The great malastruc critic: Mario Praz

Mario Praz (Rome, 1896-1982) was essentially a sage. His specialty was the fine arts - neoclassical taste, the 1600s and the Baroque in England - but also romantic and late-century literature, as shown in this opulent book, Flesh, Death and the Devil in Romantic Literature.

Praz had the good fortune to befriend the sophisticated and rare English colony living in Florence before the Second World War, and especially the unique lesbian and wise writer and art critic Vernon Lee, who facilitate stays and studies in Great Britain. This suggestive British ghetto is reflected (albeit without sex, which is a shame) in the film Un te amb Mussolini, by Franco Zeffirelli. Also the final Mario Praz, lonely and melancholic, who lived in a palace with paintings and neoclassical furniture, inspires the professor in Visconti's work Portrait of a family in interior (1974), an image - very elegant - that displeased the professor.

I met (1979) the old Praz in Rome thanks to the poet Maria Luisa Spaziani, who wrote about La casa de la vida, one of Praz's remarkable books, mixing art and biography. I was lucky that Praz showed me part of the palace, almost all covered with white sheets, because the service steals (naturally) but does not know where he sells the pieces. Praz told me it was awkward - it could knock over a lamp or damage the elevator - and he liked it when I said I didn't care.

We are talking about the excellence of Baroque art - recalled the Cartois of Granada - and about the end of centuries, beautiful and poisonous. He was an old man in a beret, of old-fashioned elegance, conservative by distinction and hatred (or contempt) for the "modern". By reading Antoine Compagnon, I learned that it was all in Praz, who in his Journey to Greece, before the War, dared to say that this modern Greece was poor and ugly. Mario remains pivotal.