Museum House

The room is surprising on account of the unexpected painting cycle on the wall: a work that Mariano Fortuny planned and created. For this project he invented a special framework of paper glued onto hemp cloth painted and attached to the walls. The composition covers three sides of the room, with a total surface area of around 140 square metres. Begun in 1915, it was completed in the 1940s. Supported by the artifice of the trompe l’œil and by a harmonious application of colours, the creation gives the space a great luminosity. An ideal “enchanted garden” animated by allegorical figures, satyrs and exotic animals: all set in a “Veronese-style” Corinthian loggia, embellished by luxuriant plant motifs, verdant garlands and sophisticated drapes.

In the centre of the room two environments are formed in ideal terms. Those entering from the Portego can admire the paintings belonging to the cycle devoted to the Four Elements – Air, Earth, Fire, Water – undoubtedly realised in the late 1940s: a theme associated with classical iconography that was very dear to the artist, who used it repeatedly in a free expressive interpretation inspired by the Symbolist ideal and literature. In the second part of the room, passing the architrave, alongside The Embrace of Siegmund and Sieglinde from Richard Wagner’s Valkyrie, we find the model for the Teatro delle Feste designed by Mariano Fortuny in 1910 in collaboration with Gabriele d’Annunzio and the French architect Lucien Hesse. An authentic synthesis of his theatrical poetics. The project, which was never realised, was to be positioned on the Esplanade des Invalides thanks to the economic support of two of the best known and richest personalities in the France of the period: Baron Maurice de Rothschild and Senator Deutsch de la Meurthe, added to whom would be the entrepreneur José Schurmann.

The context of the family to which he belonged played a role of primary importance in the artistic training of Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo (1871-1949). His mother was Cecilia de Madrazo y Garreta (1846-1932), an exponent of one of the most influential families of the 19th-century artistic and cultural panorama, both Spanish and international. The Madrazo family were highly prestigious painters, academics and men and women of letters. When in 1867 Cecilia, the daughter of Federico de Madrazo y Kuntz (1815-1894), married Mariano Fortuny y Marsal (1838-1874), known as Marsal, the latter was already recognised as a “unique” and key artistic figure of his time. Among the aspects that made his brief life special, there emerge assonances with the creativity of his son Mariano: their painting practice, the studying and copying of the great masters, their attention to light, their fascination with the representation of clouds, their applying themselves to multiple artistic fields, their technical skill in the decorative arts, their passion for travel, their taste for collecting and their attraction to Orientalism.

In this first part of the grand hall, the Portego, on the first floor, we wish to underline the extent to which the Madrazos and the Marsals bore witness, in the last quarter of the 19th century, to one of the most intense periods of Spanish painting. Mariano was to always remain profoundly linked to this intellectual and artistic world and would attempt to maintain contacts with his native country.

After some stays in Venice, between 1888 and 1889 the Fortuny family’s move to the lagoon city became definitive. Their chosen residence was Palazzo Martinengo, a privileged location for the suppers of the cosmopolitan intelligentsia of the time. It was an essential destination for collectors and merchants, artists, men and women of letters and musicians. Earlier however, during his previous Venetian stays between 1887 and 1888, Mariano Fortuny had engaged in painting studies by attending the evening courses at the Accademia di Belle Arti and coming into contact with the city’s artistic and intellectual circles: Pietro Selvatico, Pompeo Molmenti, Antonio Fradeletto, Cesare and Raffaele Mainella, Cesare Laurenti, Ettore Tito, Mario De Maria and Angelo Conti.

While Fortuny’s painting work of the late 19th century found a correspondence in the art of his time, his subsequent production proved impermeable to the avant-gardes of the early 20th century. He was faithful to a traditional painterly language, but intelligently he was not unaware of the suggestions of Liberty and Nordic Symbolism. So in this part of the hall a number of portraits of Henriette Nigrin signed by Mariano himself are visible, some realised for the Venice Biennale of Art. Between 1899 and 1942 Fortuny was to participate in eleven editions of the Venice Biennale with his paintings, indeed, after his death, a retrospective exhibition would be devoted to him in 1950.

The copying of paintings by the great masters is a recurrent exercise in the formation of any artist. This was also the case for Mariano Fortuny. Having grown up within the sphere of the academic tradition of the late 19th century, Mariano had already begun the practice of painting at a young age during his years in Paris (1878-1888), under the guidance of his maternal uncle Raimundo de Madrazo y Garreta (1841-1920). His ideal teacher was his father Marsal, who died at the very young age of thirty-six; he was a capable painter who practised the art of copying by making reproductions of incomparable quality of his contemporaries, having a preference, among the Venetian artists, for Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, Tiepolo, and then Ribera, Velázquez, Murillo, but above all Goya.

In those years Mariano met artists such as Ernest Meissonier, Jean-Léon Gérôme, Paul Baudry, James Tissot, Léon Bonnat, Emmanuel Fremiet, Alfred Stevens, Georges Clairin, Giovanni Boldini and Benjamin-Constant, who were regular visitors to the Madrazos’ Parisian residence. Mariano learned the fundamental principles of traditional painting in the latter’s studio. The exercise of copying was a constant in his artistic life. Among his preferred authors: Titian, Tintoretto, his best loved painter with no less than eleven copies, Tiepolo and Rubens.

Mariano Fortuny never met Richard Wagner, who died in Venice in 1883 when Mariano was just a child. His passion for the German composer blossomed in 1889, coinciding with the family’s relocation to Palazzo Martinengo. There, Fortuny befriended the intellectual Angelo Conti, sharing his Wagnerian philosophical ideal. At only nineteen years of age, Mariano began painting a cycle dedicated to Wagner’s musical dramas (including Parsifal and The Ring of the Nibelung), finding further inspiration in the Spanish painter Rogelio de Egusquiza, who would also introduce him to Wagner’s widow, Cosima.

In the 1890s, his profound fascination with Wagnerian iconography and his attendance at the Bayreuth festivals prompted Fortuny to abandon academicism in favor of Nordic Symbolism. As can be seen in the paintings exhibited here, his vibrant brushstrokes convey the restless spirit and inner character of the subjects. For Mariano, Wagner was more than simply a source of inspiration: he was at the origin of his research and his inventions in the field of scenography and stagecraft, which with exceptional and cohesive foresight he would carry forward for his entire life.