Infinite Variety: The Life and Legend of the Marchesa Casati - Hardcover

Ryersson, Scot D.; Yaccarino, Michael Orlando

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0967052726 ISBN 13: 9780967052724

Publisher: Viridian Books, 1999

Synopsis

Book by Ryersson, Scot D., Yaccarino, Michael Orlando

About this title

About the Author

As an award-winning illustrator and graphic designer, Scot D. Ryersson has lived and worked in London, Toronto, Sydney, and New York City. He is also the author of numerous critiques and essays on film and literature.

For the past decade, Michael Orlando Yaccarino has specialized in the analysis of international genre films. His highly praised criticisms and interviews have appeared in publications throughout the United States and Britain.

From the Inside Flap

She was the most scandalous woman of her day.

The Marchesa Luisa Casati was Europe's most notorious celebrity, and its most eccentric. For the first three decades of the twentieth century she astounded the continent. Nude servants gilded in gold leaf attended her. Bizarre wax mannequins sat as guests at her dining table. She wore live snakes as jewelry. And she was infamous for her evening strolls, naked beneath her furs, parading cheetahs on diamond-studded leashes. She traveled to Venice, Rome, Capri, and Paris - collecting palaces and a menagerie of exotic animals. Her outlandish homes became the setting for some of the century's most outrageous parties. Artists painted and sculpted her, poets praised her strange beauty, and fashion designers fought for her patronage. Among those she captivated were Gabriele D'Annunzio, Man Ray, Augustus John, Erte, Kees Van Dongen, Jean Cocteau, Cecil Beaton, and Jack Kerouac. Some became lovers, others awestruck admirers, but all were influenced by this extraordinary muse.

Then the extravagance ended. By 1930, Casati was over twenty-five million dollars in debt. Her wealth gone, she fled to London, where she spent her last years, supported by family and friends and as eccentric as ever. Even today, nearly a half century after her death, Casati still fascinates. She has been played on stage by Vivien Leigh and on screen by Ingrid Bergman. And recently, her flamboyant memory inspired a couture collection for Christian Dior.

Explored in detail for the first time, this is the story of the Marchesa Luisa Casati.

Prepare to be astonished.

This lavishly produced biography includes a Foreword by Quentin Crisp and 42 black & white illustrations and 8 color plates.

Reviews

She strolled Venice's Piazza San Marco clad only in a fur cloak, escorted by pet cheetahs on jeweled leashes; she adorned herself with snakes, live and stuffed, and accessorized an evening costume with chicken blood. She was a Belle Epoque eccentric, big time. Luisa Casati was also extraordinarily wealthy in her own right, heir to a Milanese cotton fortune and wife of an Italian noble. Her marriage began to disintegrate after just a few years, when she began an affair and a lifelong friendship with Italian poet and writer Gabriele D`Annunzio. Here she began to re-create herself, evolving from a rather shy, conformist young woman to the flamboyant pale-faced redhead, her remarkable green eyes rimmed by kohl, who would be the subject of more than 130 portraits, many by famous artists. She decorated a villa in Rome, refurbished a Venetian palazzo (now the Peggy Guggenheim museum), and threw extravagant parties and costume balls, mingling socialites and her newfound artist friends. As illustrator/graphic designer Ryersson and film critic Yaccarino describe it, her behavior grew increasingly bizarre: life-size wax replicas of herself and others were seated as guests at dinner parties but she continued to intrigue serious artists like Man Ray, Jean Cocteau, and Augustus John, who was her lover briefly and a friend until she died. Eventually, her self-indulgent life style left her $25 million in debt; in 1932 her personal possessions were auctioned off. She resettled in England, sinking into poverty so acute that it was a choice between food for herself or for her dogs. (The dogs won.) Her life was the inspiration for a play starring Vivien Leigh and an Ingrid Bergman film. Casati died in 1957, her tombstone inscribed: ``Age can not wither nor custom stale her infinite variety.'' In essence, a predictably superficial superstar bio-Cher at the turn of the century, as it were. (42 b&w, 8 color illustrations) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

The Marchesa Luisa Casati (1881-1957) cultivated celebrity through morbid eccentricity in dress and lifestyle, becoming, before 1920, a darling of portraitists, photographers, designers and gossip columnists. With her androgynous figure, bizarre makeup and disorderly dyed hair, she was the "naked sorceress" to one observer, "the Medusa of the Grand Hotels" to another. She was mistress to many, including author and adventurer Gabriele D'Annunzio, who was her great love; she pursued him as obsessively as she pursued notoriety, her exhibitionist mania her only talent. Her extravagant oddity proved expensive and carried with it an inevitable obsolescence. The authors describe her unnaturally red hair, cadaverous pallor and scarlet lips as giving her in middle age "the unsettling appearance of a Kabuki performer." By the time she was 50, she had gone from immense wealth to bankruptcy and from tantalizing and demanding muse to a lurid Miss Havisham on the edge of a diminishing clique of admirers. At the end she was forced to constantly change her addresses in London, her fame in Italy and France having run out. To one English acquaintance, then, her attire resembled "the plumage of a shabby raven." The chapel at nearby Harrods handled her funeral. Ryersson and Yaccarino strain to astonish the reader, but the empty excess of Casati's life quickly palls. Despite the authors' efforts, the overwrought Marchesa remains a forgettable figure. 42 b&w illus. and 8 color plates not seen by PW. Author tour.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Viridian Books
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0967052726
• ISBN 13: 9780967052724
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 248