As another peach-Bellini-coloured sunset begins to dissolve the stones and bricks of into light and water, my position, reclined as regally as I can on a black painted gondola, is, I feel, missing one crucial element: a live cheetah with a diamond-studded collar.
If you think that having a bejewelled jungle beast as an onboard companion for a sunset gondola ride is unnecessary, then you’re probably not aware of the story of Luisa Casati.
Seventy-five years ago, the heiress Peggy Guggenheim arrived in Venice along with her ever-growing surrealist and modernist art collection. It was an assemblage that had been described, before being rejected, by the Tate in as being “non-art”.
Venice was more welcoming to Peggy in 1949 as she moved into a semi-derelict, unfinished palazzo on the banks of the Grand Canal named the Venier, after the Venetian family who ordered its construction in 1752 – a few years later, with their trading fortunes on the wane, the family abandoned the project with their palace only having reached a single storey in height.
Peggy’s unconventional, and highly licentious, life has been well documented. But it is the life of a previous resident of the Venier palazzo (now known to all as the Guggenheim Collection) that I am fascinated by, who lived in this truncated building a century ago.
Luisa Amman was the daughter of a cotton potentate from Milan and inherited the family fortune as a teenager when both of her parents died within just two years of each other.
With money but without status, Luisa married Marchese Camillo Casati Stampa di Soncino in 1900. But the acquisition of her late parents’ new-found money and her new husband’s old-time familial reputation didn’t make for a happy marriage.
Choosing virtually to ignore her only daughter, Cristina, Luisa Casati kept her married name but spent less and less time in Italy, travelling first to Paris and then to Venice. She was, as her American journalist friend Natalie Clifford Barney wrote: “Ever trying by strange disguisements to escape from the inner strangeness”.
Walking around the Guggenheim Collection today, with its fake-grass roof terrace, white-washed gallery walls and slick gift shop, it’s hard to imagine this was once a place where gold verdigris staircases and Murano glass chandeliers hung alongside holes in the pockmarked roof and grime and ivy smothered the external walls.
Yet, within a year of Luisa purchasing this semi-ruin, she had created gardens with mechanical songbirds in cages, classical statues impasted in gold paint and a semi-feral menagerie of monkeys, sparrows, albino blackbirds (dyed in different colours) and peacocks trained to sit on her windowsills.
Venice may have long been on the decline as far as the import of silk and spices was concerned, but material goods were replaced by pioneers of new philosophies and art who were being sucked into La Serenissima.
Luisa was at the centre of it all in the second decade of the 20th century, sailing on her private gondola with her pet cheetah and turning her palazzo into an artistic space where she entertained , Man Ray, Jean Cocteau, Nijinsky, Isadora Duncan and TE Lawrence.
She was an extraordinary exhibitionist. Clad in nothing but a fur coat, she would walk naked through St Mark’s Square with her (sedated) cheetah; a striking image that I can’t help but think is preferable to the hordes of students and clusters of larcenous cafes selling €20 coffees that swamp the loggias and basilica today.
I don’t spend long here before deciding to walk back to Luisa’s former home again and let myself imagine her hedonistic life here.
Lapping the canal, the entrance steps where visitors now take a rest from gazing upon the myriad Pollocks and Picassos in the Guggenheim were once the alighting point for anyone wanting to attend a Casati party in style.
Draped 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.
Dressed as, variously, a harlequin, sun goddess or queen of the night, Luisa’s balls were rich with masks, wigs and crinolines. Yet, at whatever hour guests chose to call at her palazzo, Luisa would be clad in corsages of pearls, anomalous glitter, gold bangles, antique lace chemises or chinchilla fur cloaks.
Wearing an outfit based on St Sebastian at one of her parties, Luisa’s dress was festooned with arrows into which were fitted light bulbs. She suffered a massive electric shock when it started to rain. At another party her dress of egret feathers moulted during the course of the evening, leaving her almost entirely naked.
Perhaps the ultimate manifestation of the aesthete credo, Luisa wanted her clothes, her home, her parties and her servants to be living, breathing works of art in their totality, even to the point where it is said that more than one of her servants died after being painted entirely in toxin-laced gold paint before one soirée.
The Casati coffers, however, were running dry. Living on a diet of cocaine, absinthe and opium, by 1930 Luisa was in debt to what would be today be over $30m. Sued by a coal merchant for non-payment of bills, she received a two-month suspended prison sentence. Selling the palazzo, she spent her last years in a tiny flat in Knightsbridge, surrounded by the stuffed remains of her dogs.
Luisa died in 1957, aged 76, and is buried in Brompton Cemetery. Yet, having visited her unkempt grave in south-west London, it seems inconceivable to me that this woman, whose style has been namechecked by John Galliano and , could ever have been laid to rest anywhere but Venice.
Look carefully, as I did, into those lagoons and the rooms of the Guggenheim, and Luisa’s angular, assertive shadow lingers still.
Essentials
Rob Crossan was a guest of Tui, which offers three-night breaks in Venice, staying at the 4T Giorgionie Hotel, from £549 per person B&B based on two adults sharing a double room and including flights EasyJet from London Gatwick. A ‘Tui Collection experience’ 30-minute private Gondola tour costs £118 per person.