Scot D. Ryersson

A really interesting and fascinating insight into the lover of Gabrielle, the Anzio amongst others. The owner of a wonderful house in the Venetian grand Canal with parties that really are legendary. Her decadence and narcissism were very impressive, and led to fascinating, colourful, and of course Complex life. Anyone interested in fashion, Italy, poetry, narcissism, the bright, young things generation, and just people who aren’t afraid to beat themselves, will get a lot out of this book. Highly recommend… (lisätietoja)

One of two books I’ve read about the Marchesa Casati, by Scot Ryerson and Orlando Yaccarino; the other is Infinite Variety. That work was a straightforward biography with some illustrations; this one is a coffee-table size book of art and photography, with some biographical text, so they are complimentary. Both books cite the claim that the Marchesa was the third most painted woman of all time, after the Madonna and Cleopatra; probably reasonable but I don’t know how to check. At any rate there do seem to be plenty of portraits; I think my favorite is a 1908 one by Giovanni Boldini; the Marchesa is facing the viewer with her trademark direct gaze. She’s dressed entirely in black except for white opera gloves. A black greyhound with a diamond collar stands at her feet.

Little of the Marchesa’s personality comes though in either book; she wrote so little that the authors give a full page to reproduce a note she wrote to Cecil Beaton. Near the end of her life she produced some collages made up of illustrations from English magazines, and they’re also reproduced here. She had numerous lovers, but no one has volunteered to kiss and tell. Most of her acquaintances were sycophants who dropped her as soon as her wealth evaporated; a few friends stuck with her until her bitter end in a series of increasingly dreary London lodgings.

There are some flaws; some of the text is black on dark colors and difficult to read. The last 50 pages or so are devoted to the Marchesa’s “legacy”; some of this is relevant – for example, stills from a one-woman show about the Marchesa – while sometimes the relation is strained – full page pictures of a brand of chocolate supposedly inspired by the Marchesa.

Certainly a worthwhile accompaniment to Ryerson and Yaccarino’s other book; not bad to have on your coffee table.… (lisätietoja)

From the “interesting women” reading list. It’s argued that Marchesa Luisa Casati was the third most painted woman in history – after the Madonna and Cleopatra. She was certainly one of the most painted women of her time in another sense of the word – she favored extremely heavy makeup, with a chalk-white base, shocking red lipstick, and eyes darkened with kohl – she sometimes went as far as using 2” long false eyelashes, gluing velvet to her eyelids, and enlarging her pupils with belladonna drops.


She didn’t start this way; as a young girl she was fairly ordinary, overshadowed by her older sister Francesca. Her family was wealthy industrialists; they owned cloth mills in northern Italy, and sought to move up socially by marrying Luisa off to the Marchese Camilo Casati, a noble but impoverished Italian cavalry officer. Luisa apparently settled down to the typical life of a young Italian wife in the early 1900s, giving birth to a daughter, Cristina, and managing a rural household while her husband busied himself with hunting, hounds, and horses.


Then something happened – perhaps a long-suppressed desire to be different, maybe a stray cosmic ray interacting with a brain cell, or who knows what, and the previously drab and dutiful Marchesa suddenly went over the top. She cut her hair, dyed the remainder bright red, adopted her signature makeup style, bought a villa in Venice, and began throwing wild parties and having affairs. She picked up a menagerie – an assortment of large snakes, a monkey that guests described as “loud and smelly”, and several cheetahs. She entered parties wearing nothing but makeup, a fur coat, and a boa constrictor, and escorted by a pair of large, silent, black servants who wore loincloths and carried torches. Now and then she had the servants painted gold, for variety. She patronized artists, sometimes pestering them for weeks until they agreed to paint her. She picked up another villa in Paris and rented one on Capri, with all used for increasingly exotic fetes and masquerade balls. She recruited lovers of both sexes – the most famous being novelist, poet, aviator, war hero, and proto-Fascist Gabriele d’Annunzio. She traveled around the world – authors Scot Ryersson and Michael Yaccarino note it’s hard to keep track of her, as rumors would put her in several places at the same time, and because she never kept any diaries or wrote anything down, preferring the visual.


It couldn’t last, of course. By the 1930s, her wealth was depleted, exacerbated by her habit of paying bills with art objects and her complete horror of dealing with things like taxes. She fled to London and moved through a series of increasingly squalid houses and apartments, complicated by the Blitz and the fact that she was technically an enemy alien. Most of her old friends and lovers ignored her, although a few came through now and then to make sure she had enough to eat – and money for makeup. She died in 1957 at the age of 76; her remaining friends saw to it she was buried with a new set of false eyelashes, and a stuffed Pekinese. Her gravestone in Brompton Cemetery has an inscription from Antony and Cleopatra – “Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety”.
… (lisätietoja)