Offbeat History: Marchesa Luisa Casati

In 2017 we covered the offbeat life of Marchesa Luisa Casati. While many have admired heiress Casati over the years for her life led entirely based on her aesthetics, she was also entirely self-serving.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hey, everybody, Here is an episode from our ten episode
playlist that we're calling Offbeat History. Yeah, we're adding this
to our our regular publishing schedule as one kind of
big drop all at the same time on March nineteen.
And that is so that you have maybe have a
little bit of extra entertainment options available to you, particularly

(00:23):
if you are self quarantined or sheltering a place. Welcome
to Stuff you missed in History Class a production of
I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Holly Frying and I'm Tracy V. Wilson, and today we're

(00:45):
doing a podcast on one of those people that come
up in history who's kind of larger than life. I'm
actually shocked that a lot of people don't know who
she is, um just because she was really like, uh
tastemaker as well as being the source of much gossip
and discussion in her time. She's not She's not a

(01:06):
name that I recognized when you sent the outline over,
but as soon as I saw a picture, I went
that person. Yeah, yeah, yeah. She is really unique in
that while many people admired her over the years for
her life, which was led entirely based on her aesthetics
and this idea of creating oneself. When you really start

(01:27):
to examine her biography and look at her life story,
you also find a woman who was incredibly selfish and
she was even described by close friends as megalomaniacal uh
so clearly a very flawed person. So I think that's
why it is so startling to me that she is
so lauded as this amazing icon of style, when the
same people who do that are like, oh, yes, but

(01:48):
she was in many ways terrible. But even when taking
into account her really irresponsible and utterly self centered behavior,
it is also easy in some ways to see how
she charmed Europe in high society in the early nineteen
hundreds simply by being such an outlandish creature and really
something of a caricature of her own design. And this

(02:09):
very complex woman that we're talking about today is Marquesa
Louisa Casati. She was born Louisa adele Rosa Maria Aman
on January one in Milan, Italy. Her parents were Alberto
Ahman and Lucia Bressi. The family was quite wealthy thanks
to a successful cotton mill, and Alberto was granted the

(02:31):
title of count by Italy's king, Umberto the First. As
a child, Louisa was interested in art. She taught herself
how to draw, first copying images that she had seen
in print, and then applying her skill to creating portraits
of her family. Luisa was considered a lot less attractive
than her older sister Francesca, and living a rather isolated

(02:53):
life as a child of wealth, she was rather shy.
In April of eight for, Count Amman and his wife
were traveling in Florence for business, and so they didn't
have their daughters with them on the trip, and the Countess,
who was only thirty seven at the time, became quite
ill suddenly and she died, although it is still unknown
what exactly caused her illness. And in the two years

(03:16):
following Luccia's death, Alberto tried to raise his daughters, but
his business really required more and more of his time,
and keep in mind also he was grieving his wife
at this point. Uh He died on July eleven, two
years after his wife, leaving his then teenage daughters with
an immense fortune. The girls lived with their paternal uncle,

(03:38):
Eduardo Ahman and his wife Fanny for a while after
their father's death. But naturally they were restless teenagers. They
were eager to engage with the modern world. And their
new home was in a small community that was about
twenty five miles away from Milan. Yeah, they were very restless.
They wanted to go to the city all the time,
which is something that they had done with their mother

(03:59):
a lot. So there's that factor in as well. Uh.
And eventually in nineteen hundred, Luisa made her debut, and
soon after, on June twenty two of that same year,
she married Camilo Casati Stampa Diconcino, three years her senior,
and she became a Marquesa in the process. And this
match was really a good one, at least on paper.

(04:22):
What Cassati lacked in liquid wealth, he made up for
in noble heritage, and while Luisa had no nobility in
her family line, she had a great deal of money.
So they kind of complimented each other in that regard,
and the newlywed's actually went to the Paris Exposition on
their honeymoon. A year into their marriage, on July fifteenth
h one, the Casati has had a daughter, Christina, and

(04:45):
at this point it seemed like Louisa was on track
for a fairly conventional life that would be expected for
a wealthy married heiress. She had an interest in the
occult in the supernatural, which were pretty popular topics at
the time, but she was leading a pretty typical, though
very lavish life. Yeah, we really cannot stress how rich

(05:05):
she was. She was often touted as the richest woman
in Italy, the richest woman in Europe. Some people called
her the richest woman in the world during her heyday.
But then in nineteen oh three, Louisa met the Italian
poet and playwright Gabrielle de Nunzio, and her life took
on a very different course. For a little background on

(05:25):
de Nunzio, he was famous already at this point for
his romantic exploits with actresses and socialites throughout Europe. He
is sometimes credited as the inventor of fascism, and an
Atlas Obscure article written about him in late described de
Nunzio as quote across between the marquis assad Aaron Burr,
i'm rand and Madonna. So that gives you an idea

(05:48):
of what he may have been like as a person.
Uh De Nunzio wrote in his novel Il Piacere in
eight nine, quote it's necessary that the life of an
intellectual be artwork with him as the subject. The Nunzio
first saw the Marquesa as she rode on horseback one
day during a fox hunt. He wasn't participating in this

(06:08):
fox hunt, he was just watching. When he saw the woman,
who he later likened to quote a slender Amazon, he
was immediately taken with her, and from that moment on
he made sure to attend many of the same hunting
parties as the Cassatis did, just so he could get
close to her. When he did at first start by
flirting with her sister, he remained fixated on the Marquesa. Yeah,

(06:33):
there are many theories as to whether he was just
lavishing attention on her sister is a way to get
Louise's attention, or if he was just maybe playing the
odds hoping either of these heiresses would be into him.
But for Luisa's part, at this point, she was already
growing really frustrated with the role of wife. She felt
like she was confined by the expectations of it, and

(06:53):
she was progressively less and less shy. As it seems
she looked to others for social stimulation. In and slowly,
throughout the course of a series of hunts and events
where de Nunzio made sure he was there, she became
aware of him, and he was nearly twenty years older
than she was, and his jouis davive and his adventurous
spirit eventually captivated her, though he was far from being

(07:17):
an especially handsome man. But it wasn't long before Luisa
and de Nunzio began a sexual relationship, so the affair
that the two of them had was intense. Casati became
de Nunzio's muse, and Casati's husband seemed to just ignore
the whole situation. Soon Louisa, who do Nunzio had called
quote destroyer of mediocrity in one of his book dedications,

(07:39):
had become the toast of Europe's avant garde set. Uh. Yeah,
we'll talk a little bit more about uh Camillo Casati
and why he seemed to be okay with ignoring this
situation in a bit. Uh. But we should say that
while Luisa and de Nunzio were sort of gallivanting around Europe,
it was not as though everyone immediately accepted the pair.

(08:01):
While mistresses were certainly common for wealthy men. For a
wealthy married woman to fairly openly pursue a romance with
a man who was not her husband was still considered
quite scandalous, and Louisa often found herself the subject of gossip,
both whispered and in print, although it did not seem
to bother her, She actually seemed to kind of like it.
She also started to gather a list of very high

(08:24):
profile friends and admirers. As their list of high profile
friends and admirers got longer and longer, Ma Kasa Luisa
Kasati continued to evolve. She constantly up to the bar
on her own outlandishness to basically keep people interested in
her and feed all the stories in the gossip columns.
So not only was she not bothered by the gossips,
she was encouraging it. Yeah, that goes on throughout her life. Um,

(08:48):
and she was such an unusual character that she became
almost mythical. Her extreme appearance, which we'll talk about in
a bit, uh fostered all manner of gossip and speculation
that was both tied to and reaching owned any that
had circulated about her affair with De Nunzio. And she
seems as tracy just said to have consciously nurtured the
more outlandish stories that were told about her in social

(09:10):
circles and society pages. Living in the vast luxurious homes
that she stared with her husband, because they did have
several homes, often left the Marquisa feeling lonely, isolated and bored.
She countered this problem by throwing really lavish balls and parties,
often for charity. She was often outfitted in the most
extreme and showy ensembles for these themed events. And we're

(09:34):
gonna talk more about how Kasati started to morph into
an almost entirely different person after she met De Nunzio
in just a moment, But first we're gonna pause for
a word from one of our sponsors. Throughout the years

(09:55):
following nineteen o three, when she first met De Nunzio,
the marquis that changed dramatically. Uh Do Nunzio's idea of
self creation is art, which we mentioned a moment ago
really struck a chord with Luisa and Kasati was naturally
a very striking figure. You'll remember that he saw her
riding on horseback and was completely taken with her. She

(10:16):
was six ft tall and she was very very thin,
But she actually chose to accentuate these physical traits rather
than minimizing them, and she created a sort of character
in the way that she chose to present herself. So
her hair, which was naturally sort of a dark brown color,
slowly shifted in shades to become a brighter and brighter
shade of red. She powdered her skin so it would

(10:39):
be as pale as possible, and she took on the
habit of maintaining a constant smoky eye appearance by applying
plenty and plenty of coal eyeliner. She was really dedicated
to maintaining a very heavy, dark eyed look. Sometimes she
would go so far as to glue strips of black
velvet around her eyes in addition to always wearing these
very heavy a lashes. Sometimes she would have several layers

(11:03):
of lashes on at a time. I have hard enough
time with one on the rare occasion that I have
reason to wear eyelashes. She's even said to have taken
Bella Donna and regular doses to try to keep her
pupils dilated for the aesthetic effect, which also sounds very difficult.

(11:25):
All of this artifice was because she wanted in her
own words, to become quote a living work of art,
and the sentiment was very clearly in line with De
Nunzio's ideology as an artist like you, I can't imagine
that that much heaviness. At times, she allegedly wore false
eyelashes that were like two inches long and then layered

(11:48):
it would feel like a chandelier. But it did make
her quite striking and memorable. Well. I remember at my wedding,
my lashes were really two different lashes, but one of
them was like a half set m hm. And even
then that was a lot of eyelash too much. I
wonder about the strength of her eyelids, like they were

(12:09):
constantly getting a workout. Um all of these changes in
her appearance, because up to this point she really had
kind of looked like the classic well dressed, almost Gibson
girl esque image. But these changes did not go unnoticed
by Kasati's friends and acquaintances, and so as she stepped
farther and farther out of her demure appearance as a

(12:30):
wife of nobility, people actually began to speculate that there
may be some occult influence that was being exerted by
de Nunzio that was causing this shift in her appearance
and behavior, because it was so dramatic. When I went
to find artwork to go with this episode, uh, my
first thought after oh yeah, was is it Halloween already?

(12:52):
It's always Halloween, Tracy. So for his part, Denuncio was
equally under her spell. So he had seduced a lot
of women in his time, and he would eventually move
on when either his interest in them or their money
ran out. But Luisa really kept his attention in part
because she just stayed really obsessed with herself and her transformation.

(13:16):
She was more obsessed with that than she was with him,
and that and their shared love of aesthetics and decadence
really fueled their romance. Neither of them was tethered to
the other, but they stayed involved romantically for decades. Yeah,
I was reading in in one account that part of
the reason was that she always met him as an equal,

(13:38):
like she never fell into the the traditional role of
a woman is subservient when she was with him, and
so he sort of was very intoxicated by that. In
nineteen o six, Camilo Kasati, her husband, commissioned another home,
this one in Rome and Luisa was given complete control
over its decor and the move, at least for part

(14:00):
of her time to Rome. Remember, she lived in many
houses facilitated Louisa meeting some new friends who were as
obsessed with art as she was, including the painter and
sculptor Alberto Martini and the futurist Felippo Tomaso Marinetti. Through
De Nunzio, she also met with the celebrated portrait painter
Giovanni Bordini. This artist was instantly fascinated with Luisa and

(14:23):
he wanted to paint her in his studio in Paris, so,
without hesitation, she moved immediately and temporarily to France. She
left her husband, her child, and many many households behind.
When Baldini's painting, which features the Marquesa clad almost entirely
in black with accents of purple, accompanied by a greyhound

(14:44):
and sort of gazing directly out from the campus, when
this was unveiled as part of a show of portraits Bibaldini,
it got a lot of attention, and it was both
praised as the apex of Baldini's work and criticized as
having a vaguely demonic air about it Uh and that
controversial assortment of attention to the work completely delighted Louisa Casati,

(15:06):
but her delight quickly turned to anger when she discovered
that Boldini had denied magazines the right to print reproductions
of the portrait. She really wanted that press, and after
the artist and his subject bickered over the matter, primarily
through a series of letters back and forth, Boldini finally consented,
although he was convinced it would lead to a degradation

(15:26):
of his reputation because of the bad prince that would
be produced. Meanwhile, De Nunzio was obsessed with Venice, and
that sparked Cassatti's own love affair with that city, so
the Marquesa decided she needed a home there too. She
had actually set the wheels in motion before this portrait
trip to Paris, but it wasn't until after the painting
had been shown that a lease was found that would

(15:49):
suit her needs. In Marquesa, Louisa Casati moved into the
Palazzo Vignier de Leoni, and construction on this unfinished Venice
palace wasly begun in the mid seventeen hundreds. The luxurious
home which sits right on the Canal was never completed
by its architect, Lorenzo Boschetti, but even unfinished, it was

(16:10):
the perfect place from Marquesa Kasati to indulge her every
flamboyant whim So first she had the structure restored and decorated,
but she insisted that this restoration still retained the sense
of deterioration that the building had had. She just wanted
it to be structurally sound so that it would not
literally deteriorate around her. She also hired a permanent gondolier

(16:34):
who was always dressed in eighteenth century clothing, complete with
a powdered wig yea. There are stories about how the
the people who owned the other homes in the area
were really excited initially that it was being renovated because
it had gotten a little dilapidated and was something of
an eyesore. And then they realized there was nothing being
done on the outside. They're like, oh, it's it's still

(16:55):
gonna look like a mess um. But she loved it
that way, and in setting up her new home, Luisa
had her greyhounds transported to Venice, and then she purchased
two cheetah's as pets as well. She would eventually start
taking the cheetahs out in her gondola and walking them
through Venice on jeweled leashes. To complete her image in

(17:17):
her new city, Marquesa, Casati turned to the designer Mariano Fortuny.
Long lean lines and rich colors and luxurious fabrics that
for Tunia is famous for made the already tall and
then Marquesa look even more extreme, so she became a
really devoted customer. By this point, Luisa and Camillo, who

(17:37):
preferred rome, we're living almost entirely separate lives. Their daughter, Christina,
who was nine when Louisa moved into her Venetian palace,
was sent to boarding school. In effect, Luisa had completely
rid herself of any of her familial obligations, and Camillo
Casati was dependent enough on his estranged wife's wealth that

(17:58):
he really didn't make a fuss about her essentially abandoning
him and her daughter. The pair did eventually legally separate,
but that was several years into Luisa's carefully cultivated life
on the canal in nineteen fourteen, and it was another
decade before they would actually be divorced. Luisa incidentally insisted
that she get to keep the title of Marquesa. In

(18:18):
that divorce settlement, the Marquesa, who the residence of Venice
started to call La Kasati, became famous for the parties
that she both threw and attended. She became the ultimate
party girl. She spent massive sums of money on drinks
as well as opium, and at one soire, a Russian
ballet dancer named Vaslav Najinski and an American dancer being

(18:40):
Isadora Duncan gave an impromptu performance for the other lucky
attendees who were there. That sounds amazing. She also had
a wax version of herself made and at times she
would do things like sit in a dimly lit room
with it during her parties to see how guests would
behave when they wandered in and discovered this duo and

(19:01):
this waxen doppelganger would sometimes accompany her to dress fittings,
or it would be seated at the dining table as
though it was a guest, and at one point De
Nunzio even planned to include the wax figure in a
narrative that he was writing, although it appears at that project,
which was a short story, never really came to fruition
or if it did, it was lost to time. A
key part of her image, particularly at all these parties,

(19:25):
was Laka Sati's wardrobe. There are descriptions on top of
descriptions about her dresses and her jewels and her accessories.
She said to have adopted the habit of shopping in
Venice with her cheetahs wearing nothing but an incredibly luxurious
dressing gown. She's even been described at times as wearing
more perfume than clothing. This was also the period of

(19:47):
her life where she regularly patronized another one of our
past podcast subjects, designer Paul Poor A. Yeah, she definitely
liked to draw the eye, which was sometimes in a
wild outfit. There an image if you if you do
an Internet search for her, you'll find an image of
her in this wonderfully bizarre looking dress that's made of
light bulbs. But then she would also just kind of

(20:10):
count on using a bit of nudity to try to
get the same attention if the clothes weren't doing the trick.
There's one story of her at a party where she
insisted she couldn't breathe and she just cut her dress
off of herself. So she definitely was into the exhibitionism.
She would also have outfits made by Balletus costume designer
Leon Boxed as well, and increasingly the difference between her

(20:31):
fancy dress ensembles and her everyday clothes became kind of indiscernible.
And at the same time, she felt her wardrobe had
to be constantly augmented to top what had come before.
So uh she was always adding to that and the
amusement park that her palace had become. She just kept
wanting more and more and more of everything. In addition
to the dogs and the cheetahs, there were monkeys, birds,

(20:54):
and other wild cats. She then became obsessed with snakes.
She started with small all snakes and eventually worked her
way up to a boa constrictor. She also wanted the
snakes to travel with her, and she commissioned expensive boxes
from jewelers that she could carry them with her when
she had ventured away from Venice. She's also alleged to

(21:16):
have convinced a zoo in Rome to lend her a
lion so that she could have it tethered to the
throne that she kept in her home. So while Casati
was by all accounts a lover of animals comes up
over and over that she loved them. The manners we
have to say in which she kept them were obviously
not kind by today's standards. Keeping primates, confining cages, taking

(21:40):
wildcats out on leashes, making leopards pull her in a chariot,
and sedating snakes so that she could wear them as
jewelry are obviously all very very problematic. Uh. In short,
keeping exotic animals as pets is generally a bad idea,
and especially so when they are considered fashion accessories. But
for all that extreme extravagance, Livisa always wanted more, So

(22:03):
we're going to dive into some of the ways that
she pursued it after we pause for another quick sponsor break.
When even her home wasn't an exciting enough space for
her decadent masked balls and costume parties, Cassati actually managed

(22:24):
to get permission to use Venice's Piazza San Marco as
her own private party space. She hosted a grand ball
there in September, which was an eighteenth century themed masquerade ball,
and the Marquesa made a grand entrance by boat after
the rest of the guests had arrived, heralded by trumpet

(22:45):
and accompanyed by her cheetahs. Cassati also became increasingly interested
in the occult while living in Venice, and she would
seek out seances and other gatherings of like minded people
all through Europe. She would also invite people who seemed
to have connections to the spirit world to live in
her home as Venice in Venice as guests for long

(23:05):
periods of time. Yes, she had people that lived there
for years. And perhaps in line with her complete indulgence
in her own fantasy world, is the unrest of World
War One began, Luisa was almost indifferent to it. She
was actually in Paris on August third, nineteen fourteen, when
Germany declared war on France, and the next day, in

(23:27):
her suite at the Ritz, she rang her bell for
breakfast service, which was incidentally in the afternoon for her,
and she was irritated when no one came to bring
her food. She allegedly ran down into the the hotel
lobby and discovered a bunch of soldiers there, and that
same day Great Britain declared war on Germany. Cassati really

(23:47):
weathered the war in relative ease. She took advantage of
that time to patronize new artists and basically continue her
lavish lifestyle. In nineteen Cassati's sister Francesca eyed during the
Spanish flu epidemic. Francesca had been the one family member
that Louisa had retained a relationship with. Although there's no

(24:07):
real account of how the loss affected the Marquesa, that's
something that comes up over and over. There's not much
recorded about her like emotional state at some of these times,
so whether that's just because she kept it private because
it did not add to the exterior mystique that she
was working to cultivate or not is unclear. She continued

(24:29):
to travel the world, amazing, amusing, and sometimes dismaying her
hosts in various measures with her outlandish attire, which sometimes
included a walking stick that was almost as tall as
she was, which was actually a flask from which she
would serve herself absinthe. During a lengthy stay on the
island of Capri, she wore only black and she dyed
her hair bright green, but then eventually darkened it black

(24:52):
as well, and her sort of bizarre behavior and appearance
led to rumors spreading among the locals there in Capri
that she actually slept in a coffin. Though she remained
her same self, the post war world was less and
less her oyster. A lot of her rich friends that
she had been partying with for years were struggling financially

(25:13):
after World War One. They couldn't keep up with her anymore.
And then, to make matters worse, ready to wear clothing
was becoming stylish, which is something we've talked about in
past episodes. Ready to wear clothes were utter anathema to her.
The custom closet of expensive garments that she was used
to having became difficult to maintain when many designers making

(25:35):
those garments were closing up shop. Her trademark white skin
and red lip, which she maintained, started to look dated
instead of glamorous. And at the same time, Louisa was
tiring of her homes in Italy, and so she purchased
the Grand Trianon in Versailles, which was known as the
Palais Rose because of its pink marble exterior, and just

(25:57):
as she had done in Venice, Cassati spared no expense,
creating another spectacle of decor and indulgence. It was in
the Palais Rose at the end of June, which was
deep in the decade known as n a Fool or
Crazy Years in France, Casati, through a massive party called
Soire mag the Marquesa, was costumed as the Count Cagliostro,

(26:21):
who had been an Italian magician and occultist in the
late seventeen hundreds. Casati Is ensemble for the event included
a crystal sword and a suit made of silver and gold.
A photographer from Vogue magazine was actually on hand to
capture the event, but this lavish, primarily outdoor party was
upstaged by the weather when a storm rolled in as

(26:43):
the costume guests were conducting a parade. Everyone had to
make a run for it, and as that storm whipped in, Cassati,
who literally her clothes were being whipped off of her
by this weather, brandished her sword to try to rally
the revelers, but then she fainted and the evening came
to a rapid than unpleasant clothes there were a lot
of other things that happened that night that did not

(27:04):
go well. Allegedly, one attendee even spent the night locked
in a closet for having committed this sin of wearing
an outfit similar to the hostess. All of this lavish living,
the costumes, the animals, the drinks, and the houses. Obviously,
they were expensive. Luisa soon blazed through the fortune she
had inherited as a teenager. By n thirty, she had

(27:27):
also taken on massive debt, alleged to be as high
as twenty five million dollars in modern worth. Desperate to
try to settle some of those debts, Kasati traded many
of her priceless pieces of art away, and she sold
items from her home. She also started to borrow money
from shady people to try to make up gaps in
her finances, which only created worse problems. Additionally, she still

(27:51):
couldn't manage to control her spending habits. After a lifetime
of just throwing money around without a care, an auction
was held at the Palais in December ninety two, and
almost all of the Marquesa's personal possessions were up for grabs.
The Pale Rose itself was mortgaged several months later and
passed to one of Cassatti's creditors. Luisa initially moved into

(28:15):
an apartment in Paris, but after just six months there
she had no permanent address in the city. She basically
moved from hotel to hotel. She depended on the generosity
of friends to cover her expenses. In ninety eight, the
person who Luisa had been closest to for the longest
length of time in her life, Gabrielle de Nunzio, died,

(28:35):
just as with her sister. There is no record of
her reaction to this passing, and she did not attend
his funeral. Meanwhile, Camilo Casati had remarried and settled into
a quiet life. Christina Casati had married Frances Hastings, the
sixteenth Earl of Huntingdon, and Marquesa. Casati would sometimes visit
them in their home in Britain. In nineteen thirty four,

(28:57):
Hastings painted a portrait of Luisa. Yeah, so she had
a relationship with her daughter, but it seems like it
was To my reading, it feels almost like, um here
is my odd distant relative than than like the closeness
that a mother and daughter would normally share. Uh and
eventually to escape her debts in France and Italy and

(29:20):
a reputation that had been built on a lifetime of
invited gossip that then at this point made her basically
a pariah in high society. Casati moved permanently to Great Britain,
although it's unclear exactly when this move happened. By two
she was destitute, and by the late nineteen fifties, be
Satti was living in London in a series of small flats.

(29:41):
She never stayed in one for very long. Over the
intervening years, she had subsisted on small, regular donations of
money from her friends. They wanted to keep her from
having to beg but they knew that if they gave
her lump sums, she would just spend it all and
then be back to asking for help. The ones exquisitely
out it in Marquesa was sometimes seem rummaging and trash

(30:03):
bins for bits of velvet or lace to adorn herself,
and there are numerous accounts, even from the people who
loved her dearly, of her ongoing substance abuse. She could
be at turns her most charming and delightful self, or
an angry and unpredictable specter of her former glory. Her daughter, Christina,
who had divorced and remarried at this point, helped her

(30:26):
mother as she could, but then Christina died of breast
cancer in nineteen fifty three and her later years, Marquesa
Louisa Casati was largely cut off for most of the
society that had once celebrated her, she no longer corresponded.
She had started believing she was telepathic. She engaged in
seances with a handful of friends and acquaintances who were

(30:47):
making up her social circle by the end of her life.
She died of a stroke on June one, nineteen fifty seven,
at the age of seventy six. A friend and frequent
seance participant named Sydney farm snuck into her home after
learning that she had died, and took her Pekinese dog,
which was taxidermy in a pair of false eyelashes, which
he then spruced up. This was not to steal them,

(31:10):
but to make sure that someone who knew and cared
about her preserved them for her funeral Marchesa Casati was
buried five days after she died, with the taxidermy dog
and the false eyelashes, dressed in black and leopard at
Brompton Cemetery, one of the oldest garden cemeteries in London.
Among those in attendance, which was a very small number,

(31:32):
was Emilio Basildella, who was Kasati's gondolier from Venice. Luisa's
Venice home was purchased in nineteen forty nine by Peggy Guggenheim.
Was Guggenheim's home for thirty years, and beginning in nineteen
fifty one, the American socialite would open her Venice home,
which was filled with art, to the public. In nineteen

(31:52):
eighty one, year after Guggenheim died, it was open to
the public for good as the Guggenheim Museum, which it
means today. So if you wish to walk in Marquesa
Luisa Casati's decadent footsteps, you can still visit her former
residence in Venice. Yeah, as I was talking about her
to a number of people, particularly over the weekend, I

(32:15):
saw a lot of friends and several of them have
traveled throughout Italy and I was saying, oh, you know,
have you been to the Guggenheim in Venice And they
would go, yes, it's amazing, and I'm like, that is
where she lived, and they would go, Holy Moses, because
it's an impressive structure. If you have ever heard of
the fashion brand Marquesa, it is named after her. Many
many designers have used Luisa Casati as inspiration for their collections,

(32:39):
and there has been speculation that her unique look, tall
and gaunt, was a big part of what drove the
fashion industry to seek out models exclusively of that body
type for many years. Writer Quentin Crisp described Casati in
the forward to her biography as quote, a picturesque ruin
of a woman. They also made a really insightful observe

(33:00):
ation that goes a long way and examining how a
woman who in her youth seemed set to live a secure,
conventional life ended up taking such a dramatically different path.
Chris wrote, quote, without question, the Marquesa Casati was an exhibitionist,
but exhibitionism is a potent drug. After a short time,
a dosk's strong enough to kill a novice no longer works.

(33:21):
And in a similar sentiment, painter and illustrator Alberto Martini,
who of course we mentioned in the episode she knew
he was one of the many artists she became friends with,
and he actually worked as Cassatti's personal painter for a time,
wrote in his autobiography that the Marquesa quote lived partly
as a slave to her dream world, and finally Jean
Cocteau once wrote of Marquesa Luisa Casati, she astonished, she

(33:46):
did not please. So that's the Marquesa Luisa Cassatti who
is a mind bender for me. She's very fascinating. It's
one of those things where you kind of want to
love her, but then you're like, it's difficult. I think
probably many people in her life felt the same way.

(34:09):
Thank you so much for joining us today for this classic.
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(34:31):
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