When news came of actress Claudia Cardinale’s death, many remembered her as the beautiful Angelica, gliding through the Palermo ball in Visconti’s 1963 film The Leopard. Few directors understood that kind of world, already vanishing, or filmed it with greater intimacy, than Luchino Visconti (1906-76). Cardinale, who knew him well, once said: ‘He was one of the last of the princes. He was the Leopard.’
A nobleman, a Catholic, a Marxist, and an aesthete in the mould of Oscar Wilde, Visconti embodied contradiction. In the 1930s he left behind Fascist philistinism for Paris, where he met neorealist director Jean Renoir through Coco Chanel, and emerged with softened politics but unshaken patrician sensibility. His 14 features, three shorts, and many opera stagings amount to more than cinema: they read as a chronicle of Europe’s slow descent, a record of aristocratic civilisation in collapse.
Visconti’s method was to write history through time and through faces. The problem of time sits at the centre of his project. What has passed returns onscreen as setting, ritual, and habit, so that cinema becomes a means of historical memory rather than a vehicle for thesis. This reflects a deeper tension: the culture he inherited against the convictions he later adopted. His films preserve a civilisation at the point of failure.
That record is kept not only in rooms and seasons, but in the lives that move through them. His characters are observed with sympathy and reserve, as if he were watching passions he had known and outlived. There is a note of Proust here: identification tempered by distance, memory guiding judgement. Figures such as the Prince of Salina (Burt Lancaster), Ludwig II of Bavaria (Helmut Berger), and Professor Aschenbach (Dirk Bogarde) live under the weight of the past, find the present inadequate, and cannot command what lies ahead. Their conflicts are structural: money against love, idealism against cynicism, loyalty against betrayal. Over time, resignation increases and the question becomes how to grow old within a culture that no longer believes in itself. In this way, character serves the history: the fate of a class is usually carried in Visconti’s films by the fates of its members.
Nowhere are these concerns more finely drawn than in The Leopard. Set in 1860s Sicily, the movie follows the ageing Prince of Salina as he navigates the decline of the aristocracy during Italian unification. The film centres on his reluctant, almost ironic, acceptance of political change, sealed when his nephew Tancredi (Alain Delon) marries Angelica (Cardinale), the daughter of a nouveau riche mayor, an alliance between fading nobility and a rising bourgeoisie.
Visconti’s family had taken part in the Risorgimento, and he regarded the period with familiarity and disillusion. Unification changed the composition of power, not its substance, when one elite merely yielded to another as the industrial bourgeoisie replaced the landed aristocracy. In Lampedusa’s original novel, Visconti found a shared attention to the interplay of temperament and change. The adaptation remains unusually faithful because Visconti – of the same class as Lampedusa – recognised a vision he already possessed.
The film turns on a steady tension between nostalgia for a vanishing order and the bitterness of accepting its decline. The richness of the historical texture sharpens the sense of loss, as the prince learns what must be surrendered to preserve even the appearance of dignity. The film’s leitmotiv – ‘if we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change’ – captures more than a Mediterranean condition. Change does not come because it is not truly willed. The Sicilians’ vanity is stronger than their misery, the prince tells the emissary of the new regime. It is not revolution that triumphs in the end, but an alliance of aristocracy and bourgeoisie, united in form and in their aversion to Garibaldi’s redshirts.
In all that, the prince stands as the emblem of the old order. All others are seen in relation to him. He carries himself with resignation, aware that history will pass through him without his consent. The marriage of his nephew marks the path of accommodation and what remains is preserved through compromise. In the mass at Donnafugata, the camera lingers on the family after their long journey, faces dulled by dust, more like furnishings of the old church than parishioners. The viewer sees through the prince’s eyes and empathises with his point of view, the last noble figure in a world that no longer requires grace or finesse. What lingers is the quiet sorrow of extinction.
Part of the film’s depth lies in the way Visconti divides his sympathies between the prince and Tancredi. In the first there is bearing and detachment, in the second there is charm without loyalty, ambition without conviction, a tension which remains unresolved. The film lets the viewer move between sympathy and critique and, in that movement, it bridges the past it depicts and the present in which it is seen.
Visconti’s attention to objects is exact and his interiors are never mere decorations; they extend the world his characters are losing, the tangible forms of a culture that no longer understands itself. It is Don Calogero who remarks on the grandeur around him, noting details whose meaning escapes him. The palace’s original owners pass through its rooms with habitual indifference, the rooms speak less of taste than of time, and it is not the beauty that fades, but familiarity.
His fellow Italian film director, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and others criticised The Leopard for its lack of optimism, missing the irony in its depiction of decline. Visconti, indeed, frames a reactionary world with nostalgia, yet grants the present no warmth. The new order, though triumphant, receives none of the grace he accords the world it replaces. What compels is not so much a defence of aristocracy, but the refusal to pretend that what followed was less hollow or more beautiful.
From the failure of political idealism in Italy, and as the 1960s progressed, Visconti turned to Germany, where culture itself became the battlefield. For Visconti, Germany first meant a tradition of letters and music. He found in Goethe, Mann, Wagner, and Mahler a civilisation both beautiful and fragile. In the authors Karl Kraus and Joseph Roth, he found a register of decline that matched his instincts. Like them, he worked in the afterglow of empire, charting the unravelling of an older European order. Out of that inheritance came three studies of decline that answer, from different angles, the same question of how civilisation fails: The Damned (1969), Death in Venice (1971), and Ludwig (1973).
By the late 1960s Visconti had grown disillusioned with the politics of the day, the student revolts, the violence of 1968, the rhetoric of the New Left; none of it persuaded him. The mood recalled the years before fascism, loud, unstable, certain of itself. He turned to Mann, whose defence of humanism in an age of extremism felt both distant and urgent. Mann’s work, like Visconti’s, sought to reconcile order with desire, restraint with sensuality. They belonged, roughly, to the same cultural generation, neither avant-garde nor naïve, each shaped by a civilisation they knew was failing.
The trilogy begins with The Damned, a family drama staged as a national allegory. It is Visconti’s most commercially successful film and surely his most brutal. It traces the struggle within the Essenbeck family, loosely based on the Krupps, as they navigate the Nazi seizure of industry and the state in the early 1930s. In the film, private corruption mirrors public collapse. Visconti thought of it as a modern Macbeth, and the tone follows: ambition, treachery, and dread. The characters function less as individuals than as conduits for social forces and political interests.
The structure is openly Shakespearean. Friedrich Bruckmann (Dirk Bogarde) and Sophie von Essenbeck (Ingrid Thulin), the protagonists, carry the burden of the Macbeths. Other figures serve as omens or the three witches. At the core sits a tense triangle, Sophie, her son Martin (Helmut Berger), and her lover Friedrich, a deliberate echo of Hamlet. The moral landscape is barren and the spiritual and cultural values are either abandoned or irrevocably corrupted. In one of the most unsettling scenes, officials burn the works of German and European literature. The scene operates on two registers, a real bonfire and a figurative auto-da-fe of culture’s own inheritance in the name of purity and ‘progress’. Visconti is offering not a realist account of the rise of Nazism, but a broader allegory of how barbarism clothes itself in civilisation and how such forces can return at any time. He reminds us that history is less about what has happened than what remains possible.
If The Damned shows culture violated in public, Death in Venice turns the same crisis inward, to the solitary artist and the temptations of beauty. Based on Mann’s novella, the film follows an ageing composer (Aschenbach, played by Dirk Bogarde) who travels to the Lido in search of rest and clarity, only to become obsessed with a beautiful adolescent boy and paralysed by his own decline. As cholera spreads quietly through the city, he remains transfixed by a vision of beauty that no longer belongs to the world he inhabits.
The film is among Visconti’s most deliberately composed, a study in restraint and fading grandeur paired with flawless audio-visualisation. Its reputation rests on the muted elegance of place, the stately pace, the counterpoint of Mahler’s music against scenes of almost stifled beauty. It is decadence in the strict sense; the forms remain while significance ebbs. The waning of Western civilisation appears first in the hero’s weariness, then in the slow advance of ‘Asiatic cholera’, eroding life’s foundation. The hero, like the authorities, fails to act, preoccupied with sensuous yearning, which replaces responsibility and renders death inevitable, almost desired.
The film is also a deliberate act of recollection. Visconti recreates the arrival at the Hotel des Bains on the Lido, where his family had spent its summers. Venice becomes the metaphor for fin de siècle Europe; a city of great achievement whose surface remains intact while its foundations rot. The capital of the once Serenissima is no longer a centre of culture, but a place of leisure and irreversible decline. At the heart of the film lies a paradox: Dionysian longing is rendered with care, yet held within Apollonian control, to borrow Nietzsche’s terminology. Nothing collapses, everything fades gently like the final scene. Visconti’s art and method of history offers a diagnosis: the result is a symptom, the image of a civilisation that can still adorn itself, yet can no longer act. Its highest expressions serve not to revive it, but to mark the edge of its survival.
Finally, from the artist’s impotence Visconti moves to the sovereign’s confinement, where authority itself proves decorative. Ludwig follows the reign and decline of Bavaria’s king, who is caught between romantic aspiration and political reality. Visconti had long been drawn to the doomed house of Wittelsbach, allied with those of Hohenzollern and Habsburg, suspended between real sovereignty and a theatrical revival, between sanity and its edge. Set between the waning of German Romanticism and the rise of Bismarck’s nation-state, it traces the king’s estrangement from power as ideals are crushed by bureaucracy and realpolitik. He first tries to rule, then retreats into castles of music and stone while others govern in his place. Declared insane, he dies in obscure circumstances and is succeeded by his unstable brother, Otto.
Like all biopics it compresses a life into a coherent line, yet it becomes a portrait of a mind that cannot reconcile history with meaning. Ludwig is both sovereign and prisoner; free of ordinary constraints yet trapped in a system he neither controls nor understands. His fate lies not in insanity alone, but in the impossibility of living as though civilisation were still whole. The pacing is novelistic, built from images, pauses, and reported actions, with the sense that history now proceeds without its actors. Ludwig stands as a symbol of cultural ambition magnified to the point of fragility. The other main characters, Queen Elisabeth of Austria (Romy Schneider) and Wagner (Trevor Howard) fix the drama’s axis.
Again, by degrees, the main character’s story becomes a metaphor for the psychological condition of European civilisation in decline. In The Damned Visconti had shown how the distance between cultural aspiration and political reality could produce a wholesale perversion of spiritual values. Ludwig returns to an earlier moment in that descent, when the ideals of Romanticism still held sway yet were beginning to collapse under their own contradictions. The king’s retreat into aesthetic fantasy embodies a paradox: that of art elevated to religion as belief in a civilisation that has begun to falter. Nowhere is this clearer than in his devotion to Wagner, whose music he worships while ignoring the man’s opportunism and vulgarity. It is not only that the king cannot see Wagner clearly, but he cannot bear to.
In all three films of the German trilogy Visconti knows what the future holds for the world his characters once sustained. His Italian films had already offered variations on the same reckoning. The formation of the nation-state, in Bismarck’s Germany or post-Risorgimento Italy, furnishes the ground on which he explores the erosion of meaning, the betrayal of form, and the slow pursuit of beauty even as decay sets in. These works together trace a movement from authority to fatigue and the longing that remains.
There is in Visconti, as in Mahler, Proust, and Mann, a sense of civilisational exhaustion and a recognition that he stood at the end of a long historical cycle. From The Leopard onwards Visconti’s work shows sympathy for refined and fading worlds and an awareness that culture had entered a spiritual crisis. The past to which he returned time and again was not only lost, but it was also spent. His characters live among splendour, but splendour that no longer carries meaning. In all of Visconti’s cinema the turning away from history is essentially metaphysical. The modern world has arrived. Nothing in it rivals what has disappeared. And what remains is not resistance but mourning.
His bloodlines made him a Visconti to the last: a custodian of memories no other family could possess. In his work, the heartbeat moves with history’s convulsions, felt and recorded on behalf of those who came after. The past, for him, was not a sealed-off refuge but a field of signs, early symptoms, forewarnings, patterns that only memory renders legible. His films return to inherited forms, cultural moments, and historical thresholds to understand how decay sets in, how beauty survives authority only temporarily, and how the present still bears the marks of things thought lost.
Visconti believed that any serious understanding of the present required a deep knowledge of what had preceded it. The world he saw taking shape in the late 1960s struck him as ugly, unmoored, often insincere. And he turned to the past not to escape it, but to interpret the ruins in which he lived. Even a failing civilisation, he held, contained within it the resources of clarity. Its forms might be exhausted, but their meanings remained instructive.
Asked in 1971 whether his work might contribute ‘to the salvage of Western civilisation’, Visconti allowed that ‘it does come down to that a bit’. The idea that today’s delirium might become tomorrow’s truth unsettled him; instead, he preferred to read yesterday’s delusions for what they revealed about today. As with Angelica at the ball, we see beauty drift beyond the reach of history, lingering only in memory.