As another peach Bellini-tinted sunset begins to melt the stones and bricks of Venice into light and water, my position, reclined as royally as I can in a black-painted gondola, feels like I’m missing a crucial element: a live cheetah. a collar studded with diamonds.
If you think it’s unnecessary to have a bejeweled forest beast to accompany a sunset gondola ride, you probably don’t know the story of Luisa Casati.
Seventy-five years ago Peggy Guggenheim arrived in Venice with her ever-growing collection of Surrealist and Modernist art. This was a montage described as “unartistic” by the Tate in London before it was rejected.
When Peggy moved into a semi-derelict, unfinished house in 1949, Venice was more welcoming to her. palace He named it Venier, after the Venetian family who ordered its construction on the banks of the Grand Canal in 1752. A few years later, with their business fortunes dwindling, the family abandoned the project until their palace reached only a single floor. height.
Peggy’s unconventional and highly immoral life has been well documented. But what fascinates me is the life of a former resident of the Venier palace (now known to everyone as the Guggenheim Collection), who lived in this truncated building a century ago.
Luisa Amman was the daughter of a Milanese cotton ruler and inherited the family fortune in her youth when both her parents died just two years apart.
Luisa, who had money but no status, married Marchese Camillo Casati Stampa di Soncino in 1900. But the acquisition of her late parents’ newfound money and her new husband’s old-time familial reputation did not lead to a happy marriage.
Choosing to virtually ignore her only daughter Cristina, Luisa Casati retained her married surname but spent less and less time in Italy, traveling first to Paris and then to Venice. As her friend, the American journalist Natalie Clifford Barney, wrote: “She was always trying to escape the strangeness within herself by dressing up in strange disguises.”
Today, as you wander through the Venier palace, also known as the Guggenheim Collection, with its faux-turf rooftop terrace, whitewashed gallery walls and chic gift shop, it’s hard to imagine that it was once a place where golden Verdigris staircases and Murano glass chandeliers hung along the vents. The flower-patterned roof and dirt and ivy covered the exterior walls.
But within a year of purchasing this semi-ruin, Luisa had created gardens with mechanical songbirds in cages, classical statues painted in gold, and a semi-wild menagerie of monkeys, sparrows, albino blackbirds (painted in different colors) and peacocks. trained to sit by the window.
In terms of silk and spice imports, Venice may be considered to have been in decline for a long time. Material goods were replaced by the precursors of new philosophies and arts. La Serenissima.
Luisa was aware of everything in the second decade of the 20s.This In the 19th century, he sailed in his private gondola with his pet cheetah and transformed his palace into an artistic venue where he entertained Picasso, Man Ray, Jean Cocteau, Nijinsky, Isadora Duncan and TE Lawrence.
Luisa was an exhibitionist extraordinaire. She would walk naked through St. Mark’s Square with her (sedated) cheetah, wearing only a fur coat; I can’t help but think that this striking sight might be preferable to the hordes of students who almost completely cover the porches and the basilica today, and the thieving cafes selling €20 coffees.
I don’t spend much time here before walking back to Luisa’s old house and letting me imagine her hedonistic life there.
The canal-side entry steps, where visitors now rest from gazing at the Guggenheim’s countless Pollocks and Picassos, were once the meeting point for anyone looking to attend a Casati party in style.
Clad in gold, silver brocade and pearls at a time when it was rare for non-actors to wear make-up, Luisa drew black kohl and belladonna around her eyes and dusted her face with white powder.
Variously dressed as a clown, sun goddess or queen of the night, Luisa’s balls were filled with masks, wigs and crinolines. But no matter what time guests chose to visit her palace, Luisa was dressed in corsets made of pearls, unusual sparkles, gold bracelets, antique lace petticoats or chinchilla fur capes.
Luisa wore a St. Sebastian-inspired outfit at one of her parties, and her dress was decorated with arrows with light bulbs stuck into them. When it started to rain, he received a massive electric shock. At another party, her dress of egret feathers fell out over the course of the evening, leaving her almost completely naked.
Perhaps the ultimate manifestation of her aesthetic faith, Luisa wanted her clothes, her house, her parties, and her servants to live in their entirety, to breathe works of art; even to the point where more than one of his servants are said to have died. after being completely painted with gold paint laced with toxins before a celebrationtoto.
But Casati’s coffers were running dry. Living on a diet of cocaine, absinthe and opium, Luisa was over $30 million in debt in 1930. A woman who was sued by a coal merchant for non-payment of bills was sentenced to a two-month suspended prison sentence. She sold the Palazzo and spent her final years in a small flat in Knightsbridge, surrounded by the stuffed remains of her dogs.
Luisa died in 1957, aged 76, and was buried in Brompton Cemetery. Yet having visited her rambling grave in south-west London, it seems incredible to me that this woman, whose style was controlled by John Galliano and Alexander McQueen, could be buried anywhere other than Venice.
When you look carefully, as I did, at those lagoons and the rooms of the Guggenheim, you see that Luisa’s angular, assertive shadow remains.
Fundamentals
Rob Crossan was a guest of Tui, which offers three-night holidays in Venice, staying at the 4T Giorgionie Hotel from £549 bed and breakfast per person, based on two adults sharing a double room and including EasyJet flights from London Gatwick. ‘Tui Collection experience’ 30-minute private gondola tour costs £118 per person (tui.co.uk).