Mario Praz

Praz was the son of Luciano Praz (died 1900), a bank clerk, and his wife, the former Giulia Testa di Marsciano (died 1931), daughter of Count Alcibiade Testa di Marsciano. His stepfather was Carlo Targioni (died 1954), a doctor, whom his mother married in 1912.

He studied at the University of Bologna (1914–15), received a law degree from the University of Rome (1918), and received a doctorate in literature from the University of Florence (1920).

Praz married, on 17 March 1934 (separated 1942, divorced 1947), Vivyan Leonora Eyles (1909–1984), an English-literature lecturer at the University of Liverpool whom Praz met during his time there as a special lecturer in Italian studies. She was a daughter of British novelist M. Leonora Eyles (1889-1960) and married in 1948, as her second husband, art historian Wolfgang Fritz Volbach. The couple had one child, a daughter, Lucia Praz (born 1938).

Praz's only other known romantic attachment was to an Anglo-Italian woman named Perla Cacciguerra, whom he met in 1953 and called Diamante in the book The House of Life.

Mario Praz' residence in Palazzo Primoli in Rome has been turned into the Museo Mario Praz.

Mario Praz was a well-respected Italian-born art critic and scholar of the English language. He taught Italian Studies at the Victoria University of Manchester between 1932 and 1934. He then went on to teach English Literature at the University of Rome from 1934, until he retired in 1966. In 1962, Praz was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II and became a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire KBE. Though Mario Praz is perhaps best known for his writings in the English literary field, he has made strong contributions to the concepts, writings and perception of both interior design and interior decoration. The concepts that were presented in his "The Romantic Agony" have been shaped into his design and art criticism. This writing style has been successfully administered in Praz’s two most noteworthy design books, “The House of Life” and “An Illustrated history in Interior Design”. These works highlight his theories of the interiority of a space, and reveal his concepts to how a person inhabits the interior and how they shape it to make it their own. His ground-breaking work "Studies in seventeenth-century imagery", first published in 1939 and reissued many times since, is one of the first attempts to produce a systematic catalogue and analysis of the early modern allegorical genres of the emblem and the personal device.

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