Palazzo Fortuny in Venice - Ep. 88

Venice as it shines in spring. As always, it appears serene and unmatched. Like here at the Accademia Bridge. Everywhere you look: the entire city is a unique museum. Countless artists and patrons from all over the world who wanted to be part of this total work of art have been drawn here over the centuries.
French luxury goods magnate Francois Pinault, for example, turned the Punta della Dogana into a museum. Here he exhibits parts of his extensive collection of modern art.
Vis-a-Vis is the Isola di San Giorgio, where the famous Fondazione Cini shows parts of their unique collection. Count Vittorio Cini had put them together using all sorts of legal and illegal means.
And this is Venice's newest museum: The Museo Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo. It has just opened and is dedicated to the Spanish multi-talent who made it from Granada to Paris and finally to Venice.
The opera director Pier Luigi Pizzi transformed Fortuny's palazzo into a unique museum where you can walk in the footsteps of the master of the arts.
Fortuny was an artist, opera director and inventor. To earn the money for his extravagant lifestyle, he was
but also fashion designer, interior designer and engineer. At 18, Fortuny moved to Venice with his mother Maria, where they lived in the Palazzo Martinengo. Here they also exhibited the art of their father, who was a painter.
Fortuny owed his love for precious materials to his mother Maria. She had assembled a unique collection of fine, antique fabrics made of velvet, brocade, silk, taffeta and satin in Venice, Ghent and the Orient.
Then, in 1892, Fortuny bought the Palazzo Pesaro degli Orfei, where he lived and worked until his death.
Fortuny set up a painting and photo studio, a carpenter's workshop, a textile printing and dyeing workshop and a tailor's shop here and employed a dozen workers. Together with his French wife Henriette Negrin, who was an expert in natural dyes, Fortuny invented new methods of textile dyeing and tapestries, as well as printing on fabric.
For example, Fortuny designed the famous Delphos dress and the Knossos scarf from wafer-thin, permanently pleated silk satin, the manufacture of which Fortuny patented in Paris in 1909.
He sold his creations in Paris, London, Madrid and New York. His dresses wore dazzling and eccentric ladies like
Sarah Bernhardt, Luisa Casati, Isadora Duncan, Eleonora Duse or Lilian Gish and Martha Graham.
Fortuny registered more than 50 patents as an inventor and invented the indirect lighting effects as a theater director.
His muse was undoubtedly his wife Henriette Negrin, whom he met in Paris and who left her husband for him and followed him to Venice.
Mariano Fortuny died in 1949 at the age of 78. His wife Henriette Negrin later bequeathed his stately palazzo to the city of Venice.

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Gracias.