The game of antique dealers with time according to Mario Praz

Every time I receive a publication, however minor and secondary, by Mario Praz or about him, I always feel a precise and immediate joy. I had followed his English literature lessons for a while when I was a student at La Sapienza, but then I dropped out to attend the German literature course. I was quite Germanocentric then, even though I had just started learning the language. But then in the seventies, thanks to a growing attraction for Auden, Orwell and Edmund Wilson, I moved away from the German intellectual climate and began to think that German philosophy, with its abstractions and slang, had made Italian culture more harm than good. It occurred to me to visit Praz, but after putting it off out of shyness or laziness, in 1982 I learned that he was dead. But ever since then, after Giacomo Debenedetti, from whom I had my degree thesis, Praz has become the Italian critic I read most willingly. Much better his passionate “dilettantism” and his nonfiction wanderings in the spaces and eras of culturerather than the haughty professionalism of Gianfranco Contini, a critic for university students.

The publisher Nino Aragno has just published a small book that seems put together as an inviting hors-d’oeuvre to Praz’s work and his biography: “Omelette soufflée à l’antiquaire. In praise of antique dealers” (74 pp., 15 euros). The libretto contains two texts by Praz on the subject, and in the appendix a portrait due to Giovanni Balducci, who di Praz points out the “irreducible freedom” and the “brilliant stuff” of which his non-fiction writing is made. Two interviews follow, a broader one by Fausto Gianfranceschi and a shorter one by Franco Simongini, published in the newspaper Il Tempo in 1976 and 1979.

According to Praz, the two things antique dealers do are “make the old new” and “make the new old”. It is a speculative game, in both senses, with time, a game that transfigures, eludes or violates the linearity usually attributed to history. The antiquarian mind and mentality cannot bear that time passes and induces oblivion, nor are they able to accept that the objects that populate our present have value only in the present: and for this reason they imagine and stage them as belonging right now to that past which sooner or later will make them both disappear and be preserved at the same time.

I wonder why I feel good in Praz’s company every time I read his never perfect prose, but written as it was written “once”. I don’t understand antique dealers, I don’t admire them and I don’t frequent them as he did. But it is precisely their living in another world and in a plurality of distant worlds that I find attractive. It is their living in a colourful, precious, fabulous elsewhere thanks to the objects that returning from the past enrich or simply change our present a little. The “trade in art”, with its poetic and adventurous aura, excites the imagination and makes us dream of the existence of hidden treasures that for decades or centuries have been waiting for us to discover and save them.

Books such as “The House of Life” (1958) and “The Philosophy of Furnishing” (1945) are real worlds in which the reader gets lost, finds himself and gets lost again. Strange that in the interviews Praz, who seems to have lived not once but many times, says he doesn’t have much memory. Will it be true? How is a scholar, an antiquarian, a philologist with a poor memory possible? It must be a fluctuating memory, which loses and finds again. There can be no adventure and discovery except in those who seek, not to find, but to rediscover. Praz’s memory goes from twilight to dawn: “Someone thinks I have a great memory, but it’s not true. By heart I know little more than the first verses of the ‘Divine Comedy’”. And then: “Everything was born from a curious flash: and here my quality as a writer rather than a scientific critic is manifested”. This is why Praz has never tolerated being called a “professor”, “a boring qualification”.