Luisa Casati was a virtuosa in the art of making a spectacle of herself. Born in 1881, she inherited an immense fortune and spent it all (she died destitute) on making herself a ‘living work of art’. She had very little conversation. ‘Wisely, she seldom uttered’, noted Harold Acton. Instead she posed, and the pictures assembled in this book demonstrate how well she did it.
Orphaned at 13, and married before she was 20 to a Milanese aristocrat from whom she soon separated, Casati was an unconventional beauty, whom Marinetti, the founder of the Futuirist movement, described as having ‘the satisfied air of a panther that has devoured the bars of its cage’. Her heyday spanned the two decades centring on the first world war. Her style was an eclectic mix of fin-de-siècle decadent, surrealist and proto-Goth. Very tall and thin, she painted her face dead-white, outlined her long green eyes with quantities of kohl, or sometimes with gummed-on strips of black paper, and wore her hair dyed red and teased into a Medusan tangle of curls standing out several inches around her head.
Her houses, her clothes and her art collection were as striking as her make-up. She had a good eye and a quick appreciation of artistic innovation. She commissioned portraits of herself from an impressive roster of artists, spanning a range from Boldoni to Balla, from Augustus John and Epstein to Man Ray. She dressed up in fantastic costumes designed for her by Fortuny or Bakst and paraded around Venice, where she lived in the truncated palace which is now the Guggenheim Museum, her every outing a piece of performance art. She kept cheetahs and albino peacocks in her garden and went to parties with a live boa constrictor around her neck (Isadora Duncan has left a hilariously catty account of the havoc caused by the Casati menagerie in a hotel in Rome).
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