Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo

Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo (1871-1949), style icon of Venice at the beginning of the 20th century, can be considered an heir to the tradition of the "total artists" of the Renaissance. He was active as a painter, set designer, stylist, photographer, inventor and even light designer, today celebrated in Venice by a museum entirely dedicated to him, the Fortuny Museum, housed in the building where he lived and in which he implemented all his experiments. Son of the Catalan painter Marià Fortuny i Marsal, he left his native Spain at the age of three to move to Paris with his mother and from an early age showed a precocious talent for the treatment and decoration of fabrics, which would then culminate in his Venetian years (Fortuny moved to the Laguna in 1889, while remaining very attached to Paris) in a very successful fashion designer business throughout Europe. Fortuny can be considered a forerunner of the pleating technique: his clothes, like the famous Delphos which was inspired by the chiton shapes of Ancient Greece, were made of finely pleated silk thanks to a working system he kept secret. Another great passion of his was the theatre, which he approached as a young man cultivating a friendship with Richard Wagner who greatly influenced him with his ideal of Gesamkunstwerk, according to which the arts of different kinds had to blend harmoniously in a single "opera of total art” which was to take place on stage. Fortuny focused his attention in particular on the figurative part of the theater, creating sets and taking care of the lighting of the scene through a revolutionary system of indirect lights. It is from the stage that his activity as inventor and designer of lamps takes off, today reproduced by the Fortuny brand, direct heir of his atelier (which also operates with the Venetia Studium brand, dedicated to cushions and textile accessories for the home), and also made under license by Pallucco and the French Ecart. In his prolific activity as a painter Fortuny exhibited continuously at the Venice Biennale until 1942, while as an interior designer he dealt with projects such as the gaming room of the Hotel Excelsior in Paris or the residence of the Duchess Consuelo Vanderbilt.