “Giotto or non-Giotto” (Castelnuovo). The same year he and Paola della Pergola and Luigi Grassi brought out a nine-volume edition of Varsari’s 1568 edition of the Lives. Previtali contributed to a film on Giotto, adapted and issued in English as “Giotto and the Pre-Renascence [sic],” narrated by Richard Basehart, in 1969. His academic career was followed with teaching positions at Siena and Naples through 1971. By the early 1970s, dissention from the other members of Paragone, also Longhi students, arose regarding whether classical art subjects should be included. In 1975, Previtali and the archaeologist Mauro Cristofani (1941-1997) founded the art journal Prospettiva, open to all areas of art history. In 1976 Previtali wrote an introduction to the Italian translation of the Shape of Time by George Kubler. His interest in historiography continued with an essay in the Einaudi series, Storia dell’arte italiana on “La periodizzazione della storia dell’arte italiana” in 1979. In the 1980s he curated two exhibitions during the years he taught at Siena. These included Gotico a Siena (1982) and Simone Martini. He died at age 54. His periodization essay appeared in an English translation in 1994. Previtali’s main area of scholarship was the Italian Gothic. Articles first in Paragone (1965-1970) and then in Prospettiva (1983-1986) on Gothic Umbrian sculpture were particularly original. La fortuna dei primitivi dal Vasari ai neoclassici traced the changes in attitude toward medieval (“primitives”) from the Renaissance to the eighteenth century. It launched an career interest in art criticism. Previtali’s introduction to the Borea edition of Bellori’s Lives, still the most important study devoted to the scholar, placed him for the first time in a truly historical context. Previtali both located him in the evolution of an aesthetic theory and in his own historical time. His evaluation of the Lives was not on the basis of the Idea, but as a work addressing the relations of power within artistic culture and society in Rome in the seventeenth century. Previtali asserted that “Bellori was a true critic (beset with doubts, like every true critic, to a greater extent than is usually imagined) and at times a great one,” i.e., profoundly sensitive to the values of figurative language. (Montanari). A Marxist politically and somewhat methodologically, he followed Longhi (especially the late Longhi) in addressing large-scale issues and questions of reception (Castelnuovo).
Scritti in ricordo di Giovanni Previtali. 2 vols. Florence: Centro Di, 1990; La pittura del Cinquecento a Napoli e nel vicereame. Turin: G. Einaudi, 1978; “Introduzione.” Kubler, George. La forma del tempo: considerazioni sulla storia delle cose. Turin: Giulio Einaudi, 1976, “Ingtroduzione.” in Borea, Evelina, ed. Bellori, Giovanni Pietro. Le vite de’ pittori, scultori e architetti moderni. Turin: G. Einaudi,1976; L’Arte di scrivere sull’arte: Roberto Longhi nella cultura del nostro tempo. Rome: Editori riuniti, 1982; Early Italian Painting [chiefly a slide collection]. New York: McGraw-Hill 1964; Giotto e la sua bottega. Milan: Fabbri, 1967; La fortuna dei primitivi dal Vasari ai neoclassici. Turin: Einaudi 1964; Studi sulla scultura gotica in Italia : storia e geografia. Turin: G. Einaudi, 1991; and della Pergola, Paola, and Grassi, Luigi, eds. Vasari, Giorgio. Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architettori. 9 vols. Novara,: Istituto geografico De Agostini, 1967; “Periodizzazione della storia dell’arte italiana,”and “Materiali e problemi ,” in Bollati, Giulio, and Fossati, Paoloed, eds. Storia dell’arte italiana. vol. 1, Turin: G. Einaudi, 1979, English, “The Periodization of the History of Italian Art,” in Burke, Peter, ed. History of Italian Art vol. 2, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994, pp. 1-118.
Romano, Giovanni. Storie dell’arte: Toesca, Longhi, Wittkower, Previtali. Rome: Donzelli,1998; Montanari, Tomaso. “Introduction.” Giovan Pietro Bellori: The Lives of the Modern Painters, Sculptors and Architects: A New Translation and Critical Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, p. 3; [obituaries:] Castelnuovo, Enrico. “Giovanni Previtali.” Burlington Magazine 131, no. 1033 (April 1989): 298; “Giovanni Previtali (1934 – 1988).” Prospettiva 53/56 (1988/1989): 7-9; Romano, Giovanni. Storie dell’arte: Toesca, Longhi, Wittkower, Previtali. Rome: Donzelli, 1998.
Italianist, Giotto and Bellori scholar. Previtali came from a family of prominent musicians, his father was the conductor Fernando Previtali (1907-1985) and his mother the daughter of the conductor Vittoria Gui (1885-1975). He studied art history
Full Name: Pressouyre, Léon
Other Names:
Gender: male
Date Born: February 1935
Date Died: 10 August 2009
Place Died: Athens, Region of Attica, Greece
Home Country/ies: France
Subject Area(s): Medieval (European)
Professor of medieval art at the Université de Paris 1; member of the internationalcouncil on monuments and sites, UNESCO (1980-2005). Pressouyre furthered the research of the Châlons-sur-Marne cloister fragments, a discovery orginally made by Willibald Sauerländer.
Un apôtre de Châlons-sur-Marne. Bern: Abegg-Stiftung Bern, 1970; “Histoire de l’art et iconographie.” Actes des congrès de la Société des historiens médiévistes de l’enseignement supérieur public 20 no. 1 1989, pp. 247-268; Saint Bernard & le monde cistercien sous la direction de Léon Pressouyre et Terryl N. Kinder. Paris: Caisse nationale des monuments historiques et des sites, 1992; Utilis est lapis in structura: mélanges offerts à Léon Pressouyre. Paris: Comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques, 2000; La commanderie: institution des ordres militaires dans l’occident médiéval sous la direction d’Anthony Luttrell et Léon Pressouyre. Paris: CTHS. Comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques, 2002; Du Bosphore à l’Adriatique: des photographes français découvrent les monuments des Balkans, 1878-1914. Paris: Monum Ed. du patrimoine, 2009.
[obituary:] Blary, François, et al. Bulletin Monumental 168 no. 2 (2010):131-2.
Professor of medieval art at the Université de Paris 1; member of the internationalcouncil on monuments and sites, UNESCO (1980-2005). Pressouyre furthered the research of the Châlons-sur-Marne cloister fragments, a discovery orginally made by
Full Name: Preimesberger, Rudolf
Gender: male
Date Born: 1936
Home Country/ies: Austria
Subject Area(s): Italian (culture or style)
Institution(s): Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte
Scholar of Bernini at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich. Preimesberger’s work attracted the praise of Otto von Simson.
[transcript] “Otto von Simson, interviewed by Richard Cándida Smith.” Art History Oral Documentation Project. Getty Research Institute, Malibu, CA, p. 82.
Contributors: Lee Sorensen
Scholar of Bernini at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich. Preimesberger’s work attracted the praise of Otto von Simson.
Full Name: Praz, Mario
Other Names:
Gender: male
Date Born: 1896
Date Died: 1982
Place Born: Rome, Lazio, Italy
Place Died: Rome, Lazio, Italy
Home Country/ies: Italy
Subject Area(s): decorative art (art genre)
Career(s): art critics and literary critics
Interdisciplinary arts writer, literary critic and art historian (particularly of decorative arts). Praz was the son of Luciano Praz, a clerk in a bank and Giulia Testa di Marsciano (Praz). He attended the University of Rome, gaining a law degree in 1918. Moving to the University of Florence, he was granted a bachelor of letters degree in 1920. Praz earaned a scholarship and left Italy for England in 1923 to earn his libero docente (Ph.D). He worked at the British Museum, which gained him entrance as a professor of Italian Studies at the University in Liverpool in 1924. He delivered the British Academy annual Italian Lectures in 1928 on Machiavelli. During his tenure in Liverpool, he wrote his most important work for art history, Carne, la morte e il diavolo nella letteratura romantica in 1930 and translated into English as The Romantic Agony 1933. The study was one of the first interdisciplinary ones on the arts to include art history. By tracing the embedded and overt erotic and Sadistic impulses in the Romantic movement through all of the arts: art, literature and music, Praz deftly characterized the interrelation of these themes among the Romantic era. In 1932 he moved to Manchester University, also teaching Italian studies. He married the British subject Vivyan Eyles (b. 1910) in 1934 and returned to Italy the same year to become professor of English Literature at Rome University with the title cattedra di Letteratura inglese alla Sapienza. The couple initially lived on the via Giulia, at the Palazzo Ricci where their home was a meeting point for visitors across Europe. Praz’s 1939 study of baroque art, Studi sul concettismo, showed his knowledge of emblemata and included an important bibliography on the subject. The following year Praz published his volume on Neoclassical taste and art, Gusto neoclassico, another period at its nadir in public opinion. Praz continued to hold his chair at the University of Rome during the Fascist period through World War II and the German occupation. His interest in decorative arts, particularly furniture increased but led to his divorce from Eyles in 1947, she claiming, wryly, that he cared more about his furniture than her. In 1961 he wrote the introduction for Magnificenza di Roma‘s republication of Prianesi’s Vedute. Praz collected furniture and decoration in the Empire and Regency styles, leading to his history of interior design in 1964, La filosofia dell’arredamento. He retired in 1966 emeritus. Among the works Praz translated were text by the art critic/theorist Walter Pater. Praz contributed the essay, “Francesco Pianta’s Bizarre Carvings,” to the 1967 Festschrift of Rudolf Wittkower. In 1969 Praz moved from his Ricci palace home to the third floor of the Primoli palace, near the Piazza Navona, where he spent his final years. In 1967 he delivered the A. W. Mellon lectures at the National Gallery of Art, Washgington, D. C., which were published in 1970 as Mnesomyne: the Parallel Between Literature and the Visual Arts. In 1976 he authored a volume on the complete works of the sculptor Anontio Canova. Praz died in Rome in 1982. His Palazzo Primoli home was opened to the public in as a museum in 1995. A monograph on Canova remains untranslated. Most of Praz’s publications discussed Romantic and Neo-classical art and literature. The Romantic Agony analyzes the erotic details in the works of Baudelaire, Sade, Flaubert, and Wilde. As an art historian, also wrote a catalog of his personal decorative arts collection arranged as an autobiography, entitled, La casa della vita. The catalog describes objects in Praz’s home, accompanied by personal anecdotes that give the reader intimate insight into the life of a collector. Praz was largely responsible for the excellent translations into Italian for English-language writers, including Pater. Among American literary critics, Edmund Wilson (1895-1972) was a strong exponent, who characterized Praz’s autobiography House of Life as a masterpiece. The art historian and literary critic Wylie Sypher also praised Praz’s literary work.
[bibliography to 1966:] “A Bibliography of the Published Writings of Mario Praz.” in, Gabrieli, Vittorio, ed. Friendship’s Garland: Essays Presented to Mario Praz on his Seventieth Birthday. Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1966 vol. 1, pp. xxvii-clvii; Carne, la morte e il diavolo nella letteratura romantica. Milan/Rome: Societé editrice “La Cultura,” 1930, English, The Romantic Agony. London: Oxford University Press, 1933; Studi sul concettismo. Florence: G. C. Sansoni, 1946, English, Studies in Seventeenth-Century Imagery. 2 vols. London: The Warburg Institute, 1939-1947 [revised ed., 1964-74], supplement, and Sayles, Hilary M. J. Studies in Seventeenth-Century Imagery, part II. Rome: Ed. di Storia e Letteratura, 1974; “Introduction.” Piranesi, Giovanni Battista. Magnificenza di Roma. Rome: Edizione Il Polifilo, 1961, English, The Magnificence of Rome. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1962; La filosofia dell’arredamento: i mutamenti nel gusto della decorazione interna attraverso i secoli dall’antica Roma ai nostri tempi. Milan: Longanesi 1964, English, An Illustrated History of Interior Decoration, from Pompeii to Art Nouveau. London: Thames and Hudson, 1964; Mnemosyne: the Parallel Between Literature and the Visual Arts. A. W. Mellon Lectures, 1967. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970; An Illustrated History of Furnishing, from the Renaissance to the 20th Century. New York: G. Braziller, 1964; “Francesco Pianta’s Bizarre Carvings,” in Essays in the History of Art Presented to Rudolf Wittkower. volume 2. London, Phaidon, 1967; Scene di conversazione: Conversation Pieces. Rome: U. Bozzi, 1971, English, Conversation Pieces: a Survey of the Informal Group Portrait in Europe and America. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press,1971; Gusto neoclassico. Florence: G .C. Sansoni, 1940, On Neoclassicism. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1969; L’opera completa del Canova. Milan: Rizzoli, 1976.
Praz. Mario. La casa della vita. Milan: A. Mondadori, 1958, English, The House of Life. London: Oxford University Press, 1964; [obituaries:] New York Times, April 8, 1982, p. 12; “Professor Mario Praz, Outstanding Italian Interpreter of English Life and Letters.” The Times (London) March 26, 1982, p. 10.
Interdisciplinary arts writer, literary critic and art historian (particularly of decorative arts). Praz was the son of Luciano Praz, a clerk in a bank and Giulia Testa di Marsciano (Praz). He attended the University of Rome, gaining a law degree