The Most Outrageous Woman Who Ever Spent a Fortune
Spending money well is its own kind of skill. It requires a certain amount of creativity, and daring, and aesthetic appreciation. It is an ability that is almost as valuable as earning money. You might not recognize that talent now, for the internet is peppered with men—mostly men—declaring that no matter how much money you earn, you should spend none of it. Because, you see, that way you will have more money. And then you will die with lots of money. How dull.
No one ever surpassed the Marchesa Luisa Casati Stampa when it came to creativity in spending. Although you might not have expected this from her.
The woman later known as “the divine Marquise”, Luisa Adele Rosa Maria Amman was born on January 23, 1881, into a family of immensely wealthy Milanese textile merchants. If Luisa was known for anything in her childhood, it was her almost pathological shyness. She spent most of the time painting alongside her sister, playing dress-up and listening to fairy tales from her adored mother. Luisa would later recall some of her happiest childhood memories as being those of her mother tucking her into bed before heading out to galas, when “her laces, jewels, and pearls brushed my face, mingling with the scent of her perfume.”
As often seems to be the case when you encounter a historical figure, her mother died when she was thirteen. Her father followed two years after, leaving Luisa and her sister, two of the wealthiest heiresses in the country, in the care of their aunt and uncle.
By that time, Luisa was six feet tall. She was also skeletally thin in an age when beauty was defined by a curvaceous figure. And she still didn’t really want to talk to anyone. She proceeded to chop off her hair into a bob. This was in 1898—far before the 1920s, when the style would become a fashionable trend. It’s possible she did this specifically to deter suitors. It looked incredible on her. She would reinvent herself countless times, but she always kept the hairstyle.
And she did marry—spectacularly well. In 1900, at the age of 19, she married the Marquess Casati Stampa di Soncino, a great huntsman as well as an extremely rich and titled man. They had a daughter together by the time Luisa was 20. And then she had a lifetime of a table with a little piece of meat between them to look forward to.
It was around this time that Luisa met the writer Gabriele D’Annunzio, who would introduce her to surrealist society. D’Annunzio was famous as much for his womanizing as for his literary output. He gravitated toward wealthy women who paid his expenses, and in return, they were usually immortalized in a poem. When he met Luisa, he was immediately struck by the figure she presented. When he asked her what it was like to have such a striking appearance—a comment that probably served to flatter most beautiful women he directed it toward—the Marchesa replied that she was constantly orchestrating her appearance in the manner of an artist with a piece of work. She spoke to him about “imprinting her image on the very air, as if a retentive material, and leaving behind her a succession of impressions.”
Art seemed to be more important to Luisa than men. D’Annuzio aside, who seemed to communicate largely through cryptic notes with her referencing their shared obsession with black magic, the Marchesa wasn’t really known for her romances. It’s interesting that, during an age, a country and a social class where love affairs were a commonly accepted pastime, the Marchesa Casati seemed to have little amorous inclination. She was not spending time on her appearance to be desirable. She was spending time on her appearance to transform into a piece of living art.
During this turn of the century period, her visage took on the characteristics that surrealists would later immortalize in their paintings. She dyed her hair red and began rimming her large green eyes with black kohl. She left her family, and D’Annunzio led her to Venice, his favorite city. There she transformed the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni (an aside—it now houses the Peggy Guggenheim Collection), built in the 15th century, into a kind of stage for her to elaborately dress up, just as she had done as a child, though in far more thrilling fashion. This time, she had accessories.
The Grand Duke Boris Vladimirovich recalled one of her masked balls where she appeared in sweeping robes, “leading a tigress by a silver chain, and preceded by two nude men painted gold from head to foot.” Covering her servants in gold paint would be a recurring motif in the Marchesa’s parties, and one which would later make its way into Ian Fleming’s book Goldfinger. Unlike the Bond film, no one actually died from the Marchesa’s artistic attempts, though one servant did collapse from heatstroke and survived only because the landlord scraped all the gold leaf off his body.
As for the Marchesa herself, residents of Venice frequently saw her “strolling through St. Mark’s Square perfectly nude and lunar white beneath a fur cloak, accompanied by two cheetahs on diamond-studded leashes.” At another event, she entered in a golden chariot drawn by two leopards, “in an armor- like gown of cloth and with a silver helmet on her pretty head. And wrapped about her waist . . . was the shiny length of an eight-foot boa constrictor.”
Her parties—at the Palazzo, but also at her villa in Capri and her French chateau, the Palais Rose—were attended by artists of so many disciplines, including Pablo Picasso, Man Ray, Cecil Beaton, Vaslav Nijinsky, Colette, Marcel Proust, Isadora Duncan, Coco Chanel and every other person you’d want to meet from this period. She enlisted most of them in various tarot readings and seances, which she loved, and which inspired her to periodically wander through the streets carrying a crystal ball.
At her Chateau, she set up an artist’s studio in the gardens for visiting friends. In one of the chateau’s halls, she hung over 200 paintings of herself by these friends, including career-defining works by Man Ray, Giovanni Boldini and Augustus John. By 1926, it was reported that “every famous artist of her time has considered it an honor among honors to have La Casati pose for him.” It’s said that she is the most-painted woman after the Virgin Mary.
Her outfits were similarly inspiring, whether she was wearing necklaces of live snakes, a skintight red leather suit, or going to an opera ball covered in the blood of chickens.
In New York, which she visited in the 1920s, she wore low-cut dresses with massive skirts draped over panniers and held together with safety pins. At other times, she would appear dressed as the Virgin Mary or Joan of Arc. Sometimes she appeared with her hair dyed orange and black to resemble a tiger, or else green. She was perhaps most famous for her “light bulb dress,” which was electric, powered by a generator covered in diamonds. The effect was such that the Polish sculptor Catherine Barjansky claimed, “she was more a work of art than human being.”
By 1932, she was wildly, outrageously bankrupt, with debts approximating 20 million dollars in today’s currency. Forced to sell her homes, she traveled with weekend luggage, which was reported not to contain the usual items “of a middle aged lady, but Venetian swords, Chinese head-dresses, jeweled crowns and an extraordinary assortment of stage properties and costumes.”
Her friends encouraged her to sell some of her works to raise funds, but she refused. She was no more inclined to make money than a statue might be. Indeed, the art historian Philippe Jullian noted, “The Marchesa seemed to have a genuine horror of money.” In her final days in London, she lived in a studio apartment and was seen out rummaging through trash bins, according to Jullian, “not for food, of course, but scraps of velvet or lace.” She was buried in a leopard print coat, clutching one of her taxidermy dogs, with an inscription on her grave reading, “Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety.”
By modern monetary standards, this end may constitute an abject failure of a life. However, far from only influencing the painters of her own time, the Marchesa inspired Vivienne Westwood, Karl Lagerfeld, John Galliano and Alexander McQueen. The fashion brand Marchesa is named after her. It is not an exaggeration to say that she foresaw many of the most interesting fashions of the 20th and 21st centuries. Jack Kerouac wrote a poem about a picture of her, declaring, “Marchesa Casati / Is a living doll / Pinned on my Frisco / Skid row wall.” She also inspired a play (starring Vivien Leigh) and a film (starring Ingrid Bergman).
Her boldness, her chic, her unwillingness to see her own body as anything but an ornamental canvas made her immortal in the way that a finance expert urging you to never buy anything impractical is unlikely to allow.
Sources
- Scot D. Ryersson and Michael Orlando Yaccarino, Infinite Variety: The Life and Legend of the Marchesa Casati, University of Minnesota Press, 2004
- Infinite Variety, page 17
- Judith Thurman, “The Heiress Who Blew A Vast Fortune on Fashion,” The New Yorker, September 15, 2003
- Italy’s Famous Beauty Who Lives Like A Fairy Princess, The Detroit Press, April 4, 1926
- Nancy Baele, “The Mysterious Marchesa Who Inspired Masterpiece,” The Ottawa Citizen, April 9, 1987
- “The Marchesa Had A Tiger in Leash,” Evening Standard Sat, Mar 25, 1939