VENICE, June 2, 1957 — The most photographed woman of her age died yesterday in a single rented room in Knightsbridge, London, with a tin of boot polish beside her bed and a fortune that had evaporated into legend. Louisa Casati, the Milanese heiress who spent the largest private fortune in Italy transforming herself into a living work of art, was 76. She died of a cerebral hemorrhage, alone but for a stuffed dog and a spiritualist’s promise of a fresh set of false eyelashes.
The woman who once walked the Piazza San Marco at midnight naked beneath furs, leading cheetahs on diamond-studded leashes, had been reduced to applying her trademark kohl-rimmed eyes with Cherry Blossom boot polish warmed on a spoon. Her death ends a reign that defied every convention of its era, a life that blurred the line between patron and artwork, between madness and mastery. She was, by every account, the last of a species.
Born Louisa Adele Rosa Maria Amman in Milan in 1881, she was orphaned by 15, inheriting a cotton empire that made her the wealthiest heiress in Italy. Her mother’s bedtime stories were not fairy tales but the grim chronicles of Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria, Empress Elizabeth of Austria, and Sarah Bernhardt—figures who turned tragedy into spectacle. Louisa absorbed them all, then exceeded them.
She married a marquis, bore a daughter, and abandoned both for a palazzo on the Grand Canal.
Venice became her stage. She transformed the unfinished Palazzo Venier dei Leoni into a theater of the impossible, filling its gardens with white peacocks and albino blackbirds, its rooms with a wax double of herself dressed in her own gowns. She threw her own funeral, presiding from the casket.
She wore living snakes as jewelry. She kept a boa constrictor named Anaxagoras in jeweled boxes. Her dinner guests discovered the gold coiled at her throat was moving.
The poet Gabriele D’Annunzio named her Corè, after the goddess of the underworld, and wrote that she was the only woman who ever astonished him. The painter Giovanni Boldini, who immortalized her in a portrait that made Paris stop, called her an anti-Gioconda. Augustus John painted her twice, the second time as a storm-queen in white pajamas, a canvas critics ranked with Velázquez.
The sculptor Jacob Epstein, working by candlelight, captured her basilisk stare in bronze.
She was the model for Cleopatra and the Virgin Mary, the only women in history portrayed more often. Cartier’s panther was born in her house. Dior put her on a Paris runway 40 years after her death.
She was the subject of poems by Ezra Pound and Jack Kerouac, the inspiration for plays by Tennessee Williams and novels by Maurice Druon. Her image hung in the bedrooms of poets and the halls of museums. And yet, at the end, she was dining with a gilded tortoise and a ghost.
The money ran out in 1932, when a bounced check to a Parisian coal merchant landed her in court. The compulsory sale of her possessions scattered her Moroccan leather books, her Lalique torches, her 400 photographs of the Countess de Castiglione to strangers’ hands. She was $25 million in debt.
She retreated to London, where she lived on £5 a month, sustained by the charity of friends like Augustus John and Cecil Beaton—the latter betraying her with stolen photographs published against her will.
Her daughter, Christina, named for a seance ghost, died of breast cancer in 1953, estranged from the mother who had left her in a convent while keeping cheetahs in the garden. Christina’s husband destroyed the tapes of her life story in grief, so whatever she understood of her mother went into the fire with her voice. The Marchesa did not attend the funeral.
She had stopped attending anything that was not her own invention.
The final act was staged in a single room at 32 Beaufort Gardens, where she kept a requiary said to hold the finger of St. Peter, a mask of Pericles, and shelves of fine books arranged with gilt edges outward, spines to the wall. She made collages of kings and queens, cutting up magazines with the same scissors she had used as a child in her mother’s wardrobe.
She still dropped belladonna into her eyes daily, the poison that had kept them vast and glittering for half a century, even as they went blind.
She was buried in Brompton Cemetery beneath a small sculpted urn, her epitaph a line written for Cleopatra: “Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety.” The mourners numbered a handful: a granddaughter, a gondolier who had owed her his marriage, a friend who had once asked if they should buy cheap wine or take a taxi ride. The stuffed dog was slipped into the coffin at her feet.
She resembled, one witness said, some great Gothic figure.
The Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, her unfinished palace, now houses the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, visited by millions who never hear her name. The Boldini portrait sold at Christie’s in 1995 for over a million dollars. The Dior show of 1998 recreated her final masquerade as a triumph, lightning and thunder over the Paris Opera.
Karl Lagerfeld, watching models play at her, issued the final correction: “The 𝒹𝓇𝒶𝓂𝒶 of Casati was that she was not playing.”
She was, as her friend Catherine Barjansky wrote, unable to express herself in any branch of art, so she made an art of herself. It cost her everything—her fortune, her daughter, her sight, her sanity’s edge. But the art remains.
The frame is gone, but the picture endures. And in the end, the woman who had commanded a thunderstorm with a crystal sword, who had stood alone in the wreckage of her own party waving defiance at the sky, got the last word she always wanted: an audience, and the center of it, forever.
