“Of all the clothes and dressing gown Madame de Guermantes wore, those who appear to me as bearing a special meaning, were the ones made by Fortuny on the basis of ancient Venetian drawings.” As Marcel Proust writes in this passage of “The Prisoner”, where even the fugitive Albertine is touched by the silky stroke of such magic cloth.

Mariano Fortuny de Madrazo (1871-1949) is Andalusian from Granada. He loves Goya and Tintoretto. He gets to Venice at the beginning of the Twentieth century to seize its Byzantine essence and transform it. Essential handbook for Italian aestheticism, the novel “Beata riva – trattato dell’oblio” (Blessed shore – treaty of oblivion) was written by Angelo Conti who dedicated it to the protean figure of Mariano.

It retraces the exact lines of that cultural momentum: art as a moral and redemptive force, decadent Hellenism, dialogues written after the example of Plato. Fortuny meets his ideal environment in the Wagnerian Venice of D’Annunzio, Eleonora Duse, Primoli and Marius Pictor “divine lunar painter”. He is painter, stage designer, magnificent creator of fabrics and eclectic aesthete always looking for influences.

For the realization of “Francesca di Rimini” by D’Annunzio, (performed by Duse in 1901) he provides stage sketches and costumes, he designs a folding and movable dome for indirect stage lighting, he experiments with the effect of light on fabrics. He is interior and product designer and he constantly paints. Spanish from Granada but Venetian by adoption he discovered the city of stone and reflection as an idyllic homeland. His idea of beauty combines perfectly with Venice’s rarefied Byzantine atmospheres, exhausted colours and light glares captured by velvet so much in tune with the watery, crepuscular style of Venice at the beginning of the century.

D’Annunzio would refer to him as the alchemic dyer, printer of new generations of stars, planets and animals. In 1906 Fortuny opened a printing workshop where he produced silk, taffeta and velvets dyed through a procedure derived from the Japanese Katagami technique. With a sort of “fusion style” developed much ahead of its time, he draws inspiration from Coptic, Persian, Turkish and Renaissance fabric decorations mixing them with paleochristian sculpted motives and Irish miniature manuscripts; he shuffles and overlaps patterns of laces, Kufic calligraphy and Hindu culture. Bleached out edges, scattered brushstrokes, and iridescent powders.

The result is magnificent fabrics that he uses to cover many Venetian interiors and his own house. Thin plissé satin, a stretched line tight to the body: Delphos, a dress that became the symbol of his entire production, first worn by his wife Henriette Nigrin in a portrait he made of her; then worn with confidence by marchioness Casato and a bit more clumsily by heiress Peggy Guggenheim who kept wearing it until the end of her life. Such dresses remind of Coptic tunics and oriental mantles, kimonos dotted with vitreous pearls and Murrine (glass beads) from Murano.

From the sketchbooks of Venetian sculptor Ettore Cadorin (published posthumous by Count Vittorio Cini in a very limited edition in 1953) we learn that the widow of Mariano Fortuny Senior - who died extremely young in Rome - Fortuny’s mother, Cecilia de Madrazo already lived in the city with her sister Marie Luise: “they were always locked inside the house, surrounded by a mass of pigeons crowding balconies and yards”. At the Fortuny house Wagner was constantly played and Mariano stopped-by very rarely.

When he chose Venice as his steady residence to live with his wife-muse Henriette, the impact was emphatic and final. He found the perfect place to invent, hide secrets and nestle emotions in Pesaro degli Orfei Palace, looking onto the small asymmetrical campo di San Beneto - that once hosted the Academia dei Musici (academy of musicians) - an outpost for Orphic inkling.

Condensed experience and vision, remote from all trajectories, umbilical labyrinth thick with mystery and layers. Mariano dismantles, reinvents, composes and decomposes. He installed himself in the guts of that living organism. He established a symbiotic relationship and started to plot. Venetian painting so full with pigment and Orientalism inspired him; he drew from trips to Egypt, Coptic legends and Kufic calligraphies; melting Berber and Mamluk Islam with Castile and the ochre powders exudating from his palace.

The walls were covered by those fabrics who look like dipped into darkness, encrustations, powder of past lives. Huge pendants made of tissue-paper emit a diffuse light, conferring a mystic touch as in a Mosque. Everything recalls ancient oriental atmospheres; and just a few object casually refer to the present.

Useful, a movable wooden bookshelf with small wheels and a lamp thrust upon, anticipates certain pieces of nomadic design from this millennium. Such things were experimented by Fortuny for his own satisfaction, in order to keep his practice together letting his manual ability following endless inclinations. That same curiosity that pushed this Venetian Hidalgo to explore the possibilities of objects at some point brought him to photography.

The attention to the chemistry of light that has been with him since the very beginning, when he was printing on fabrics or working on stage designs, brought him to this form of expression. Thousand of photographs were shot during his explorations, 12.000 plates are stored in the recess of his palace.

Many of his albums are divided according to themes: Trees of Rome, the Nile, the Tigris, and the Euphrates. Features of women, tableaux vivant with a woodland touch. Mariano was a nomadic necromancer, a Gnostic initiated to archaic cults.

He travelled ceaselessly: gathered, photographed, elaborated and reinvented. His aestheticism drips with innovation and the contamination of different experiences escapes from decadence. He soaks silks and velvets to obtain clothes perfectly fitting the body: “ancient printed fabric fragments found in Greece made me think of a way to print on cloth” (an extract from his notes).

The palace is his workshop and his opus. An initiation bowel, that takes to the netherworld, bringing back fertile madness, alembics and weaving devices. Relics of travels, emanating objects coming from ancient Persia, Andean Peru and Black Africa.

The old elephant hear all shrivelled up is still able to vibrate. Almost everything has stayed as it was. Mariano’s ghost snakes around in between the excrescences of the plaster, the cracks in the “Pastellone” floors, through the swells on the walls and the dull light filtering from the windows. Mossy caverns engraved by time keep talking about him, in a relentless mutation.

Until May 4, Palazzo Fortuny will host the exhibition “Roberto Capucci and Mariano Fortuny: artistic shapes and ideas”, from June 5 to November 15 “In – finitum” will follow, a show presenting infinity in all of its manifestations, from non-finite to the limitless, in a multidisciplinary approach where art, science and philosophies from different epochs and civilisations meet.