Mario Praz: Mnemosyne: The Parallel Between Literature and the Visual Arts (1970–) [English, Spanish]

In his search for the common link between literature and the visual arts, Professor Praz draws upon the abundant evidence of long mutual understanding and correspondence be­tween the sister arts. Although parallels of theme and inspiration are plentiful, he is not primarily concerned with these. Rather, he examines the close relationship or air de famille between the expression of the arts in any given epoch.

Each epoch has “its peculiar handwriting or handwritings, which, if one could interpret them, would reveal a character, even a physi­cal appearance.” Although handwriting is taught and some of its characteristics thus belong to the general style of the period, the personality of the writer does not fail to pierce through. Something of the same sort, the au­thor proposes, occurs in art. The kinship of literature and painting rests on this circum­stance: a work of art, whether visual or liter­ary, must use the distinctive “handwriting” of its particular age, even as its originality pierces through this handwriting.

The likeness between the arts within various periods of history can ultimately be traced, then, to structural similarities — similarities that arise out of the characteristic way in which the people of a certain epoch see and memorize facts aesthetically. Mnemosyne, at once the goddess of memory and the mother of the muses, therefore presides over this view of the arts. In illustrating her influence, Professor Praz ranges widely through Western sources, both literary and pictorial. (from the dust jacket)

The A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, 1967
Publisher Princeton University Press, 1970
Bollingen Series XXXV, 16
ISBN 9780691098579
261 pages

Review (E.H. Gombrich, 1972)
Review (D.C., Spenser Newsletter, page 3, 1971)
Review (in Japanese)

Publisher (EN)

Mnemosyne: The Parallel between Literature and the Visual Arts (English, 1970)
Mnemosyne: El paralelismo entre la literatura y las artes visuales (Spanish, trans. Ricardo Pochtar, 1979, no OCR, via Daniel Ferreira)