A Nineteenth-Century Countess’s Sultry Selfies
The nineteenth-century Italian aristocrat Virginia Oldoini, Countess de Castiglione, has been cast in many lights: narcissist, courtesan, spy, exhibitionist. In the photo studio of Mayer & Pierson, she played all these parts and one more—the role of self-portraitist. For decades, Oldoini helped conceptualize and starred in more than four hundred portraits so experimental and expressive that they have drawn comparisons to works by Claude Cahun and Cindy Sherman.
Oldoini was born in Florence, in 1837, just two years before the announcement of a new photographic medium: the daguerreotype. In 1854, at sixteen, she married the twenty-eight-year-old Count de Castiglione; the following spring, they had a son, Georgio, and she had her first documented extramarital affair. Near the end of 1855, the family moved to Paris. The move involved some diplomatic intrigue: present-day Italy was then a patchwork of independent states, and Oldoini’s cousin, the politician Camillo Benso, Count di Cavour, tasked her with promoting Italian unification at Napoleon III’s court. It seems to have been clear to di Cavour that, no matter what happened, Oldoini could not be ignored.
“Never have I seen such a beauty, and never again will I see one like her,” Princess Pauline Metternich recalled in a memoir. Oldoini arrived late at events so as to make a grand entrance. When she went to the theatre, audiences would allegedly stand and applaud at the sight of Oldoini in her box. “She is the queen of beauty, poise, and grace, and when she arrives, she looks like Venus strolling by,” gushed the fashion journal Le Bon Ton. At one summer soirée, in 1856, the countess and the French Emperor spent a long time alone on an island in a lake. By winter, their affair was common knowledge.
It would be easy to conclude, given her beauty, her status, her wealth, and her admirers, that Oldoini’s portraits were solely an exercise in vanity, another attribute that she unquestionably possessed. Perhaps that was what first brought her to the studio of Mayer & Pierson, on the chic Boulevard des Capucines, in July of 1856. But unlike the studio’s other aristocratic models, Oldoini went on to collaborate with Pierre-Louis Pierson for close to forty years.
In the early portraits, she appears stiff, or coolly coquettish. (Her appearance was once described as possessing a “cold fire.”) She projects confidence in front of the camera, perhaps in part because this was at the height of her reign as the ne-plus-ultra beauty of Paris. In early 1857, she attended a ball dressed as the Queen of Hearts—a rather on-the-nose costume choice. Hearts radiated from her headpiece to her hem, with a single heart placed near her pelvis. (Napoleon’s wife, the Empress Eugénie de Montijo, purportedly commented that the heart was a little low.)
But hearts are fickle. In the spring of 1857, Oldoini was banished from court, following speculation that she was involved in an assassination attempt on Napoleon, which took place as he left her residence. Oldoini separated from her husband and moved to the outskirts of Turin, where she lamented to a visitor, “My life has barely begun and already my role is over.”
Oldoini returned to Paris, and to the photo studio, in the eighteen-sixties. Italy had unified in 1861, and whatever diplomatic position she had once held was gone. In photos from this period, it appears as if she wants to remind herself of her now tenuous importance. For one portrait, she dressed in the Queen of Hearts costume from five years earlier; the photo was the basis for an elaborate, painted-over image, a fantasy dreamed up by Oldoini and executed by Aquilin Schad, an artist in Pierson’s studio. In it, she stands in a leafy bower and gazes at the viewer, lifting her skirt slightly to reveal a dainty, heart-emblazoned shoe.
The eighteen-sixties were Oldoini’s most photographically productive decade. In another series from the period, she appears dressed as the Queen of Etruria. She had worn this outfit to a costume ball in 1863, after which the press, having confused her with another guest, reported that she had been nearly nude. The images were a refutation—and a response to her husband, who believed the reports and threatened to take their son, Georgio. Oldoini sent him some photographs, including one in which she held a dagger, titled “La Vengeance.”
In her most famous image, Oldoini holds an oval frame to her eye, through which she peers knowingly. A frame within a frame, an eye meeting a lens—if Oldoini had been born in the early twentieth century, she might have given the Surrealists a run for their money.
Oldoini shared her images with friends and family, but only once agreed to sell a portrait, for charity. In this image, she wears an austere costume that she conceived after the Etruria debacle—that of the Hermit of Passy, which just barely reveals her face, set in an expression of stony contempt. In 1867, she agreed to have the painted-over Queen of Hearts portrait displayed at the Exposition Universelle, although she reportedly wanted to be listed as the artist. Her request was denied.
Oldoini’s last series of portraits were made in the eighteen-nineties. By this time, the scope of her life had contracted. She was already widowed when her son died of smallpox in 1879, at the age of twenty-four. In the eighteen-seventies, she commissioned a postmortem photograph of her beloved terrier Kasino. In her will, she specified that her two embalmed dogs should lie in her coffin under her feet, like little furry footstools. Along with her other stipulations, this was ignored.
The commentary around Oldoini’s last decade is awash with mythology and more than a little misogyny. (“When Fairy Queens Become Witches,” read one headline about her, in 1914.) Some claimed that her mental health had deteriorated. Others described her dimly lit apartment as being draped in black velvet, with mirrors either shrouded or forbidden entirely, and said that Oldoini walked her dogs only at night and with her face veiled. In these stories, she comes across as a Norma Desmond type, transfixed by her own former glories.
Whether or not these accounts were accurate, Oldoini’s expression in portraits from this time seems more vacant, her eyebrows heavily drawn. In some images, she wears her old, now threadbare costumes. One disturbing image shows her legs and feet—body parts that she had once so audaciously photographed—with the perspective shifted, so that it looks like she’s in a coffin, buried alive with her camera, as if she was aware that her prescient, obsessive self-documentation would long outlive her.
