The Kaleidoscopic Countess
“Everyone thinks these are self-portraits but they aren’t meant to be. I just use myself as a model because I know I can push myself to extremes, make each shot as ugly or goofy or silly as possible.” — Cindy Sherman
“Individualism? Narcissism? Of course. It is my strongest tendency, the only intentional constancy I am capable of….” — Claude Cahun
The first time I saw a picture of the infamous Countess of Castiglione was on the cover of of Alexander Chee’s The Queen of the Night. The novel, about woman continually reinventing herself set against the backdrop of 19th century Paris, features on its cover the photograph of a woman in a dress with an enormous white skirt and a black mask obscuring over half of her face. She is posed with one arm akimbo and the other hand under her chin, index finger resting on her cheek and middle finger under her mouth. Not smiling, she looks as if she is pondering the viewer whom she can see fully but whose view of her is obscured.
In her day, the Countess was an aristocrat, mistress to the emperor, and a fixture in Parisian society. She was also the subject and director of hundreds of early photographs in which she cast and recast herself in hundreds of different dramas. (Her picture was an excellent fit for the cover of Chee’s book.) Today, she is perhaps best remembered for this photographic legacy, but the nature of that legacy — true artistic output or mere vanity project? — is left to viewers afterwards to assess for themselves.
For a long time, the Countess’ output had been ignored by the art world. This is because, as curator Pierre Apraxine writes in La Divine Comtesse, a book exploring the Countess’ cultural impact, her project was “undermined by her shameless self-absorption,” and “could not therefore be regarded as that of a true artist.” Elsewhere, he puts the problem more bluntly: “The Countess, who was perceived as a disturbing character whose motives were unclear, was understood to have taken up photography merely to satisfy her own narcissism.”
Can a true artist be motivated by his or her own vanity? It is perhaps one thing to take pride in an artistic skill one has acquired — to step back and look with satisfaction at a perfectly rendered landscape or still-life. But the Countess, though she was heavily involved in the staging of her portraits, had no formal photography training. As Apraxine suggests, the only skill she was thought to be exercising was that of making herself look good. It’s not for nothing that 21st century writers have called her “The Selfie Queen.” Yet this dismissal on the basis of her perceived narcissism may have been too abrupt.
Young Virginia became a countess on her arranged marriage to Count Francesco Verasis di Castiglione in 1854. She was seventeen. He was twenty-nine. Only a year or so later, she was sent to France with her husband, tasked with the mission of winning Emperor Napoleon III’s sympathy for Italian unification. Her cousin Camillo Cavour, minister to King Victor Emmanuel II of Sardinia and an ardent supporter of the cause, exhorted her to “succeed by any means you wish — but succeed!” She soon became the emperor’s mistress.
Though the affair lasted less than a year, it nonetheless helped establish her reputation among the French elite not just as a beautiful woman (she was widely considered to be the most beautiful woman of her day), but as someone extravagant, glamorous, and show-stopping, someone at whom you could not help but look. The Countess “seldom appears in society,” an account at the end of the century would recall. But, “whenever she does so it is an event.” Separating from her husband, now bankrupt thanks to those extravagant tastes, she returned to Italy, but within a few years came back, serving once again as a fixture in the upper echelons of Parisian society.
In 1856, not long after her first arrival in Paris, the Countess paid a visit to the studio of Mayer and Pierson. The studio specialized in portraits, particularly those that were retouched with color (usually water color or oil paint), which were very popular at the time. The Countess’ working relationship with Pierre-Louis Pierson would span nearly four decades and produce several hundred portraits.
It has been described as a collaborative relationship, but it was the Countess who was the driving creative force in this partnership. It was she who decided not only the subject to be photographed — herself of course — but also the context of the picture, how she would be dressed and the drama she was trying to create, how the shot would be set up, right down to the camera angles themselves, all with obsessive fastidiousness. When the photographs were being accented with color, it was sometimes she who would take up the brush, putting the finishing touch on an image she likely had shepherded from conception to completion. Otherwise, she was giving the painter careful direction.
The portrait “La Frayeur” (Fear), which exists in its original form and in various iterations of painted retouching, is a perfect example. The original features the Countess in another enormous ballgown and an elaborate ringleted updo, posed as if she is fleeing something. The painted version of the photograph (retouched under the Countess’ instruction) provides more context, showing her escaping a fire that has broken out at a ball. The painter has added much in the way of detail. We see other guests trying to leave; one woman swoons into her partner’s arms as smoke and flames billow. The Countess’ appearance has also become more fanciful. Her hair is more ornate, and her dress now has a long trailing sash of grapes and leaves, with similar leaves and grapes ornamenting her shoulders and her hair. The effect is not so far off from those of the filters we use today. Her face, though, is inscrutable. Is she expressing grim determination to escape, or did she have something to do with that fire?
Many of her portraits share this theatricality. Though they began more conventionally, they would grow to become an output more dramatic (such as “La Frayeur”), scandalous (such as the picture “Legs,” which daringly features only her bare legs) or just plain bizarre (such as when she playacted a corpse). Some depict her dressed as figures from literature (such as Lady Macbeth), myth (such as Medea, wife of Jason of the Argonauts) and opera (Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII’s second wife, famously beheaded, and subject of Donizetti’s opera Anna Bolena). Some feature the Countess lavishly attired to recreate a past social triumph, such as the portrait in which she is costumed as the Queen of Hearts, just as she had been six years prior for a ball at which she had boldly appeared on the arm of Napoleon III. Even some six decades later, her entrance had been mythologized in the Comte de Soisson’s The True Story of Empress Eugenie, in which he wrote:
The Countess de Castiglione, who, they say, is on the most intimate terms with the Emperor, had the most fantastic and daring costume imaginable. … she carried the weight of her beauty insolently. The proud Countess does not wear corsets; she would willingly be a model to a Phidias, if there were one, and she would pose clad only in her beauty. La Castiglione is a courtesan like Aspasia; she is proud of her beauty and she veils it only as much as is necessary to be admitted into a drawing-room.
While her brazen appearance may have raised some eyebrows (most notably those of Empress Eugenie herself), the Countess almost certainly would have considered the evening a grand success. Commemorating it in a portrait six years later has allowed it to outlast living memory.
Others are portraits in a more straightforward sense (no obvious costumes, scenes being enacted, or past triumphs commemorated), but use other techniques to pique interest and play with how she sees and is seen. In “Scherzo di Follia” she is seated in three-quarter profile, holding a frame over her face such that all we can see are her eye, chin and mouth. But given that she is not fully facing the camera and the shadow cast by the frame on the lower portion of her face, the first place we look is at that framed eye. That eye is also looking directly back at us. “I can see you,” she seems to say, just as she did on the cover of Chee’s novel, “but you’re only seeing part of me, and on my terms.” In other portraits she employs mirrors to show herself at multiple angles in the same view, again playing with how she is seen. Sometimes the mirror serves to highlight a particular body part. A portrait titled “The Eyes” features her seated and holding a small hand mirror. We cannot see her eyes directly, only as they are reflected in the mirror. Another shows the Countess standing, gazing into a full-length mirror. Her back is to us, with only her reflection looking at the audience, as if we are some kind of Medusa that would turn her into stone. Or maybe the danger is to us if we look directly at her.
The Countess did not stop taking pictures as she aged. At the time of her death in 1899, she had been planing a new exposition featuring photographs that had been recently taken for the 1900 Exposition Universelle. It is possible she was trying to undermine the perceived vanity of the earlier portraits, undercutting the more glamorous images of a younger woman with photographs showing that time had taken its toll. Or perhaps she was merely a sad, deluded old woman. At the end of her life, she lived as a recluse in a small apartment, the mirrors all covered in black. Whether she truly knew what she looked like and how she felt about it are questions to which we are unlikely to ever get answers.
The status of her narcissism in the creative process also remains an open question. Art historians have observed links between the Countess’ output and that of Cindy Sherman, whose “film stills” also feature the photographer in dress-up as their subject, and the Surrealist self-portraiture of Claude Cahun. Yet the status of these women as artists and their work as art seems never to have been in question, despite the fact that they too put themselves in front of the camera. Perhaps the difference lay in an accident of circumstances, the Countess having died on the eve of the 20th century, when both these women made their mark. Perhaps it was that the Countess was not a professional, but an aristocratic amateur whose interest in photography seemed only to go as far as it could serve her vanity. Or perhaps the difference is what has or hasn’t been read into their respective outputs. Many see Cahun, with her gender-bending aesthetics, as subverting the patriarchal gaze. In the film stills series, Sherman had herself photographed as various generic female movie character types in the style of different kinds of cinema, such as that of film noir or B movies. “By photographing herself in such roles,” MoMa’s website dedicated to modern and contemporary art explains, “Sherman inserts herself into a dialogue about stereotypical portrayals of women.”
In contrast, the Countess seems to have no such consistent, gender studies-approved agenda. While some of the more bizarre output may indeed subvert the male gaze, others, like the commemoration of her Queen of Hearts costume, seem to do just the opposite. But a particular concern with how she is seen and wants us to see her runs through all of her photographs. What’s more, the portraits themselves and the process of telling the different, sometimes imagined, stories in each gave her an even deeper way to control how others would see her. They gave her the ability to make and remake her own story — on her own terms — incorporating elements of what really happened (such as the Queen of Hearts portrait), imagined scenarios (such as “La Frayeur”), and mythical, literary or operatic inspiration into a new, richly embellished composite that has been capturing imaginations since her death. If art is indeed “not what you see, but what you make others see,” as Edgar Degas put it, then her many pictures certainly count as art.
Some could describe her output as fractured. Even in individual pictures she fractures herself, isolating body parts as we have seen by obscuring the space around them or multiplying them using mirrors. But the more appropriate adjective might be kaleidoscopic. Each picture, whether opulent or disturbing, creates a world and tells a story about its subject, drawing the viewer in and inviting a moment of pause to consider who this woman was and what she was trying to say. They are art as much any other portraits are art, and have left us a legacy of haunting images at which we, like so many in her day, can’t help but look.
