Luchino Visconti at 14
Luchino Visconti, 1906–1976
Son of Giuseppe Visconti di Modrone, Duke of Grazzano Visconti (1879–1941), and Carla Erba (1879–1939), Donna Carla divorced her husband in 1925 after the discovery of her father's homosexual affairs. A patron of young theater companies, Giuseppe Visconti was nicknamed "Don Zizi" in Milan, appearing at La Scala in "powder and mascara."
At 19, Luchino Visconti was "so handsome he could knock bread off his feet."
Luchino was the fourth of seven children, pictured on the right.
But it wasn't until 1935, after Irma von Windischgraetz's father refused to allow him to marry her, that he truly embraced his homosexuality, which he saw as an inescapable fate: "For him, as for King Ludwig and Proust, homosexuality remained linked to a curse for a long time.
Luchino Visconti, Paris, 1937. by Horst P. Horst
More than a libertine nobleman, Visconti displayed in many of his actions a bourgeois attached, among other things, to a very traditional and patriarchal morality of family and society," according to Laurence Schifano. One of his first lovers was the Vogue photographer Horst, whom Coco Chanel introduced to him in Paris.
Horst P. Horst, 1906/1999, they were the same age, traveling to Tunisia in 1936.
