Mariano Fortuny i Madrazo, like any good Spaniard, was an artist who resisted manifestos, theories, or intellectual pressure groups. He was an individualist who did not align with any of the avant-garde movements that dominated the artistic landscape during his youth. For this reason, while he enjoyed well-earned fame in the fashion world, he remained somewhat marginalized in the world of major arts or orthodox design; although figures such as Marcel Proust, Peter Greenaway, Annie Leibovitz, Helmut Newton, Andrée Putman, Balenciaga, Issey Miyake, Lanvin, Jean Patou, John Galliano, and Manolo Blahnik... have all considered him a genius. (The latter, when asked about this, replied, “It is an honor that my name is connected with Don Mariano Fortuny. My late friend Tina Chow was crazy about his dresses, lamps, and furniture, just like me, and she owned an unbeatable collection of them.")

The first thing I will show is the artist's little bottom. I make this comment because Mariano's first artistic contribution, at the age of three, was to serve as a model for two brilliant paintings by his father. These two paintings, among the last works of the great painter, are marvelous and free, leading us to wonder what this artist—always gifted with a prodigious technique but for years confined to genre painting or casacones, as demanded by his French art dealer—would have achieved had death not claimed him so young, at only thirty-six years old, in the height of his creative powers. In the first, a small piece measuring barely 14 x 20 cm, Marianito is depicted lying on his back on the volcanic sand of Portici beach (1). There, in contrast to the cool tones of his back and the cobalt gray of the Vesuvius sand, appears the charming little pink bottom of our artist. I don’t think a future genius’s backside has ever been preserved for history in such a remarkable way. The second is a masterpiece that Fortuny himself considered the most notable of those created in Portici. In it, on an extremely long divan, Marianito and his sister, Mª Luisa, are portrayed. The painting is called The Painter's Children in a Japanese Salon, and in it, as in all the last works of the Master, the influence of Far Eastern art is evident—an influence that, among many others, would be inherited by his son.

From this early experience as a model, Mariano Fortuny i Madrazo did not have it easy in the art world. Being the son of a genius is very difficult, especially when the son wants to follow in his father's footsteps. Mariano’s insight was not to try to surpass his father in what he was unbeatable at—drawing, engraving, watercolor, and oil painting—but instead, to become something else: specifically, an inventor. When the organizers of this exhibition, aware of my fascination with the artist, invited me to participate in this catalog and asked me which aspect of his multifaceted work I would like to focus on, I replied that I would like to cover them all; like him, all of them seduce me, and not only this, in many I have had the opportunity and pleasure of working personally. Fortuny is the complete opposite of a specialist; he is incapable of concentrating on one thing—everything interests him: the artistic tradition, Classical and Minoan Greece, the Renaissance, Symbolism, Italy, the Near and Far East, the Arab world, Spain... He is interested in emerging technologies, photography, the scenographic possibilities of electric lighting, furniture design, gadgets and lamps, and, particularly, the fabrics, prints, accessories, and dresses that made him famous worldwide… And for me, it is the heterogeneous nature of his work that fascinates me; all of Fortuny’s talents attract me, and, I must admit, they provoke genuine envy.

The envy I feel for Mariano’s painting is inevitably overshadowed by the disproportionate envy I feel for his father’s. If we didn’t relate them to the rest of his polyphonic and dazzling work, his drawings, engravings, and paintings would interest us less. Mariano is a notable painter, but he is not a great painter; only after we have fallen in love (as an Englishman would say) with his dresses, prints, or lamps, do we begin to truly be intrigued by his painting.

But, for all his activities, whether professional or amateur, Mariano was not only endowed with dazzling ease, but he was also an unstoppable innovator, a true inventor. The large number of patents he filed from 1900 until the end of his life attest to this. Patents for scenographic and lighting devices, for pleating, printing, and dyeing systems, for textile machines, for a photographic paper made from carbon pigments… And he even marketed, under the name Tempera Fortuny, a collection of colors with a unique chemical composition of his own. The difference between a good design and an invention is subtle but real. For a design to be good, it does not necessarily have to be inventive, but when it is, it makes history. Gio Ponti's Superleggera, despite being a reinterpretation of a historical chair, is a magnificent design, but Thonet’s chairs are, in addition, an invention—not only the first industrially produced chairs, but also the best chairs designed up until that point. I would even dare to say they were the first “good” chairs. Well, from this perspective, Mariano reaches the category of “inventor” in many of his works.

I envy the designs of his printed silk lamps. Nearly a century after they were designed, they are still in production, and many interior architects continue to rely on them. Their charming print may not make us notice the ingenious and ethereal wire structure and how the opaline silk serves as an excellent light diffuser. Fortuny was a phenomenal ornament designer (certainly, he was not willing to obey Loos' dictates, who at this time had already declared ornament a crime), but at the same time, he was a rationalist with a scientific mindset. He knew a lot about lighting technology; he knew that to avoid glare, the brightness of the light source needed to be distributed across the largest possible surface. For this reason, his lamps are so large, yet at the same time, thanks to being made of silk, so light. What Noguchi and Ingo Maurer would do with paper, Mariano did with silk.

I envy the gadgets, lamps, and furniture he designed for his studio. Designs that were never intended for mass production, and which sometimes solve very specific problems, such as the seven-meter-high ladder that leads to an upper platform from which he could oversee large-scale works, or the various little work columns with stacked circular trays, topped with adjustable lamps in height and angle. The desk lamp that could be produced in an entirely industrial manner – in fact, it is reproduced this way today – and could have come out of the Bauhaus workshop. And, above all, the floor lamp with a reflector shaped like an umbrella, rediscovered and reissued years ago by the famous interior architect Andrée Putman. This lamp reproduces at a smaller scale the famous dome that Fortuny used as an indirect lighting system in stage design. This lighting system was an obsession for Fortuny; he filed his first patent in Venice in 1900, another in 1903, and even in 1904, he registered an invention he called Système de constitution d’une paroi concave au moyen d’une capacité gonflable, which consisted of, no less, two concentric textile domes between which a slight vacuum was created by a fan, making the skin of the inner dome completely smooth. That same year, for the first time in theater history, Fortuny installed a lighting control booth at the back of the room from which a technician could command and check all the lighting effects of the scene. That’s how ingenious and inventive Mariano was.

Although he might have considered them works of an amateur, I envy his photographs. Like for many painters—since 1900 to the present, from Degas to Josep Maria Sert, from Dalí to Gerhard Richter—photography began as valuable documentary material for their painting, but later it captivated him, and it took on enormous independent interest. I can’t write anything more fitting than what another great photographer, Helmut Newton, expressed: "I had never seen the photographs taken by Fortuny. They are extraordinary. The first thing that strikes me is the sensuality of his nudes and the beauty of the women he photographed. In many of his fashion photos, we perceive the shape of the body under the clothing, as if the clothing were meant to reveal more than to cover. The lighting is superb. Above all, one of his nudes is extraordinary because of the way he offers his body to the gaze, laughing, not with a seductive smile, but with a hearty laugh, which makes the photograph surprising and completely modern."

Fortuny uses techniques that have fascinated me for some time: the use of shop-window mannequins, the panoramic camera... The discovery of his photographs is both a technically exciting event and rich in visual emotion. And, naturally, I envy his fashion design, in which the invaluable collaboration of his beloved Henriette is rightly acknowledged. The design of fabrics, prints, accessories, and garments is what turned Mariano into a universal artist. In his clothing designs, Fortuny achieves something magical: to be so classic that it ends up ultra-modern. “What is not tradition is plagiarism,” said Eugeni d’Ors, a maxim that seems to have been inspired by Fortuny. A Delphos draping a modern-day girl is absolutely modern and incredibly erotic, but there’s no doubt it’s inspired by the Greek Auriga. Even today, the most refined people crave a Delphos. It was the precious gift that Annie Leibovitz gave to her beloved Susan Sontag, and which Sontag requested to be used as her shroud, as the stunning photographs by Annie attest. To appreciate any dress hanging on a hanger or even on a mannequin demands a power of imagination that I lack. This is why I don’t enjoy most museums or exhibitions of dresses; instead, I get mesmerized not only by the live runway shows of great designers but by the video reproductions of them in any boutique of their brand. Clothes are meant to conceal and reveal, to move around the woman, not to hang dusty and dead in a showcase. Therefore, in the absence of seeing real women walking in Fortuny clothes, I prefer photos of modern girls wearing them: the splendid Liselotte Höhs descending the staircase barefoot and regal in a Delphos or the spectacular photos by Sacha Van Dorssen of models in Venice.

My fascination with Mariano Fortuny i Madrazo was definitively cemented during my first visit to the Palazzo Fortuny (pronounce Fortuní if you are searching for it in the alleyways of Venice). It must have been nearly forty years ago. At that time no one visited that decadent palace, well, decadent like all of Venice. We were received and given an exceptional tour by an elderly man who turned out to be the family’s butler. After explaining with great knowledge every work, every object, and the use the family made of each room, he eventually told us how, not long ago, the widow Henriette had passed away in his arms. Death in Venice. It was then that I learned that in 1948, a year before he passed away, Fortuny expressed his desire to donate the Palazzo to the Spanish government, which, after years of doubts and showing the proverbial Spanish stubbornness, declined the donation. After my first visits, the Palazzo faced serious difficulties. After several years during which it remained closed, only a small part of it could be made accessible. The splendid installation Watching Water, created by Peter Greenaway for the 1993 Biennale, placed the Palazzo on the world stage and renewed my fascination with both (with Fortuny and Greenaway). The enthusiastic dedication of the current caretakers has made it possible to visit almost the entire Palazzo again, although parts, such as the rear facade with delicate wooden sections, still need restoration. Naturally, Venice, like all of Italy, has many priorities regarding its vast heritage; saving it as best as possible is the most important thing, even if it means sheltering Monsieur Pinot's collection of contemporary banalities.

(Text for the catalog of the exhibition Fortuny, the magician of Venice, which was held at La Pedrera, Barcelona, ​​in March 2010.)