#Luisa Casati

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described as wearing more perfume than clothing,

on Marchesa Luisa Casati, Infinite Variety by Michael Orlando Yaccarino & Scott D. Ryersson

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Augustus Edwin John - The Marchesa Casati (1919)

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Marchesa Luisa Casati

- Man Ray (1922)

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Notable portraits by Beltran Masses

Federico Beltrán-Masses (1885–1949) ~ La Maja Maldita, 1918. Oil on canvas. Posed (likely) by Carmen Tórtola Valencia

Federico Beltrán-Masses (1885–1949) ~ La Marchesa Casati, 1920. Oil on canvas

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Marchesa Luisa Casati, 1881–1957

Italian patron of the arts & muse

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1922 Man Ray, Marchesa Luisa Casati. 

"In 1922, Luisa visited a young and still unknown photographer named Man Ray. In his autobiography, the American tells the story of the photo that became the most famous of all the representations of the Marchioness Casati (...) "I drew a few where one could distinguish a semblance of face; On one of the negatives, we saw three pairs of eyes. It could have been mistaken for a surreal version of the Medusa. It was precisely this photo that delighted her: I had made a portrait of her soul, she said, and she ordered dozens of copies from me. I wish my other clients had been so easy to please. The photo of the marquise went around Paris. Figures from the most closed circles began to come, all expecting miracles. I had to leave my hotel room and find a real studio. » (x)

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[desimonewayland]

Luisa Casati and mystery companion in the garden of Palazzo Venier dei Leoni - Luisa Casati, started to live in the famously unfinished palazzo in 1910.

Luisa was one of the wealthiest women in Italy, having inherited her father’s industrial fortune. As the wife of the Marchese Camillo Casati, she was allied to the highest ranks of Italian nobility. Yet after falling under the spell of the notorious writer and aesthete Gabriele D’Annunzio, Luisa had turned her back on conventional society and, with a passion that bordered on profound eccentricity, vowed to turn her life into a work of art.

Venice was to be her theatre, the romantically derelict Venier palazzo her stage. Luisa hired an army of workmen to transform the interior into a dazzle of marble, glass and gold, but she was determined to retain the building’s dirty, overgrown and crumbling exterior.

Further evidence of Luisa’s maverick taste was revealed in the menagerie of pets that she began to gather around her — parrots, monkeys, snakes and peacocks, plus a flock of albino blackbirds that she would dye different colours to suit her mood. Most beloved of these pets was the elegantly spotted cheetah that accompanied her everywhere.

Photo: Mariano Fortuny, Palazzo Pesaro degli Orfei – Museo Fortuny © Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia / via: Christie's

Today the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni now the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice named after its last resident.

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“THE MARQUISE CASATI WITH HORSES” MAN RAY // PARIS, 1935 [gelatin silver print | 15.4 × 10.3 cm.]

“One of Man Ray’s earliest portrait commissions in Paris came from the Marquise Luisa Casati, an eccentric Italian aristocrat who was an important patron of vanguard artists. Casati’s audacious hair and makeup were part of the fantastical world she constructed, which included a taste for extravagant clothing, interior design, costume balls, and pets. Her masquerade costume here represents her as the Empress Elizabeth of Austria.”

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Romaine Brooks (1874-1970): 1) “White Azaleas” (1910), 2) “The Crossing” (1911), 3) “Weeping Venus” (1917), and 4) “The Marchesa Casati” (1920).

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"My inspirational icon of glamorous eccentricity is the Marchesa Casati. I would like to give every person who thinks she is so risque and so eccentric a book called Infinite Variety so she can read about what eccentricity really is and who was living it in a big way almost a hundred years ago! "I want to be a living work of art!" the Marchesa said.

I also love Empress Elizabeth of Austria, who seemed pretty eccentric to me too. Being corseted down to 17 inches in a flowing black silk riding habit and sitting sidesaddle and jumping horses shows a real dedication to glamour, no?

- Dita von Teese

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If the public can predict you, it starts to like you. But [she] didn't want to be liked. She wanted to incite.

on Marchesa Luisa Casati, Infinite Variety by Michael Orlando Yaccarino & Scott D. Ryersson

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Giovanni Boldini - La marchesa Luisa Casati con penne di pavone (1914)

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Luisa Casati, Man Ray, 1922

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Marchesa Luisa Casati

Augustus John, The Marchesa Casati, 1919

Augustus Edwin John, Marchesa Casati, c. 1942

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Gustav Adolf Mossa, Pastel of Marchesa Luisa Casati. 1915

Luisa was on holiday in Nice when she chanced accorss the work of Gustav Adolf Mossa. This French symbolist dedicated his craft to rendering fantastical creatures of myth – many of them in ghoulish feminine forms with bloodied lips and nightmarish eyes. His unsettling pastel vision of Luisa reduces her to a shrieking, nonhuman elemental force. At least in part, Mossa perhaps meant the almost perceptible scream from his siren-like subject to echo the horror and indignation expressed by so many at the recent start of the First World War. (x)