Mariano Fortuny y De Mandrazo (1871-1949) was
a man who dedicated his life to Art, and became renowned
worldwide for his Art Nouveau textiles that have adorned the
world’s finest museums, churches, palaces and houses since 1906.
Mariano was born to an artistic family in
Granada, Spain in 1871. His father was the famous painter
Mariano Fortuny y Marsal and his mother, Cecilia De Mandrazo,
was herself daughter and niece of famous Spanish painters.
When his father died, in 1874, Mariano was
only three years old and his mother took the decision to move
the family to Paris, which was one of the biggest centre in
Europe of the Arts, of vanity and of the cult of luxury.
It was in Paris that Mariano was trained as a
painter, and mixed with the high society of the time who later
became his faithful admirers like the French writer Marcel
Proust or friends and colleagues like the famous Italian writer
Gabriele D’Annunzio and the actress Eleonora Duse.
In
the year 1889, the family moved again, this time settling into
the magnificent Palazzo Pesaro Orfei in Venice, where he lived
and worked for the rest of his life.
After his death, his widow donated the palace to the city of
Venice , and was turned into the museum that we see nowadays
in Campo San Beneto, that recreates Mariano Fortuny's home, with
his upholstery, his paintings, his furniture, and allows the
visitor to taste the passions and interests of a great artist of
the Belle Epoque.
Many of Mariano Fortuny’s paintings were
introduced in the most important European cities with his
exhibitions, starting from his firs one in London in 1894, but
not many of them remain today and most of those that remain are
portraits of his wife Henrietta.
Although
he was an accomplished painter, Mariano excelled also in many
other fields, and was a very eclectic character. He had
interests that spaced from painting to photography, from theatre
stage-set design to the creation of colours, from fashion
drawing to lighting, interior design and architecture. He was in
fact one of the most creative minds of his time.
Mariano Fortuny was the first to experiment
coloured slides in photography, he revolutionized the stage set
of the most important theatre of Venice, the Fenice, as well as
other theatres, and in the 1900’s he invented innovative systems
of stage lighting to the newly invented electric light.
He developed new and unique processes of
textile dyeing, making fabrics that change colour according to
light and movement and designed and patented machines for ths
purpose.
The manufacturing of Fortuny fabrics continues on the island of
Giudecca, with cottons of great importance and evanescent
colours, based on the original designs.
Fortuny’s
works included innovative pleated silk gowns and dresses,
lustruous silk and velvet scarves. For his designs, he was
inspired by the original ancient Greece gowns and in 1907 he
invented the “Delphos”, a fine pleated silk dress of
revolutionary shape which was made famous by theatrical legends
Isadora Durcan and Sarah Bernhardt.
Since then there was a transition from the
typical wide skirt woman’s dress to a modern style that freed
from the restraints of convention, a dress that was worn by
slipping it on from the head, taking shape only on the human
body.
This is how Fortuny became the first authentic
fashion designer, giving his contribution to the freedom of the
body and to the revolution in woman’s clothing.
For internal decoration, he also invented
elegant lamps, which diffused a subtle light through a superior
quality opalescent silk shade, stretched over a delicate wire
form.
The silk shade was hand-painted with coloured arabesque style
motifs and were decorated with Murano glass beads and silk
cording as finishing touches.
In his works of applied arts, Mariano fortuny
drew inspiration from his numerous trips to Greece, Morocco and
Egypt, and was inspired by the oriental designs of ancient
Ottoman tapestries, brocades and velvets, as well as by painters
of the Venetian Renaissance such as Carpaccio and Memling,
combined with the vibrant colours of Persian Art.
