Luisa Casati was a virtuosa in the art of making a spectacle of herself. Born in 1881, she inherited an immense fortune and spent it all (she died destitute) on making herself a ‘living work of art’. She had very little conversation. ‘Wisely, she seldom uttered’, noted Harold Acton. Instead she posed, and the pictures assembled in this book demonstrate how well she did it.
Orphaned at 13, and married before she was 20 to a Milanese aristocrat from whom she soon separated, Casati was an unconventional...
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