Nothing special, just the elderly Marchesa Maria Arconati-Visconti playing a bored Renaissance page at home, in the Dutch castle of Gaasbeek

Nothing special, just the elderly Marchesa Maria Arconati-Visconti playing a bored Renaissance page at home, in the Dutch castle of Gaasbeek. A great eccentric even in her youth, in her declining years the Marchesa Arconati-Visconti devoted herself to decorating and refurbishing a castle in the Southern Netherlands, which she turned into a veritable casket of antiques and works of art. Sometimes she could be seen in the castle in extravagant costumes like this one, though this surprised no one who had known the aristocrat for long: widowed in the third year of her marriage and left an enormous fortune, she lived without a backward glance, hosting salons for progressive politicians and thinkers, parties and ideological gatherings, donating considerable sums to scholars and holding consistently to anticlerical views. Childless, the 82-year-old Marchesa disposed of her colossal property for the benefit of the public, leaving her collections to the Louvre and the castle to the Netherlands. It is now a museum, where, in keeping with the hostess's tradition, they are very fond of costume photo shoots.