VIRGINIA OLDOINI ,ITALIAN ARISTOCRAT TURNED OF NEPOLEON III BORN 1837 MARCH 22 -1899 NOVEMBER 28
Virginia Oldoïni, Countess of Castiglione (22 March 1837 – 28 November 1899), better known as La Castiglione, was an Italian aristocrat who achieved notoriety as a mistress of Emperor Napoleon III of France. She was also a significant figure in the early history of photography.
Virginia Elisabetta Luisa Carlotta Antonietta Teresa Maria Oldoïni, (French: Virginie Élisabeth Louise Charlotte Antoinette Thérèse Marie Oldoïni) was born on 22 March 1837 in Florence, Tuscany to Marquis Filippo Oldoini and Isabella Lamporecchi, members of the minor Tuscan nobility, she was often known by her nickname of "Nicchia". She married Francesco Verasis, Count of Castiglione, at the age of 17. He was twelve years her senior. They had a son, Giorgio. Ignored by her father Filippo, she was educated by her grandfather Ranieri.[2]
Her cousin, Camillo, Count of Cavour, was a minister of Victor Emmanuel II, King of Sardinia (that included also Piedmont, Val d'Aosta, Liguria and Savoy). When the Count and Countess traveled to Paris in 1855, the Countess was under her cousin's instructions to plead the cause of Italian unity with Napoleon III of France. She achieved notoriety by becoming Napoleon III's mistress, a scandal that led her husband to demand a marital separation. In 1855, she had a brief relation with king Victor Emmanuel II of Italy who called the Countess with the nickname "Nini".[2] In 1856-1857, she entered the social circle of European royalty. During her relationship with the French emperor, she met Augusta of Saxe-Weimar, Otto von Bismarck and Adolphe Thiers. She had many clients-amateurs among which there were a banker of the Rothschild family and the then director of the Louvre Museum.[2]
The Countess was known for her beauty and her flamboyant entrances in elaborate dress at the imperial court. One of her most infamous outfits was a "Queen of Hearts" costume.[3] George Frederic Watts painted her portrait in 1857.[4] She was described as having long, wavy blonde hair, a fair complexion, a delicate oval face, and eyes that constantly changed colour from green to an extraordinary blue-violet.
Italian unification
The Countess returned to Italy in 1857 when her affair with Napoleon III was over. Four years later, the Kingdom of Italy was proclaimed, conceivably in part due to the influence that the Countess had exerted on Napoleon III. That same year, she returned to France and settled in Passy.
In 1871, just after the defeat of France in the Franco-Prussian War, she was called to a secret meeting with Otto von Bismarck to explain to him how the German occupation of Paris could be fatal to his interests. She may have been persuasive because Paris was spared Prussian occupation.[5]
Photographic artist
Circa 1860
Circa 1861-1867
Photographs by Pierson
In 1856 she began sitting for Mayer and Pierson, photographers favored by the imperial court. Over the next four decades she directed Pierre-Louis Pierson to help her create 700 different photographs in which she re-created the signature moments of her life for the camera. She spent a large part of her personal fortune and even went into debt to execute this project. Most of the photographs depict the Countess in her theatrical outfits, such as the Queen of Hearts dress. A number of photographs depict her in poses risqué for the era — notably, images that expose her bare legs and feet. In these photos, her head is cropped out.
Robert de Montesquiou, a Symbolist poet, dandy, and avid art collector, was fascinated by the Countess di Castiglione. He spent thirteen years writing a biography, La Divine Comtesse, which appeared in 1913. After her death, he collected 433 of her photographs, all of which entered the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.[6]
Later years
Virginia spent her declining years in an apartment in the Place Vendôme, where she had the rooms decorated in funeral black, the blinds kept drawn, and mirrors banished—apparently so she would not have to confront her advancing age and loss of beauty. She would only leave the apartment at night. In the 1890s she began a brief collaboration with Pierson again, though her later photographs clearly show her loss of any critical judgement, possibly due to her growing mental instability. She wished to set up an exhibit of her photographs at the Exposition Universelle (1900), though this did not happen. On November 28, 1899, she died at age sixty-two, and was buried at the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.[7]
Legacy
Gabriele D'Annunzio authored an appreciation of the Countess that appeared as a preface to Montesquiou's work. It was also published on its own in 1973.[8]
The Countess's life was depicted in a 1942 Italian film The Countess of Castiglione[9] and a 1954 Italian-French film The Contessa's Secret that starred Yvonne De Carlo.[10]
The Countess was painted by the artist Jacques-Emile Blanche after her death.
The Countess is also depicted in Alexander Chee's novel "The Queen of the Night."
She inspired the novel Exposition by Nathalie Leger.[11]
The Scandalous, Narcissistic 19th-Century Countess Who Became Her Own Muse
The Countess of Castiglione was obsessed with her own beauty, and meticulously art directed hundreds of portraits of herself over the course of her life.
Rosalind Jana
By Rosalind Jana
4.1.17
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PHOTO VIA WIKIPEDIA
Picture it: a woman sitting with her face in perfect profile, skin bright against the background. Her dress is huge—voluminous skirts trimmed with thick bands of lace. She has bracelets on each wrist and hair partially pinned up, one ringlet trailing down her neck. Behind her sits a child, his face blurred and ghostly mid-motion. But the most intriguing aspect of the image is one of its smallest components: the small hand-mirror this woman wields. It's oval-shaped, holding a partial reflection of her face—eyes, nose, the top of her lips. In this fragment of a reflection, her gaze is steady, staring right down the camera lens.
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In fact, you may not need to picture it; you may have already seen the image. It's the sort of thing that pops up regularly all over the internet, unmoored from context or time period. It holds just the right amount of intrigue with its arrangement of material and mirrors, as well as its ambiguous message: Vanity? Self-knowledge? Artifice? Voyeurism? Playfulness? Or something else entirely?
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Whichever interpretation you prefer, it's probably a fitting one. The subject of the photo—a woman named Virginia Oldoini, better known as the Countess of Castiglione—sat for hundreds of haunting, strange photos over the course of 40 years, from 1856 to 1895, and the resulting body of work has intrigued people for generations. She was no mere muse or passive model, however: The Countess obsessively and fastidiously art directed each photo, sometimes even choosing the camera angle or painting over the printed images herself.
PHOTO VIA GETTY
In recent years, the Countess has been dubbed everything from "selfie queen" to "supreme narcissist" to Surrealist pioneer. During her lifetime, she was called "a miracle of beauty," like "Venus descended from Olympus"—but, one of her contemporaries noted, she was so self-absorbed that "after a few moments… she began to get on your nerves." Another wrote that, at gatherings, she would "allow people to her admire her as if she were a shrine… She almost never spoke to women."
Writing about herself in third person, the Countess said, "The Eternal Father did not know what he was creating the day he sent her into the world; he modeled and modeled, and when he was finished he looked at his wondrous work and was overwhelmed. He left her in a corner without assigning her a place."
The Countess' story begins in the mid-19th century, when she was married off to an Italian count at age 17. Nearly two years into their marriage, in 1855, she was sent to Paris along with her husband. She had been secretly entrusted with a significant mission: to persuade Emperor Napoleon III into agreeing on the unification of Italy. (Her cousin, the minister Camillo Cavour, reportedly told her to "succeed by any means you wish—but succeed!") Duly, she ignored the usual diplomatic routes and inveigled herself into prime position as the emperor's mistress.
It was a short-lived affair, lasting less than a year. But whether the relationship was for business or pleasure, it nonetheless helped the Countess establish an immediate reputation. All eyes were on her whenever she entered a room, and her costumes were the talk of the court. On one occasion, she boldly appeared at a ball on the emperor's arm, dressed as the Queen of Hearts—prompting the empress to angrily quip, "The heart is a bit low, Madame."
In 1857, she separated from her husband, whom she had openly cheated on and bankrupted. "Our separation is irrevocable," he wrote furiously, returning to Italy alone.
Of all the relationships the Countess formed in Paris, the most significant—and by far most enduring—was her relationship with the camera. Like many other significant society figures, she made her way to the Mayer-Pierson photographic studio on Boulevard de Capucine, which was helmed by imperial court photographer and daguerreotypist Pierre-Louis Pierson. The studio specialized in hand-painted photography, an explosively popular technique. Hand-tinted photographs were regarded as both a luxury and a novelty. Moreover, these rudimentary special effects could smooth, enhance, and flatter their subjects, transforming and elevating them.
After sitting for her first portrait, the Countess returned again and again, working intensively with Pierson from 1856 to 1867, and then again towards the end of her life in the 1890s. Although their relationship was technically collaborative, the Countess held all the cards: meticulously dictating the costumes, the sets, the scenes, and the ways in which images should be painted and embellished afterwards (some were given to the artist Aquilin Schad to overlay with gouache, while others she scribbled on herself).
Most of the images they produced were of specific characters drawn from myth, art, literature, or the Bible, including Lady Macbeth, Anne Boleyn, the queen of Eritrea, Judith before beheading Holofernes, a nun, and even a corpse. She also recreated defining moments of her life, mythologizing her own story by documenting herself in dresses that had proved themselves especially admired or notorious, chief among them being her Queen of Hearts costume.
PHOTO VIA WIKIPEDIA
It's hard not to admire the sheer, inventive scope of the imagery, as well as the clothes: all those veils, capes, headpieces, and ornate off-the-shoulder gowns. There are masks and silk robes and, in one photograph, just a bedspread draped suggestively. Some of the images are sumptuous and witty. Others are disquieting. An image of the Countess with long hair and knife in her hand, titled "La Vengeance," was sent to her estranged husband when he attempted to gain custody of their child.
But as she aged she grew more reclusive, living in a house without mirrors. She rarely left its walls (painted black, of course) during daylight hours. The photo projects continued occasionally. They'd posthumously be described by critics as more morbid, more disturbed, more deranged than her earlier work. At the time of her death, she was in the process of planning a comeback exhibition, a retrospective titled "The Most Beautiful Woman of the Century."
In La Divine Comtesse, a book exploring the Countess' social and cultural legacy, curator Pierre Apraxine writes that art critics have long overlooked the Countess' body of work, mistakenly considering it trivial. "The Countess, who was perceived as a disturbing character whose motives were unclear, was understood to have taken up photography merely to satisfy her narcissism," he argues. "Her project, undermined by her shameless self-absorption, could not therefore be regarded as that of a true artist."
But Apraxine notes that the Countess' work anticipated several trends in contemporary art and feminist art in particular, prefiguring artists like Cindy Sherman, Claude Cahun, Gillian Wearing, Yasumasa Morimura, and Sophie Calle, all of whom used photography to explore the significance of dressing up, adopting appearances, and manipulating the means of being viewed by others—though Apraxine cautions against viewing the Countess' work as feminist or a "conscious source of the pictorial innovations to follow."
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Strangely, it's hard to find out much about the impact of Castiglione's photos during her own lifetime. Some of the portraits were sent out in albums to friends and admirers, often as a signal of her favor. These portraits helped to shape her very deliberate, highly controlled public persona—one that irked plenty of her peers. Others claim that they were largely a private collection—rarely circulated, and never used to commercial ends.
Either way, although she was widely talked about during her life, the portraits were mainly appreciated after her death, feeding into the legend developed by her avid admirers, including Robert de Montesquiou and the similarly eccentric Marchesa Luisa Casati. And that's how she continues to exist: as an image, a face, a set of poses meticulously choreographed and endlessly marveled over.
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