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.

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