May 23, 2023 • 30 mins
More than a hundred years before the selfie became commonplace, a woman in France used photographs to immortalize her favorite subject: herself. But as she aged, she became a lighting rod for our cultural conversation about growing old and the power of beauty.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of iHeartRadio and Grim
and Mild from Aaron Mankie. Listener discretion advised. Most nights,
the woman covered in veils goes out walking under cover
(00:22):
of darkness. It's Paris eighteen seventy nine. Sometimes the woman's
dog is on a leash beside her. Occasionally a police
officer stops her. She is malingering with vagrants? Is she
a vagrant? She scoffs and walks on. She will name
(00:42):
a series of vindictive photos after the area police. Later,
she promises herself, with thoughts of this sweet justice in
her head, she walks on. Finally, the dog pulls at
the leash. There home twenty six beasts vendant, Furtively trying
(01:02):
to keep the veil across her face. The woman opens
the first locked door to her apartment, then the second,
then the third. She closes herself in with the dog.
Only once she's safely locked away behind three doors does
she removed the veils. She doesn't have to worry about
(01:26):
seeing what she looks like. Her walls are painted black,
she has no mirrors or reflective surfaces. She's an old woman,
she believes, though really she's only in her forties. In
her mind, she only wants to see herself as she was,
and photos of her younger self cover the walls. The
(01:50):
woman looks at one of the photographs and breathes a
sigh of relief. Yes, there she was a young woman
who's beauty was famous in Italy and then France. Pale,
round cheeks, eyes rumored to be either bright green or
piercing violet, slim waist, draped in evening gowns and costumes.
(02:16):
A smile crosses the older woman's lips before she closes
her eyes for the night. She is Virginia Oldoni, the
Countess of Castilione. In her youth, she was as famous
for her beauty as she was her vanity. She was
the mistress of King Vittorio Emmanuel, the second King of
(02:38):
Sardinia and later of Italy, but that wasn't her most
prominent conquest. As a teenager, she was personally dispatched from
Italy to France to become the mistress of Emperor Louis
Napoleon the Third, to whisper into his ear that he
must support Italian unification. She had taken him easily, She
(03:04):
had done her duty. She had been kicked out of court. Eventually, yes,
but the Kingdom of Italy had united and Louis Napoleon
had supported it. But as she grew older, she grew strange,
perhaps mentally ill. Unable to handle the loss of her
(03:24):
youth and political role, she bankrupted her husband and left him.
Before he died, she dressed head to foot as a
hermit in her last public appearance, before consigning herself to
walk the streets of Paris only by night. She became
obsessed with recreating her own images in photography, in art
(03:49):
form then in its early days, she was dressed in
scenes from her own past life, directed and retouched the
photographs herself, and she continued to take these photos long
after everyone believed that she was too old to pull
it off. After her death, one man became so obsessed
(04:13):
with her that he bought plaster casts of her legs
and displayed them in a self made museum. In the
history of photography, La Castilione was like an early Cindy Sherman.
There were no selfies in the second half of the
nineteenth century. Being photographed was a big deal for a
(04:35):
private person who was not a celebrity, and though she
had been renowned for a time. La Castilione may be
the single most photographed private person of the eighteen hundreds.
The story of the Countess Virginia Aldoni is the story
of what it meant to be a woman whose youth
(04:56):
and beauty was used to attract importance, men to play
political games, and whose youth and beauty ultimately faded as
they tend to do. But there were no plastic surgery
drop in centers offering botox and a bikini wax in one.
But there was early photography, There was costume paint, and
(05:21):
there was a woman testing how much control she actually
had over her own image, over the fading of her
famous light. I'm Dana Schwartz, and this is noble blood.
(05:44):
Virginia Elizabeta Luisa Carlata Antonetta Teresa Maria Aldone Rappollini was
born on March twenty second, eighteen thirty seven, to an
aristocratic family in Florence. By age sixteen, her parents encouraged
her to marry Francesco Barassis Assinari, Count of Castiglioni. One
(06:08):
year after the wedding, at age seventeen, in eighteen fifty five,
the new Countess gave birth to their only child, Georgio,
the Count, was a widower more than a decade older
than Virginia. He was infatuated with her, but she never
loved him and barely pretended to. Young Virginia had always
(06:30):
been a great beauty, and she knew it. Her prenup
guaranteed that she could still go about in society however
she wanted. So. If Virginia's parents hoped that marriage would
rein in ment attraction to their daughter, they were sorely mistaken.
The Countess was young, beautiful, and vain. She spoke Italian
(06:54):
and French and unaccented English, and she was never going
to be happy sitting home as the wife of an
old count. Within a year of Giorgio's birth, she moved
to Paris. Officially, she was visiting her cousin. Unofficially, she
had a much more important mission. When Virginia was born,
(07:17):
the area we know today as modern Italy was comprised
of several states controlled by Naples, Austria, and the Pope.
Florence was located in the Kingdom of Sardinia and Piedmont,
ruled by King Vittorio Emmanuel the Second. The king was
only one of the many lovers that Virginia would take
(07:40):
over the years. It was his Prime minister Camillo Cavour
who hatched the plan for the countess. She would be
sent to France, where she would intimately involve herself in
the court of Emperor Louis Napoleon the Third. She would,
in short, get the ear of the French Emperor. Then
(08:02):
she would convince him to support the unification of the
Kingdom of Italy under Vittorio Emmanuel. The Countess wasn't yet
twenty when she received her assignment. She must have felt
at least partially thrilled to receive a secret code from
the Prime Minister so that she could communicate with him
(08:23):
while in Paris. She would have listened carefully to his instructions.
Quote succeed by whatever means you wish, but succeed, And
she must have understood whatever means you wish. He had said,
she was a great beauty. More than anything else he
meant seduction. On February fifth, eighteen fifty six, then eighteen
(08:50):
year old Countess Virginia Castilioni arrived at a masked ball
on the Champs Elise. The room was filled with a
wristocrats in Mardi Gras masks. The Countess knew that she
was a vision, so she ignored the women in the room.
She looked right past most of them, and then caught
(09:12):
the eye of the only man she cared about, the Emperor,
Louis Napoleon the Third. Yes he was married to Empress Eugenie,
who was eight months pregnant. Yes, he was involved and
distracted in ending the Crimean War. It didn't matter. She
smiled at him flirtatiously, and he turned toward her. In
(09:35):
the months to come, sellacious rumors would swirl about the
Countess's beauty, her vanity, her elaborate costumes, and her seduction
of France's emperor, one general said quote. Infatuated with herself,
always classically draped, she would appear at gatherings like a
(09:56):
goddess descended from the clouds. She would allow people to
admire her as if she were a shrine, but as
soon as the Emperor or Empress approached, her face would
be transformed. She seemed to be saying to all, I
am not here for you. I am of a different essence.
(10:17):
I know only the sovereign and his consort. End quote.
In June eighteen fifty six, Empress Eugenie made the mistake
of inviting Virginia to a garden party. Louis Napoleon invited
the Countess to a boat ride, rowed her out to
an island in the lake, and disappeared with her for hours.
(10:40):
It was an incredibly flagrant public outing of their affair. Unsurprisingly,
Virginia found herself hated by the Empress. On February seventeenth,
eighteen fifty seven, Virginia had arrived at a costume ble
dressed as the Queen of Hearts. Scandalously for the time,
(11:02):
she wore no corset and no crinoline. Chains around the
bodice of her dress formed heart shapes, the neckline plunged shockingly.
She wore her hair down around her shoulders. Empress Eugenie
had cutting words for her. The heart is a little low, Countess.
(11:25):
But the Empress wasn't always so cutting. She despaired about
her husband's affair with the Countess, at one point saying,
I have tried everything, even to make him jealous. It
made no difference. I can't take any more. But a
man with a wandering eye has a tendency to wander.
(11:46):
Only ten days after the Countess's success as the Queen
of hearts. At the eighteen fifty seven Mardi Gras ball,
Louis Napoleon's affections wandered on to someone new, the Countess Wallesca,
an affair that would continue for seven years. After that,
La Castiliani's days at the French court were numbered. It
(12:10):
may have been her first taste of not being the favorite,
of being passed over for another woman. She didn't like it.
She had not forgotten her charge to whisper in the
Emperor's ear about unification of Italy. She believed that she
was playing an important geopolitical role. Unfortunately for the Countess,
(12:33):
the French used that role against her. On April sixth,
eighteen fifty seven, Louis Napoleon was leaving Virginia's residence at
three in the morning when the Italian Carbonari made an
attempt on his life. Virginia almost certainly had nothing to
do with the assassination attempt, but Louis Napoleon was through
(12:55):
with her anyway. She was banished from the French court
and would have of the Emperor's ear no longer. The
Countess Castilioni's banishment from French court was the beginning of
the end of her very brief life as a political figure.
Her husband went back to Italy, but she refused to
(13:17):
live with him there. She and her son Georgia were
living separately in Turin when in eighteen fifty nine Louis
Napoleon sent French troops in support of Italy against Austria.
In eighteen sixty one, Victorio Emmanuel became king of a
united Italy. The Countess believed she had played an important
(13:39):
role in this victory. Historians tend not to agree. In
eighteen sixty one, the Countess and Georgio returned to France
again without her husband, the count They moved to a
suburb of Paris called Passe, near the photographer Pierre Louis Pierson,
and here this second act of her life began, the
(14:02):
part that she is actually most famous. For five years earlier,
when she had been the favorite of the Emperor, she
had met with Pearson for a simple photography session in
which she wore a standard black velvet dress. But that
was then. Now she was out of favor with the
(14:24):
Emperor and she felt her great beauty was going to waste,
so she went back to the Mayor and Pearson portrait
studio and for the next several years, she and Pearson
undertook one of the largest serieses of photographs of a
private person in the nineteenth century. She had him take
(14:46):
over four hundred photographs, all of herself, and not just
any photos of herself. In these photographs, she recreated the
costumes of her earlier victories at court. She wore the
famous Queen of Hearts dress all over again. It doesn't
take a freud who was actually born the year the
(15:08):
Countess first went to Pearson to analyze that she was
trying to live in the past. She was trying to
document her beauty. To prove it in front of the camera,
the Countess posed herself in costume as a peasant, a
noble woman fleeing a fire, characters from novels and plays.
(15:28):
She lounged on chases and sat up in beds. Some
especially salacious photos show her bearing gasp her naked leg.
At the time, the only women's legs that a respectable
person might see outside the bedroom or the brothel was
at the ballet, and even then that could be almost
(15:51):
as titillating as pornography. So too, as in the so
many bedroom selfies that are sent across the Internet today,
the photos that she took in which she showed her
feet tended not to also include her face. Through all
this work in the photography studio, the Countess's famous vanity
(16:12):
only increased. At one point, she asked Pearson if he
fully recognized that God is quote making you the collaborator
of the most beautiful creature who has ever existed since
the beginning of time end quote. It's quotes like that
that I do feel our important context here, because often
(16:33):
I think history has a knee jerk reaction to label
beautiful women as vain. But in this case it is
a label that seems especially apt. In a technique common
for the time, the Countess ensured that the photos were
painted over, so they were touched up and in color.
(16:54):
She had Pearson photograph her son too, But even there,
her famous vanity was unre relenting. The Countess would dress
Giorgio up as her. A series of photos show him,
at age seven, in a dress, his long hair flower pinned,
clearly meant to look like his mother. Of the one
(17:16):
hundred and ten photos of Georgio, some show him alone,
some with the Countess, and only one also includes his father.
During all this time, the Countess had taken lover after lover,
but love itself seemingly was out of the question. I
don't believe in love, she wrote. It's a malady that
(17:39):
comes and goes little by little, or an intermittent fever.
She was not loved in the Parisian court. Years into
her return to France, at last she was invited to
one ball. In eighteen sixty three, she appeared as the
Queen of Etruria, a costume that she expected would dazzle
(18:02):
but instead scandalized. Rumors spread that she'd almost been naked.
To modern eyes, of course, the photos of the costume
are laughably clothed. Only her arm from the shoulder is bare,
and I will include photos in the episode script on
(18:23):
our Patreon. Hearing about the costume from his post in Turin,
her now estranged husband threatened to take their son, saying quote,
I want to spare myself the status of husband to
the beautiful countess. Shortly after, she mailed him a print
of herself in the Queen of Etruria costume, this time
(18:46):
holding a dagger. The photo is so striking that nearly
one hundred and fifty years later, the Metropolitan Museum of
Art used it as the cover of their catalog for
the show about her in the year two thousand. The
Countess titled the photo herself. She named it Vengeance. After that,
(19:09):
the Countess appeared to go a little mad. In April
eighteen sixty three, two months after the quote unquote Naked
Queen of Vitrurian debacle, she arrived at one last event.
Rumor swirled that she would show up naked. Instead, she
dressed head to toe as a nun. She called herself
(19:31):
the Hermit of Passe and was accompanied by a violinist
playing Chopin's Funeral March. We can conceive of these events
kind of like a modern met ball think of Kim Kardashian,
who shows up sometimes channeling Marilyn Monroe and sometimes shrouded
in black from head to toe. The Countess CASTILIONI did
(19:54):
the same thing from the Queen of Hearts to complete
hermit nun. She was an all or nothing person, all drama, nothing,
balanced or in between. Later psychoanalysts would coin the term
Madonna horr complex, though the Countess viewed herself more as
(20:14):
a goddess or queen, a divine creation, and if she wasn't,
then she didn't want to be seen at all. Her
appearance as the Hermit of Pesse marked her final dramatic
showing at a public ball. In eighteen sixty seven, her
husband died. The next year, she locked herself away in
(20:36):
the apartment at the Place Bendome, with the three doors
between her and the world, and no mirrors and all
black walls, which she covered in photos of her younger self.
In eighteen seventy nine, her son died suddenly at the
age of twenty four of smallpox. After that, if she
(20:58):
did venture out, it was only under cover of night,
shrouded in veils, with the company only of her dogs.
In the eighteen nineties, the Countess returned to Pearson's studio,
now in her fifties. The years had not been kind
to the once famous beauty, but she came back to
(21:22):
Pearson wanting what she had always wanted, more photographs, and
so began a smaller series of photographs of the Countess
wearing a younger woman's costumes, sometimes looking in a mirror
or lifting her sleeve to contemplate her aged ugly arm.
(21:43):
I say ugly in quotes, according to the catalogs and
articles that I could find. Everyone talks about how horribly
old and decrepit she had become. The met Catalog calls
the photos quote a sorry spectacle, painful documents charting the
(22:04):
course of a physical and mental decline. Her face has
coarsened and her waist has thickened. A history of the
modern portrait in nineteenth century France goes further, quote, it
is difficult to comprehend what masochistic impulse could have incited
her stout, toothless and virtually bald, to reappear before the
(22:28):
camera and create grotesque countertypes of the earlier portraits. End quote.
Here's the thing, listener, something weird I believe is going
on here with history. The photos used as illustrations of
her grotesquerie show a woman who is yes, clearly in
(22:49):
her fifties, whose mouth yes, is closed, perhaps not showing teeth,
and who yes, has gained some weight since her twenties.
Maybe some of the off the shoulder sleeves and necklines
aren't totally becoming, or perhaps they indicate that she's trying
too hard. Maybe her eyes do look a little haunted
(23:12):
or desperate or even mad, but she totally has hair,
or she's wearing a very convincing hair piece. The dresses
fit basically fine, and she's not ugly, certainly not grotesque,
And if her expression is a little vacant, well, if
you flip back in the catalog, I can tell you
(23:35):
it's basically the same gaze she had in her younger photos.
I believe art history itself seems to have fallen into
the trap of which they accuse the countess disdaining a
woman feeling unable to accept her for the simple crime
of aging. She is only grotesque. I think if you
(23:57):
think a woman in her fifties who looks like she's
in her fifties is grotesque, or if you think a
woman in her fifties who wants to be looked at
is grotesque, I happen to think not. It's a good
lesson in seeking primary sources, which because their photographs remain
right there for us, unbiased by interpretation and analysis. To
(24:22):
these photos, the Countess pinned paper to make herself look thinner,
almost like an early Instagram edit. How much has really
changed today? The reception of the later photos shows us
how the world saw a woman who got older, and
the Countess's actions prefigured how women might try to control
(24:46):
how the world saw themselves pathetic and grotesque for a
woman to grow old and age, and even more grotesque
if an aging woman tries to look younger. Of course,
the Countess was indeed somewhat mentally unstable by the time
of these photo sessions. In eighteen ninety she titled one
(25:10):
photo in the series, I Don't give a damn for
the Police Commissioner. In place vendome, she photographed her own
swollen feet from the perspective of a corpse looking down
in a casket. It would be comic and even smart
if she had any sense of irony about it. Art
(25:31):
history does not suggest that she did. At the end
of her life, she wanted an exhibit of the photographs
of her to be called the most beautiful woman of
the century. She died first on November twenty eighth, eighteen
ninety nine, at the age of sixty two. After her death,
(25:52):
she became the subject of plays and books, and in
the mid twentieth century several Hollywood films. She prefigured Cindy
Sherman and other photographers who made themselves the subject as
photography continue to develop as an art form, although perhaps
they did it with more self awareness. In two thousand,
(26:14):
the Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibited her photographs in twenty sixteen.
The novelist Alexander Chief used her as a character in
his novel The Queen of the Night, alongside a cover
image that is one of her photographs from a masked ball.
And her most artistic photo of all is one you
(26:36):
may have seen in the past sixty years. It's become
an icon of modern photography. It's a photo of a
glamorous woman holding an oval cutout in front of one
eye and peering through directly at the viewer. Covered and exposed.
And so the Countess did become an icon, a niche
(27:00):
one in the end. Yet upon her death it's not
clear that was what she wanted anymore. The Countess of Castilioni,
Virginia Aldoni, famous narcissist, asked for no priest, no fanfare,
not even a mention of her death in the newspaper.
(27:21):
Her wishes were ignored. People did talk. That's the story
of the Countess de Castiliani, but stick around after a
brief sponsor break to hear about one of her most
(27:42):
obsessive posthumous admirers. After the Countess's death, newspapers and auction
houses cataloged her life and its objects. But one man
(28:03):
beat out all others in his intense, rather creepy, posthumous
obsession with the Countess. The Comte Montexieu Fizonzac was a
poet and a dandy who never met the Countess in life,
but upon her death he said he felt, quote time
is running out. I must act. At the hour appointed
(28:26):
for the closing of the casket. I went up the
tiny staircase at Vassin. In the middle of the bedroom.
On the floor was a coffin about to be closed.
There was for me a flash of light in the
brief glimpse of the pale, beautiful, noble, solemn face of death,
on the point of vanishing forever end quote. Monticxieu took
(28:49):
post death obsession to another level. He collected every artifact
of the Countesses that he could, including and this is
just a partial list, the nightgown that she had asked
to be buried in, pieces of her actual coffin, plaster
casts of her feet and arms, the key to her apartment,
(29:11):
a shoe from her famous Queen of Hearts costume, and
four hundred and thirty four photographs. He wrote and published
a book about her La divine comtesse in nineteen thirteen,
but the only person he was more obsessed with than
her was himself. He aimed to be the most photographed
(29:33):
person in the world. The Countess's narcissism inspired nothing so
much in him, but more narcissism. Noble Blood is a
(29:57):
production of iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Manke.
Noble Blood is created and hosted by me Dana Schwartz,
with additional writing and researching by Hannah Johnston, Hannah Zwick,
Mira Hayward, Courtney Sender, and Lori Goodman. The show is
edited and produced by Noemi Griffin and rima Il Kahali,
(30:21):
with supervising producer Josh Thain and executive producers Aaron Manke,
Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of iHeartRadio and Grim
and Mild from Aaron Mankie. Listener discretion advised. Most nights,
the woman covered in veils goes out walking under cover
(00:22):
of darkness. It's Paris eighteen seventy nine. Sometimes the woman's
dog is on a leash beside her. Occasionally a police
officer stops her. She is malingering with vagrants? Is she
a vagrant? She scoffs and walks on. She will name
(00:42):
a series of vindictive photos after the area police. Later,
she promises herself, with thoughts of this sweet justice in
her head, she walks on. Finally, the dog pulls at
the leash. There home twenty six beasts vendant, Furtively trying
(01:02):
to keep the veil across her face. The woman opens
the first locked door to her apartment, then the second,
then the third. She closes herself in with the dog.
Only once she's safely locked away behind three doors does
she removed the veils. She doesn't have to worry about
(01:26):
seeing what she looks like. Her walls are painted black,
she has no mirrors or reflective surfaces. She's an old woman,
she believes, though really she's only in her forties. In
her mind, she only wants to see herself as she was,
and photos of her younger self cover the walls. The
(01:50):
woman looks at one of the photographs and breathes a
sigh of relief. Yes, there she was a young woman
who's beauty was famous in Italy and then France. Pale,
round cheeks, eyes rumored to be either bright green or
piercing violet, slim waist, draped in evening gowns and costumes.
(02:16):
A smile crosses the older woman's lips before she closes
her eyes for the night. She is Virginia Oldoni, the
Countess of Castilione. In her youth, she was as famous
for her beauty as she was her vanity. She was
the mistress of King Vittorio Emmanuel, the second King of
(02:38):
Sardinia and later of Italy, but that wasn't her most
prominent conquest. As a teenager, she was personally dispatched from
Italy to France to become the mistress of Emperor Louis
Napoleon the Third, to whisper into his ear that he
must support Italian unification. She had taken him easily, She
(03:04):
had done her duty. She had been kicked out of court. Eventually, yes,
but the Kingdom of Italy had united and Louis Napoleon
had supported it. But as she grew older, she grew strange,
perhaps mentally ill. Unable to handle the loss of her
(03:24):
youth and political role, she bankrupted her husband and left him.
Before he died, she dressed head to foot as a
hermit in her last public appearance, before consigning herself to
walk the streets of Paris only by night. She became
obsessed with recreating her own images in photography, in art
(03:49):
form then in its early days, she was dressed in
scenes from her own past life, directed and retouched the
photographs herself, and she continued to take these photos long
after everyone believed that she was too old to pull
it off. After her death, one man became so obsessed
(04:13):
with her that he bought plaster casts of her legs
and displayed them in a self made museum. In the
history of photography, La Castilione was like an early Cindy Sherman.
There were no selfies in the second half of the
nineteenth century. Being photographed was a big deal for a
(04:35):
private person who was not a celebrity, and though she
had been renowned for a time. La Castilione may be
the single most photographed private person of the eighteen hundreds.
The story of the Countess Virginia Aldoni is the story
of what it meant to be a woman whose youth
(04:56):
and beauty was used to attract importance, men to play
political games, and whose youth and beauty ultimately faded as
they tend to do. But there were no plastic surgery
drop in centers offering botox and a bikini wax in one.
But there was early photography, There was costume paint, and
(05:21):
there was a woman testing how much control she actually
had over her own image, over the fading of her
famous light. I'm Dana Schwartz, and this is noble blood.
(05:44):
Virginia Elizabeta Luisa Carlata Antonetta Teresa Maria Aldone Rappollini was
born on March twenty second, eighteen thirty seven, to an
aristocratic family in Florence. By age sixteen, her parents encouraged
her to marry Francesco Barassis Assinari, Count of Castiglioni. One
(06:08):
year after the wedding, at age seventeen, in eighteen fifty five,
the new Countess gave birth to their only child, Georgio,
the Count, was a widower more than a decade older
than Virginia. He was infatuated with her, but she never
loved him and barely pretended to. Young Virginia had always
(06:30):
been a great beauty, and she knew it. Her prenup
guaranteed that she could still go about in society however
she wanted. So. If Virginia's parents hoped that marriage would
rein in ment attraction to their daughter, they were sorely mistaken.
The Countess was young, beautiful, and vain. She spoke Italian
(06:54):
and French and unaccented English, and she was never going
to be happy sitting home as the wife of an
old count. Within a year of Giorgio's birth, she moved
to Paris. Officially, she was visiting her cousin. Unofficially, she
had a much more important mission. When Virginia was born,
(07:17):
the area we know today as modern Italy was comprised
of several states controlled by Naples, Austria, and the Pope.
Florence was located in the Kingdom of Sardinia and Piedmont,
ruled by King Vittorio Emmanuel the Second. The king was
only one of the many lovers that Virginia would take
(07:40):
over the years. It was his Prime minister Camillo Cavour
who hatched the plan for the countess. She would be
sent to France, where she would intimately involve herself in
the court of Emperor Louis Napoleon the Third. She would,
in short, get the ear of the French Emperor. Then
(08:02):
she would convince him to support the unification of the
Kingdom of Italy under Vittorio Emmanuel. The Countess wasn't yet
twenty when she received her assignment. She must have felt
at least partially thrilled to receive a secret code from
the Prime Minister so that she could communicate with him
(08:23):
while in Paris. She would have listened carefully to his instructions.
Quote succeed by whatever means you wish, but succeed, And
she must have understood whatever means you wish. He had said,
she was a great beauty. More than anything else he
meant seduction. On February fifth, eighteen fifty six, then eighteen
(08:50):
year old Countess Virginia Castilioni arrived at a masked ball
on the Champs Elise. The room was filled with a
wristocrats in Mardi Gras masks. The Countess knew that she
was a vision, so she ignored the women in the room.
She looked right past most of them, and then caught
(09:12):
the eye of the only man she cared about, the Emperor,
Louis Napoleon the Third. Yes he was married to Empress Eugenie,
who was eight months pregnant. Yes, he was involved and
distracted in ending the Crimean War. It didn't matter. She
smiled at him flirtatiously, and he turned toward her. In
(09:35):
the months to come, sellacious rumors would swirl about the
Countess's beauty, her vanity, her elaborate costumes, and her seduction
of France's emperor, one general said quote. Infatuated with herself,
always classically draped, she would appear at gatherings like a
(09:56):
goddess descended from the clouds. She would allow people to
admire her as if she were a shrine, but as
soon as the Emperor or Empress approached, her face would
be transformed. She seemed to be saying to all, I
am not here for you. I am of a different essence.
(10:17):
I know only the sovereign and his consort. End quote.
In June eighteen fifty six, Empress Eugenie made the mistake
of inviting Virginia to a garden party. Louis Napoleon invited
the Countess to a boat ride, rowed her out to
an island in the lake, and disappeared with her for hours.
(10:40):
It was an incredibly flagrant public outing of their affair. Unsurprisingly,
Virginia found herself hated by the Empress. On February seventeenth,
eighteen fifty seven, Virginia had arrived at a costume ble
dressed as the Queen of Hearts. Scandalously for the time,
(11:02):
she wore no corset and no crinoline. Chains around the
bodice of her dress formed heart shapes, the neckline plunged shockingly.
She wore her hair down around her shoulders. Empress Eugenie
had cutting words for her. The heart is a little low, Countess.
(11:25):
But the Empress wasn't always so cutting. She despaired about
her husband's affair with the Countess, at one point saying,
I have tried everything, even to make him jealous. It
made no difference. I can't take any more. But a
man with a wandering eye has a tendency to wander.
(11:46):
Only ten days after the Countess's success as the Queen
of hearts. At the eighteen fifty seven Mardi Gras ball,
Louis Napoleon's affections wandered on to someone new, the Countess Wallesca,
an affair that would continue for seven years. After that,
La Castiliani's days at the French court were numbered. It
(12:10):
may have been her first taste of not being the favorite,
of being passed over for another woman. She didn't like it.
She had not forgotten her charge to whisper in the
Emperor's ear about unification of Italy. She believed that she
was playing an important geopolitical role. Unfortunately for the Countess,
(12:33):
the French used that role against her. On April sixth,
eighteen fifty seven, Louis Napoleon was leaving Virginia's residence at
three in the morning when the Italian Carbonari made an
attempt on his life. Virginia almost certainly had nothing to
do with the assassination attempt, but Louis Napoleon was through
(12:55):
with her anyway. She was banished from the French court
and would have of the Emperor's ear no longer. The
Countess Castilioni's banishment from French court was the beginning of
the end of her very brief life as a political figure.
Her husband went back to Italy, but she refused to
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live with him there. She and her son Georgia were
living separately in Turin when in eighteen fifty nine Louis
Napoleon sent French troops in support of Italy against Austria.
In eighteen sixty one, Victorio Emmanuel became king of a
united Italy. The Countess believed she had played an important
(13:39):
role in this victory. Historians tend not to agree. In
eighteen sixty one, the Countess and Georgio returned to France
again without her husband, the count They moved to a
suburb of Paris called Passe, near the photographer Pierre Louis Pierson,
and here this second act of her life began, the
(14:02):
part that she is actually most famous. For five years earlier,
when she had been the favorite of the Emperor, she
had met with Pearson for a simple photography session in
which she wore a standard black velvet dress. But that
was then. Now she was out of favor with the
(14:24):
Emperor and she felt her great beauty was going to waste,
so she went back to the Mayor and Pearson portrait
studio and for the next several years, she and Pearson
undertook one of the largest serieses of photographs of a
private person in the nineteenth century. She had him take
(14:46):
over four hundred photographs, all of herself, and not just
any photos of herself. In these photographs, she recreated the
costumes of her earlier victories at court. She wore the
famous Queen of Hearts dress all over again. It doesn't
take a freud who was actually born the year the
(15:08):
Countess first went to Pearson to analyze that she was
trying to live in the past. She was trying to
document her beauty. To prove it in front of the camera,
the Countess posed herself in costume as a peasant, a
noble woman fleeing a fire, characters from novels and plays.
(15:28):
She lounged on chases and sat up in beds. Some
especially salacious photos show her bearing gasp her naked leg.
At the time, the only women's legs that a respectable
person might see outside the bedroom or the brothel was
at the ballet, and even then that could be almost
(15:51):
as titillating as pornography. So too, as in the so
many bedroom selfies that are sent across the Internet today,
the photos that she took in which she showed her
feet tended not to also include her face. Through all
this work in the photography studio, the Countess's famous vanity
(16:12):
only increased. At one point, she asked Pearson if he
fully recognized that God is quote making you the collaborator
of the most beautiful creature who has ever existed since
the beginning of time end quote. It's quotes like that
that I do feel our important context here, because often
(16:33):
I think history has a knee jerk reaction to label
beautiful women as vain. But in this case it is
a label that seems especially apt. In a technique common
for the time, the Countess ensured that the photos were
painted over, so they were touched up and in color.
(16:54):
She had Pearson photograph her son too, But even there,
her famous vanity was unre relenting. The Countess would dress
Giorgio up as her. A series of photos show him,
at age seven, in a dress, his long hair flower pinned,
clearly meant to look like his mother. Of the one
(17:16):
hundred and ten photos of Georgio, some show him alone,
some with the Countess, and only one also includes his father.
During all this time, the Countess had taken lover after lover,
but love itself seemingly was out of the question. I
don't believe in love, she wrote. It's a malady that
(17:39):
comes and goes little by little, or an intermittent fever.
She was not loved in the Parisian court. Years into
her return to France, at last she was invited to
one ball. In eighteen sixty three, she appeared as the
Queen of Etruria, a costume that she expected would dazzle
(18:02):
but instead scandalized. Rumors spread that she'd almost been naked.
To modern eyes, of course, the photos of the costume
are laughably clothed. Only her arm from the shoulder is bare,
and I will include photos in the episode script on
(18:23):
our Patreon. Hearing about the costume from his post in Turin,
her now estranged husband threatened to take their son, saying quote,
I want to spare myself the status of husband to
the beautiful countess. Shortly after, she mailed him a print
of herself in the Queen of Etruria costume, this time
(18:46):
holding a dagger. The photo is so striking that nearly
one hundred and fifty years later, the Metropolitan Museum of
Art used it as the cover of their catalog for
the show about her in the year two thousand. The
Countess titled the photo herself. She named it Vengeance. After that,
(19:09):
the Countess appeared to go a little mad. In April
eighteen sixty three, two months after the quote unquote Naked
Queen of Vitrurian debacle, she arrived at one last event.
Rumor swirled that she would show up naked. Instead, she
dressed head to toe as a nun. She called herself
(19:31):
the Hermit of Passe and was accompanied by a violinist
playing Chopin's Funeral March. We can conceive of these events
kind of like a modern met ball think of Kim Kardashian,
who shows up sometimes channeling Marilyn Monroe and sometimes shrouded
in black from head to toe. The Countess CASTILIONI did
(19:54):
the same thing from the Queen of Hearts to complete
hermit nun. She was an all or nothing person, all drama, nothing,
balanced or in between. Later psychoanalysts would coin the term
Madonna horr complex, though the Countess viewed herself more as
(20:14):
a goddess or queen, a divine creation, and if she wasn't,
then she didn't want to be seen at all. Her
appearance as the Hermit of Pesse marked her final dramatic
showing at a public ball. In eighteen sixty seven, her
husband died. The next year, she locked herself away in
(20:36):
the apartment at the Place Bendome, with the three doors
between her and the world, and no mirrors and all
black walls, which she covered in photos of her younger self.
In eighteen seventy nine, her son died suddenly at the
age of twenty four of smallpox. After that, if she
(20:58):
did venture out, it was only under cover of night,
shrouded in veils, with the company only of her dogs.
In the eighteen nineties, the Countess returned to Pearson's studio,
now in her fifties. The years had not been kind
to the once famous beauty, but she came back to
(21:22):
Pearson wanting what she had always wanted, more photographs, and
so began a smaller series of photographs of the Countess
wearing a younger woman's costumes, sometimes looking in a mirror
or lifting her sleeve to contemplate her aged ugly arm.
(21:43):
I say ugly in quotes, according to the catalogs and
articles that I could find. Everyone talks about how horribly
old and decrepit she had become. The met Catalog calls
the photos quote a sorry spectacle, painful documents charting the
(22:04):
course of a physical and mental decline. Her face has
coarsened and her waist has thickened. A history of the
modern portrait in nineteenth century France goes further, quote, it
is difficult to comprehend what masochistic impulse could have incited
her stout, toothless and virtually bald, to reappear before the
(22:28):
camera and create grotesque countertypes of the earlier portraits. End quote.
Here's the thing, listener, something weird I believe is going
on here with history. The photos used as illustrations of
her grotesquerie show a woman who is yes, clearly in
(22:49):
her fifties, whose mouth yes, is closed, perhaps not showing teeth,
and who yes, has gained some weight since her twenties.
Maybe some of the off the shoulder sleeves and necklines
aren't totally becoming, or perhaps they indicate that she's trying
too hard. Maybe her eyes do look a little haunted
(23:12):
or desperate or even mad, but she totally has hair,
or she's wearing a very convincing hair piece. The dresses
fit basically fine, and she's not ugly, certainly not grotesque,
And if her expression is a little vacant, well, if
you flip back in the catalog, I can tell you
(23:35):
it's basically the same gaze she had in her younger photos.
I believe art history itself seems to have fallen into
the trap of which they accuse the countess disdaining a
woman feeling unable to accept her for the simple crime
of aging. She is only grotesque. I think if you
(23:57):
think a woman in her fifties who looks like she's
in her fifties is grotesque, or if you think a
woman in her fifties who wants to be looked at
is grotesque, I happen to think not. It's a good
lesson in seeking primary sources, which because their photographs remain
right there for us, unbiased by interpretation and analysis. To
(24:22):
these photos, the Countess pinned paper to make herself look thinner,
almost like an early Instagram edit. How much has really
changed today? The reception of the later photos shows us
how the world saw a woman who got older, and
the Countess's actions prefigured how women might try to control
(24:46):
how the world saw themselves pathetic and grotesque for a
woman to grow old and age, and even more grotesque
if an aging woman tries to look younger. Of course,
the Countess was indeed somewhat mentally unstable by the time
of these photo sessions. In eighteen ninety she titled one
(25:10):
photo in the series, I Don't give a damn for
the Police Commissioner. In place vendome, she photographed her own
swollen feet from the perspective of a corpse looking down
in a casket. It would be comic and even smart
if she had any sense of irony about it. Art
(25:31):
history does not suggest that she did. At the end
of her life, she wanted an exhibit of the photographs
of her to be called the most beautiful woman of
the century. She died first on November twenty eighth, eighteen
ninety nine, at the age of sixty two. After her death,
(25:52):
she became the subject of plays and books, and in
the mid twentieth century several Hollywood films. She prefigured Cindy
Sherman and other photographers who made themselves the subject as
photography continue to develop as an art form, although perhaps
they did it with more self awareness. In two thousand,
(26:14):
the Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibited her photographs in twenty sixteen.
The novelist Alexander Chief used her as a character in
his novel The Queen of the Night, alongside a cover
image that is one of her photographs from a masked ball.
And her most artistic photo of all is one you
(26:36):
may have seen in the past sixty years. It's become
an icon of modern photography. It's a photo of a
glamorous woman holding an oval cutout in front of one
eye and peering through directly at the viewer. Covered and exposed.
And so the Countess did become an icon, a niche
(27:00):
one in the end. Yet upon her death it's not
clear that was what she wanted anymore. The Countess of Castilioni,
Virginia Aldoni, famous narcissist, asked for no priest, no fanfare,
not even a mention of her death in the newspaper.
(27:21):
Her wishes were ignored. People did talk. That's the story
of the Countess de Castiliani, but stick around after a
brief sponsor break to hear about one of her most
(27:42):
obsessive posthumous admirers. After the Countess's death, newspapers and auction
houses cataloged her life and its objects. But one man
(28:03):
beat out all others in his intense, rather creepy, posthumous
obsession with the Countess. The Comte Montexieu Fizonzac was a
poet and a dandy who never met the Countess in life,
but upon her death he said he felt, quote time
is running out. I must act. At the hour appointed
(28:26):
for the closing of the casket. I went up the
tiny staircase at Vassin. In the middle of the bedroom.
On the floor was a coffin about to be closed.
There was for me a flash of light in the
brief glimpse of the pale, beautiful, noble, solemn face of death,
on the point of vanishing forever end quote. Monticxieu took
(28:49):
post death obsession to another level. He collected every artifact
of the Countesses that he could, including and this is
just a partial list, the nightgown that she had asked
to be buried in, pieces of her actual coffin, plaster
casts of her feet and arms, the key to her apartment,
(29:11):
a shoe from her famous Queen of Hearts costume, and
four hundred and thirty four photographs. He wrote and published
a book about her La divine comtesse in nineteen thirteen,
but the only person he was more obsessed with than
her was himself. He aimed to be the most photographed
(29:33):
person in the world. The Countess's narcissism inspired nothing so
much in him, but more narcissism. Noble Blood is a
(29:57):
production of iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Manke.
Noble Blood is created and hosted by me Dana Schwartz,
with additional writing and researching by Hannah Johnston, Hannah Zwick,
Mira Hayward, Courtney Sender, and Lori Goodman. The show is
edited and produced by Noemi Griffin and rima Il Kahali,
(30:21):
with supervising producer Josh Thain and executive producers Aaron Manke,
Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
Host
Dana Schwartz
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