An Enchanted Castle in Venice: The Fortuny Museum

You’d think that fashion impresario Mariano Fortuny still lived there, amid his sumptuous textiles and design experiments.

L ast week I wrote about the strike of staffers at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, then entering its fourth week and poised to become the longest strike in Philadelphia history. After the intervention of Philadelphia’s mayor, the strike was settled over the weekend. I hear that the brass-knuckles shelf at every Wawa in town is empty.

Management sweetened its offer a bit — a 14 percent average wage increase over three years as opposed to 11 percent — but with near-double-digit inflation, union dues, and lost pay, workers are in the hole. The city government already gives the museum a yearly subsidy of $2 million.

Did it sweeten its own subvention to buy the strike’s end? I tend to think those brass knuckles have Ben Franklin’s face on them. After all, the PMA union is an AFSCME affiliate, and the relationship among the union, City Hall, and the PMA’s politically wired board is incestuous. There are lots of ways for the city to smuggle money to the museum. I asked the PMA press office whether the municipal Santa had come early and thought I heard “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas,” but I must have imagined it. I didn’t get an answer.

The city wants labor peace at its marquee art museum. On October 20, the PMA opens its glitzy Matisse in the 1930s exhibition, which, it hopes, will goose admissions-paying attendance, still in the dumps from the Covid lockdowns. No one — in the museum administration or among its trustees and big donors — wants Scabby the Rat, Fat Cat, picketers, and rotten tomatoes greeting them at the opening.

Last week, needing an escape from news of soaring inflation and cocktail-party chat about Armageddon, I reviewed Surrealism and Magic, a show in Venice at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection over the summer. This week, it opens at the Barberini Museum in Potsdam. Magic might very well be what it takes to make bad news disappear.

Today I’m writing about the Fortuny Museum, the new museum in Venice focused on the couture impresario, textile designer, painter, and inventor Mariano Fortuny (1871–1949). In May, it reopened, totally reborn, in Fortuny’s palace and workshop not far from St. Mark’s Square. It feels like an enchanted castle, but a modern one.

I go to the Doge’s palace every few years if there’s a good exhibition happening. I saw part of the Tintoretto retrospective there. Otherwise, I skip the place. It’s a palace, so it’s overwrought and it salutes, above all else, government. There’s lots of work by Tintoretto, but it’s not his best. There’s touristical Venice, but then there’s quiet, intimate, magical Venice. There’s Torcello Island, little churches in the Cannaregio district such as Sant’Alvise, and San Sebastiano for Veronese. I’ve put the Fortuny Museum on the list, too. It’s a unique Venice experience for the art of fashion, design, and invention.

From the Teens into the ’40s, Fortuny was one of Europe’s most famous fashion designers, with a distinctive look that was both historicist and modern. His seminal design is the Delphos, a columnar, monochromatic dress made of finely pleated silk owing its shape to the Greek chiton worn by the figure in the Charioteer of Delphi, a bronze sculpture from around 470 b.c. discovered in 1896.

Fortuny patented a formula for repeated dye baths that give the silk’s color incandescence, and another formula for gathering the pleats by hand and setting them with heat so they’re asymmetrical and closely spaced. Fortuny added tiny glass beads, sometimes in strings, sometimes along the hems, to give the garment some weight and also sparkle. He made the prototype in 1909. It became a classic.

Fortuny, inventor, designer, and entrepreneur, drew from clothes in Renaissance painting, especially the work of Carpaccio, as well as old textiles — many Venetian but also Flemish, French, Chinese, and Near Eastern — that he collected or researched using his impressive library. Chinese brush paintings, Arab calligraphy, and the Alhambra’s Moorish patterning influenced him. He invented methods to make cotton look like silk and to give velvet a metallic sheen. Fortuny was also a pioneer in stage lighting that used the new science of electricity. His home, now a museum, is a 15th-century Venetian Gothic palace, but it was also his laboratory.

The new museum is astonishingly effective. The main attraction is the piano nobile, the vast space that served as Fortuny’s studio, living room, parlor, and showroom. Pier Luigi Pizzi, the opera conductor, director, set designer, and costume designer, led the charge in the renovation. Pizzi’s in his 90s, so this project has the flair of a valedictory — one visionary’s salute to another.

It’s packed with Fortuny’s paintings and textiles, but it also restores Fortuny’s filtered light system and foregrounds his experiments with electric light at home and in theater design.

It conveys the lifestyle of one rich and famous Venetian — Fortuny — but there’s no whiff of decadence, little to suggest Thomas Mann or rich, aimless tourists. Fortuny’s salon was an intellectual hub for artists such as Rodin and Giovanni Boldini, Toscanini, Eleanora Duse, Isadora Duncan, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Gabrielle d’Annunzio. The space is about 1,500 square feet. Yes, it’s elegant, but it’s not languid. Like the best house museums, it conveys the personality and achievements of the owners. There’s plenty of creative energy there. It’s luxury Venice, but it’s also Venice with zest. It feels as though Fortuny still lives and creates there.

Fortuny was the son of Mariano Fortuny (1838–74), the visionary Spanish painter who straddled the avant-garde and traditional art worlds of Paris and Rome and, at his early death, was working in a style parallel to Impressionism.

Had he lived, I’m certain he would have exhibited with the Impressionists. Father Fortuny died in Rome from lead poisoning — he habitually licked his paintbrushes to moisten them — combined with malaria.

His French widow and her young children moved to Paris to be close to her family but then to Venice in 1889. She and her husband loved Venice, so there was a sentimental draw. It was quieter, too. Mariano, it seems, was allergic to horses. In Paris, horses moved everything. In Venice, people and things moved in boats.

I’ve been to Venice many times but successfully visited the Fortuny Museum only once, and not for a lack of trying. It was the most shut, officially open museum in Italy, with siesta stretching not through afternoons but entire seasons. It was haphazard, too, and dusty. It was pickled in the juice of Henry James’s Venice. There was a permanent, panegyric gallery dedicated to Fortuny, but mostly it was rotating exhibitions.

Then came the Acqua Granda, or big daddy of high waters, on November 12, 2019. It wasn’t end-of-the-world catastrophic. Venice is still there and looks and feels the same. Still, for the Fortuny Museum, this regular intersection of a full moon, high tide, and seasonal western wind was exceedingly problematic. The palace’s ground floor flooded, wrecking the admissions desk, visitor-services area, and offices. Rather than pump some formaldehyde into what was a corpse of a museum and reopen, the city decided to go big. It’s completely redone.

The museum’s draw is the piano nobile. It’s a big, rambling space that isn’t directed, requiring some preparation. The museum isn’t exactly a place for connoisseurs, but it’s both sensual and intellectual, and thick with color and stuff.

The introductory wall panels fail in that they’re too long and, panels being objects, too big. I read everything, but they’re daunting. I wouldn’t edit them since the material’s solid and necessary. Rather, I’d deliver the information in smaller helpings.

The Delphos dress stars. It needs to be seen to be believed. The rippling, irregular pleats look like water agitated by waves and a breeze. They’re excitable. The garment can be fitted by wearing a belt or it can be worn loose. The gowns were made without particular sizes, unless the patron was truly fat. The pleated fabric responded to the shape of the wearer. Fortuny never changed the basic model. For a fashion designer, he was shockingly constant.

Fortuny’s palette draws from Tiepolo’s, Tintoretto’s, and Carpaccio’s. His colors are rich but muted, even faded, to suggest the passage of time, never venerability, but timeless plush. Fortuny worked at the same time as the Italian Futurists, whose colors were bright and brash, extreme, and created via chemical dyes. Nothing about Fortuny celebrates speed or danger or attack. His work — and his museum — are all about luminosity and shimmer.

Fortuny started experimenting with electric light in the early 1890s. Over time, he pioneered domed lamps that redirected harsh, electric light away from the subject to be lit and into a reflective dome. This generated indirect, softer light and moderated, even eliminated, distracting or discordant shadows. Proust compared Fortuny’s shimmering silk gowns, velvet capes, even his sofa cushions and throw pillows, to flickering light on water.

These light experiments didn’t start or stop with clothing. Again, starting in the 1890s, Fortuny developed theater lighting, first through building miniature stages that used his system of domed lamps. He eliminated painted backdrops and replaced them with mobile projectors that generated a scene whose lighting — dawn, day, dusk, or night — supported the storyline. For aficionados of Richard Wagner, the museum is a destination. Fortuny was, in his day, a revolutionary in designing the lighting and sets for Wagner operas.

There are half a dozen rooms off the big, piano nobile salon. Fortuny’s library is there as well as his studio, with his easel, anatomical models, and samples from the 50 paint colors he patented. Father Fortuny, whose retrospective at the Prado I reviewed a few years ago, collected armor, antique glass, Near Eastern tiles, and carpets. Fortuny fils owned part of this collection, displayed in the museum, and augmented it with Chinese and South American art. It’s the most outlandish mix in Venice but perfectly at home in a place that was a crossroad between East and West.

When I visited, the second piano nobile floor — the floor above the Fortuny salon — hadn’t reopened yet. This was a factory space. Fortuny developed a factory in Giudecca, the island across from the Dorsoduro district. Fortuny — the company — still makes textiles. This year is its 100th anniversary. The oldest factory in Venice, it specialized in Fortuny’s day in goods produced for a mass market.

By the mid ’20s, Fortuny had a shop on Madison Avenue and big American sales for his cotton textiles. The Palazzo Orfei, though, was his luxury, bespoke factory that made cloaks, dresses, and scarves. By 1910, more than 100 women worked there. I’m looking forward to seeing what the museum does there.

The museum is also showing contemporary art in rotating exhibition galleries on the ground floor, once flooded and, I expect, now waterproofed. There was an exhibition of American art from the Panza di Biumo collection, donated to the city of Venice a few years ago. The work by Phil Sims, David Simpson, and Stuart Arends was awful. “Where’s a flood when you need it?” I thought.

I assume the museum’s masters believe the place needs a contemporary-art component to draw young people. The art already belongs to the city, and I suspect that Panza’s gift is contingent on periodic display. Showing the work of living artists is fine, but this component needs to be well done and, ideally, in harmony with the museum’s permanent collection. It’s Biennale time, and Venice has a million artists engaged in the city’s doings. The rest of the museum is first-rate, indeed delicious. The space for living artists has to hit the same high standard.