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). She took over the whole of the Piazza San Marco and threw phantasmagorical fancy-dress balls at which she appeared as a pierrot or as Count Cagliostro (she liked cross-dressing) or as a Queen of the Night attended by naked footmen painted all over in gold.
This is not the first book that Ryersson and Yaccarino have written about the Marchesa. Their earlier biography gives a fuller account of her life, making much of her relationship with Gabriele d’Annunzio (which was not quite the grand passion they seem to believe) and tracing her sad post-war decline to the status of embarrassing old lady using Cherry Blossom boot-polish for eyeliner and cadging taxi-fares from her dwindling band of acolytes.
This handsome new volume — of comparatively few words, but many gorgeous pictures — is a more fitting tribute to Casati’s peculiar gift, and a better use of its authors’ talents. Their prose may be a little too mauve, their claims for their subject exaggerated, but their picture archive is marvellous. Here are dozens of portraits: some first-rate art-works; the majority kitsch but evocative. Here are photographs and caricatures. Here are recent fashion-shoots demonstrating that Casati is still a muse to designers and stylists. And here is evidence that the disreputable arts of dressing-up, showing-off and over-spending can produce sensational results.
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