Mariano Fortuny, An Artistic Legacy (Part I)

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The section "The Past Recaptured" of the exhibition "In Pursuit of Fashion: The Sandy Schreier Collection" currently on at the Met's Costume Institute, features extremely rare designs by Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo and Maria Monaci Gallenga.

If you're a Fortuny fan, though, the best place where you can learn more about his life, appreciate his work and get inspired, remains Palazzo Pesaro degli Orfei, better known as Palazzo Fortuny, in Venice.

Sadly the museum is currently closed after a major flood hit the city a couple of weeks ago. But, right before it closed down, the institution had organised a major exhibition entitled "I Fortuny. Una storia di famiglia" (Fortuny. A Family Story).

The event attempted to trace a path and highlight artistic correspondences between Mariano Fortuny y Marsal (1838-1874) and his son Mariano Fortuny de Madrazo (1871-1949) while celebrating the latter's 170th death anniversary.

The fact that Mariano Fortuny is often mentioned by designers as a constant inspiration and garments that evoke his designs reappear on the runways is perfectly understandable as he could be considered as a modern polymath.

Nowadays we all add two or three roles or jobs to our profiles on social media to prove we are extremely versatile and multi-talented in different fields, something that, unfortunately, is not always true. Fortuny was instead a genuinely talented artist, he was a pioneering fashion designer, but also a photographer, a painter and architect, a set designer and a lighting engineer, so he combined art and science with technology and architecture in his practice.

The story woven at Palazzo Fortuny for the exhibition devoted to this family started in Spain and ended in Venice, and used the building as a stage where the lives and inspirations of the father and the son were recreated.

Born in 1838 in Reus, near Tarragona, Spain, Mariano José María Bernardo Fortuny y Marsal was raised by his grandfather after his parents died. He studied at the Escola Provincial de Belles Arts in Barcelona and at the Academia Gigi in Rome.

Called by the Government of the Province of Barcelona to depict the campaigns of the Spanish-Moroccan War, he moved in 1859 to Morocco where he developed a passion for Orientalist themes and historicist genre painting. His role was essentially that of a journalist, since he had to record through his works the war.

Fortuny arrived after the fall of Tetuan and was also commissioned to paint the capture of the camps of Muley-el-Abbas and Muley-el-Hamed by the Spanish army (he began his composition of "The battle of Tetuan" on a 15 metre-long canvas, but never finished it).

The journey to Morocco deeply changed his style and influenced his paintings, inspiring him exotic themes. Throughout the six months spent in Morocco, Fortuny drew, sketched and painted lanscapes, people and palaces.

His portraits were characterised by colourful brushstrokes and vivid nuances and attention for ornamental details (preciocismo) - such as clothes and accessories - though one of the most important points of his works was the representation of light.

Quite often his works featured a sharp chiaroscuro and in some cases the painter focused his attention on the rendition of the weapons and of the costumes of the people he portrayed.

Art historian Richard Muther stated about Fortuny: "His residence in the East, which lasted from five to six months, was a discovery for him - a feast of delight. He found the opportunity of studying in the immediate neighbourhood a people whose life was opulent in colour and wild in movement; and he beheld with wonder the gleaming pictorial episodes so variously enacted before him, and the rich costumes upon which the radiance of the South glanced in a hundred reflections."

"The great battle-piece which he should have executed on the commission of the Academy of Barcelona remained unfinished. On the other hand, he painted a series of Oriental pictures, in which his astonishing dexterity and his marvellously sensitive eye were already to be clearly discerned: the stalls of Moorish carpet sellers, with little figures swarming about them, and the rich display of woven stuffs of the East; the weary attitude of old Arabs sitting in the sun; the sombre, brooding faces of the strange snake-charmers and magicians. This is no Parisian East, like Fromentin's; every one here is speaking Arabic."

There were several paintings and paper sketches by Mariano Fortuny y Marsal at the exhibition in Venice, among them potraits of people, sketches of animals and studies of hands. His works proved he had a passion for details (check out the hilt of a sword engraved on a copper plate or the bottle of scent), but also for fable-like atmospheres.

The exhibition also tried to put his paintings and drawings in context, juxtaposing them with several traditional costumes.

These pieces are part of Fortuny's own textile collection preserved at Palazzo Mocenigo, the Venice-based Museum and Study Center of the History of Fabrics and Costumes (from picture 16 to picture 24 in this post).

The collection was started by Fortuny's parents in Spain, sold in Paris after his father's death, but then restarted by Fortuny himself, who used it as the starting point for his prints and embroideries.

There is a strong connection between Fortuny's collection of textiles and costumes and his father's Moroccan paintings.

Collecting textiles in Fortuny's times depended more from the culture and sensibility of the collectors rather than from their financial resources.

Fortuny's collection of textiles proves he had a predilection for Middle-Eastern dresses (Turkish kaftans, Moroccan surcoats or Persian tunics) and designs from the Far East (Indian wedding gowns, Chinese jackets and Japanese ceremonial kimonos).

He collected both men and womenswear in all sorts of materials, from humble cotton and linen to thin silk gauze, from luxurious damasks to soft velvets and sensual satins.

After his experience in Morocco, Mariano Fortuny y Marsal moved to Granada in 1870 with his wife Cecilia de Madrazo and established there his atelier, known as Estudio de los Mártires.

He returned to Rome in 1874 where he suddenly died in November of the same year from malaria that he had contracted while painting in Naples (at the "Fortuny" exhibition in Venice there was one of his last paintings, showing the Vesuvius with the sea).

After his father died, young Mariano, who was born in Granada, Spain, moved with his family to Paris where his uncle Raymundo de Madrazo lived.

Mariano grew up in the French capital, surrounded by art developing an interest for the world of theatres, and in particular for the theatrical applications of electricity, and for stage sets and decoration.

In the late 1880s, the family moved to Venice, taking up residence in Palazzo Martinengo, on the Gran Canal, near the San Gregorio Church.

The palazzo soon became a meeting place for many literati and artists and Mariano continued his painting studies while developing further interests in photography and stage sets.

At the end of the 1890s he started exhibiting his paintings publicly, while designing the scenes for an operetta at Countess Albrizzi's private theatre in San Polo.

He was so successful in this task that Giuseppe Giacosa, the Puccini librettist, suggested him to prepare the sketches for Richard Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde" that opened in December 1900 at La Scala.

Fortuny worked on the scenes and costumes from his new studio, a workshop on the top floor of Palazzo Pesaro degli Orfei, in Venice, and even attempted to implement parts of La Scala lighting system.

The staging was very successful and Fortuny went to Berlin and Paris to obtain recognition for his innovations.

While in Paris he also created the "Fortuny Dome", a concave device that could be used to enhance the depth effect of the stage set.

In the following years he concentrated on stage lighting and costumes and the restructuring of the Countess of Béarn's private theatre.

The latter featured his famous "dome" and a velvet stage curtain decorated with a fabric-printing technique that would made Fortuny famous in the following years.

The Countess' theatre opened in 1906 and the new and innovative dome installed in it amazed many visitors, even foreign ones and soon the German company AEG got in touch with Fortuny to start selling his stage lighting systems.

Architectural plans and models of the Teatro delle Feste and the Bayreuth Theatre are preserved at Palazzo Fortuny (and they were part of this exhibition dedicated to the Fortunys).

The creation of theatre models on a small scale (Fortuny built 31 of them) was a tool for devising his lighting changes in osmosis with the Gesamtkunstwerk ("total work of art") proposed by Wagner, a synthesis of acting, music, costume and lighting in one artwork, the prevailing artistic mood at the end of the 1800s.

The Bayreuth Theatre maquette is an intricate and complex system made up of small cables, electrical power transformers and light bulbs, with wings and scenes depicted on cardboard meticulously created by Mariano Fortuny's skilled hands.

In 1907 Fortuny produced his first item of clothing, the Knossos scarf that featured prints applied to it by means of wooden plates. Researches into fabrics continued and soon he developed a technique for printing on silk and velvet.

While working on further theatre projects, Fortuny focused on experimenting on new chromatic ranges, pigments and fabric printing techniques.

He was inspired in his search for new and exciting colours by masters such as Titian and Tintoretto and infused in his textile designs influences from China, Japan, Persia, Turkey, Northern Africa and Spain.

He combined such influences with his artistic inspirations and his passion for the Wagnerian Cycle.

His dark and somber paintings showing Parsifal kneeling in prayer or resting and the golden light surrounding the knights of the Holy Grail carrying the coffin with the body of Titurel, find for example correspondences in his black or brown velvet gowns decorated with gold prints.

In 1909, Fortuny registered a pleated silk fabric made with a machine he had invented, and started developing finely pleated garments.

In the same year he patented a process for polychromatic printing on fabric and paper and, in November, he launched the Delphos Gown, a garment inspired by ancient Greek sculpture, the Charioteer of Delphi (also known as Heniokhos View this photo).

Considered one of the finest examples of ancient bronze sculptures, Fortuny had seen it during a trip to Greece.

At the 1911 Decorative Arts Exposition in the Pavillon de Marsan of the Louvre, Fortuny exhibited dresses, tunics and scarves.

Success arrived also thanks to the endorsement of many celebrities, among them Eleonora Duse, Isadora Duncan, the Marchesa Casati, Lyda Borelli, Madame Conde Nast and, later on, also Peggy Guggenheim.

The main reason why they all favoured Fortuny's designs is easy to grasp, especially if you see one of his creations close up in a museum.

The artist and designer had created a system for printing beatiful motifs on fabric, but he had also managed to come up with one dress for many bodies and shapes, an item of clothing that was light and easy to pack. One of the cabinets at Palazzo Fortuny features indeed a Delphos crumpled in a small box to show how easy it was to store it even in the smallest of spaces, a characteristic that anticipated modern and compact designs by Nanni Strada and Issey Miyake.

His creations were also mentioned in works by Marcel Proust and Gabriele D'Annunzio, who wrote in his novel Forse che si, forse che no (1910): "She was enveloped in one of those long, Oriental gauze scarves that the alchemist dyer Mariano Fortuny submerges in the mysterious potions of his caldrons, stirring them with a wooden stick, first like a sylph, then like a gnome, where he obtains colours from strange dreams and later prints them with his thousands of new generations of stars, plants and animals."

D'Annunzio became a Fortuny fan after he met him in 1894: between 1901 and 1930 he wrote frequently to Fortuny, hoping that the Spanish artist and designer may have created the sets for his drama "Francesca da Rimini" (the collaboration never happened).

With over 100 workers creating his pieces in the workshop at Palazzo degli Orfei, Fortuny's production output increased and he opened a boutique in Paris and another in London, showcasing his fabrics in 1914 in New York, though World War I slowed down his work and researches.

After the War ended, Fortuny managed to start his textile business again in partnership with Giancarlo Stucky.

Together with him he opened a new factory on the island of Giudecca (the showroom and shop of the factory can still be visited) founding the Società Anonima Fortuny.

Fortuny started producing interior design fabrics from the 1920s: his creations were used to decorate famous residences such as the house of actress Dina Galli and of the Princess of Noailles, and also hotel rooms, ships, museums and churches.

In 1924 Fortuny married in Paris Henriette Nigrin, who became his muse throughout his life, as proved by the many paintings and photographic portraits the artist dedicated to her.

The years that followed were quite successful for him as his paintings were exhibited at different art events, his costumes and stage sets appeared in various plays and he also received new commissions for his stage lighting systems.

In the early '30s he took out a patent for a carbon-pigment photographic paper he had invented, began selling his tempera paints created with a secret formula and took permanent possession of Palazzo Pesaro degli Orfei in Venice.

Fortuny continued working on his stage lighting systems and costumes and died in Venice on 2nd May 1949.

For the recent exhibition at Palazzo Fortuny in Venice the piano nobile (main floor) was the main theatre where the Fortunys' story was staged through objects and artworks.

The main point of the event was exploring the influeces of Mariano Fortuny's artistic family upon him, looking at his interests and achievements, but also at his inspirations borrowed from art and history, theatre, photography and fashion.

After Mariano Fortuny's death, the family collection that had belonged to him and to his father was dismembered and donated to various museums.

The exhibition in Venice comprised therefore also pieces on loan from international and private collections, such as the precious Vaso del Salar, a vase from the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg.

Dating from 13th century, the vase was found in the Salar Church (Granada, Spain) and bought by the artist Mariano Fortuny y Marsal in 1871.

The vase is characterised by bronze lion stands designed by Mariano Fortuny y Marsal.

Fashion-wise the exhibition comprised an extraordinary number of Fortuny designs, from theatrical costumes and capes in printed silk velvet (1920-1935) inspired by the Middle Ages (among them also a rare printed silk Spanish cape designed for American painter Romaine Brooks) to stunning dresses from 1910-15.

Among the most beautiful designs there were Delphos dresses in a delicate palette comprising salmon, peach, pale green and turquoise, juxtaposed to portraits of Fortuny's wife Henriette, his mother Cecilia and sister Maria Luisa.

Some of the gowns were accessorised with belts or subtly decorated around the armholes with iridescent or multi-coloured glass beads produced in Murano.

One of the most graphically striking designs was a silk Knossos scarf that went marvellously well with a painting of Henriette Fortuny in Pompeian costume (1935).

The final message of this exhibition is that Fortuny's legacy is vitally important for a wide variety of arts, from set design to textile printing and pleating techniques, and that even contemporary fashion designers should be thankful for his gowns that, emphasising the natural shape and the movement of the body, revealed an extremely modern sensibility.

That's the main reason why Mariano Fortuny's gowns keep on reappearing in fashion, as it first happened five decades ago when Gloria Vanderbilt donned one of his designs in a 1969 photo shoot by Richard Avedon for Vogue.