The Unfinished Palazzo

The Unfinished Palazzo
Author: Judith Mackrell
Publisher: National Geographic Books
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2017-09-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 0500518661

The story of Venice’s “Unfinished Palazzo”— told through the lives of three of its most unconventional, passionate, and fascinating residents: Luisa Casati, Doris Castlerosse, and Peggy Guggenheim Commissioned in 1750, the Palazzo Venier was planned as a testimony to the power and wealth of a great Venetian family, but the fortunes of the Veniers waned midconstruction and the project was abandoned. Empty, unfinished, and decaying, the building was considered an eyesore until the early twentieth century when it attracted and inspired three women at key moments in their lives: Luisa Casati, Doris Castlerosse, and Peggy Guggenheim. Luisa Casati turned her home into an aesthete’s fantasy where she hosted parties as extravagant and decadent as Renaissance court operas, spending small fortunes on her own costumes in her quest to become a “living work of art” and muse. Doris Castlerosse strove to make her mark in London and Venice during the glamorous, hedonistic interwar years, hosting film stars and royalty at glittering parties. In the postwar years, Peggy Gugenheim turned the Palazzo into a model of modernist simplicity that served as a home for her exquisite collection of modern art that today draws tourists and art lovers from around the world. Each vivid life story is accompanied by previously unseen materials from family archives, weaving an intricate history of these legendary art world eccentrics.

The Unfinished Palazzo

The Unfinished Palazzo
Author: Judith Mackrell
Publisher: National Geographic Books
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2018-09-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 0500294569

“A breathtaking social portrait, peeling the glitter from privileged lives even as it fleshes out the spectacle they created.” —The Washington Post Commissioned in 1750, the Palazzo Venier was planned as a testimony to the power and wealth of a great Venetian family, but the fortunes of the Veniers waned during construction and the project was abandoned. Empty, unfinished, and decaying, the building was considered an eyesore until the early twentieth century, when it attracted and inspired three women at key moments in their lives: Luisa Casati, Doris Castlerosse, and Peggy Guggenheim. Their extraordinary, acclaimed story is now available in paperback. Luisa Casati turned her home into an aesthete’s fantasy, where she hosted parties as extravagant and decadent as Renaissance court operas, spending small fortunes on her own costumes in her quest to become a “living work of art” and muse. Doris Castlerosse strove to make her mark in London and Venice during the glamorous interwar years, hosting film stars and royalty at glittering parties. In the postwar years, Peggy Guggenheim turned the Palazzo into a model of modernist simplicity that served as a home for her exquisite collection of modern art. Each vivid life story is accompanied by previously unseen materials from family archives, weaving an intricate history of these legendary art world eccentrics.

The Unfinished Palazzo: Life, Love and Art in Venice: The Stories of Luisa Casati, Doris Castlerosse and Peggy Guggenheim

The Unfinished Palazzo: Life, Love and Art in Venice: The Stories of Luisa Casati, Doris Castlerosse and Peggy Guggenheim
Author: Judith Mackrell
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Total Pages: 529
Release: 2017-09-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 0500773963

The story of Venice’s “Unfinished Palazzo”— told through the lives of three of its most unconventional, passionate, and fascinating residents: Luisa Casati, Doris Castlerosse, and Peggy Guggenheim Commissioned in 1750, the Palazzo Venier was planned as a testimony to the power and wealth of a great Venetian family, but the fortunes of the Veniers waned midconstruction and the project was abandoned. Empty, unfinished, and decaying, the building was considered an eyesore until the early twentieth century when it attracted and inspired three women at key moments in their lives: Luisa Casati, Doris Castlerosse, and Peggy Guggenheim. Luisa Casati turned her home into an aesthete’s fantasy where she hosted parties as extravagant and decadent as Renaissance court operas, spending small fortunes on her own costumes in her quest to become a “living work of art” and muse. Doris Castlerosse strove to make her mark in London and Venice during the glamorous, hedonistic interwar years, hosting film stars and royalty at glittering parties. In the postwar years, Peggy Gugenheim turned the Palazzo into a model of modernist simplicity that served as a home for her exquisite collection of modern art that today draws tourists and art lovers from around the world. Each vivid life story is accompanied by previously unseen materials from family archives, weaving an intricate history of these legendary art world eccentrics.

The Unfinished Palazzo

The Unfinished Palazzo
Author: Judith Mackrell
Publisher: Regan Arts.
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2017-04-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781941393451

Judith Mackrell brings to life the history of Venice’s mysterious and idiosyncratic Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, “the Unfinished Palazzo,” through the lives of three of its most eccentric, passionate, and rule-breaking residents—Luisa Casati, Doris Castlerosse, and Peggy Guggenheim. Venice, 1750: The powerful Venier family commissions a beautiful palazzo on the Grand Canal, one they intend to cast a shadow on every other domestic building on its stretch of the canal. Yet the Republic of Venice—and the Venier family’s fortune—began to wane and the project was abandoned, with only one story completed. Luisa Casati. Doris Castlerosse. Peggy Guggenheim. These three women inhabited the Palazzo at different periods, from the start of the twentieth century to the 1960s. Each came from a different country—an Italian, a Brit, and an American—but they had a surprising amount in common, above and beyond their ownership of the same extraordinary building. Amongst other things, all of them had scandalous lives, a passionate interest in art (although in the case of Luisa Casati, the subject had almost invariably to be herself), a fascination with sex, and a deep love of Venice. And, all surrounded themselves with and amazing supporting cast at so many glamorous parties, from D’Annunzio and Nijinsky, via Noel Coward and Cecil Beaton, to Yoko Ono amongst the Picassos. Mackrell weaves an intricate history of the Unfinished Palazzo, bringing it—and its legendary inhabitants—to life.

Infinite Variety

Infinite Variety
Author: Scot D. Ryersson
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 1999
Genre: Art patrons
ISBN: 9780967052724

A detailed account of the life of the Marchesa Luisa Casati, "Europe's most notorious celebrity," whose promenades with cheetahs, love affairs with famous men, and lavish spending were so fascinating as to inspire a play, a movie, and a fashion collection.--Jacket.

The Mistress of Mayfair

The Mistress of Mayfair
Author: Lyndsy Spence
Publisher: The History Press
Total Pages: 279
Release: 2016-11-07
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0750969652

The plot could have been inspired by Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies, but unlike Waugh's novel – which parodies the era of the ‘Bright Young Things’ – The Mistress of Mayfair is a real-life story of scandal, greed, corruption and promiscuity at the heart of 1920s and ’30s high society, focusing on the wily, willful socialite Doris Delevingne and her doomed relationship with the gossip columnist Valentine Browne, Viscount Castlerosse. Marrying each other in pursuit of the finer things in life, their unlikely union was tempestuous from the off, rocked by affairs (with a whole host of society figures, including Cecil Beaton, Diana Mitford and Winston Churchill, amongst others) on both sides, and degenerated into one of London’s bitterest, and most talked about, divorce battles. In this compelling new book, Lyndsy Spence follows the rise and fall of their relationship, exploring their decadent society lives in revelatory detail and offering new insight into some of the mid twentieth century’s most prominent figures.

The Marchesa Casati

The Marchesa Casati
Author: Scot Ryersson
Publisher:
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2009-10
Genre: Art
ISBN:

Visual biography about the Marchesa Luisa Casati (1881-1957), telling Casati's life story alongside the art and designs she has inspired, featuring 200 images covering her lifetime and beyond.

The Correspondents

The Correspondents
Author: Judith Mackrell
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 522
Release: 2021-11-02
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0385547692

The riveting, untold history of a group of heroic women reporters who revolutionized the narrative of World War II—from Martha Gellhorn, who out-scooped her husband, Ernest Hemingway, to Lee Miller, a Vogue cover model turned war correspondent. "Thrilling from the first page to the last." —Mary Gabriel, author of Ninth Street Women "Just as women are so often written out of war, so it seems are the female correspondents. Mackrell corrects this omission admirably with stories of six of the best…Mackrell has done us all a great service by assembling their own fascinating stories." —New York Times Book Review On the front lines of the Second World War, a contingent of female journalists were bravely waging their own battle. Barred from combat zones and faced with entrenched prejudice and bureaucratic restrictions, these women were forced to fight for the right to work on equal terms with men. The Correspondents follows six remarkable women as their lives and careers intertwined: Martha Gellhorn, who got the scoop on Ernest Hemingway on D-Day by traveling to Normandy as a stowaway on a Red Cross ship; Lee Miller, who went from being a Vogue cover model to the magazine’s official war correspondent; Sigrid Schultz, who hid her Jewish identity and risked her life by reporting on the Nazi regime; Virginia Cowles, a “society girl columnist” turned combat reporter; Clare Hollingworth, the first English journalist to break the news of World War II; and Helen Kirkpatrick, the first woman to report from an Allied war zone with equal privileges to men. From chasing down sources and narrowly dodging gunfire to conducting tumultuous love affairs and socializing with luminaries like Eleanor Roosevelt, Picasso, and Man Ray, these six women are captured in all their complexity. With her gripping, intimate, and nuanced portrait, Judith Mackrell celebrates these courageous reporters who risked their lives for the scoop.

Lady in Waiting

Lady in Waiting
Author: Anne Glenconner
Publisher: Hachette Books
Total Pages: 366
Release: 2020-03-24
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0306846357

Discover untold secrets with this extraordinary memoir of drama and tragedy by Anne Glenconner—a close member of the royal circle and lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret. Anne Glenconner has been at the center of the royal circle from childhood, when she met and befriended the future Queen Elizabeth II and her sister, the Princess Margaret. Though the firstborn child of the 5th Earl of Leicester, who controlled one of the largest estates in England, as a daughter she was deemed "the greatest disappointment" and unable to inherit. Since then she has needed all her resilience to survive court life with her sense of humor intact. A unique witness to landmark moments in royal history, Maid of Honor at Queen Elizabeth's coronation, and a lady in waiting to Princess Margaret until her death in 2002, Anne's life has encompassed extraordinary drama and tragedy. In Lady in Waiting, she will share many intimate royal stories from her time as Princess Margaret's closest confidante as well as her own battle for survival: her broken-off first engagement on the basis of her "mad blood"; her 54-year marriage to the volatile, unfaithful Colin Tennant, Lord Glenconner, who left his fortune to a former servant; the death in adulthood of two of her sons; a third son she nursed back from a six-month coma following a horrific motorcycle accident. Through it all, Anne has carried on, traveling the world with the royal family, including visiting the White House, and developing the Caribbean island of Mustique as a safe harbor for the rich and famous-hosting Mick Jagger, David Bowie, Raquel Welch, and many other politicians, aristocrats, and celebrities. With unprecedented insight into the royal family, Lady in Waiting is a witty, candid, dramatic, at times heart-breaking personal story capturing life in a golden cage for a woman with no inheritance. New York Times Bestseller USA Today Bestseller The Sunday Times Bestseller The Globe and Mail Bestseller ABA Indie Bestseller The Times (UK) Memoir of the Year One of Newsweek's Most Anticipated Books of 2020