Noble Blood - Through the Eyes of La Castiglione

Episode Date: May 23, 2023

More than a hundred years before the selfie became commonplace, a woman in France used photographs to immortalize her favorite subject: herself. But as she aged, she became a lighting rod for our cultural conversation about growing old and the power of beauty. Support Noble Blood:  — Bonus episodes, stickers, and scripts on Patreon — Merch! — Order Dana's book, 'Anatomy: A Love Story' and its sequel 'Immortality: A Love Story'  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. What's up, everyone? I'm Ago Vodam. My next guest, it's Will Ferrell. Woo, woo, woo, woo. My dad gave me the best advice ever. He goes, just give it a shot.

But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration. It would not be on a calendar of, you know, The cat, just hang in there. Yeah, it would not be. Right, it wouldn't be that. There's a lot of luck.

Listen to Thanks, Dad, on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of IHeart Radio and grim and mild from Aaron Manky. Listener discretion advised. Most nights, the woman covered in veils, goes out walking under cover of darkness. It's Paris, 1870. Sometimes the woman's dog is on a leash beside her. Occasionally a police officer stops her. She is malingering with vagrants.

Is she a vagrant? She scoffs and walks on. She will name a series of vindictive photos after the area police later, she promises herself. With thoughts of this sweet justice in her head, she walks on. Finally, the dog pulled. at the leash. They are home. 26 B's place Vendon. Fertively trying to keep the veil across her face,

the woman opens the first locked door to her apartment. Then the second, then the third. She closes herself in with the dog. Only once she's safely locked away behind three doors, thus she remove the veils. She doesn't have to worry about seeing what she looks like. Her walls are painted black. She has no mirrors or reflective surfaces. She's an old woman, she believes, though really she's only in her 40s. In her mind, she only wants to see herself as she was, and photos of her younger self cover the walls. The woman looks at one of the photographs and brings. And, breathes a sigh of relief. Yes, there she was, a young woman whose beauty was famous in Italy and then France, pale, round cheeks, eyes rumored to be either bright green or piercing violet,

slim waist, draped in evening gowns and costumes. A smile crosses the older woman's lips before she closes her eyes for the night. She is Virginia Oldoni, the Countess of Castellione. In her youth, she was as famous for her beauty as she was her vanity. She was the mistress of King Vittorio Emmanuel II, king of Sardinia and later of Italy. But that wasn't her most prominent conquest. As a teenager, she was personally dispatched from Italy to France to become the mistress. of Emperor Louis Napoleon the Third, to whisper into his ear that he must support Italian unification. She had taken him easily. She had done her duty. She had been kicked out of court eventually, yes, but the Kingdom of Italy had united, and Louis Napoleon had supported it. But as she grew older, she grew strange, perhaps mentally ill. Unable to handle the loss of her youth and political role,

she bankrupted her husband and left him before he died. She dressed head to foot as a hermit in her last public appearance before consigning herself to walk the streets of Paris only by night. She became obsessed with recreating her own images in photography, in art form then in its early days. She was dressed in scenes from her own past life, directed and retouched the photographs herself, and she continued to take these photos

long after everyone believed that she was too old to pull it off. After her death, one man became so obsessed with her that he bought plaster casts of her legs and displayed them in a self-made museum. In the history of photography, La Castiglione was like an early Cindy Sherman. There were no selfies in the second half of the 19th century. Being photographed was a big deal for a private person who was not a celebrity. And though she had been renowned for a time,

La Castellione may be the single most photographed private person of the 1800s. The story of the Countess Virginia Aldoni is the story of what it meant to be a woman whose youth and beauty was used to attract important men to play political games, and whose youth and beauty ultimately faded, as they tend to do. But there were no plastic surgery drop-in centers offering Botox and a bikini wax in one. But there was early photography. There was costume, paint, and there was a woman testing how much control she actually had over her own image, over the fading of her famous light. I'm Dana Schwartz, and this is Noble Blood. Virginia, Elizabetha, Louisa Carlotta Antonetta, Teresa Maria Aldone Rapalini,

was born on March 22, 1837, to an aristocratic family in Florence. By age 16, her parents encouraged her to marry Francesco Veracis Asinari, Count of Castellioni. One year after the wedding at age 17 in 1855, the new countess gave birth to their only child, Giorgio. The count was a widower more than decade older than Virginia. He was infatuated with her, but she never loved him and barely pretended to. Young Virginia had always been a great beauty, and she knew it. Her pre-up guaranteed that she could still go about in society however she wanted. So if Virginia's parents hoped that marriage would reign in men's attraction to their daughter, they were sorely mistaken. The countess was young, beautiful, and vain. She spoke Italian and French and unaccented English, and she was

never going to be happy, sitting home as the wife of an old count. Within a year of Georgio's birth, she moved to Paris. Officially, she was visiting her cousin. Unfficially, she had a much more important mission. When Virginia was born, the area we know today as modern Italy was comprised of several states, controlled by Naples, Austria, and the Pope. Florence was located in the kingdom of Sardinia and Piedmont, ruled by King Vittorio Emmanuel II. The king was only one of the many lovers that Virginia would take over the years. It was his prime minister. It was his prime minister. Camila Cavour, who hatched the plan for the Countess. She would be sent to France, where she would intimately involve herself in the court of Emperor Louis Napoleon III.

She would, in short, get the ear of the French Emperor. Then she would convince him to support the unification of the Kingdom of Italy under Vittorio Emmanuel. The Countess wasn't yet 20 when she received her assignment. She must have felt, at least partially thrilled, to receive a secret code from the prime minister so that she could communicate with him while in Paris. She would have listened carefully to his instructions, quote, succeed by whatever means you wish, but succeed. And she must have understood whatever means you wish, he had said. She was a great beauty more than anything else. He meant seduction. On February 5th, 1856, then 18-year-old Countess Virginia Castellione arrived at a masked ball on the Champs-Elese. The room was filled with aristocrats

in Mardi Gras masks. The countess knew that she was a vision, so she ignored the women in the room. She looked right past most of them, and then caught the eye of the only man she cared about. The Emperor, Louis Napoleon III. Yes, he was married to Empress Eugenie who was eight months pregnant. Yes, he was involved and distracted in ending the Crimean War. It didn't matter. She smiled at him flirtatiously, and he turned toward her. In the months to come, salacious rumors would swear.

whirl about the countess's beauty, her vanity, her elaborate costumes, and her seduction of France's emperor. One general said, quote, infatuated with herself, always classically draped, she would appear at gatherings like a goddess descended from the clouds. She would allow people to admire her as if she were a shrine. But as soon as the emperor or empress approached, her face would be transformed. She seemed to be saying to all, I am not here for you. I am of a different essence.

I know only the sovereign and his consort. End quote. In June 1856, Empress Eugenie made the mistake of inviting Virginia to a garden party. Louis Napoleon invited the countess to a boat ride, rode her out to an island in the lake, and disappeared with her for hours. It was an incredibly flagrant, public outing of their affair.

Unsurprisingly, Virginia found herself hated by the Empress. On February 17, 1857, Virginia had arrived at a costume ball dressed as the Queen of Hearts. Scandilessly for the time, she wore no corset and no crinoline. Chains around the bodice of her dress formed heart shapes. The neckline plunged. Shockingly, she wore her hair down around her shoulders. Empress Eugenie had cutting words for her.

The heart is a little low, countess. But the empress wasn't always so cutting. She despaired about her husband's affair with the countess at one point saying, I have tried everything, even to make him jealous. It's made no difference. I can't take any more. But a man with a wandering eye has a tendency to wander. Only ten days after the countess's success as the Queen of Hearts at the 1857 Mardi Gras Ball, Louis Napoleon's affections wandered on to someone new.

The Countess Walesca, an affair that would continue for seven. seven years. After that, La Castellione's days at the French court were numbered. It may have been her first taste of not being the favorite, of being passed over for another woman. She didn't like it. She had not forgotten her charge to whisper in the emperor's ear about unification of Italy. She believed that she was playing an important geopolitical role. Unfortunately for the Countess, the French used that role against her. On April 6, 1857, Louis Napoleon was leaving Virginia's residence at 3 in the morning when the Italian Carbonari made an attempt on his life. Virginia almost certainly had nothing to do with the assassination attempt. But Louis Napoleon was through

with her anyway. She was banished from the French court and would have the emperor's ear no longer. The Countess Castellione's banishment from French court was the beginning of the end of her very brief life as a political figure. Her husband went back to Italy, but she refused to live with him there. She and her son, Georgia, were living separately in Turin, when in 1859, Louis Napoleon sent French troops in support of Italy against Austria. In 1861, Vittorio Emmanuel became king of a United Italy. The Countess believed she had played an important role in this victory. Historians tend not to agree. In 1861, the Countess and Giorgio returned to France again without her husband the Count. They moved to a suburb of Paris called Passé, near the

photographer Pierre Louis Pearson, and here the second act of her life began, the part that she is actually most famous for. Five years earlier, when she had been the favorite of the emperor, she had met with Pearson for a simple photography session in which she wore a standard black velvet dress. But that was then. Now she was out of favor with the emperor, and she felt her great beauty was going to waste. So she went back to the mayor and Pearson portrait studio. And for the next several years, she and Pearson undertook one of the largest series of photographs of a private person in the 19th century. She had him take over 400 photographs, all of herself. And not just any photos of herself. In these photographs, she recreated.

the costumes of her earlier victories at court. She wore the famous queen of heart's dress all over again. It doesn't take a Freud, who was actually born the year the countess first went to Pearson, to analyze that she was trying to live in the past. She was trying to document her beauty to prove it. In front of the camera, the countess posed herself in costume as a peasant, a noblewoman fleeing a fire, characters from novels and plays. She lounged on chases and sat up in beds. Some especially salacious photos show her bearing, gasp, her naked leg. At the time, the only women's legs that a respectable person might see outside the bedroom or the brothel was at the ballet, and even then that could be almost as titillating as pornography. So, too, as in the

so many bedroom selfies that are sent across the internet today, the photos that she took in which she showed her feet tended not to also include her face. Through all this work in the photography studio, the countess's famous vanity only increased. At one point, she asked Pearson if he fully recognized that God is, quote, making you the collaborator of the most beautiful creature who has ever existed since the beginning of time. End quote. It's quotes like that that I do feel are important context here because often I think history has a knee-jerk reaction to label beautiful women as vain, but in this case it is a label that seems especially apt. In a technique common for the time, the countess ensured that the photos were painted over, so they were touched up and in

color. She had Pearson photograph her son, too. But even there, her famous vanity was unrelenting. The countess would dress Giorgio up as her. A series of photos show him at age seven in a dress, his long hair flower pinned, clearly meant to look like his mother. Of the, one, the one of 110 photos of Giorgio, some show him alone, some with the countess, and only one also includes his father. During all this time, the countess had taken lover after lover. But love itself seemingly was out of the question. I don't believe in love, she wrote. It's a malady that comes and goes little by little, or an intermittent fever. She was not loved in the court. Years into her return to France, at last she was invited to one ball in 1863. She appeared as the

Queen of Etruria, a costume that she expected would dazzle, but instead scandalized. Rumors spread that she'd almost been naked. To modern eyes, of course, the photos of the costume are laughably clothed. Only her arm from the shoulder is bare. And I will include photos in the episode script on our Patreon. Hearing about the costume from his post in Turin, her now estranged husband threatened to take their son, saying, quote, I want to spare myself the status of husband to the beautiful countess.

Shortly after, she mailed him a print of herself in the Queen of Etruria costume, this time holding a dagger. The photo is so striking that nearly 150 years later, the Metropolitan Museum of Art used it as the cover of their catalog for the show about her in the year 2000. The Countess titled the photo herself. She named it Vengeance.

After that, the Countess appeared to go a little mad. In April 1863, two months, after the quote-unquote naked Queen of Etruria debacle, she arrived at one last event. Rumor swirled that she would show up naked. Instead, she dressed head to toe as a nun. She called herself the Hermit of Passa and was accompanied by a violinist playing Chopin's funeral march.

We can conceive of these events kind of like a modern met ball. Think of Kim Kardashian who shows up. sometimes channeling Marilyn Monroe and sometimes shrouded in black from head to toe. The Countess Castellione did the same thing, from the Queen of Hearts, to Complete Hermit None. She was an all-or-nothing person, all drama, nothing balanced or in-between. Later, psychoanalysts would coin the term Madonna-Hore complex, though the countess viewed herself more as a goddess or queen, a divine creation, and if she wasn't, then she didn't want to be seen at all. Her appearance as the Hermit of Pessé marked her final, dramatic showing at a public ball.

In 1867, her husband died. The next year, she locked herself away in the apartment at the Place Bendome, with the three doors between her and the world, and no mirrors, and all black women. walls, which she covered in photos of her younger self. In 1879, her son died suddenly at the age of 24 of smallpox. After that, if she did venture out, it was only under cover of night, shrouded in veils, with the company only of her dogs. In the 1890s, the countess returned to Pearson's studio, Now in her 50s, the years had not been kind to the once-famous beauty, but she came back to Pearson, wanting what she had always wanted, more photographs.

And so began a smaller series of photographs of the countess wearing a younger woman's costumes, sometimes looking in a mirror or lifting her sleeve to contemplate her aged, ugly arm. I say ugly, in quotes, according to the catalogs and articles that I could find. Everyone talks about how horribly old and decrepit she had become. The Met catalog calls the photos, quote, A sorry spectacle, painful documents charting the course of a physical and mental decline. Her face has corsoned, and her waist has thickened. A history of the modern portrait in 19th century France goes further, quote,

It is difficult to comprehend what masochistic impulse could have incited her, stout, toothless, and virtually bald, to reappear before the camera and create grotesque countertypes of the earlier portraits, end quote. Here's the thing, listener. Something weird, I believe, is going on here with his. The photos used as illustrations of her grotesquery show a woman who is, yes, clearly in her 50s, whose mouth, yes, is closed, perhaps not showing teeth, and who, yes, has gained some weight since her 20s. Maybe some of the off-the-shoulder sleeves and necklines aren't totally becoming, or perhaps they indicate that she's trying too hard, maybe her eyes do look a little haunted or desperate or even mad. But she totally has hair. Or she's wearing a very convincing hairpiece. The dresses fit basically fine. And she's not ugly, certainly not grotesque.

And if her expression is a little vacant, well, if you flip back in the catalog, I can tell you it's basically the same gaze she had in her younger photos. I believe art has. I believe art has, history itself seems to have fallen into the trap of which they accuse the countess, disdaining a woman, feeling unable to accept her for the simple crime of aging. She's only grotesque, I think. If you think a woman in her 50s who looks like she's in her 50s is grotesque, or if you think a woman in her 50s who wants to be looked at is grotesque. I happen to think not.

It's a good lesson in seeking primary sources, which, because their photographs, remain right there for us, unbiased by interpretation and analysis. To these photos, the countess pinned paper to make herself look thinner, almost like an early Instagram edit. How much has really changed today? The reception of the later photos shows us how the world saw a woman who got her. older, and the countess's actions prefigured how women might try to control how the world saw themselves. Pathetic and grotesque for a woman to grow old and age, and even more grotesque if an

aging woman tries to look younger. Of course, the countess was indeed somewhat mentally unstable by the time of these photo sessions in 1890. She typed. one photo in the series, I don't give a damn for the police commissioner in Place Vendom. She photographed her own swollen feet from the perspective of a corpse looking down in a casket. It would be comic and even smart if she had any sense of irony about it.

Art history does not suggest that she did. At the end of her life, she wanted an exhibit of the photographs of her to be called the most beautiful woman of the century. She died first on November 28, 1899, at the age of 62. After her death, she became the subject of plays and books, and, in the mid-20th century, several Hollywood films, she prefigured Cindy Sherman and other photographers

who made themselves the subject, as photography continued to develop as an art form, although perhaps they did it with more self-awareness. In 2000, the Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibited her photographs. In 2016, the novelist Alexander Cheath used her as a character in his novel, The Queen of the Night, alongside a cover image that is one of her photographs from a masked ball. And her most artistic photo of all is one you may have seen. In the past 60 years, it's become an icon of modern photography.

It's a photo of a glamorous woman holding an oval cutout in front of one eye and peering through directly at the viewer, covered and exposed. And so the countess did become an icon, if a niche one in the end. Yet upon her death, it's not clear that was what she wanted at. anymore. The Countess of Castellioni, Virginia Aldoni, famous narcissist, asked for no priest, no fanfare, not even a mention of her death in the newspaper. Her wishes were ignored. People did talk. That's the story of the Countess de Castelliani, but stick around after a brief sponsor break to hear about one of her most obsessive, posthumous admirers.

Everyone, I'm Ago Vodam. My next guest, you know from Step Brothers Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and The Big Money Players Network. It's Will Ferrell. Woo, woo, woo, woo. My dad gave me the best advice ever. I went and had lunch with them one day, and I was like, and Dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.

I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings. I'm working my way up through, and I know it's a place that come look for up-and-coming talent. He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet. Yeah. He goes, but there's so much luck involved. And he's like, just give it a shot. He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall

and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration. It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat. Just hang in there. Yeah, it would not be. Right, it wouldn't be that. There's a lot of luck. Listen to Thanks Dad on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

What's up, everyone? I'm Ago Wodom. My next guest, you know from Step Brothers Anchorman, Saturday Night Live and the Big Money Players Network. It's Will Ferrell. My dad gave me the best advice ever. I went and had lunch with them one day, and I was like, and Dad, I think I want to really give this a shot. I don't know what that means. but I just know the groundlings. I'm working my way up through,

and I know it's a place they come look for up-and-coming talent. He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet. Yeah. He goes, but there's so much luck involved. And he's like, just give it a shot. He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall

and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration. It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there. Yeah, it would not be... Right, it wouldn't be that.

There's a lot of luck. Listen to Thanks Dad on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. After the Countess's death, newspapers, and auction houses cataloged her life and its objects. But one man beat out all others in his intense, rather creepy, posthumous obsession with the Countess. The Comte Montexiu-Fizzenzac was a poet and a dandy who never met the Countess in life. But upon her death, he said he felt, quote, time is running out, I must act. At the hour appointed for the closing of the casket, I went up the tiny staircase at Vossine, in the middle of the bedroom on the floor, was a coffin about to be closed. There was, for me, a flash of light

in the brief glimpse of the pale, beautiful, noble, solemn face of death, on the point of vanishing forever, end quote. Muntikshu took post-death obsession to another level. He collected every artifact of the countesses that he could, including, and this is just a partial list, the nightgown that she had asked to be buried in, pieces of her actual coffin, plaster casts of her feet, arms, the key to her apartment, a shoe from her famous Queen of Hearts costume, and 434 photographs.

He wrote and published a book about her, La Divine Comtesse, in 1913. But the only person he was more obsessed with than her was himself. He aimed to be the most photographed person in the world. The Countess's narcissism inspired. Nothing so much in him, but more narcissism. Noble Blood is a production of I-Heart Radio and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Manky. Noble Blood is created and hosted by me, Dana Schwartz, with additional writing and researching by Hannah Johnston, Hannah Zwick, Mira Hayward, Courtney Sender, and Lori Goodman. The show is edited and produced by Noemi Griffin and Rima Il Kali, with supervising producer Josh Thane and executive producers Aaron Manke, Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick.

For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. What's up, everyone? I'm Ago Vodom. My next guest, it's Will Ferrell. My dad gave me the best advice. ever. He goes, just give it a shot. But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration. It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat. Just hang in there. Yeah, it would not be. Right. It wouldn't be that. There's a lot of luck. Listen to thanks dad on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

This is an I-heart podcast, guaranteed human.