Suicided by Society: Marchesa Casati, the rise and fall of Priestess of Divine Madness.
“74th Chorus”.
By Jack Kerouac
Marchesa Casati
Is a living doll
Pinned on my Frisco
Skid row wall
Her eyes are vast
Her skin is shiny
Blue veins
And wild red hair
Shoulders sweet and tiny
Love her
Love her
Sings the sea
Bluely
Moaning
In the Augustus John
De John
back ground
How big is the step from luxurious castle on the shores of Lago Maggiore in Piemont and admiration of poets, artists, fashion designers and royalty to going through trash bins in the streets of London looking for feathers to decorate a hat?
Marchesa Luisa Amman Casati Stampa (18881-1957) was born a myth maker. She was choosing for herself symbols of aggressive elegance: python, gheopard, peacocks and black servants who she would dress for parties in costumes copied from Tiepolo, she dived in occult and performed in Ballet Rousse without having prior professional dance training, where her sole physical presence on stage would ensure success of a play. She owned a fully articulated reproduction of head of Baroness Mary Vetsera, murdered lover of Crown Prince Rudolf, that came complete with bloodied bullet hole in its skull. She owned a dagger that had belonged to Renaissance tyrant Cesare Borgia and is impersonating him in one of photos in full armour.
Luisa was rich, and not just rich, but endlessly rich. The younger daughter of Alberto Amman and his wife, the former Lucia Bressi, Luisa Adele Rosa Maria Amman was born in Milan to a life of luxury. Luisa’s father was of Austrian descent, while her mother was Italian and Austrian. Luisa’s father was made a count by King Umberto I. Countess Amman died when Luisa was thirteen, and Count Amman died two years later, making his daughters, Luisa and her older sister, Francesca (1880–1919, married Giulio Padulli), reportedly the wealthiest women in Italy.
But her life purpose lay in being an art muse, an icon and mastermind of the newborn art movement, Art Nouveau and later Futurism. Groundbreakingly soaked in mysticism, newly fashionable intoxicating substances and orient, the culture of Belle Epoque was a wild elitistic step from somewhat rigid academic and neo-classical art of France and Italy of the second half of nineteen hundreds. Explosion of colours, glamour and ideas. Visions of future and insight in the hidden past.
Her vision might have been conceived while in Paris in the library full of books on magic belonging to writer Rene Guenon, initiate of occult sect Golden Dawn, which attracted at the time artistic elite and had poet William Butler Yeats as a subtle propagator.
The highest and most joyful time of her life was the gradual unfolding of the magic theatre in Palazzo dei Leoni and Villa Fortuni in Venice. She was painted, repeatedly and by many. The owner of Villa, himself and artist and fashion guru working with oriental fabrics and jewels, dressed her for every occasion. Poets were dedicating her their hymns.
Her portrait by Giovanni Boldini was exhibited in Salon of 1909 and had a power of firework explosion. Raven black atlas gown, enormous and rich black hat with black feathers, black fur, holding a black pincher with two small dashes of colour of odorous spring violets: the bouquet she is holding and a tiny glimpse of underskirt. The focus on a white glove covering a royal refined hand and the eyes, those magnetic eyes holding suspense of knowing a secret, slightly provocative, slightly superior. She is keeping spectator at a long hold, and she is keeping the dog on guard, placing it between herself and the viewer.
The fame of being an inspiration for a hit artwork brought acquaintance with Ballet Rousse, the trendsetters of time. Same spring of 1909 in Paris she was introduced to Diagilev when a journalist lured her to “meet some of her Russian friends”, who were going to be the part of “Russian pavilion” in VII Biennale in Venice where she was also on her way to return to. First time she appeared in “L’Oiseau de Feu” by Stravinski playing a paradise fire bird, the second – in Persian dance in “Chovanscina” by Musorgski wearing oriental costume, both time designed by Leon Bakst who’s stage dresses were a crucial part of what made Russian Ballet so famous a phenomenon, becoming a part of 1913 book “Decorative Art of Leon Bakst”. In “Temptations of St.Anthony” after Flaubert she appeared as a queen of Sheeba, making more stir than the storyteller himself.
Then came multiple appearances on balls in splendid especially designed for her fantasy outfits, as a shining star with rays spreading along the cape, as Elisabetta of Austria, in feathers and with a whip, or just as herself.
Giovanni Boldini did not stop painting her and made many more stunning character portraits, more idealised impressions of her than realistic works one could expect at that time being painted of society ladies by Sargent or de Lazlo.
Visiting villa of Dr. Axel Munthe, the private physitcian of Queen Victoria of Sweden, in Capri, she would receive guests sitting in a medieval Florentine throne swarthed in a cloak claimed to have been worn by notorious eighteenth century magician Cagliostro. In Capri she befriended Baron Jacques d’Adelsward-Fersen, descendant of a lover of Marie-Antoinette, fleeing Paris on charge of “corruption de minieurs” who was sharing Villa Lysis with a teenage newspaper boy plucked from the streets of Rome, and they fuelled midnight parties on the cliffs of magical island with opium, passing around pipes and changing costumes from Hindu Gods to Black Mass Priests. She was rumoured to own a book of spells bound in human flesh from which there was still growing hair.
The third person of destiny she met during the same period was Gabrielle d’Annunzio, poet, writer, philosopher and political guru.
He was a revolutionary. But not the stereotypical kind of revolutionaries we would imagine, although Lenin himself quoted him among admirations and if I am not mistaken, had written to him. He had a unique revolution in mind. At one point he invaded a chroatian harbour of Fiume (which was due to defunct of Austro-Hungarian Empire as no-man’s land) leading a somewhat 2000 men army of bon-vivants, in fact mutinees from Italian army. Yes, the main political agenda of his revolution was liberty and joy, and they even had a tank. At one point the order “to stop d’Annunzio, if necessary by shooting him dead” was issued by the Allies, but considering the fact that he was the most admired writer in Italy who had proclaimed himself (and was proclaimed by others) “il Vate” (the national bard), second after Dante, the order was repeatedly ignored, if not to mention multiple acts of deserting the armies for d’Annunzio’s utopia. He called Fiume a “searchlight radiant in the midst of an ocean of abjection”, a “model-state” and at the same “a Land of Cockaigne”, both mythical and floating in real supplies of one. As a writer he was called by James Joyce the only European writer after Flaubert (and before Joyce himself) and was ranked one of the three “most naturally talented writers of his time”, the others being Kipling and Tolstoy.
The place became a political laboratory. Socialists, anarchists, syndicalists and newly appeared fascists were drawn here, as well as representatives of Sean Fein and of nationalist groups from India and Egypt, “The Union of Free Spirits Tending Toward Perfection” who met under a fig tree in the old town to talk about free love, yoga and abolition of money, as well as rebellious young aristocrats and just runaway teenagers, followed by journalists and british intelligence to watch how this experiment went.
D’Annunzio announced that in Fiume he was making an artwork whos materials were human lives. A journalist wrote about the place: “Songs, dances, rockets, fireworks, speeches. Eloquence! Eloquence! Eloquence!” In Brescia he was treated like the second king of Italy.
The utopia gradually was swept from surface of Earth by ethnic conflict and violence, as most utopias have. An Italian warship eventually broke into the harbour waters and bombarded his headquarters, after which he capitulated having withstood a 5-day fight.
Unfortunately, but predictably enough, his ideology attracted Mussolini, who (unknown for many fact) he sternly rejected, but his name got connected to far-right Italian nationalism (read: fascism) for long decades, even until present due to commissioning by Mussolini a biography of d’Annunzio entitled “The John The Baptist of Fascism”. Connected mistakenly and never in this or any world rightfully so, as to him Mussolini was nothing but a rude pleb who he once had not let in through the front door placing in the aftermath a plaque over it “Mussolini did not come beyond this point”.
He was granted by Italian government an estate on the spectacular shore of Garda Lake which he “Il Vittoriale” (read: dedicated to victorius Italian nation) where he kept an immaculate eclectic collection of artifacts.
He spoke for Life, Love, imagination with a diabolical charisma, and even people who heartily disapproved him found him irresistible. As a person he was notorious for debts, duels and scandalous love affairs, and Luisa Casati was one of them. He was short, bold and had lost one eye in a crash of private plane, and nevertheless the list of his multiple conquests included Eleonora Duce, Sarah Bernhard, and tall bisexual Russian ballerina Ida Rubinstein who had a title role in forbidden by the Bishop of Paris and placed in Papal index of Books No Good Catholic May Read “Martyrdom of St.Sebastian”, score for which he had written in collaboration with his friend Claude Debussy for the music part, the premier being attended by Marcel Proust who otherwise never left his sound-proof home.
His theatre premiere of Piu Che Amore (More than Love) was so scandalous there was signed an arrest warrant.
To Andre Gide he had once said that he dislikes Maeterlink for his banality and being “artificial and monotonous” and Ibsen for lack of beauty, adding “What do You expect, I am Latin”, having built his own little empire of cultural politics on calling Germanic and Anglo-Saxon people “barbaric”. Once d’Annunzio was introduced by Nencioni, an Italian critic and anglophile based in Florence, relationship with who he compared with the one between Socrates and Alcibaldes, to Pre-Raphaelites and Walter Pater (who re-evaluated the art historical canon in claiming values of beauty and passion and re-introduced Botticelli to artistic pantheon) as well as romantic poets, all so english yet so italian. D’Annunzio moulded his artistic personality after one of Lord Byron, being the owner of his ring and emersing into politics as well as promiscuity and swimming nude.
Marchesa Louisa Casatti, as d’Annunzio had written “was the only woman who had astonished me”. By the time she would paint her face dead white and dye her hair read in curls standing out as supernatural gloria in a fashion of Medusa. Marinetti, the futurist partially subsidised by her described her as having “the satisfied air of a panther that has devoured the bars of its cage”.
But their relationship was distant and aetherial, more distant and aetherial than she wanted it to be. Some claim the two, whos faiths were so intertwined, were never even physically involved. True soulmates keeping to their separate planets, hers of a masquerade and serving as a priestess of eros, his of physical escapades and serving as a soldier of eros.
Nevertheless seven years after their introduction they are staying together in Paris’ the Ritz, she requiring daily supply of white rabbits to feed her boa constrictor. They are seen together in a restaurant in St.Germain, where he is publically kissing her in the neck, leaving a red mark for display.
Next, she writes to him from St.Moritz in gold ink on a sheet of black parchment, crested with a death’s head and a rose (his watermarked stationery is sober by comparison), summoning him to meet the film producer Giovanni Pastrone, which gave rise to successful collaboration culminating in epochal epic of ancient Carthage, Cabiria.
Was it the wild rage of physical rejection or simple lack of attention by the one who never rejected anyone, that brought on a gradual decline? In a poem by one of close friends she appears as a demoness so consumed by passion she is impregnated by it and gives birth to the devil. On repeatedly interfering with her Welsh artist friend’s sittings with a notable client, he suggested “Luisa Casati should be shot, stuffed and displayed in a glass case”.
She would not only act as a patron of art giving recommendations and doing business matchmaking between artists and collectors or benefactors, she was acting as financial patron herself, subsidizing quite many young artists. She would not only be painted as a model, as she grew older she would commission more and more portraits, and sponsor various artistic projects, including newly exploded bomb of Italian futurist movement, being in a close relationship with Marinetti.
She had prolific friends within politics. Rumoured for her supernatural powers, she would give off the record intuitive advice on questions she had no practical knowledge of, thus acting as unofficial Italian modern-time Oracle of Delphi.
She was married, first really, then only on paper, to Camillo Casati, who was in military, and they had 2 children, growing up much without her too close involvement. Her daughter Christina followed her convent education by attending Oxford, where she never completed a degree in English, but met Augustus John, who invited her to a party at his studio in Chelsea, London where she in turn met Francis John Clarence Westenra Plantagenet, Viscount Hastings, the future 16th Earl of Huntington, who she married in 1925, much to disdain of the groom’s family, caused both by shared communist sympathies of the couple and the notorious reputation of the bride’s mother. The couple escaped to Australia, South Seas, Mexico where they were close friends with Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, and further to USA.
In the meanwhile, Louisa’s accountants were becoming concerned, for even limitless wealth has its limits. Entering second half of 1920s she started to gradually sell off some of her possessions: first childhood items, then father’s cotton mill, which was particularly difficult as it was the main continual source of income. Then went her custom-built Roman house and apartments in Milan. Camillo (the nominal husband) was happy to do so, as he enjoyed the pastoral lifestyle of his family mansion in Cinisello Balsamo. His consent was also given to finalise the long-overdue divorce being quietly processed at this time.
In the meanwhile Marchesa made an entrance in New York, where she was introduced as “La Marchesa Casati, a Venetian lady of great circumstance and eccentricity”. She got a fantastic write-up in media, be it by reporters from Time or Hollywood, and made friends with young Man Ray. But her star was in decline. She spent much more money than was worth doing so by throwing costumed and lavishly styled balls.
By the time she was celebrating her 50th birthday in 1931 her personal debt was in modern equivalent of 25 million dollars. So she decided to escape. She moved to London.
During 1940s her address changed more than 15 times. At one time she was lucky to occupy Hamilton House in Piccadilly. It had personal importance to her: first owned by Lady Hamilton, Lord Nelson’s mistress and then Lord Byron (the alter ego of her one true faraway love d’Annunzio), she herself had attended multiple parties there thrown by previous aristocratic owner. Now converted into a boardinghouse, she would occupy a top-floor flat. Still, but insignificantly, supported by art elite, she was keeping undeniable style and high spirits, but none of former glory.
Louisa survived the German bombings of the London Blitz. She now lived in a one-bedroom apartment in Kensington, surrounded by taxidermed former exotic pets and had no money, none at all. She would still entertain, inviting guests for gracious dinners of tinned food, and occasionally telephone an acquaintance to ask with adventurous enthusiasm: “I have ten shillings. Shall we have a bottle of cheap wine or go for a taxi ride?”
But her own artistic voice woke up, and she started producing bizzare but to a modern eye stupendously fashionable collages from magazine clip-outs.
On Saturday, June 1, 1957, Louisa died at home at the age of 77 of a cerebral haemorrhage. Her sudden demise followed an afternoon spent in a spiritualist session. A requiem mass was given at Brompton Oratory, and she was buried wearing a set of favourite cosmically long false eyelashes and with a taxidermed Pekinese dog. Among the attending friends and family was one of faithful Venetian gondoliers, who remained modestly anonymous.
Luisa Casati’s villa in Venice with portico doors opening to marble steps to Grand Chanel allowing to great the morning sun, was purchased by Peggy Guggenheim and is now place of Guggenheim Collection in Venice.
“If fashion is the reflection of time, no one better than Louisa Casati symbolized the moment of complete change – living la Belle Epoque and diving into modern life”. Diane von Furstenberg, designer.
With special thanks to Mr. Charles Cecil, who allowed me to join a group of his art students on a tour to Venice, which led me while discovering town on my own in free time to unfold this story,
© Natasha Kimstatsch, 2015
List of literature:
Materials from exhibition “La Divina Marchesa”, Palazzo Fortuni, Venice, 2014
Marchesa Casati, Portraits of a Muse. Scott D. Ryersson and Michael Orlando Yaccarino
The Pike. Lucy Hughes-Hallet