Mario Praz - Design Writings

Design Writings

Mario Praz has made a severe impact not only to the writings of interior design and decoration but also to the history, and the upkeep of this field of design. The work, An Illustrated History of Interior Decoration from Pompeii to Art Nouveau has allowed the creation of a photographic album to be made, “Praz’s rediscovery of this minor but fascinating art . . . was a revelation, and the historic no less than aesthetic importance of the subject is now recognised by a group of informed collectors”. His work “provides a selection of visual representations of domesticity from ancient Greece through to the Art Nouveau, and a commentary upon them.” The images show the interior decor and design of Greek, Roman, Medieval, Renaissance and Victorian Homes in Europe between the period of 1770 and 1860. The sketches, paintings, and watercolour representations capture the spatial qualities and features of the interiority and decoration of the overall space. The images record accuracy to the shape of the room, from the carpet, to the furniture, pictures, fabrics, wall colour, the hang of curtains and the placement of light. Mario Praz’s work has documented all these interior characteristics that would have shaped the space for the inhabiters in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This work has had a strong contribution to the impact of not only researching the interiority of a space, but provided a new groundwork into recording a history of an interior.

Further, Praz has made an influential impact on the way interior design has been studied and documented since the mid twentieth century. He helped foster the change in the growth of historical design studies and research. His work, An Illustrated History of Interior Decoration, “merges a traditional art-historical approach with philosophical musings about the role of interior assemblage”. Praz was one of the first critics to look into the links between the contexts of art history, and link it to the interior workings of a space. He was one of the first designers to note that furnishings were a representation of the individual. This is shown in this writing as he states “furnishings are tangible artefacts of social history”. The concept about the need of furnishing is addressed in the initial states of this publication. Praz sees the house and its interiority as “a continuum, which is always in need of furnishing”. Through the grounding of this concept “Praz takes the idea of the inhabiting subject, and the interior and its decoration, as pre-given concepts for the construction of this history, not ones that have emerged out of particular historical conditions”, thus meaning that the furniture, the home and the interior all act as a “representational evocation” of the individual that resides in the home, reflecting the “character or the personality of the occupant”. Ultimately, Praz challenges the concept of interior design and decoration, highlighting how the individual completely influences how the layout and decoration of their house will be presented. The concept that the interior is a personal reflection of the individual is personally manifested in his spatial autobiography The House of Life. The concepts and documentation style that was presented in An Illustrated History of Interior Decoration have been continued and challenged through later design writings by other critics and historians.

The House of Life is the easiest way to understand the concept of the interior representing the individual. Praz’s work allows audiences to delve into the personal interior scope of Mario Praz’s apartment by providing a “room by room description, of (the) flat in Rome in which (Praz) lived for thirty years”. The thorough recount of the interiority of this space “shows the apartment (in a manner of a television program), providing autobiographical accounts of associations with furnishings”. This autobiographical recount chronicles architecture and orchestrates the interior, giving the reader a full account of his home and “offering us the chance to follow the true routes of privacy, and to recreate the Professor’s universe, reduced to the dimensions of the human eye.” His writing provides an insight into firstly how he accesses the space in which he lives, and how he inhabits that space. The House of Life basically mimics the writing style of An Illustrated History. This detailed recount and writing style has been mimicked in future design writing, in order to document every aspect of the interiority of a space.

The concept of horror vacui in art is associated with Praz who used the term to refer to cluttered visual interior design.