At the start of the twentieth century, the residents of Venice could catch sight of a strange apparition. As night fell across the city, a six-foot-tall, skeletal-looking woman with short red hair, ghostly white skin and dark eyes would be seen strolling between the canals, wearing nothing but a fur cloak and holding the jewelled leashes of two cheetahs which followed at her heels. But while phantom-like, this woman and her exotic pets were no hallucination; Venetians had glimpsed the wealthy Milanese heiress, Marchesa Luisa Casati.
In 1910 Casati had leased and moved into the Palazzo dei Leoni – now the Peggy Guggenheim Museum – on the Grand Canal. In 1903 she married the Marquis Camillo Casati Stampa di Soncino, with whom she had a daughter, but just three years after her wedding Casati became the lover, and the muse, of the writer Gabriele D’Annunzio. D’Annunzio wrote her into his 1910 novel, Forse che sì forse che no (Maybe yes, maybe no) as the rich widow Isabella Inghirami, and introduced her to a new world of artists and writers. Casati had been given her first taste of musedom, and she was hooked. Turning her back on conventional society and the life expected of her, Casati declared the sole purpose of her life: ‘I want to be a living work of art.’
Now leading an exclusively independent life from her husband, Casati set about transforming her Venetian palazzo into a fantastical realm, fit for a muse. Retaining the romantic, crumbling waterfront facade, she hired a team of designers, builders and carpenters to refurbish and redecorate its interior with black-and-white marble floors, chandeliers and curtains of gold lace. Meanwhile, Casati began to fill the gardens with a menagerie of unusual animals: peacocks painted white, monkeys, cats, greyhounds, parrots, snakes and, of course, her pair of legendary cheetahs.
Portraits of Casati frequently represent her accompanied by these strange pets. In Giovanni Boldini’s early painting, Portrait of the Marchesa Luisa Casati, with a Greyhound (1908) she stares alluringly – with wide dark eyes and a mischievous smile – at the viewer from beneath a huge black hat adorned with feathers. Wearing a matching floor-length black satin dress and with an expressively outstretched white-gloved hand, she holds the leash of her black greyhound; dog and owner are entirely coordinated. Similarly, in Boldini’s The Marchesa Casati with Peacock Feathers (1914) Casati sits within a bed of expressively painted peacock feathers, which also adorn her headdress; it’s as if she is metamorphosing into one of her birds.
The Italian artist had been commissioned to paint such portraits of the heiress; Casati effectively paid to become Boldini’s muse, stage-managing sittings and sending him countless photographs. However, it wasn’t merely through her association with curious animal companions that Casati created an outlandish image of herself. Though not considered beautiful according to conventions of the time, she created herself in the image of an enthralling actress – she dyed her hair flame red, powdered her skin to a bleached white and wore long false eyelashes. She would line her famous green eyes with dark kohl and regularly use drops of Belladonna, a plant-based potion with the power to dilate pupils, evoking the pitch-black eyes of her pet snakes.
Casati didn’t stop there: she also commissioned the most daring designers and couturiers, from Paul Poiret to Romain de Tirtoff (better known as Erté), to dress her in increasingly extravagant outfits for parties across Europe and the themed costume balls she threw at her own palazzo. On her guest list were socialites, renowned writers and avant-garde artists, including Pablo Picasso and Jean Cocteau. But the star of these parties was always Casati herself, as writer Robert Fulford remembered: ‘Exhibitionism was her art form. By entering a room, she turned everyone else into a spectator.’
Casati, who became infamous for her decadent costumes, dressed as Roman Empress Theodora, Lady Macbeth with a bloodstained hand attached to her throat, a glittering sun goddess and Eve with a drugged snake around her neck. She wore a Paul Poiret-designed ‘fountain dress’ made from three tiers of pearls and wire, and transformed into St Sebastian complete with a suit of silver armour pierced by brightly lit electrified arrows, which accidentally electrocuted her. Through such endlessly inventive outfits, Casati was undoubtedly advertising herself to any artists in attendance as a muse to be admired.
Casati soon caught the attention of a new artistic and social movement which was then gaining momentum in Italy: Futurism. In 1909 the poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti published the founding Manifesto del Futurismo in which he denounced the past and traditions in favour of the modern world. The Futurists celebrated, and aimed to capture, the dynamism, power and speed of the new age across all art forms, including fashion. It’s no surprise, then, that this group of young artists were enthralled by Casati’s modernist attire, which embodied the ideals of their movement.
But the Futurists also broadcast loudly, in a series of manifestos, their open hostility towards femininity: ‘We scorn women when conceived as the only ideal, the divine receptacle of love, woman as poison, woman as the tragic plaything, fragile woman, haunting and irresistible, whose voice, weighted down with destiny, and whose dreamlike mane of hair extend into the forest and are continued there in the foliage bathed in moonlight.’
It’s astounding and ironic that Casati managed to become the muse of such a misogynistic movement. However, she was far removed from the image of feminine sentimentality which the Futurists rejected. By 1914 Casati, who cut her hair dramatically short in a shockingly androgynous style for that time, had also divorced her husband. Disregarding all expectations of a noblewoman, she instead threw herself into cultivating and championing those artists who could grant her wish of musedom. Firmly displaying her credentials as a Futurist, it’s clear that – at least in the eyes of these artists – Casati existed beyond their notions of traditional womanhood.
As she had done with Boldini, Casati commissioned numerous portraits by the Futurists, including painter Alberto Martini, who portrayed her wearing various costumes, from that of a ferocious archer atop the Grand Canyon to the cunning Cesare Borgia who inspired Machiavelli’s The Prince. In his colourful painting, Marchesa Luisa Casati as Euterpe (1931) she even appears as the muse of music from Greek mythology, complete with instrument in hand – although depicted with six eyes to evoke notions of dynamism, Casati comes closer instead to the look of a mythical beast than a feminine goddess.
From deliberately positioning herself as Boldini’s model, numerous other Futurist artists, including Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni and Fortunato Depero chose to portray Casati in Futurist terms. Balla, for instance, created a playful moving bust, titled Marchesa Casati with mica eyes and a wooden heart (1915) from various materials, including painted wood and sheets of cardboard. When visitors turned the model’s heart, the abstracted face of Casati came to life – her eyes blinking, like a marionette.
Casati not only inspired, but was also idolised by, the Futurists. Marinetti, with whom she became close friends, credited her with keeping the movement alive during the First World War when she hosted the group at her home in Rome. He subsequently dedicated his 1917 Manifesto of the Futurist Dance to her, and even identified Casati as a member of the group when he gifted her a portrait of himself, painted by Carlo Carrà, with a dedication to ‘the great Futurist Marchesa Casati with the languid satisfied eyes of a panther that has just devoured the bars of its cage’. As Casati’s biographers Scot D. Ryersson and Michael Orlando Yaccarino write, ‘Unlike the typical society patron, Casati was fearless in becoming an eager accomplice to the talent she supported. For them, she became a tangible and effective promotion of their radical artistic experiments.’
However, Casati did not champion and collaborate with the Futurists alone. The heiress made frequent trips to Paris, where she would stay for months at a time, usually at the Ritz as it allowed her to bring her pet boa constrictor, Anaxagoras, which is said to have escaped into another guest’s room on one occasion. It was during one of her stays in the French capital that Casati met the surrealist artist Man Ray, whom she proposed photograph her. As Man Ray recalled in his memoirs, ‘I received a visit from a tall imposing woman in black with enormous eyes emphasised with black makeup. She wore a high headdress with black lace and bent her head slightly as she came through the door, as if it were too low for her. Introducing herself as the Marquise Casati, she expressed the wish to have herself photographed.’
Fascinated by this larger-than-life figure, Man Ray obliged and, at first, seems to have regretted his decision to shoot Casati as she couldn’t sit still: ‘It was trying work – the lady acted as if I were doing a movie of her.’ But, exploiting her restlessness, and using the technique of double exposure, he captured his sitter in a blurred black-and white-photograph, Marchesa Casati (1922). In this closely cropped, uncanny image the heiress emerges from the dark, with her mass of tangled hair and six eyes, appearing as a mystical being.
Man Ray, taken aback with the result, remarked that Casati was ‘a Surrealist version of the Medusa’. Many of the surrealists, who were focused on picturing the subconscious, drew inspiration from Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytical writings, in which he had proposed that mythology was a means of revealing the human psyche. Casati had presented Man Ray with a ready-made image of the snake-haired Gorgon from Greek mythology whose stare could turn anyone she looked at to stone; in the photograph her piercing eyes offer an opening into her inner self.
Casati, too, recognised that Man Ray had ‘portrayed her soul’ in his image; thrilled with it, she sent copies to D’Annunzio and numerous friends. Equally impressed, they wanted their photograph taken by this emerging French artist: ‘Sitters began coming in – people from more exclusive circles, all expecting miracles from me,’ Man Ray remembered. Taking Casati as his muse had been an excellent career move for the surrealist; not only had he created an iconic image in the spirit of the movement, but he had also gained new supporters and patrons. Moreover, from this point onwards, eyes became a recurring symbol, and double exposure a trademark, of his dreamlike photography.
Man Ray was among several artists who regarded Casati as a monstrous figure, and represented her as such. After meeting her at a luncheon in London, American-British sculptor Jacob Epstein invited the heiress to model for him. ‘We began the sittings and her Medusa-like head kept me busy until nightfall,’ he reminisced. ‘The winter light had failed and I had many candles brought in. They formed a circle round my weird sitter with the fire in the grate piled high to give more light. The tireless Marchesa, with her over-large blood-veined eyes, sat with a basilisk stare.’
The result of this evening rendezvous between artist and muse was the almost life-sized bronze bust, Marchesa Casati (c.1918). In contrast to Man Ray’s pulsating picture of Casati as a writhing Medusa, Epstein mounted her head upon a black base, recalling the moment in the myth when the Greek hero Perseus successfully beheaded her. Although motionless, the imposing heiress confronts viewers with a mass of wild hair and wide snake-like eyes, an image of dangerous beauty to be controlled.
Casati’s unconventional allure stopped many artists in their tracks, including Welsh painter Augustus John. He remembered in his autobiography the moment that he first set eyes on the Marchesa at a party in Paris in 1919: ‘A lady of unusual distinction had entered. Her bearing, personality, and peculiar elegance seemed to throw the rest of the company into the shade… She moved about the ballroom with supreme ease, while looking about her with an expression of slightly malicious amusement. Our eyes met. Before leaving I obtained an introduction; it was the Marchesa Casati.’
It was not long after that John painted The Marchesa Casati (1919). The first of four portraits of Casati, here she is dressed in creamy silk pyjamas, standing before an abstracted blue-green landscape which contrasts with her curled red hair and full lips. With hands clasped before her waist, she turns her body and dark, heavily made-up eyes, towards the viewer with a sultry look. Although posing provocatively, there is an intimacy to this painting, in which Casati has been stripped of her theatrical costumes. Instead, viewers encounter her as a romantic muse, indicating the short love affair she had begun with John, following on from which the pair became lifelong friends.
Casati also appears in the image of a sensual romantic muse in the paintings of Dutch Fauvist painter, Kees van Dongen, who wrote enthusiastically in a letter to the French art critic Félix Fénéon about his desire to take her as a muse: ‘I know La Casati. Her type is immediately agreeable to me and I would be very happy to paint her portrait.’ Van Dongen frequently portrayed wealthy women on his canvases, transforming them into slender, wide-eyed princesses, imagined in a palette of vibrant colours. He understood exactly what they wanted from him, commenting, ‘The essential thing is to elongate the women and especially to make them slim. After that it just remains to enlarge their jewels. They are ravished.’
But Casati, naturally tall and thin, required very few flattering alterations in the eight known portraits he made of her. In The Bowl of Flowers (1917), she appears before a mirror, dressed only in a pearl necklace, red stilettos and a gauzy grey shawl which she has deliberately dropped to her thighs to uncover her slender frame. On the floor a white greyhound dozes, adding to the dreamy and relaxed atmosphere of the painting, in which Casati appears behind the closed doors of her own boudoir.
Casati wasn’t the romantic muse of exclusively men, either. Travelling to the island of Capri in 1920 – where a community of queer artists congregated – she met American artist Romaine Brooks. A wealthy heiress herself, Brooks had the freedom to paint whoever she liked and in whatever manner she pleased; in a distinctive palette of muted tones, she expressed her sitters’ gender non-conforming identity through fashion, famously painting herself with a cropped haircut, top hat, tailored riding coat and white shirt in her 1923 work, Self-Portrait.
Learning that Brooks was on the island, Casati was determined that this painter – who renounced restrictive ideas of how women should look and behave – should immortalise her on canvas. She proposed a commission which, according to Casati’s biographers, Scot D. Ryersson and Michael Orlando Yaccarino, the artist at first declined: ‘Brooks invented a number of feeble excuses to avoid it. But the Marchesa was indomitable.’
Brooks not only gave in to Casati’s demands, but she also painted her in the nude – stirring jealousy in her long-term partner, the writer Natalie Barney, who must have guessed that the pair had also entered into a sexual relationship. In Portrait of Luisa Casati (1920) the heiress stands naked, with the exception of a dark cloak draped over her right arm, which falls to the floor of craggy grey rocks below. Her other arm, outstretched at full length to evoke the large wingspan of a predatory bird, ends with her hand gripped tightly like a claw. Staring straight at the viewer, in an almost antagonistic manner, Casati appears in the image of a cruel siren; in Greek mythology these hybrid bird-women lured sailors to their deaths on the rocks with their enchanting singing.
Although Casati had commissioned this portrait, Brooks refused to give it to her. Instead, she held on to the painting of her muse – imagined as a wicked femme fatale – for herself. Perhaps she wanted a memento of their affair, particularly given the magnificent canvas which she had created. But it’s also possible that Brooks – who is said to have kept the canvas rolled up under her bed – held on to it for another reason. Although she came to admire Casati, Brooks found the process of working on the portrait all-consuming, and wrote to Barney, ‘I am exhausted, I am losing weight, I am losing my hair, I am afraid, I need my rest.’ Perhaps she also wanted to preserve the painting, which could act as a warning sign against taking on other such romantic muses.
While we often think of artists possessing power over their muses, in the case of Brooks and Casati these stereotypical roles were entirely reversed, and the effects of their partnership were detrimental to the painter. Brooks certainly wasn’t the first artist to have been obsessed or haunted by their romantic muse. When Alma Mahler left Oskar Kokoschka in 1918, he famously commissioned the doll-maker Hermine Moos to create a life-sized replica of her, from which he drew, painted and photographed again and again.
Like Mahler, Casati entranced many of the artists she modelled for, not least Brooks. But she also seems to have bewitched herself. In fact, just like Kokoschka, Casati commissioned Catherine Barjansky to create a life-sized wax mannequin in her own image, with a wig made from her hair and green glass eyes – she clothed this body double in fantastical outfits and brought it to dinner with her, as well as to dress fittings in Paris. In a reversal of the Pygmalion story from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in which the sculptor’s artwork Galatea is brought to life, Casati chose to cast herself as a lifeless statue. Obsessed with creating herself again and again, she acted as an artist, taking herself as her own muse and preserving herself in wax.
Without doubt, Casati’s lifelong fixation with becoming a muse took its toll on her. Her entire life was a choreographed performance, into which she poured not only time and energy but all of her vast inheritance. By 1930, she had amassed a personal debt of US $25 million; unable to pay her creditors, her personal possessions were auctioned off. Among the bidders was Coco Chanel, who acquired a pair of bronze deer which she displayed in her sitting room.
Casati spent the last years of her life living in a small flat in London, where she was supported by friends including Augustus John. When she died in 1957, at the age of seventy-six, she was financially bankrupt. Twenty years after her death, Erté created an enchanting art deco illustration, Alphabet L for Luisa and Leopard (1976) in tribute to the woman he had dressed. Wearing a figure-hugging leopard-skin dress and jewelled collar, she is chained by the neck to the leopard which lies at her feet, almost like a slave to her overwhelming desire to become a spectacle.
But Casati had undoubtedly succeeded in her aim to become a muse – she appears in over two hundred known portraits. The Marchesa’s unconventional appearance and spectacular way of life sparked inspiration for some of the most significant modern art movements: surrealism, Futurism, Fauvism. At the same time, the likes of John, van Dongen and Brooks captured the complexities of this extraordinary woman beneath her costume. Throughout her varied portrayals, from femme fatale to eccentric lover, Casati’s prominent eyes show her seeing just as much as she is seen, reflecting the fact that she took herself as her own muse, too.
In the legendary Greek myth of Medusa, even after the hero Perseus had cut off her head, the Gorgon’s powerful stare could still turn people to stone. Like Medusa, Casati has continued to inspire countless artists and fashion designers, from John Galliano to Alexander McQueen, while British designers Georgina Chapman and Keren Craig created the Marchesa fashion house in her name. She is buried at Brompton Cemetery, where her small unassuming tombstone is inscribed with a poignant epitaph from Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra: ‘Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety.’ Casati didn’t just achieve her aim to become a living work of art, she also surpassed it – in life and in death.