Infinite Variety
Scot D Ryersson and Michael Orlando Yaccarino
249pp, Pimlico, £12.50
Buy it at a discount at BOL
La Divina Comtesse
Pierre Apraxine
192pp, Yale, £16.95
Buy it at a discount at BOL
Marchesa Luisa Casati, heiress and young wife to minor nobility, was spotted while out foxhunting in 1903 by the stocky, cocky Gabriele D'Annunzio, poet and dealer in decadent Art Nouveau imagery. He went after the slender Amazon first as a trophy, then as a muse: he switched her on from dim shyness to blazing, narcissistic exhibitionism.
Much of the 20th century's repertoire of female weirdness, from the kohl-blackened eyes of silent movie vamps to rock queens' taste for snakeskin, is traceable to the illuminated Casati. She wore Fortuny velvet, diamond cycle-clipped harem pants, hawsers of pearls or nothing at all under her furs while loping about Venetian piazzas bracketed by cheetahs on leashes and servitors bearing her leopardskin trunks and hatboxes.
Over 30 extremely odd years, she divorced the husband and dissipated the fortune in staging herself as a spectacle: she made drop-dead entrances at costume balls or brooded in the palazzos she had redecorated to showcase her outrageousness - filling them with albino blackbirds and snakes to wear in lieu of jewellery. She posed for painters from the supersleek Boldini to the shaggily lecherous Augustus John, and for the new celebrity snapper Man Ray. She wore an electrified ensemble that accidentally stunned her rather than spectators; lugged a wax twin to Paris to be fitted for matching couture ensembles; threw tantrums and gems from the windows of her suite at the Ritz and lit a torch on the balcony of her Capri holiday home to signal her sexual satisfaction with D'Annunzio...
Stop there. Yes, this is all true. But it is also exactly how the authors of Infinite Variety want readers to react - to consider Casati as they do, in an ooh, fancy-that manner. They are besotted with the visual effects she contrived, and with her legacy in art and movies, from the silent Cabiria to Vivien Leigh. They are especially entranced by her influence on fashion, reporting in campy catwalk prose the 1998 collection that John Galliano dedicated to her.
But the nearest they get to attributing to her the possibility of an inner life is to quote the notes she exchanged with D'Annunzio, which read like code broadcasts to occupied territory ("You will receive a tortoise from Hagenbeck"). Otherwise, the book is biography as extended caption, or maybe catalogue: how Casati launched her first flagrances; repackaged herself at 35 as the angular, amused muse of the futurists; ruined herself by extravagance before 50; and was a bag lady for three decades, bottles clinking in the cupboards of her London digs. They attribute her downfall to one crucial ball at her Pink Palace in 1927: the event, based as it was on Lu's tomb-and-zoo definition of exoticism, was out of date for the jazz age. The authors plead for us to honour Casati's nerveless style, but her dandyism depresses: it is vanity as nihilism - and nihilism less in the sense of the rejection of norms than of the worthlessness of living at all.
Loopy Lu seems almost cheerily sane beside Virginia, the Countess de Castiglione celebrated in La Divina Comtesse, so legendary a looker that Lu herself owned some of the charismatic old bat's trinkets. Castiglione's fame derived from a brief season in the 1850s as the crinolined mistress of Napoleon III. She fell from imperial favour at 20 and after Paris reviled her took to acting out the triumphs of her beauty before the camera of Pierre-Louis Pierson in a Passy portrait studio. The compilers of this catalogue of a New York exhibition of the resultant pictures regard them as narratives of high and low life told in a single frame, as the beginning of the choreography of fashion photography, and as a prefiguring of the type of face that cinematography later worshipped in close-up - some shots suggest Garbo.
Again, all true; it's chic in NY to knowingly compare the show with Cindy Sherman's self-portraits. But the Countess's unhappy snaps are far more disturbing than Sherman's savvy parodies: Virginia demanded that the paid eye of Pierson's camera accord her the adoration society denied her once she was no longer modish. After 35, supermodelling did not console her, and she became a mad recluse, secluded in draped, darkened rooms with silenced clocks. She emerged in the 1890s, toothless, bewigged and in the bedraggled finery of her prime, for a few final plates of dignified pathos. She died in 1899, and devotees such as Robert de Montesquiou (who built a shrine to the Countess in the very Palais Rose in which Casati later gave that damned ball) bought her tatty accessories in veneration of what they claimed was her heroic retreat when age defeated beauty.
And we're expected, reading both these books, to join the cult; to vow that - only for a woman, of course - posing in the perfect frock (or, better, sublime nudity) for a single canvas or photograph that excites admiration is worth a lifetime never lived. Nah. Not even a minute.
