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Infinite Variety: The Life and Legend of the Marchesa Casati

by Scot D. Ryersson and Michael Orlando Yaccarino
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2004
264 pp., illus. 32 b/w. Paper, $18.95
ISBN: 0-8166-4520-5

Reviewed by Stefaan Van Ryssen
Hogeschool Gent

stefaan.vanryssen@pandora.be

Every age and place has its icons, its stars, and its weirdos. Some of them last a few weeks or years, others never get really forgotten and continue speaking to the imagination across space and time. The difference between the short-lived and the longer lasting variants is probably due to the effect the person in question has or had on art, science, religion, politics or lifestyle rather than the measure of their extravagance in itself. If the traces they leave become visible over and over again through the continuing interest in the works of their contemporaries, chances are that they come into the spotlight again. Of course, sometimes one or the other is dug up by historians and chroniclers, but that gives them only a small advantage. It is not the science of historiography that keeps people alive; it is their synchronic relevance in a wider field than just the one they were doing their thing in. Someone’s rating on the Sitwell Scale of Eccentricity––named after that most delightful collector of colourful characters, Edith Sitwell, a notable weirdo in her own right––doesn’t suffice for lasting fame. One needs to leave an imprint in both popular media and highbrow art.

Such is the case with Luisa, Marchesa Casati, the daughter of a wealthy Milanese industrialist who married the Marquis Casati at a very early age, as was the aristocratic custom in the last quarter of the 19th Century. Bored with the life of an obedient catholic mother and wife with no other pastimes than embroidery and amateur music making, she quickly develops an interest in the fine arts, men, and exotic pets––we are not certain in what order of importance. She soon became the mistress and muse of Gabriele d’Annunzio, keeping him enthralled with her whims and her ability to reinvent herself over and over again. After the First World War, when romanticism waned and the haute bourgeoisie had long lost its role of a cultural avant-garde, she turned to the futurists. Marinetti and Balla are among her friends, and she is seen in Venice, London, and Paris in the company of the fine fleur of artists in the interbellum. Numerous painters, sculptors and photographers became inspired by this red-haired woman who painted black circles round her eyes and who dressed out of fashion but always in the grandest of styles. With her pearl necklaces and her pet cheetahs or snakes, she must have been in a class of her own, and she was certainly recognised for it by the contemporary boulevard press. Impoverished and in dept since 1930, she kept in contact with the likes of Man Ray, Jean Cocteau, Ezra Pound, and even Jack Kerouac. She died in 1957, aged seventy-six, poor but remembered.

Ryersson and Yaccarino have done their best to paint a vivid and well-researched portrait of this extraordinary woman and her times, but at times one wishes they had kept a bit more distance from their subject. It is clear that they have fallen victim to her mystery just like many of her contemporaries. And truthfully, I don’t think they are to blame for that.

 

 




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