I’ve recently become fascinated with the Contessa di Castiglione.

The fascination was a long time brewing.  Because for the longest time I hadn’t been.  And yet I had been aware, for many years (decades, really), of the above photo of her (probably her most famous image), which adorns the cover of a five-book anthology I have, of the novels of Ronald Firbank.  I had purchased this volume at a Barnes and Noble, way back when, before it had rebranded itself as an upscale commercial boutique.  B&N was then selling mainly remainder items, and the stores were a treasure trove of obscure volumes and enticing oddities…such were the days…

I won’t go into Ronald Firbank here, a great, albeit not-well-known novelist, as well as aesthete, except to mention how Firbank’s deliciously suggestive prose, both elusive and allusive, self-absorbed yet poetic, flamboyant yet oddly simple…seems to cohere, exquisitely, with the life and legend of the Contessa herself.  Perhaps only a stylist like Firbank could have done justice to this lady’s own flamboyance, her recherché allure, her hypnotic fascination…directed most of all to herself.

But now I’ve become fascinated by who is pictured on the book’s front cover.  On the back cover the photograph is identified as that of “Countess Castiolione”[sic].  Having no idea who that was, I began a Google search…and thus began my descent into a most interesting rabbit hole.

So, who was the Contessa di Castiglione?  Depending on what interests you about historical figures, the Contessa, at first meeting, may seem none too extraordinary, or seem…quite unique.  Born Virginia Oldoini Rapallini (1837-99), the only child of minor Tuscan nobility, she was noted from childhood, writes Roger Williams, for her extraordinary “beauty and the iron will and narcissism which too often accompan[ies such].”   Blessed with such besotting looks, the young Virginia was “nurtured in an atmosphere of adulation, which grew in intensity as she matured.”  At age 17 she was married off to the Count Castiglione, a mild-mannered fellow who wished to possess a good-looking wife, and who married Virginia without knowing much about her other than what she looked like.  The result, says Williams, was “a supreme example of incompatibles joined in unhappy union.”

Charming, restless, intelligent (she spoke four languages, including unaccented English), and bored with her marriage, the Contessa had already dallied with a lover before her cousin, the Count of Cavour, a famous Italian diplomat and statesman, sent her, in 1856, to the French court of Emperor Napoleon III (“as a sort of reclining ambassadrix,” notes Lyle Rexler).  Her mission, says Malcolm Daniel, was to persuade the emperor to agree to the Cause of Italian unification—in which, as impressed upon her by Cavour, the Contessa was to “’succeed by whatever means you wish—but succeed!’”  And if ever a combination of stunning looks, adamantine willpower, and a consuming desire to be noticed at all costs could be said to succeed, then succeed is what the Contessa did.

From the start, Parisian nobility noticed the Contessa.  “Never have I seen such a beauty,” per a quote attributed to Princesse Pauline de Metternich, “and never again will I see one like her.”  At her first court appearance, Williams writes, her looks created a sensation:  “The fame of her beauty was such that, when she was announced, the dancers paused to gape; many of the gentlemen climbed on furniture for a more favorable view, and even the music momentarily stopped.”  An immediately smitten Napoleon, making no secret of his attraction, soon acquired the Contessa as his mistress (one of many), and she became the talk of a scandalized (though no doubt enjoyably so) aristocracy.

It was more than her looks.  Not content with passive admiration, the Contessa, with typical wit and daring, schemed to make herself the focus, the center, the cynosure of all upper-crust eyes.  Ensconced in a society that, writes Rexler, was “obsessed by theatricality and appearance,” the Contessa bloomed like a hothouse rose.  At the French court’s many masked balls, she dared to be outrageous in a series of eye-catching frocks, usually, says Williams ,“low-cut [and] clinging” (she “regarded her bust as a challenge to the rest of her sex”), as well as uncorseted.  In her most famous gown, costumed as the Queen of Hearts, “she draped her bosom in light gauze; the skirt was raised and caught up in back…, showing the petticoat.  Ornamental hearts were scattered over both bodice and skirt, invariably in interesting places.”  Observing said outfit, the Empress Eugenie was said to remark (dryly, no doubt) that the Contessa’s “heart seemed a little low.”  Nothing succeeds like excess, they say; and the Contessa must have made that her mantra.

The Queen of Hearts Dress

Unsurprisingly, despite her fame, her style, her fabled beauty, the Contessa was not popular.  Per Rosalind Jana, “one of her contemporaries noted…she was so self-absorbed that ‘after a few moments… she began to get on your nerves.’”  Says Rexler, “She was the dinner guest from hell, who cut you with her clothes, drank your champagne and stole your men.”  A court observer, says Heather McPherson, opined that the Contessa “’arrogantly carried the weight of her beauty and displayed it ostentatiously.’”  Loveliness has its limits; in less than a year the Contessa’s affair with the emperor had cooled (no doubt, an attempt on his life, occurring, per Rachel Elspeth Gross, as he departed her Parisian residence, helped chill his passion).  The lady’s extravagances had also bankrupted her hapless husband, who asked for a legal separation; and, her Court influence waning and her reputation clouded, the Contessa returned to Italy to cool her heels.  She made a brief resurgence in 1861, but after another Court scandal, involving the misattributed flaunting of a scandalously skimpy costume—the Contessa claimed she was not the (nearly nude) wearer, but the accusation stuck—she retired from society for good, living in seclusion in a Parisian suburb.  Though she still had lovers, and continued to correspond with the rich, influential, and famous, her life dwindled into obscurity.  And as her looks and health declined with age, so did the (wealthy) lovers and friends.  Her money gone and her vaunted beauty vanished, the Contessa lived in apartments painted black with no mirrors; she would come out only at night, heavily veiled—a shadow, a ghost, a forgotten trace of a once-glittery era, barely remembered as ‘La Divine Comtesse,’ the famous beauty and fabulous courtesan to the Gaudy and Great.

By now you must all be saying:  What a movie this lady’s life would make!

Well, you’re right.  To date at least two theatrical movies (as well as a recent TV film) have been made of her life, dramatizing her notoriety at the French court, her relationship with Napoleon III, her involvement with Italian politics, her scandalous behavior, and her wonderful, amazing, much-marveled-at looks.  Surely if anyone’s life was fashioned for cinematic spectacle, it was the Contessa di Castiglione’s.

However, that spectacular, notorious, glitzy first-part-of-her-life is not what the Contessa is now famous for.  But more on that later.

The two above-mentioned Contessa films, one released in 1942, titled La Contessa Castiglione, the other in 1954 (in Eastmancolor), known variously as La Contessa, La Contessa di Castiglione, and The Contessa’s Secret, are European productions, the first from Italy, the second from France.  I was able to view them both on YouTube, and their immediate disadvantage is that both films are in Italian, with no English dubbing or subtitles on the prints I watched.  As my Italian is limited pretty much to recognizing the name La Dolce Vita, what bits I could grasp of the plots relied on a couple of maddeningly brief synopses I found on the Internet and my scant knowledge of the Contessa’s history.

However, one bonus, if that, in watching a movie in which you don’t understand anything being said is that you feel…adventurous.  Supposedly Henri Langlois of the Cinémathèque Française refused to show films subtitled or dubbed in another language, so that they could be seen primarily as film—as moving images.  And in such spirit did I approach my Contessa viewings—as an experiment in ‘pure’ cinema watching, each film’s meaning to be gleaned from the techniques of film itself—cinematography, editing, camera work, mise en scene—from the very essence of what makes a motion picture.  That being what we love about movies…

Except Langlois probably didn’t consider the particular quality of the biopic, whose plots depend not on sound, motion, and image, but on imparting gobs of biographical and historical background, often obscure, detailed, and sometimes not interesting—stuff that can’t always be depicted pictorially (I mean—how deeply do Garbo and Queen Christina really dig into the Peace of Westphalia?).  And all to be conveyed in a time span that doesn’t challenge the limits of human attention.  Or of patience.  Or of pressure on the backside.  Or on the bladder.  At least I was able to view these two films on my computer, in the comfort of my apartment (the pause button always nearby).  But had I viewed them as originally meant, in a darkened movie theater, with no intermissions, and the exits a distance away from the seats…it might have been more an endurance test than a spree.

Fortunately, neither film is long, although their stories seemed, to my comprehension, comparable in their basic plots.  Each film has the Contessa turning heads, hearts, and hankerings at Napoleon’s court; each has her gowned, painted, and coiffed with as much frou-frou as the human frame can endure; each includes a Cavour-ish character who has a Very Serious Talk with the lady, which I assume was about the Cause and the Contessa’s duty to it.  Yet although separate productions, with separate story lines, they seemed oddly chronological to each other:  The 1942 film touches on the Contessa’s early days at the French court, ending with her decision to become Napoleon’s mistress (for the Cause, you see); the 1954 version picks up with her dalliances with the emperor and revolutionary politics, and ends with her (presumed) departure from French society after an attempt on Napoleon’s life (also for the Cause).  Her court life and political maneuverings are thus nicely rounded off; put the two films together and you’ve got yourself a mini-history lesson.

But the Cause itself (as well as the broader issues of the Italian Risorgiomento) is of minor interest in these films.  What really absorbs the camera’s gaze in both are the Contessa’s ravishing features (Doris Duranti in 1942, Yvonne de Carlo in 1954) as well as her ravishing gowns, some, according to this blog (delightfully named Frock Flicks), styled on the Contessa’s actual wardrobe.  What the films lack in history, however, is made up, in the fashion of romantic biopics, in the visual and emotional pleasures of the ‘Woman’s Film’ genre—in sets, costumes, high emotions, melodramatic clashes, and scenes of gorgeous people being gorgeously in love (that being what we love about movies…).  Thus the 1942 film includes a long flashback to the Contessa’s girlhood and her romance with a dashing young beau who braves all (I’m guessing) for the Cause, while the 1954 film highlights her affair with a dashing young revolutionary who also braves all for the Cause; both young bucks, I suspect, are entirely fictional.  Nor is the Contessa’s relationship with her husband much depicted; indeed, as far as I could determine, he doesn’t appear at all in the 1942 version.  But Husbands (and History) be damned; studios had a product to sell, and the dull Castiglionian Spouse didn’t fit the bill.

A popular literary theory has that there are Seven Basic Plots in storytelling:  Overcoming the Monster, Rags to Riches, The Quest, Voyage and Return, Comedy, Tragedy, and Rebirth.  To which I would add:  The Woman Who Bares All—not for a Cause, per se, but, stereotypically, for Love (as well as fabulous décor and clothes).  It’s the firm staple that binds the plots of the Woman’s Film, a genre focusing on “women-centered narratives, [with] female protagonists…designed to appeal to a female audience…[with] problems revolving around domestic life, the family, motherhood, self-sacrifice, and romance.”  The genre is, supremely, a person-centered narrative; as Ilian Film writes, “In the ‘woman’s film’, the woman is at the center of the universe.  Best friends and suitors live only for her pleasure, talk about her constantly, and cease to exists[sic] when she dies.”  And in both her cinematic depictions, the Contessa is indeed at the center of All That Goes On, the camera ceaselessly cutting between the Contessa—dancing, strolling, riding, walking down stairs—and hordes of gossipy onlookers, amazed (and annoyed) by her beauty, her gowns, her hauteur, her very Fabulousness.  Ilian Film further (perceptively) notes, “Central to the woman’s film is the notion of…middle-class-ness, not just as an economic status, but as a state of mind.”  Thus, displays of the Contessa’s splendid cinematic life, at the highest levels of society, in beautiful settings and in even more beautiful couture, is essentially for middle-class mass consumption—a vicarious fantasy of a life of constant glamour, excitement, and beauty, far from the seemingly smaller concerns and more straitened circumstances of modern suburban living.

With its focus on love, passion, domesticity, and intimate matters of the heart, the Woman’s Film has often been derided (the term, says Ilian Film “carries the implication that women, and therefore women’s emotional problems, are of minor significance”).  Its concerns are subjective ones, that of privacy, the inner world of feeling, self-contemplation, the demands between public life and personal inclination.  Yet the Woman’s Film, while sometimes trite and histrionic in treatment, is not insignificant.  Its subject matter is very much what concerns Modernity:  The experience of the inner life, and the question of that Inner, Experiencing Self—the recognition that we are distinct entities within and of ourselves, joined to yet separate from the culture and society that produce us, and needing to negotiate the junctures between these public and private identities.  It’s also a recognition of the role Fantasy plays in our lives—of who, in the innermost realms of our being, we think we are, what we wish to be, and how, why, and what we choose—or not—to present of ourselves to the outside world.

And, oddly enough, that very concern is what the Contessa’s second-part-of-her-life—during her seclusion after exile from the French court, the life not shown or even hinted at in her biographical movies—was all about.

My interest in the Contessa di Castiglione’s life began with an image; and a deep dive into her life will plunge you into just that…the Image.  Or, more accurately—Images, plural.  Over and over…

However much the elite public of her time was fascinated by the Contessa’s beauty, no one was more fascinated by it than the Contessa herself.  Exiled from the opulence and intrigue of the French court, probably disillusioned and bored, and having little to do (and plenty of time to do it in), the Contessa began what was probably her most intimate, devout, all-consuming, and longest-lasting relationship; and that was with—the Camera.

From roughly the late 1850s to the mid-1890s, The Contessa, in collaboration with the photographer Pierre-Louis Pierson, of the fashionable Mayer & Pierson photography studio (and an official court photographer of Napoleon III), had, says Heather McPherson, anywhere from 500 to 700 photographs taken of her, “hundreds of images in various costumes and poses…[that] offer a unique and moving fictionalized autobiography of the proud comtesse…devot[ing] the remainder of her life to the cult of her declining beauty.”  It was, as McPherson quotes her biographer, the poet Robert de Montesquiou, a project that “exemplified the triumph of self-love…and the cult of beauty for its own sake.”  It was also, perhaps, an epic, a saga, an Unending Story…even a monumental work of Art.  A peculiarly singular, self-absorbed art, with but one subject, one model, one theme…but a creative one, nonetheless.

The Contessa’s photographs were more than idle snapshots for a family album.  They were carefully planned theatrical compositions, presenting the Contessa self-imaged, in reconstructed dramatic moments from her life (such as her triumph as The Queen of Hearts), or as fantasized historical or literary figures (the Queen of Etruria, Ophelia), or even as personified ‘qualities’ (one, in which she wields a dagger, is labelled ‘Vengeance’).  Many photos present her gazing into mirrors, or posing in her most extravagant gowns (so large and bulky, they almost push her out of the frame), or merely gazing pensively at the camera; a number present only parts of her body—bare legs, feet, shoulders (which would have been, in her time, considered shocking)—as if deconstructing herself for the camera’s objectifying gaze.  It was a project, says McPherson, in which the Contessa assumed “her active role in constructing [her] legend”—that being, as the Contessa claimed of herself, The Most Beautiful Woman of the Century.

And it was an active role the Contessa took in creating what McPherson calls this “mythologizing fantasy” of Self.  She chose the subject, the poses, the props and costumes, the attitudes, indeed, the very roles in which she saw herself.  “[S]he was the real artist, or art director,” writes Gross; “Though she never wielded the camera herself, she directed the shoots, wrote out scenarios which she wanted to enact, and selected and styled the costumes, props, and furnishings.”  She was, in effect, the auteur of her legend, choosing, designing—and embodying—the desired images for an imagined posterity.

Reactions to the Contessa and her project, now as well as then, still vary.  McPherson describes her as “pathologically narcissistic,” noting how the blank gaze often seen in her photos “mirrors the void at the center of the comtesse’s existence.”  Whereas Rexler defends her as “an artist.  And if the artist were the first to use a medium in a certain way, you might even call her revolutionary.”  And maybe it’s only in the 21st century, the heir of the late 20th-century post-modern aesthetic, of the examination of the self in history and society, and of the birth of social media, that the Contessa has now reached her true audience.  If, Zuzanna Stańska writes, the Contessa “could be named the vainest queen of selfies,” her photos, says Malcolm Daniel, yet “[f]unction[n] as a means of self-advertisement as well as self-expression.”  Her impact in today’s online world is undeniable; as the blog Duchessa Lia notes, “the Countess could only be called an influencer” whose “important body of work…influenced future photographers, designers, and society.”  She was, writes Max Henry, “an inadvertent innovator consumed with portraying herself as deity and muse to the world.”

And the Contessa’s photos are gorgeous to look at—haunting, strange, otherworldly, with an eerie quality, as if enticing you to dive…into an obsession with them.  It’s like plunging into that rabbit hole and not wanting to climb out.  Perhaps that feeling is due to the photos’ elaborate costumes, the flamboyant poses, their atmosphere of luxury and wealth, at once seductive yet oppressive within the limited photographic frame—as though trapped in an exquisite miniature removed from reality.  Perhaps it’s the Contessa’s often blank features (though could that blankness be due to the phenomenon known as ‘resting bitch face’?), which tell you almost nothing, but leave you free to project your own narratives onto her.  Or perhaps, most notably, it’s the way she engages with the camera:  How it looks at her objectively, with a metaphorically long gaze, as she poses for you, the viewer; but then, how she looks back, her eyes sly, alluring, acknowledging your gaze, aware she is the object of it, but also—aware she is willing you to gaze at her as an object, which thus makes her the controlling subject, directing your eyes.  And if she’s not looking at the camera, she is…looking at herself…frequently at her mirrored reflection, gazing, enigmatically, at her face, her eyes absorbed, for an eternal moment, on her unchanging visage.

It’s not just the photos, though.  The Contessa, in her enactments of private dramas, of private Selves, as it were, reifies herself as self-metaphor—staging various aspects of her Self, constructing herself as multiple Dramatic Personae.  She presents self-fantasies in still images, to be preserved, contemplated, made public, and displayed (she often sent copies of photos to friends and lovers)—and to be, perhaps, absorbed into our own contemplations of our own Selves, our own self-images.  As such, she could represent what Rexler calls the “birth of modern consciousness”—our realization we are not only an Individual Self, but are also many Selves, faceted identities we can try out, practice, and pose, then stand outside and reflect upon; and which can then be presented—via digital media—for other selves to see, observe, participate in, and reproduce.  No longer kept private, but to be revealed, shared, embraced.

In her own pictured self, The Contessa is also something of an endless rabbit hole.  Those photos of her gazing into a mirror, reproducing her image within an image, observing reflections of her Self mirrored in the objectifying glass…it’s a never-ending dive into self-contemplation, into a bottomless pit of one’s own circulating gaze.  One of the Contessa’s photos is even labelled The Gaze; and consider—it’s primarily through the Gaze that most of us negotiate the world—how we see, perceive, judge, and navigate what’s outside us…while allowing ourselves to be gazed at in turn.

It does make me wonder:  What would the Contessa have thought of the movies made about her life?  I think she would have been delighted—to know that her story, her image, her self, was being dramatized and presented to enraptured spectators, her narratives to be consumed, endlessly, as spectacle, presented on giant screens, making her literally larger than life.  And I’ve no doubt she would have wanted to portray her own self onscreen, deeming that only her own person, her own corporeal body, substance, personality, and image, could have captured her Fabulous Self on moving celluloid.  I’m sure she’d even have wanted to direct such a film—who else but she could recreate those private moments, staging them as elaborately as she did her photographs, making her, once again, her own auteur, the artist, creator, and presenter of her own life and Self.

Imagine, in an Alternate Universe, that last image I evoked—the Contessa both behind and in front of the film camera, dramatically enacting her Self, her multiple Selves, in florid theatrical presentations, her Inner Life enlarged for melodramatic display, at once private and public.  Then multiply that image to that of the Contessa directing herself in a movie in which she enacts, as drama, the spectacle of herself gazing, once more, at her own reflected image, in frame after frame—a repetition of Selfhood infinite, boundless, unending.  You could call it the Ultimate Woman’s Film, made by, with, and for One Woman only.

But wotta movie that would make.

You can watch a not-bad B&W print of the 1941 film La Contessa Castiglione, courtesy of Kult Movie YouTube channel.  In Italian, no subtitles or dubbing.  But the opera singing at the film’s beginning is gorgeous to listen to.  And Doris Duranti is gorgeous to look at.

You can watch a rather washed-out Eastmancolor print of the 1954 film La Contessa di Castiglione, courtesy of aretha pas movie YouTube channel.  Also in Italian, undubbed and unsubtitled.  However, a must for Yvonne de Carlo fans.  On a side note, the movie was originally filmed in French (this version is an Italian dub), and de Carlo, per her autobiography, spoke French for her role.

Click here to view over 300 images of the Contessa di Castiglione, courtesy of Getty Images.  Get ready to dive into that rabbit hole.