Opening to the public of the second floor of the Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo Museum
25 October 2022, Venice

The Fortuny Museum opens the second floor where the creativity of Mariano Fortuny is told.

A unique opportunity as for the first time in history the Civic Museums Foundation has decided to present to the international public objects that until now were kept in the deposits.

By the will of the Municipality of Venice and the Venetian Civic Museums Foundation, chaired by Mariacristina Gribaudi, these large rooms have now assumed a museum function and set-up, accurately and scenically welcoming a series of fundamental focuses on Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo and his differentiated activities.

These in-depth spaces – anticipates the Head of the Museum and Director of MUVE Chiara Squarcina – are fundamental to really know, and under different profiles, the extraordinary personality and story of Fortuny. Artist and, at the same time, an attentive and original entrepreneur, who knows how to carry his brand and that of Venice in the great world of the time.

The spotlight is first of all on Fortuny (father and son), and the art of engraving. Art by both collected and above all practiced in an original way, so much so as to influence the graphics of the time for styles, themes and procedures.

On the one hand the father, still tied to the Goyesque tradition, on the other the son, who develops a personal technique in etching and aquatint, also using an electric drill for dental use to create the original optical effects that can be admired on the prints of him.

Together with the engravings, you can also observe the tools, including two presses of different make and age, used for their realization.

A second focus, no less fascinating, goes to deepen what Mariano Fortuny, flanked by his wife Henriette, produces in the field of textile art, transforming the small workshop created in the attic of Palazzo Pesaro degli Orfei into one of the most prestigious textile industries in the early twentieth century in Europe.

It was a peculiarity of the Fortuny brand to recreate the illusion of ancient woven fabrics using only the printing technique, thus managing to propose refined reworkings of iconographic repertoires taken from the historical family collection and from cultures of different countries.