Walton Ford: La Marchesa

The marchesa lived partly as a slave to her dream world. She was a great artist, but not understood by the common people or even her own friends, who were jealous spectators of her artistic successes.

—Alberto Martini, in Infinite Variety: The Life and Legend of the Marchesa Casati, 1999

In 1900, the newly married Marchese and Marchesa Casati were photographed perched side by side on a smooth boulder next to a waterfall. Camillo Casati wears a three-piece suit and sits in a confident and jaunty spread-legged pose, a proud crooked smile slanting beneath his waxed mustache. Luisa Casati sits by him ramrod straight, unsmiling, her large, melancholy eyes meeting ours. She is tightly corseted, trussed into a dark Victorian outfit that completely covers her body save for her hands and face. She holds a riding crop and has donned a great floral hat. She does not steady herself by clasping her husband’s arm; instead she seems to be leaning on her unseen hand, touching the cool rock behind her back.

Thirteen years later, Luisa Casati was photographed in the center of a large crowd of costumed revelers, many in eighteenth-century dress. Now uncorseted, she wears an androgynous white harlequin costume, complete with loose high-waisted trousers and black mask, designed for her by Léon Bakst of the Ballets Russes. Again, her eyes look directly at the viewer. Her lipsticked mouth hints at a smile. One of her pet cheetahs sits calmly beside her and a large macaw rests on her hand. By that time she had left her husband and had begun throwing massive parties at her half-ruined palazzo in Venice.

Luisa made her palazzo into a kind of bohemian playground, hosting wild masquerades with live jazz, booze, opium, artists, writers, and socialites. She would dress outrageously and fearlessly, costumed as a fountain or as Catherine the Great, or covered with electric lights. She had lovers, both male and female, and ended up spending all of her vast wealth on clothes, jewels, artwork, parties, and exotic animals. The social events she created anticipated Andy Warhol’s Factory, artsy nightclubs, contemporary raves—in fact they propagated any idea we now have of a hot art scene.

In their book Infinite Variety: The Life and Legend of the Marchesa Casati (1999), Scot D. Ryersson and Michael Orlando Yaccarino write, “More than one report details Luisa’s unusual nocturnal promenades: her spectral form, totally nude within the folds of a voluminous fur cloak, leading her pet cheetahs by jeweled leashes about the Piazza San Marco.” Having discovered only three rather blurred photos of Casati with her cheetahs, I found myself trying to imagine the cats’ life with the marchesa. These creatures contributed to the ferocity of Casati’s public image. They were also wild African animals caught up in a strange, frenetic world of parties, palazzos, gondola rides, and excess. I wanted to paint pictures about the world’s fastest animals living a fast life with a wild woman in Venice. The cheetahs got me invited to the party. Show me more.