“I want to be a living work of art,” the Marchesa once said. And she didn’t stop at anything to shape her life around the eccentric, artistic, somewhat macabre beauty which she craved.
Born Luisa Amman in 1881, she was one of the wealthiest heiresses of her time and went on to marry a Milanese aristocrat, Marchese Camillo Casati. Despite her privileged background, though, Luisa Casati was shy and retiring - until she met Italy’s most outrageous poet, Gabriele D’Annunzio.
Her affair with D’Annunzio transformed her. The once plain girl became an intriguing woman with an alluring, if altogether idiosyncratic look. Her deep red lips and huge green eyes, which she accented with thick black kohl, false lashes and even droplets of belladonna, shone on an alabaster face under a shock of red curls. Her sense of fashion was just as sharp - and just as flamboyant. She wore live snakes as necklaces, went for her evening stroll naked beneath thick furs and dressed top to toe in black velvet or white satin to set off her tall, thin, pale figure.
But it was her daring personality that really made her bewitching. Non-conformism was too tame a word to describe her. Her servants wore nothing but gilded leaves, her salons were decorated with animal skins and life-size wax statues of tragic heroines, and her pets were cheetahs and monkeys, which she kept on diamond studded leashes. Nothing was too decadent or over the top for her.
She became the society queen of the early 20th century, wandering the world from Venice to Paris and America, collecting magnificent palazzos and throwing sensational parties wherever she went. Her antics captivated the movers and shakers of her time, including Marcel Proust, Colette and Coco Chanel. Her real fascination, though, was art. Always ready to discover new talent, she had her portrait painted and her likeness sculpted by many great 20th century artists - Alberto Martini depicted her as a flame-haired dream, Adolf de Meyer captured her intense expression in a dramatic photograph, Catherine Barjanski rendered her vitality in wax.
Now a new book, Marchesa Casati: Portraits of a muse, brings Casati and her glittering world back to life. Written by Scot D. Ryersson and Michael Orlando Yaccarino, the duo who wrote the Marchesa’s biography, Infinite Variety: The Life and Legend of the Marchesa Casati, ten years ago, Portraits of a Muse adds new insights and research to the first book.
But this is far more than a revised biography. Lavishly illustrated, it is a visual cavalcade through the paintings, drawings and photographs that made the Marchesa immortal. More than 200 pictures of famous artwork and private family photographs show every facet of her dazzling extravagance, while sketches by fashion king Karl Lagerfeld reveal her enduring influence as a style icon.
Casati accumulated spectacular debts in her life, saw much of her property seized and auctioned off and sought refuge in London where, despite her financial constraints, she still shocked and fascinated society in equal measure until she died on 1 June 1957. Now Portraits of a muse ensures the glamorous Marchesa continues to bewitch us even from beyond the grave.
Marchesa Casati: Portraits of a muse is available from Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk through the links below.
