Being Isn't Always Believing

Take the Countess of Castiglione. She knew a thing or two about photography: the power of the image. Famously, she manipulated portraits of herself in later years to appear more svelte and nubile than her middle-age spread allowed. A nineteenth-century kind of 'nip and tuck'; a Prima Donna of celebrity imaging,  pre-Madonna.

According to Malcolm Daniel, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York:

'Toward the end of her life, following a hiatus of some twenty-five years, the Countess di Castiglione resumed her sessions with [the photographer Pierre-Louis] Pierson. The pictures reveal her mental instability and loss of all critical sense'. (http://www.metmuseum.org)

Or more simply(sympathetically) . . .

This woman's world had been turned upside down: circumstances out of her control.

It takes some time, some doing - a lot of being without really believing in it - to regain one's perspective on life.