In a manuscript preserved in the archival records of the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana in Venice, Mariano Fortuny states: "I'm still interested in many things, but painting has always been my true profession." His passion for painting is clear also in the motifs decorating his textiles, capes and dresses.
As stated in a previous post, Fortuny had a collection of textiles and a great knowledge of ancient textiles that he used as the starting point for his personal decorative solutions for fashion and interior designs.
While one of his main inspirations remained this vast collection of textiles owned by his family, Fortuny created some of the most beautiful patterns for his clothes and velvet capes moving from art.
Fortuny's sketches, patterns, motifs and wooden blocks to print his decorative elements on fabrics are still preserved in Venice.
Quite a few of these materials were on display in the attic of Palazzo Pesaro degli Orfei as part of the exhibition "I Fortuny. Una storia di famiglia".
For the occasion the last floor of the palazzo was dedicated to Fortuny's workshop and introduced visitors to the background research that went into the creation of his famous textiles.
Among the materials on display there were preparatory drawings, sketches and patterns inspired by the East, but also motifs taken from the Renaissance.
While being an endless source of inspiration for graphic artists and designers, these materials are also very fascinating if you know a little bit of history about Fortuny's collection of textiles and about his researches into iconic paintings, as they allow you to make connections with specific fabrics or artworks.
French poet Henri de Régnier wrote about meeting Cecilia, Mariano Fortuny's mother, who introduced him to her textile collection, explaining she had started it in Spain.
Cecilia showed Henri de Régnier a Richelieu pattern (named after the 17th century French cardinal) with two golden lions on a crimson background. Fortuny used it for his upholstery fabric,s but recreated it with two lions in various colour combinations on a golden background.
One of Cecilia's first purchases was an antique blood-purple velvet with a motif of pomegranates, a symbol that connected the family to the city of Granada, Fortuny's birthplace, historically known as the city of pomegranates and a place where Eastern and Western inspirations combined.
The pomegranate décor was also popular among wealthy Europeans in the 15th century, and Fortuny borrowed it from the Italian Renaissance for his long velvet cloaks and gowns with gold or metallic patterning on a dark background.
Fortuny's velvet textiles with pomegranates were also used to make tapestries for palace halls, rich residences and public buildings, in Europe and America.
One source of inspiration for Fortuny were therefore the antique fabrics and textiles in his own collections and in the archives of museums, but he also borrowed from paintings by Bellini, Carpaccio, Mansueti, Tintoretto and Tiepolo that featured characters in richly decorated gowns.
His garments were therefore the modern interpretation of designs that were created and popularised throughout the Middle Ages and depicted in Renaissance paintings.
Fortuny was particularly inspired by Carpaccio's cycle of the "Legend of Saint Ursula" and studied the costumes of the ambassadors and of the other characters in the scene entitled the "Meeting of the Betrothed Couple".
This port scene documented the textile trade in Renaissance Venice, showing Oriental carpets and Eastern textiles, tradesmen waiting and people in garments made with elaborate fabrics.
Fortuny recreated textiles with the same patterns, evoking the Orientalism of Venice in the 1500s, so that the Eastern inspirations and moods were mediated through paintings.
He employed these velvets for exotic capes and tunics inspired by the Berber bournous, the Sudanese jibbah, the Italian tabarro and the Renaissance giornea (overgown).
Also the technique employed to make the patterns came from art: Fortuny created the patterns on his woven brocades and damasks using block printing, stamping the motifs onto the surfaces of the dyed fabrics, and blending crushed metallic pigments into tempera paint to create variation of texture that could also illuminate the designs (the allucciolato effect) .
Even the final effects of the pile on pile velvet brocaded in gold or allucciolato velvet with a background in tabby, satin or gold teletta that created uneven textures was a reference to art and in particular to the mosaics in Saint Mark's Basilica.
Just like Fortuny looked at Venetian painters to create the patterns on his gowns, the writer Marcel Proust ended up looking at the paintings to find the words to describe Fortuny's gowns.
Proust used a Fortuny wardrobe for Albertine in his novel In Search of Lost Time (or Remembrance of Things Past) to evoke desire, sensuality, pain and memory.
In Proust's In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (or Within a Budding Grove, 1919), the first volume of Proust's In Search of Lost Time, the painter Elstir makes this connection between Fortuny and art: "(...) I hear that a Venetian artist, called Fortuny, has recovered the secret of the craft, and that before many years have passed women will be able to walk abroad, and better still to sit at home in brocades as sumptuous as those that Venice adorned, for her patrician daughters, with patterns brought from the Orient. But I don’t know that I should much care for that, that it wouldn’t be too much of an anachronism for the women of to-day, even when they parade at regattas, for, to return to our modern pleasure-craft, the times have completely changed since 'Venice, Queen of the Adriatic.' The great charm of a yacht, of the furnishings of a yacht, of yachting dress, is their simplicity, as just things for the sea, and I do so love the sea. I must confess to you that I prefer the fashions of to-day to those of Veronese’s and even of Carpaccio's time."
In other descriptions found in the other volumes of the novel, the writer emphasised the connection of Fortuny's textiles with the East.
In The Captive (1923), the fifth volume of In Search of Lost Time, he wrote: "The Fortuny gown which Albertine was wearing that evening seemed to me the tempting phantom of that invisible Venice. It swarmed with Arabic ornaments, like the Venetian palaces hidden like sultanas behind a screen of pierced stone, like the bindings in the Ambrosian library, like the columns from which the Oriental birds that symbolised alternatively life and death were repeated in the mirror of the fabric, of an intense blue which, as my gaze extended over it, was changed into a malleable gold, by those same transmutations which, before the advancing gondolas, change into flaming metal the azure of the Grand Canal. And the sleeves were lined with a cherry pink which is so peculiarly Venetian that it is called Tiepolo pink."
Donned by Albertine in Proust's novel, Fortuny's gowns are spiritualised: "In the matter of dress, what appealed to her most at this time was everything that was made by Fortuny. These Fortuny gowns, one of which I had seen Mme. de Guermantes wearing, were those of which Elstir, when he told us about the magnificent garments of the women of Carpaccio's and Titian's day, had prophesied the speedy return, rising from their ashes, sumptuous, for everything must return in time, as it is written beneath the vaults of Saint Mark's, and proclaimed, where they drink from the urns of marble and jasper of the byzantine capitals, by the birds which symbolise at once death and resurrection. As soon as women had begun to wear them, Albertine had remembered Elstir's prophecy, she had desired to have one and we were to go and choose it."
"Now these gowns, even if they were not those genuine antiques in which women to-day seem a little too much 'in fancy dress' and which it is preferable to keep as pieces in a collection (I was in search of these also, as it happens, for Albertine), could not be said to have the chilling effect of the artificial, the sham antique."
"Like the theatrical designs of Sert, Bakst and Benoist who at that moment were recreating in the Russian ballet the most cherished periods of art — with the aid of works of art impregnated with their spirit and yet original — these Fortuny gowns, faithfully antique but markedly original, brought before the eye like a stage setting, with an even greater suggestiveness than a setting, since the setting was left to the imagination, that Venice loaded with the gorgeous East from which they had been taken, of which they were, even more than a relic in the shrine of Saint Mark suggesting the sun and a group of turbaned heads, the fragmentary, mysterious and complementary colour. (…) While we waited for these gowns to be ready, I used to borrow others of the kind, sometimes indeed merely the stuffs, and would dress Albertine in them, drape them over her; she walked about my room with the majesty of a Doge’s wife and the grace of a mannequin."
Fortuny had become already popular in France before Albertine adopted his dresses: the Medieval and Oriental patterns he had designed went indeed well with the eclectic exoticism favoured by French fashion between 1910 and 1912 and the designer had a shop in Paris on rue Pierre Charron 67 where he sold his textiles and clothes.
In 1924 the magazine La Renaissance des Arts confirmed his success, writing: "He has created at-home dresses worn to receive guests with damasked effects as elaborate as the hilts of Arab swords, finely pleated dresses in delicate shades and evening capes with golden rays, designs that have become very popular among the most refined members of Parisian society."
His textiles and clothes were also sold by Maison Babani, based on the Boulevard Haussmann and specialising in imported exotic goods. The fashion house used to sell designs in the style of Fortuny employing textiles by the Venice-based Spanish artist or by French artists who had started imitating his style, like Suzanne Bertillon.
In a way, the more you research Fortuny, the more you discover elements that link him to a wide range of disciplines and to art in particular. But if somebody ever asked you "Why should Fortuny's creations be considered as art rather than fashion?", you could still come up with a very short answer: he created timeless designs and continued to refine them throughout his life, without making great changes and above all without generating temporary and futile trends.
Image credits for this post
All images in this post copyright © Anna Battista, 2019
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