Who is marchesa luisa casati

The authors are judicious historians of frivolity who capture the tone of a life that was obscenely profligate yet strangely pure. Their subject was born Luisa Annan, the daughter of a prodigiously successful, self-made Milanese textile magnate who was ennobled by his frequent houseguest King Umberto I.

Both Count Annan and his wife died when their two daughters were teen-agers, leaving them one of the, if not the, greatest industrial fortunes in Italy. They had a spunky only child, Cristina, neglected by her parents from an early age, who studied at Oxford and eloped with an English lord who was said to share her Communist sympathies. For a few years, the young Marchesa dressed decently and lived dutifully, if opulently, as a conventional matron of her class.

But once he had aroused her appetite for the poetry of excess, no extravagance could slake it. Her treasures piled up. Morgan paid for his custom-fitted Rolls-Royce. Her crumbling palace on the Grand Canal it was later owned by another priestess, Peggy Guggenheim was decorated with rare gemstones, priceless lace, hothouse flowers, and Egyptian statuary. There, and in her Roman mansion and her Parisian villa, she installed menageries of exotic animals—not only the cheetahs but lion cubs, owls, panthers, monkeys, peacocks, a gorilla, albino blackbirds, greyhounds powdered pink and mauve, a parrot that squawked obscenities, and a boa constrictor that travelled with her everywhere in a plush-lined glass case.

The Princess di Belgiojoso, a man-eater much beloved of the Romantics, pioneered the macabre makeup and hair. The French writer Rachilde, for example, adopted two sewer rats that she named Kyrie and Eleison.

But it would be hard to find two women better designed to loathe each other, despite a shared gift for malice and a penchant for exhibitionism. There is nothing muted about her approach to appearance. She was six feet tall and accentuated her height with extravagant headpieces. Accounts say she took doses of belladonna, a poisonous plant, to dilate her pupils and make them darker.

She painted her face in stark black and white, like a photograph of the period. And she was fascinated by the occult, always carrying a crystal ball and collecting wax replicas of herself, including one that was life-sized with a wig made from her own hair: when hosting dinner, she would sit the figure next to her and in the dim candlelight her guests struggled to make out which was the real Luisa. Casati was physically striking, enhancing her features in an unusual way, as a profile in The New Yorker described.

Yet Casati was not simply a flamboyant eccentric, as Mackrell reveals in her book. The outfit that electrocuted Casati was itself a piece of art: the bulbs were at the tips of hundreds of arrows that pierced a suit of silver armour, and by embracing modern technology it was intended to show her credentials as a Futurist a group of artists welcoming the new age of the machine.

While her attempts at creating art with her outfits had mixed success, Casati could inspire painters and sculptors both as muse and subject. Her portrait was painted by Augustus John and Jacob Epstein sculpted her in bronze.

All of this was inextricably tied to the Casati of the gossip pages. To accentuate the effect she wore black kohl around her eyes, with false eyelashes and strips of black velvet glued to the lids. She separated from the Count in due to her need to live freely, and took a home in Venice — an unfinished palace called the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, built in the 18th century on the Grand Canal — which, years later, would become home to another heiress: Peggy Guggenheim.

Here she lived with a motley crew of people and animals: a host of gold-painted servants, a pet boa constrictor, mechanical birds in gilded cages, an ostentation of white peacocks and a coalition of cheetahs with diamond collars. Casati's singular aim had always been to become a living work of art, and she achieved it through multifarious means. Her garb grew ever more elaborate with each social gathering, her most famous being a dress made of lightbulbs and powered by a generator.

Determined to preserve the legend she had worked so hard to create, she assembled a vast collection of portraits of herself that she would exhibit in a detached pavilion at her Paris mansion.