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# Countess Virginia Oldoini di Castiglione (1837-1899) fell in love with being photographed before it became mainstream
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/grafinia-virdzhiniia-oldoini-la-kastilone-1837-1899-poliubila-fotografirovatsia-eshche-do-togo-kak-eto-stalo-meinstrimom/
- Published: 2023-09-24T10:21:44.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-01T05:35:44.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Aristocracy, Archive, Mores, Paris, People

Countess Virginia Oldoini di Castiglione (1837-1899) fell in love with being photographed before it became mainstream. Thanks to the fact that her archive of photographs found its way into the Metropolitan Museum as early as the nineteenth century, dozens of portraits of this society intriguer, courtesan and Parisian fashionista of Italian origin have come down to us. Virginia Oldoini came from an aristocratic Florentine family and, as often happened in her milieu, married young a mature and wealthy nobleman, bore him a son, and soon abandoned the family to go and make merry in Paris. Her Parisian life is described in several novels, and rumour credited her with liaisons with King Victor Emmanuel II, Napoleon III and Bismarck. Besides the usual society amusements of the day, the countess had a passion for posing: for many years she appeared before the lenses of the best photographers, devising ever new guises, right up to old age, when she had to disguise grey hair, a thickened figure, wrinkles and other traces of the years

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