Luisa Casati was born in 1881 into one of the wealthiest families in Italy. By the time she died in 1957, she was penniless, living in a tiny flat in London with only her taxidermied Pekinese for company. In between, she became the most photographed woman in the world.
She kept cheetahs on diamond leashes. She walked through Venice at midnight with live snakes wound around her neck. She commissioned portraits from every great artist of her era — Boldini, Man Ray, Augustus John — and reportedly sat for over 130 paintings, sculptures, and photographs. More than any queen. More than any film star.
But here is what fascinates me most: she was not beautiful. Not in the conventional sense. She was strange-looking — enormous eyes, a sharp face, a body that moved like a marionette pulled by invisible strings. She made herself beautiful by the sheer force of her imagination.
"I want to be a living work of art," she declared, and then she spent forty years and an entire fortune proving that she meant it.
She is the patron saint of everyone who has ever been told they are too much. Too dramatic. Too extravagant. Too strange. She is the proof that too much is sometimes exactly enough.