Venice, early 20th century. Marchesa Luisa Casati was born in Milan in 1881, the daughter of a cotton manufacturing fortune. By the time she was 15, both her parents were dead and she and her sister were reputedly the wealthiest young women in Italy. RFE/RL She had one ambition: "I want to be a living work of art." She pursued it with a ferocity that would eventually consume everything. She walked her pet cheetahs through Venice on diamond-studded leashes. She wore live boa constrictors as jewelry. She dilated her pupils with belladonna until they were enormous and unnatural. She had white peacocks trained to perch on her windowsills. She dyed her greyhounds blue. Wikipedia One evening she arrived at a ball in Paris wearing a dress made entirely of tiny electric lightbulbs, powered by a hidden generator. The dress short-circuited. The electric shock was so great it threw her backwards across the room. True to form, she carried on through the evening. Dallas Weekly Her Venice palazzo on the Grand Canal became the center of European artistic life. She had herself painted by Giovanni Boldini, Augustus John, Kees Van Dongen, and Romaine Brooks; sculpted by Jacob Epstein and Giacomo Balla; photographed by Man Ray and Cecil Beaton. She appeared in novels, poems, artworks throughout the 1910s and 1920s. Encyclopedia Britannica She had a debt of $25 million by the early 1930s. Creditors circled. The palazzo was sold. The art collection was auctioned. The animals were taken. Olympics The most painted woman in Europe was suddenly without anything at all. Casati fled to London, where she lived in comparative poverty in a one-room flat. She was rumored to be seen rummaging in bins searching for feathers to decorate her hair. She had only a few remnants of her former life: a broken cuckoo clock, a stuffed lion's head, a few books. HISTORY The world that had celebrated her had moved on entirely. On June 1, 1957, Luisa Casati died in London. She was 76 years old. Her funeral was attended by a handful of people — including an elderly man who had traveled from Venice, where fifty years earlier he had been her personal gondolier. Women of the Hall And then — true to everything she had ever been — she made sure she went out in style. She was buried wearing her black and leopard skin finery, a pair of false eyelashes. One of her beloved taxidermied Pekinese dogs was placed at her feet. Her gravestone is inscribed with a quote from Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra: "Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety." Encyclopedia Britannica The epilogue is extraordinary in its own right. Her Venice palazzo — the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni on the Grand Canal — was later purchased by Peggy Guggenheim and became the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, the most important museum in Italy for European and American art of the first half of the 20th century. BlackPast The house she once filled with cheetahs and peacocks and painted servants became one of the great art museums of the world. And Casati herself? She influenced John Galliano, Alexander McQueen, and Karl Lagerfeld. A fashion house, Marchesa, was named after her. She is considered a pioneering figure in performance art — using one's own body and life as artistic medium. Dallas Weekly She died thinking her transformation into living art had failed. That the fortune she'd spent creating beauty had been wasted. She was wrong. She wanted to be a living work of art. She succeeded brilliantly. And paid for it by dying in poverty, outliving the fortune that funded her transformation. That might be the most Casati thing of all. "Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety." She made sure of it herself.