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An illustrated history of furnishing, from the Renaissance to the 20th century (1964)

by Mario Praz

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An Illustrated History of Furnishing from the Renaissance to the 20th Century—is in a sense an extension of The House of Life. In 1945, Praz published a little book called—after Poe’s The Philosophy of Furniture—La Filosofia dell’ Arredamento. This essay has now been revised and enlarged, and it appears as the introduction to the Illustrated History of Furnishing, a book of four hundred illustrations—sixty-three pages in color—with a commentary by Praz.

One could hardly do justice to this book by attempting to cover its contents. One can only explain that it is an enormous collection of paintings, drawings and engravings of all kinds of rooms in all kinds of dwellings, from royal palaces to taverns, collected from all over Europe as well as from Russia and America. There are usually people in these rooms, so the book is a history of social life as well as a history of furnishing. I have found it inexhaustibly interesting. It provides such a variety of entertainment that one cannot take it in by merely setting out to go through it. One should have it around on the table and give it an hour from time to time. It is, in any case, a wonderful volume that nobody but Praz would have undertaken.
added by SnootyBaronet | editNew Yorker, Edmund Wilson
 
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Our forefathers in the past (and in the present century, a few idlers in provincial cities, before war violated even the most remote places) used to spend their hours of leisure in pastimes as delightful as they were useless; and among these self-imposed tasks none perhaps was ever so singularly vain and pompous as the practice of writing didactic verses.
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A venerated master of mine at the University of Florence used to say, from his lectern, many learned things about the Provencal poets. I hung on his every word. But it was a grim day when I first crossed the threshhold of his house. As soon as the door was opened, I was confronted by a loathsome oleograph of a Neapolitan shepherdess (that same oleograph used to urn up often in the shops where unclaimed objects from the state pawnshop, the Monte di Pieta, are sold). The shepherdess, shading her eyes with her hand, affected a simpering smile, while Vesuvius smoked in the background.
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