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In a collection of photographic portraits of the Spanish polymath, artist and fashion designer Mariano Fortuny in the museum that bears his name, a calm, slightly bohemian gentleman holds the viewer’s gaze. But this appearance belies a mind fizzing with creativity, demonstrated by the breadth of his interests and inventions on display throughout the museum.
Born in Granada in 1871, Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo moved with his mother to Paris and then to Venice. In his thirties, already established as a painter, he rented a studio in the Palazzo Pesaro degli Orfei close to the Grand Canal. The 15th-century late Gothic building had been one of the city’s grandest residences but by the late 1800s it was in decay, having been divided into about 20 flats as well as commercial spaces, its rows of tall lancet windows part boarded.
Seeing potential, Fortuny began to acquire it piecemeal until, by 1906, he owned from the first floor to the attic, and opened up the massive double-height piano nobile to its original 43-metre length. He furnished it with brocade drapes and suits of armour, creating a salon that was part baronial hall, part theatre set.
The similarly sized space on the floor above became a laboratory for his experimentation in interior lighting, fabric printing and dying, theatre effects, engraving, photographic techniques and couture fashion, which brought him to wider public attention.
With his wife and creative partner Henriette, Fortuny conceived a way of micro-pleating silk to drape and flow beautifully over the human form. The couple’s gowns, especially the classically derived Delphos, were worn by luminaries such as the actress Ellen Terry and the dancer Isadora Duncan. The technique, patented by the couple in 1909, would be revived by Issey Miyake in the 1980s.
In the palazzo’s attic, he started the textile company that still bears his name and which celebrated 100 years of trading in 2022. His design innovations included a new method of printing on textiles: you can see some of the blocks bearing designs drawn from Minoan to Moorish sources with which he achieved the richness of tapestry on his silks and velvet.
When Fortuny died in 1949, Henriette left the palazzo to the city authorities on the condition it was used as a cultural centre and the piano nobile preserved as a museum of her husband’s work. In 2019, the city’s highest tide in 50 years flooded Venice, and the palazzo. The enforced closure provided the opportunity for a revamp.
The great hall has been cleared of exhibits and restored closely to its early 20th-century glory. The sense of being in a stage set is enhanced in a room Fortuny called the winter garden, its walls covered by great stretched canvases — the largest 10 metres long — painted with allegorical figures and garlanded architectural screens. In another room, Fortuny’s fascination with Wagner is channelled into high-contrast Symbolist paintings.
Visitors leave through the unadorned ground floor, which houses a shop and temporary exhibition space but whose bare stonework acknowledges that there is no way permanently to hold back the tide in a city defined by its inseparability from water.
The palazzo was built at the height of the Italian Renaissance; it seems a fitting monument to a 20th-century renaissance man.
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