Luisa Casati

Biography

Luisa, Marchesa Casati Stampa di Soncino (born Luisa Adele Rosa Maria Amman; 23 January 1881 – 1 June 1957), was an Italian heiress, socialite, and patroness of the arts in early 20th-century Europe.

== Early life == Luisa Adele Rosa Maria Amman was born in Milan, the younger of two daughters of Alberto Amman and his wife Lucia (née Bressi). Her father was a prosperous textile manufacturer, born in 1847 to Austrian parents from Göfis in Vorarlberg, and her mother was born in 1857 in Vienna to an Italian father and Austrian mother. At the time of her parents' births, Milan and much of northern Italy belonged to the Austrian Empire. Her father was made a count by King Umberto I. Her mother died when Luisa was 13, and her father died two years later, making his daughters, Luisa and her older sister, Francesca (1880–1919, married Giulio Padulli), reportedly the wealthiest women in Italy.

== Marriage and descendants ==

In 1900, she married Camillo, Marquess Casati Stampa di Soncino (Muggiò, 12 August 1877 – Roma, 18 September 1946). The couple's only child, Cristina Casati Stampa di Soncino, was born the following year. The Casatis maintained separate residences for the duration of their marriage. They were legally separated in 1914. They remained married until his death in 1946. In 1925, the couple's daughter Cristina (1901–1953), married Francis John Clarence Westenra Plantagenet Hastings, known as Viscount Hastings and later the 16th Earl of Huntingdon; they had one child, Lady Moorea Hastings (4 March 1928 – 21 October 2011), and divorced in 1943. The following year the Viscountess Hastings married Wogan Philipps; that marriage produced no children. Luisa Casati's only grandchild, Lady Moorea Hastings, was the wife of politician and diarist Woodrow Wyatt from 1957 to 1966, and later married the adman Brinsley Black, named as one of the best-dressed Englishmen in the inaugural issue of Men in Vogue in 1965. She had a son with each husband:

The Hon. Pericles Plantagenet James Casati Wyatt (born 1963), became an owner and operator of water parks and recreational-vehicle camps in Arizona; half-brother to journalist Petronella Wyatt. Octavius Black (Octavius Orlando Irvine Casati Black, born 1968), the founder of The Mind Gym, a mind-development system based in London;. Moorea Hastings was so unmaternal that, on learning she was pregnant, she arranged with her first husband that childless cousins of his would care for the baby. When Wyatt later sued for divorce on grounds of her adultery, he was, unusually, given full custody of the child.

== Muse and patroness ==

Casati was known for her eccentricities that delighted European society for nearly three decades. The beautiful and extravagant hostess to the Ballets Russes was something of a legend among her contemporaries. She astonished society by parading with a pair of leashed cheetahs and wearing live snakes as jewellery. She captivated artists and literary figures such as Robert de Montesquiou, Romain de Tirtoff, Jean Cocteau, and Cecil Beaton. She had a long-term affair with the author Gabriele d'Annunzio, who is said to have based on her the character of Isabella Inghirami in Forse che sì forse che no (Maybe yes, maybe no) (1910). The character of La Casinelle, who appeared in two novels by Michel Georges-Michel, Dans la fete de Venise (1922) and Nouvelle Riviera (1924), was also inspired by her.

In 1910, Casati took up residence at the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni on Venice’s Grand Canal, owning it until circa 1924. In 1949, Peggy Guggenheim purchased the Palazzo from the heirs of Viscountess Castlerosse and made it her home for the following thirty years. Today, the palazzo houses the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. Casati's soirées there would become legendary. Casati collected a menagerie of exotic animals, and patronized fashion designers such as Fortuny and Poiret. From 1919 to 1920 she lived at Villa San Michele in Capri, the tenant of the unwilling Axel Munthe. Her time on the Italian island, tolerant home to a wide collection of artists, gay men, and lesbians in exile, was described by British author Compton Mackenzie in his diaries. Numerous portraits of her were painted and sculpted by artists as various as Giovanni Boldini, Paolo Troubetzkoy, Adolph de Meyer, Romaine Brooks (with whom she had an affair), Kees van Dongen, and Man Ray; many of them she paid for, as a wish to "commission her own immortality". She was muse to Italian Futurists such as F. T. Marinetti (who regarded her as a Futurist) Fortunato Depero, Giacomo Balla (who created the portrait-sculpture Marchesa Casati with Moving Eyes that was reproduced on the covere of Il mondo in March 30, 1919 ), and Umberto Boccioni. Augustus John's portrait of her is one of the most popular paintings at the Art Gallery of Ontario; Jack Kerouac wrote poems about it and Robert Fulford was impressed by it as a schoolboy. There is an anecdote which tells of her meeting with her rival socialite and famous Countess Morosini with Casati saying to the countess: "When I was a child my father already told me about your famous beauty." To which Morosini replied: "Without going so far back, my dear, your husband, every evening, spoke to me about yours"; the implication being that they were on intimate terms.