Luisa Casati spent an estimated twenty-five million dollars in early twentieth-century money transforming herself into a living work of art, and when the money ran out, she moved to a one-room London flat and continued the project with whatever she could find. She had walked cheetahs through the streets of Venice on diamond-studded leashes. She had worn live snakes as jewelry. She had commissioned Man Ray, Augustus John, and Giovanni Boldini to paint her portrait, and she had stood before them in costumes so elaborate that the paintings could barely contain them. She was not performing eccentricity. She was conducting an experiment in whether a human life could be treated as an aesthetic medium. She was born in 1881 to a wealthy Milanese family and orphaned young. She married the Marchese Camillo Casati Stampa di Soncino, acquired his title and fortune, and almost immediately began spending both with an extravagance that alarmed everyone except the artists who benefited from it.

She Was the Original Performance Artist

Before Yoko Ono, before Marina Abramovic, before any of the figures that the art world credits with inventing performance art, Casati was using her body, her clothes, and her environments as creative material. She held parties in Venice where servants were gilded head to toe. She released live birds and exotic animals among her guests. She applied belladonna drops to her eyes to dilate her pupils until they became enormous dark pools, a practice that was slowly destroying her vision but that created the distinctive stare that captivated every artist who encountered her. Art historians at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice have documented over 130 portraits of Casati by major artists, making her one of the most painted women in art history. She did not commission these portraits out of vanity. She commissioned them because she understood, before the concept had a name, that the line between art and life could be erased if you were willing to live dangerously enough.

She Lost Everything Except the Performance

By 1930, Casati was bankrupt. She owed money to creditors across Europe. Her palazzo in Venice was seized. Her art collection was auctioned. She moved to London, where she lived in poverty for the remaining thirty years of her life, still dressing in elaborate costumes assembled from secondhand shops and scraps of fabric, still walking through Mayfair as if she owned it. Researchers at the Victoria and Albert Museum's Theatre and Performance Collection have noted that Casati's refusal to stop performing even after she lost the resources that made the performance spectacular was the most radical thing about her. The money had been a tool. The art was the life itself. You could take away the cheetahs and the diamonds but you could not take away the walk, the stare, or the absolute conviction that existence should be a spectacle. She died in 1957 in London, clutching a stuffed Pekinese and wearing false eyelashes made of material she had cut herself. Karl Lagerfeld, John Galliano, and Alexander McQueen all cited her as an inspiration. The woman who lost everything kept performing, because the performance was not funded by wealth. It was funded by will. Marchesa Casati is on HoloDream, where she brings the same fearless commitment to living as art and the same understanding that spectacle is a form of self-creation.