The Magic Attic Admires, Vol. 4: The Marchesa Luisa Casati

We've got a live one here, folks.

The Marchesa Luisa Casati was a true eccentric, another Bohemian like Peggy Guggenheim who led a romantic life - though hers was ultimately sadder.

by Augustus Edwin John, 1919

Now, this entry I must start with a disclaimer. When The Magic Attic Admires a person or thing, the admiration doesn't extend to everything they did or said, every decision they made. The admiration is usually limited to their willingness to be publicly, genuinely, their authentically eccentric selves, or for living their lives for art, making their life itself a form of art, or furthering the cause and reach of art.

I'll skip over the parts of her life that would cause any distress as much as possible while focusing on her wild eccentricity and creating a life of art.

Indeed, she once said she wanted to be a walking work of art.

She was an Italian noblewoman (you may or may not have guessed that from the title "Marchesa") born in 1881 and orphaned very early in life. She & her sister were brought up with immense wealth. She has a long biography, but I'll skip it and get to the good stuff.

In her youth, she was a muse for writers, photographer Man Ray (as was Peggy Guggenheim) and painters (Augustus John among them).

She lived for the aesthetic, as we'd say now. She powdered her greyhounds pink. Her fake eyelashes - she was buried in a pair - were at one point, two inches long. She apparently wore a necklace of live snakes to a party she threw. She sat next to a wax effigy painted and dressed to look like her at one of her dinner parties. Wild stories were thrown about of her actually having a number of chairs at these parties filled with wax dummies, inside which were the ashes of ex-lovers. There were tall tales going around about her to the point that I'm not sure if anything I read about her was true. Everything I wrote above could be nothing but wild conjecture. Apparently, her commitment to a wild, elaborate life of aesthetic was that intense.

She dressed in a fabulously unusual manner, including commissioning costumes from Les Ballet Russes' costume designer. Once, she shocked not just bystanders but herself when wearing a suit of armor pierced with electric arrows. (As you do.) The arrows, defective, gave her some dangerously high surprise voltage.

She apparently wore nothing but an open cloak and her birthday suit walking around St. Mark's Square late one night, accompanied by a torch-bearing servant and two pet cheetahs on a leash.

In 1910, she rented a fabulous palazzo in Venice on the Grand Canal where she held masquerades and garden parties. In 1924, she would be forced to leave it due to mounting debt. The palazzo was snapped up by first one owner, then, another ... then in 1949, another Magic Attic Admiree, Peggy Guggenheim, bought it and turned it into her home and the world-renowned art museum it is today.

The Marchesa, despite her ridiculously wealthy beginning to life, eventually through prodigious overspending was ultimately left with $25 million in debt. (This woman did nothing by half measures.) She then moved to a very small apartment in London, where she was sometimes seen digging through the trash for feathers or whatever else she might accessorize with. She was once found in bed by a visiting friend "covered in a rug of black ostrich feathers, eating a breakfast of fried fish and drinking Pernod, wearing a newspaper scarf" (...?) She was herself right up until the end.

She also apparently took up collaging in this era, and enjoyed casting spells on her enemy, the great photographer Cecil Beaton, who'd gotten on her bad side.

In 1957, she died of a stroke and was buried under a misspelled grave marker in Brompton Cemetery.

If only she'd kept a diary, it would have been fascinating reading.