“Word and Image: A Comparison between two Languages”

The essay probes into Mario Praz’s role as a theorist of the Sister Arts firstly through his study on emblems, devices and topoi and, later in his career, through his volume Mnemosyne (1970), an unexpectedly formalist and structuralist text in its own way, for it did not obliterate the historical and cultural dimensions. The essay also testifies to Praz’s interactions with major twentieth-century philosophers and critics – Croce, Warburg, Curtius, Wellek, Propp – and his concurrent capacity to elaborate a distinctly personal vision, often against the grain.