The House of Life and the Memory Palace: Some Thoughts on the Historiography of Interiors

Edward Hollis
Edward Hollis practiced as an architect until 1999, when he started lecturing in Interior Architecture at Napier University, moving in 2004 to Edinburgh College of Art, where he now runs the department of Interior Design. He is secretary of the Interiors Forum Scotland that has successfully organized two conferences devoted to interiors: Thinking inside the Box (2007) and Interior Tools Interior Tactics (2008). Architectural alteration has been the main subject of his own research and his first book, The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories, was published in 2009.

Interiors Volume 1, Issue 12 pp 105118

Reprints available directly from the publishers Photocopying permitted by license only Berg 2010 Printed in the UK

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ABSTRACT Interiors evade the neat taxonomies of style and narratives of progress that have traditionally dominated the history of art and architecture. Interiors are temporary arrangements: the meeting places of building, lining, furnishing, and occupation. The historic interior is never a complete, unitary artifact, and the history of interiors possesses no fixed canon. The historic interior may only ever be apprehended through traces and secondary sources. Once an interior has passed away, its constituent elements are incorporated into other interiors; and all interiors, are, to some degree or another, made out of the remnants of others; and this means that the history of the interior can never enjoy the linear clarity of the histories of architecture or product design, which involve to a large part the creation of

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new artifacts. This article explores the vanished interiors of one palace through the lens of another. The first is The House of Life, an apartment in Rome dwelt in by the writer Mario Praz, which became the subject and the pretext of his autobiography (The House of Life Methuen, 1964). The second is the Memory Palace, the classical rhetorical device explored by Frances Yates in The Art of Memory (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966). This ramble through the House of Life as a Memory Palace will be used to consider the structure for a possible history of interiors that, on the one hand, possesses something of the narrative coherence of traditional history, and, on the other, responds to the protean nature of the interior.
KEYWORDS: decoration, design, architecture, historiography, memory

Space Time and Architecture: A Simple Problem with the History of the Interior
This article explores two interiors: one confected from the subdivided rooms of a sixteenth-century palace in Rome, a host of nineteenthcentury antiques, and a book published in 1958; the other repeatedly imagined by poets, orators, divines, and occultists from ancient times until the seventeenth century. This exploration takes place in the processors of a laptop manufactured in 2008. The laptop is sitting on a vaguely Mackintosh-esque table, which must have been made in the 1920s and that I inherited in 2005 from an aged aunt who lived on the Isle of Wight. I am sitting on a matching chair, one of three that still survive from the original set of eight. The curtains in the window were made by my mother in 2006, and they mask tilt-and-turn windows that were put into the building, I guess, in the 1980s. The room and the flat in which I am sitting was built in the early 1960s as council housing. I stripped the wallpaper and sanded the floors in 2006. On the walls, which I did not repaint, you can still see the pencil marks used by the builders to set out their work forty years ago. Outside the window, dominating the room, is the skyline of Edinburgh, which has changed little since the early nineteenth century. On the television, placed in front of the blocked fireplace, Jordans lover, cage fighter Alex Reid, is being ushered into the Big Brother house, which has been dressed up as Hell for the occasion. The television rests on a battered chest whose faded Victorian typeface is more or less illegible. The interior I inhabit as I write will be familiar to many of us, who live amid a similar jumble; but it is the sort of interior strangely absent from the history of interiors. Go to any museum, read most traditional histories of the interior, and you will find yourself walking through

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room after room, that take the visitor from century to century, from medieval hovel to loft apartment. In each of them, architecture, linings, furnishings, and an implied occupation all share what has traditionally been called a period, be it Louis XIV, Rococo, Regency, and so on. Such taxonomies of style, such narratives of progress, are ultimately derived from histories of art and architecture, which, at least since the Renaissance invention of the Gothic, have subscribed to the notion of art history as a story of stylistic development. In the introduction to his A History of Interior Design written as late as 2000, John Pile justifies the use of architectural categories of style by the fact that interiors are contained by architecture. The architectural spaces illustrated in his book possess little of the styleless clutter that characterizes so many of the interiors we actually inhabit. It has ever been thus. Homes Sweet Homes, published in 1939 by the cartoonist and designer Osbert Lancaster is, despite its modest and humorous intentions, something of a classic of the history of interiors. It is a slim volume, each page of which contains a satirical cartoon of a particular period of English interior design. True to the narrative structure of traditional interior histories, architecture, linings, furnishings, and people all correspond to that period to the exclusion of all others. In one image Norman knights feast at a rustic table in a great hall whose round-headed windows echo their pudding-bowl haircuts. In another, the raised eyebrow of an eighteenth-century courtesan matches precisely the rocaille paneling of her boudoir as well as all of her furniture. The melting expression of an art nouveau beauty is so styled as to be indistinguishable from the decor that surrounds her. But Lancaster was well aware of the ironies of this position, for while interiors are generally contained by architecture, they are not exactly the same thing, and may not be so neatly slotted into a progressive narrative of history. His period pieces of the twentieth century are anachronistically entitled: Vogue Regency, Curzon Street Baroque, and Stockbroker Tudor, and are as full of ersatz objects out of period with their stage-set-like decor as their titles might suggest. In a paired set of images entitled reconstruction Lancaster draws the same old lady sitting on a chair in what is evidently the same room. Nothing about the architectural disposition of the space has changed. However, everything else has. The room in the top image entitled ordinary cottage is filled with knick-knacks, every surface is patterned, the window is swathed in upholstery, and the old lady warms her toes at a roaring fire. In the lower image that fire has been replaced with a ventilator, the window freed of its textile infestation, the surfaces cleared of ornament, and the space of bibelots. Both of these images were drawn at the same time; and were drawn of the same time, for, as Lancaster was keen to point out,

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the ordinary cottage was quite as much of the interior landscape of the mid-twentieth century as was its modernized counterpart, even though it was filled with the detritus of earlier periods, and was therefore not truly modern. Lancasters drawings raise, and attempt to answer, a simple but important historical question. If the history of interiors is a story about the development of style that responds to and express different periods, then how do the vanished interiors of the past ever leave traces behind them? How did medieval furniture survive through the Renaissance? How did all those Chippendale chairs and all that Georgian paneling outlive the hideous heights of the Victorian Gothic revival? Why and how was there an antiques craze in the 1980s? How, indeed, do we know about the history of interiors at all? The answer lies in Osbert Lancasters ironized, unmodern modern interiors, and in rooms like the one in which I am sitting: a room in an out-of-date building, populated with unfashionable furniture, and inherited artifacts to which I am too sentimentally attached to throw away. Such rooms assemblages of elements collected from many times and places evade the taxonomies of style and the linear narratives of traditional art history. Indeed, it is foolish perhaps, to include them in the history of design at all. However, it is the quixotic purpose of this article to explore their narratives and to propose an approach to the structure of their history.

The House of Life

Mario Praz was a literary critic by profession a particular lover of the English Romantics, but he nursed a private passion for neoclassical interiors, and was an inveterate collector of the furniture and applied arts of the early nineteenth century. His classic Illustrated History of Interior Decoration was published in 1964, and in the introduction, Praz betrays a romantic predilection to treat the external world as the mirror of the individual soul: It has been said that just as the body according to the Swedenborgian philosophy is nothing but the projection, the expansion of the soul, so for the soul, the house where it lives is nothing but an expansion of its own body . . . the surroundings become a museum of the soul, an archive of its experiences; it reads in them its own history, and is perennially conscious of itself . . . (Praz 1964b: 1920) For Praz, the art of the interior was essentially the art of the decorator the collector and the arranger of objects in space in order to create, to simulate, and to appropriate memories. As he was writing his history, Praz also took the opportunity to test out this approach to interiors and souls by experimenting on himself. His autobiography, published in Italian in 1958, was entitled

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La Casa Della Vita, and translated into English as The House of Life in 1964. The narrative structure of The House of Life is provided by the apartment in which Praz wrote it. Praz moved into his first-floor apartment in the Palazzo Ricci on the Via Giulia in Rome in 1934, and in the subsequent years he filled it with an ever-growing collection of treasures. The chapters of the book form a stroll through the apartment from the Villa Giulia through the entrance hall, the dining room, the bedroom overlooking the Piazza Ricci, the anteroom, Lucias (his daughters) bedroom, the drawing room, and ultimately the boudoir. As we stroll with the writer, our gaze is directed to various precious objects which are described, and which also open the narrative up to various episodes in Prazs life. For instance, the author remarks on an embroidery in the entrance hall. The coat of arms of my mothers family, the Di Marsciano, lovingly embroidered by her, that hangs on another wall of this entrance hall, reminds me of another devastation. The remark, casual as it seems, triggers all sorts of level of memory. His mother, embroidering, is brought to mind, as is, the ancient lineage of her family. The devastation mentioned refers to the appropriation of the family home by American soldiers during the Second World War. Praz recalls that they took potshots at the stone escutcheon over the gateposts, and destroyed the stone eagle carved upon it (Praz 1964a: 26). Thus, in the contemplation of one object in one room, a person (mother), a dynasty (her family), an activity (embroidery), an event (the American potshot), and a place (the family home) spring to mind. This autobiographical stroll (snoop? rummage?) finishes in front of a mirror in the boudoir with these words: The person who looks into a mirror is myself, and this book that I have written is like a conspectus, in a convex mirror, of a life and of a house: and when I reflect that Giovanni Bellinis allegory is vanity who gazes at herself in a convex mirror, am I to conclude that what you now have before you is merely the monument of an unparalleled vanity? I would say rather that, at the end of this journey, which, like the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili is a pedantic description of objects and a vain pursuit of the phantom of a Polia, an ideal woman indistinctly described, in various semblances, in the course of the years, I see myself as having become an object and an imagined museum piece among museum pieces, already detached and remote, and that, like Adam in the graffito on the marble floor of the church of San Domenico in Siena, I have looked at myself in a convex mirror, and have seen myself as no bigger than a handful of dust. (Praz 1964a: 350)

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For, through the agency of his book, Praz has become the living embodiment of his house, just as it has become the reification of his personal history. Each one recalls the other.

The Memory Palace as the Analog of the Interior

Frances Yatess The Art of Memory was published soon after The House of Life in 1966. It begins, like all classical treatises on the art, with the same story. One night the poet Simonides was invited to dine at the house of the famous boxer Scopas. Halfway through dinner, Simonides was summoned outside and, as he stepped through the door, the hall collapsed behind him. So complete was the wreckage that no one could identify the bodies of those who had died inside. No one, that is, except for Simonides, who, having committed the place of every guest at the table to his memory, was able to reunite grieving relatives with the remains of their loved ones. Simonides, Yates tells us, was credited by all subsequent classical writers on the subject with the invention of the art of memory, which has at its heart a very simple principle. Simonides had been able to remember the names of the dead guests because he remembered where they had been sitting. The poets and orators of antiquity, who had to remember long passages of speech, believed that they could remember them better by assigning reminders imagines of small parts of them to imaginary places loci. When the time came to recite the poem, or to make the speech, the speaker would take an imaginary stroll from locus to locus, being reminded of what to say in both in easily digestible chunks, and in the correct order. The anonymous author of a letter written in the time of the late Roman Republic, Ad Herennium, and the orators Cicero and Quintilian were among those who developed the technique in their treatises on rhetoric the art of public speaking from memory and the way they wrote about it suggests that the art of memory was in common usage in the classical period. They called their constellations of imagines and loci memory palaces, and recommended that orators base them on real palaces and places that they had visited. The design of such palaces was precisely prescribed. Colonnades, for example, were not to be recommended in memory palaces because the loci between the columns were too repetitive to stimulate specific memories. Locations should be peaceful, and should respond to the scale of the human body. The treatise Ad Herennium offers a typical piece of advice: . . . backgrounds differing in form and nature must be secured, so that, thus distinguished, they may be clearly visible . . . And these backgrounds ought to be of moderate size and medium extent . . . [they] ought to be neither too bright nor too dim, so that the shadows may not obscure the images nor the lustre make them glitter. (Ad Herennium 1954)

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Yates herself, a historian of ideas rather than of design, does not draw the parallel, but such advice could almost come from some treatise on interior design, and, indeed, it is the contention of this article that the memory palace and the interior are analogs for one another. Prazs The House of Life is one such memory palace: a series of loci in which imagines call to mind a lifetime of stories, a personal epic as complex and engaging as that of any classical poet.

The Life of The House of Life

The memory palace was imaginary, of course, and once the speech or the story it had been designed to recall was over, it was emptied of its contents. The orators of antiquity would then ready their memory palaces for new occupants: devising new rooms, and colonnades as a new narrative structure required, seeking out new imagines to stimulate new memories. And in this way the old memory palace would have changed into a new one, ready to stimulate the mind to tell a new story. Like a folk tale, handed down by oral tradition, like a historic building, preserved and altered by each iteration of transmission, the memory palace evolved in the mind of the orator in response to evolving circumstances. The House of Life was a memory palace, and, like its antique analogs, it has passed away. Praz left his apartment in the Palazzo Ricci on the Via Giulia in 1969, and moved, with his collection, to the third floor of the Palazzo Primoli in the nearby Piazza Navona. There he died in 1988. In 1995, that apartment was turned into a museum: a memory palace whose function is to remember another. The interiors of The House of Life ceased to exist, then, in 1969, thirty-five years after they had been brought into existence. The architecture of the apartments remained where it was, of course, but it became an empty shell, ready to receive and to be altered by another occupant. Prazs collection, liberated from its carapace, was rearranged in response to another one. The inhabitant of whose soul The House of Life was but a projection has become, in his own words a handful of dust (Praz 1964a: 350). The constituent parts of The House of Life may still exist, but they do so in an altered state. Not that they had ever been otherwise: Mario Praz had not been the first to alter the first floor of the Palazzo Ricci to suit his own ends. Of the entrance hallway he observed: The monumental travertine doorframe tells you that this was once the external, not the internal adornment of an entrance way. There must have been a loggia here . . . (Praz 1964a: 23) And he proceeds to describe how the once magnificent piano nobile of the palace had already suffered from countless subdivisions as the noble family that once occupied it altered their palace to suit their ever-straitening economic and social circumstances.
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And just as all the treasures that filled the house were removed elsewhere in 1969, so once they had also been taken from other places. For instance, in that same altered hallway, a neoclassical statue of Cupid by the Danish sculptor Thorvaldsen stood in front of an English Regency bookcase, the booty of Prazs numerous peregrinations between Rome and London. Opposite them both is an eighteenth-century painting of the return of the Duke of Calabria to Palermo. None of these things had been designed to stand in the blocked up loggia of the Palazzo Ricci, lit by an incandescent light bulb, and they occupied (and still occupy) worlds that their creators could not have imagined. Like all interiors, The House of Life was a temporary arrangement, a matter of decades rather than centuries. Since the end of its life, every aspect of Prazs apartment has been altered: demolished, destroyed, decorated, repainted, repaired, removed. But before the beginning of its life, all these things had also already happened, probably many times over. The House of Life was itself an altered state. In her seminal text The Decoration of Houses, published in 1898, Edith Wharton reminds us that the domestic interior was, in origin a portable, temporary affair a perpetually altering and altered state (Wharton and Codman 2007). As the large aristocratic households of the late Middle Ages moved from residence to residence, literally eating their tenants and retainers out of house and home, they carried all their belongings with them. In the time of Henry VIII, the Duke of Norfolk would even take his windows with him: the glass in them was so precious he could only afford one set. He would arrive at some castle or other, his servants would get to work, and soon enough, a bare shell would have been transformed into a rich and luxurious habitation. When the Duke left, his interiors would disappear along with him.This ephemeral sensibility is preserved in the words we use to describe the interior. The difference between immobile architecture and mobile furnishings is preserved in the French distinction between immeubles (dwellings) and meubles (furnishings), and in the verbs turned nouns like hangings (hung) and ceilings (with which temporary spaces were provided with a ciel an artificial sky). In Authentic Dcor: The Domestic Interior 16201920, Peter Thornton (1984) explores the notion further, and suggests that the heavily lined and paneled interiors of the French ancien rgime represent the settling down of such mobile households. But, even in these interiors, most furniture (with the exception of the shrine-like state bed) was still mobile: chairs and tables were placed against walls, and only brought out by servants when they were required. Only in the nineteenth century did furniture move out into the middle of the room; and when it did, visitors were initially shocked to find rooms in a disarray they imagined had been left by servants too lazy to return chairs and tables to their proper places against the walls. It was only later that furniture actually began to build itself into walls,

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achieving the total fixed interiors of the early twentieth century, which represent the complete integration, for good or ill, of all the elements of the interior with architecture. Each of these interior sensibilities represents a development not in the creation of new objects, linings, or buildings per se (although changed circumstances did provoke such changes). Rather, they represent developments in the relationships between the elements of the interior, between buildings, and linings, and furnishings. In her paper Towards an Interior History Susie Attiwill writes, Interior design histories have also ignored temporality in the design of interiors through a focus on objects and built space as static form (2008: 6). And she suggests that the interior need not only be imagined as one thing, or many things, but also as a set of relationships between things that exists in time. It is tempting, then, to reimagine the history of the interior as the story of a changing set of relations, rather than as the stylistic taxonomy of things. The consequences are provocative. The curator of period interiors could, for example, make a nineteenth-century interior using only Louis XIV furnishings, or a medieval one using modernist meubles and immeubles. All that would be necessary would be to place these elements into the correct relationships with one another in space and time. It is an idea that takes one some way towards solving the historiographic problems posed by Osbert Lancasters (1939) Stockbroker Tudor and the ordinary cottage. In these respects the interior is a contingent structure of places and objects: loci and imagines. It is a memory palace, momentarily reified, ready to tell a story.

Memories of the Memory Palace

If every interior is a temporarily assembled memory palace, and every memory palace a storytelling device, then every interior tells a story. Walter Benjamin wrote: To inhabit means to leave traces (quoted in Praz 1964b: 25) and at its simplest, the story told by any interior is of course the story of its inhabitants. As Praz writes in the introduction to his Illustrated History of Interior Decoration: The surroundings become a museum of the soul, an archive of its own experiences . . . the resonance chamber where its strings register their most authentic vibration (Praz 1964b: 20). Such a point of view satisfies the writers desire to identify himself with his surroundings; but it takes no account of the temporal aspect: of the interior as an altered state and as the seed of many more. As we have already observed, Prazs The House of Life was the temporary occupation of a sixteenth-century palace in one of the oldest cities in the world. This occupation was achieved through the arrangement of countless precious objects that were already hundreds of years old before they entered the house, and which had been designed for other places, other interiors. The story of The House of Life is not only about Mario Praz, but also about all

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the others who at many different times and in many different places, held a stake in its constituent parts. These might include the scions of the house of Ricci who built the palace; the nameless nineteenthcentury painters, craftsmen, and artists who created the objects with which it is inhabited. They might include the others who rented the apartment before Praz did, and made their own alterations, and the many people who bought, owned, sold, broke, and mended the treasures that found their winding ways into his rooms. In the hallway of The House of Life there stood a malachite basin that was used as a planter for ferns. Praz wrote of it: I have been told that similar malachite flowerstands once adorned one of the Youssupov abodes, and I like to think that this object is Russian because I have a weakness that cannot very easily be explained for Russian objects of the Empire Period. (Praz 1964a: 24) For in the objects he collected, he wished not only to be reminded of other lives, but of other interiors. One day, he must have been well aware, his own interiors would be those recalled in absentia. The House of Life, now vanished, leaves traces of its own. One is in the denuded, reoccupied architecture that once enclosed it. Others lie in and the assorted objects that once filled it. The book in which they are so minutely recorded is a third. The complex story of The House of Life extends Benjamins famous dictum. For it is not only lives lived, but also the physical traces they leave behind them which themselves leave traces of their own. Housed in new interiors, the fragments of old ones become imagines moved into loci within a new memory palace. Each object or fragment placed in the new memory palace is a device to recall others; and this means that interiors, populated with the fragments of their vanished predecessors, are strangely reflexive artifacts. If the purpose, or at least the narrative structure, of any memory palace is a story or an argument, then the story told by any interior includes, consequently, stories about other interiors. In some cases this is entirely deliberate, and fairly straightforward. The Mario Praz museum in the Palazzo Primoli is an interior designed to stimulate memories of the lost House of Life in the Palazzo Ricci. Sometimes interiors are memory palaces that play more complex games with time, and, indeed, tricks on the memory. Charles Rices consideration of Sigmund Freuds study in The Emergence of the Interior (Rice 2007) explores the strange traces that that seminal interior has left behind it. There are, in fact, three remembered interiors of Sigmund Freuds famous consulting room. The most immediately tangible of these three is the room in the house in Hampstead to which Freud moved after fleeing Vienna in 1938. There, enshrined in reverent gloom, lies the famous couch, awaiting, so it seems, a subject, the chair arranged at the head so as

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to make the doctor himself invisible. There is the desk, and arrayed upon it, Freuds collection of ancient idols and fetishes. And somewhere in the room hang photographs that, almost like a mirror, depict the same room. Almost like a mirror, but not quite, for there are significant differences between the room depicted in the photographs and the room in which they are displayed. These photographs were in fact taken by Edmund Engelman in Vienna in 1938, just before the interior of Freuds study was dismantled and shipped to London. They are also hung on the bare walls of those original rooms in Vienna. Ironically, of the three traces of that lost interior, this original one, devoid of the dark profusion of objects and furnishings, is the least compelling. Freuds study and consulting room are misremembered, then, in a hall of mirrors dreamlike, fragmentary simulacra, none of which is capable of fully realizing the experience of the original. And that is to gloss over the memories suppressed and transformed, and the provenance and the origins of all the strange objects with which the room was filled, from the turkey carpet to the miniature deities lifted from those most permanent and original of interiors, Egyptian tombs. One day, like those tombs, the contents of Freuds tomblike study will also be dispersed, and find homes in other interiors not yet existent. Imagines ensconced in new loci, they will be used to construct, and perhaps, as they were used by Freud, to deconstruct new memories.

Telling the Story of the Interior

Interiors are, of their nature, historical devices: momentary memory palaces that narrate their own stories and those of their antecedents. Mario Prazs The House of Life was one such memory palace, a narrative game played in and with time, as well as space. It was confected from the defunct salons of a sixteenth-century palace and an ever-changing collection of objects made in the early nineteenth century; but the profuse, self-ironizing bricolage of its furnishing (rather than its furniture) belonged entirely to the twentieth century. The elements of this interior might have originated in the whims of renaissance cardinals and the aspirations of biedermeier bourgeois, but the results of their meeting would have been entirely alien to the intentions of either. To use the traditional narrative structures of interior history to describe The House of Life as a static artifact, even as a static set of relations, the production and the possession of one time and one place, is to obscure a crucial aspect of its nature: its existence in time, and, furthermore, the tricks and games interiors can play with time. These tricks are many layered. The House of Life was a memory palace: an arrangement of imagines in loci that told many stories: about the life of the person who arranged them, and about the

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objects themselves. Now that it has itself passed into memory, The House of Life has become imagines placed in other memory palaces. An interior of constructed remembrances has itself become a constructed memory. Perhaps the narrative structure of a history of interiors in time could, like Prazs autobiography, be a rummage through the interiors of a memory palace populated with fragments reminders of other memory palaces. The room in which this article has been written has little of the overt intentionality of The House of Life, the rhetorical flourish of Ciceros speeches, or the stylistic integrity of Osbert Lancasters drawings. But, its architecture has already engaged many lives other than my own, and these lives have left their traces: in the altered windows, and the pencil marks made by joiners and electricians long dead on the wall, still visible on the recently stripped plaster. Hung against them are portraits of members of my family who died so long ago that no-one can remember their names; but I can remember these pictures hanging on other walls in other rooms for as far back as I can remember at all. The dining chairs on which I sit were already second-hand by the time they appeared in my aunts house in the Isle of Wight, and they bear traces of a provenance that will never fully be known. On the television in the corner, memories of a final season of Big Brother are being fabricated on camera, online. The room in which this article has been written is itself a game of memory and forgetting. My living room, modest as it is, is like every inhabited interior, from Osbert Lancasters ordinary cottage to Mario Prazs The House of Life. It is the entrance hall to an almost infinite series of connections from interior to vanished interior: a memory palace as vast in extent, as labyrinthine, as grand, as any in Rome.

References
Ad Herennium. 1954. Ad Herennium Book III, 13. Trans. Harry Caplan. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library. Attiwill, Susie. 2004. Towards an Interior History. IDEA Journal. Available online: idea-edu.com (accessed January 7, 2010). Lancaster, Osbert. 1939. Homes Sweet Homes. London: John Murray. Pile, John. 2000. History of Interior Design. New York: Wiley. Praz, Mario. 1958. La Casa Della Vita. Rome: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore. Praz, Mario. 1964a. The House of Life. Trans. Angus Davidson. London: Methuen Praz, Mario. 1964b. An Illustrated History of Interior Decoration from Pompeii to Part Nouveau. Trans. William Weaver. London: Thames & Hudson. Rice, Charles. 2007. The Emergence of the Interior. Abingdon: Routledge.

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Thornton, Peter. 1984. Authentic Dcor: The Domestic Interior 16201920. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson. Wharton, Edith and Codman, Ogden. 2007. The Decoration of Houses. New York: Rizzoli. Yates, Frances. 1966. The Art of Memory. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

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