Outrageous marchioness saw herself as a living work of art
 |
| The Marchesa Casati photographed by Adolfo de Meyer in 1912 |
The heiress, socialite and artist’s muse Luisa Casati, known
for her outlandish dresses, exotic pets and hedonistic lifestyle, was born on
this day in 1881 in Milan.
Casati, born into a wealthy background, married a marquis –
Camillo, Marchese Casati Stampa di Soncino – when she was 19 and provided him
with a daughter, Cristina, a year later, yet the marriage was never strong and
they kept separate residences from an early stage.
It was not long before she tired of a life bound by
formalities and the strict rules of etiquette and everything changed after she met
the poet, patriot and lothario Gabriele D’Annunzio at a society hunt.
They became lovers and D’Annunzio introduced her to the
world of writers and artists. Tall,
almost painfully thin and with striking looks, she became a creature of
fascination for many young artists, who craved the attention of this eccentric
aristocrat and the chance to paint her.
Their interest only encouraged the Marchesa Casati to
indulge her taste for the extravagant, posing in ever-more outlandish dresses, embracing the culture of the Belle Époque.
Her wealth enabled her to throw lavish parties and in 1910 she moved to Venice,
taking up residence in the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni on the Grand Canal, the
palace that now houses the Peggy Guggenheim Collection.
 |
| Casati in 1922 in a typically outrageous dress |
There she created a fantastical lifestyle, assembling an
extraordinary menagerie of pets that included a pair of cheetahs, a boa
constrictor, white peacocks trained to perch on her window sills, a flock of
albino blackbirds and greyhounds whose coats she dyed blue.
She staged enormous, elaborate parties, in which she paraded
herself in increasingly ridiculous costumes, such as a dress made entirely of
lightbulbs, which at one point gave her such a powerful electric shock she was
thrown backwards across the room.
Naturally shy, the Marchesa concentrated on making an
impression through how she looked. She contrasted her fiery red hair with skin
that she kept a deathly white, dropped belladonna in her eyes to dilate her
pupils and framed them with black eye liner and false eyelashes. She delighted in prowling the atmospheric
Venetian streets after dark, with her jewel-collared cheetahs on leads, herself often naked beneath a cloak embroidered with emeralds.
Her parties, in Rome and Paris as well as Venice, may have
seemed like merely excuses for decadence and excess, with opium and cocaine a common indulgence among some of the guests, but were affairs that she
choreographed carefully, with clothes, décor and entertainment precisely
planned according to whichever theme she chose.
She saw herself as a living work of art.
She was certainly an inspiration for works of art. Giovanni Boldini, Paolo Troubetzkoy, Adolph
de Meyer and Romaine Brooks were among those painters who were in her thrall, along
with Futurists such as Fortunato Depero and Umberto Boccioni. She had affairs with several. Augustus John's
portrait of her is one of the most popular paintings at the Art Gallery of
Ontario.
 |
| The Marchesa with a greyhound, painted by Giovanni Boldoni |
She patronised a number of fashion designers. John Galliano,
Karl Lagerfeld and Alexander McQueen created collections based on or inspired
by her, while the British designers Georgina Chapman and Karen Craig had her in
mind when they opened a fashion house called Marchesa.
It was all a far cry from a childhood lived in a palace in
Milan and villas in Monza and on Lake Como. Her father was Alberto Amman, a giant
in the textile industry who was made a Count by Umberto I and whose death when
Luisa was 15 made her and her sister, Francesca, the two wealthiest young women
in Italy.
But her extravagances did not come cheap. By 1920 she was living on Capri at the Swedish
psychiatrist Axel Munthe’s Villa San Michele and moved out of the Palazzo
Venier dei Leoni in the mid-1920s. By
1930 she had amassed personal debts of $25 million and was forced to auction
off her possessions.
Pursued by creditors, she fled to London and lived in a
one-bedroom flat. It was just around the corner from Harrods in hardly
the least salubrious part of the city, yet placed her reduced circumstances by her
standards.
 |
| Casati's grave in London |
Among just a handful of mourners at her funeral was an elderly man who had
travelled from Venice, where half a century earlier he had been her personal
gondolier. Her grave is marked with a small tombstone shaped like an urn draped in cloth, bearing the inscription ‘Age cannot
wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety’ from Shakespeare's Antony
and Cleopatra.
 |
| An autumnal scene in Milan's Parco Nord |
The Marchesa Casati’s married home in Milan was the Villa
Casati, a stately mansion on the edge of what is now Parco Nord, a suburban
park that was once an airfield, in Cinisello Balsamo, then a town in its own right,
now more of a suburb. It is on the northern edge of the Milan metropolitan
area, about 10km (6 miles) from the city centre. More than 75,000 people now
live there.
 |
| The Grand Canal frontage of the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni |
The Palazzo Venier dei Leoni is a palace on the Grand Canal
in Venice once owned by a noble Venetian family of the 14th to 16th
century, three of whom – Antonio Venier, Francesco Venier and Sebastiano Venier
– were Doges. It was bought by the
American socialite and arts patron Peggy Guggenheim in 1949 and she lived there
for 30 years, opening her collection of artworks to the public for the first
time in 1951. It is in the Dorsoduro
quarter of Venice, near where it emerges into the lagoon, accessed from San
Marco via the Accademia Bridge.