La moda di Fortuny

With an insatiable appetite for the historic, Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo (1871-1949) consistently looked to the past for inspiration. His in-depth study of the history of art provided a wide visual vocabulary of patterns, colors, and forms that he emulated in his silk gowns, velvet cloaks, and upholstery textiles. Though his designs were regarded as shockingly modern, Fortuny’s attitude towards historical referencing is quite clear in his statement, ‘Nothing is new in this world, so I do not pretend to bring new ideas […].’ As a revivalist, Fortuny closely studied past designs to re-create them.

His most famous design, the pleated silk Delphos gown, was inspired by the chiton worn by the Delphic Charioteer – an Ancient Greek statue (ca. 475-70 B.C) unearthed by archaeologists in 1896. Fortuny’s printed Knossos scarves were also inspired by archaeological discoveries of textile fragments in Greece.

In addition to viewing designs of the past through archaeology, he also studied paintings for their portrayal of historic dress. Though he is mostly remembered for his fashion designs, Fortuny was first trained as a painter and he approached fashion with these sensibilities. He often copied patterns from cinquecento paintings held in the Accademia (specifically those by Vittore Carpaccio) on his velvet capes. With metallic pigmented paint, Fortuny stencilled onto his designs the glittering patterns of woven brocades and damasks from the Italian Renaissance.

Fortuny was an ardent researcher of art history. His personal library is filled with a wide-range of illustrated books on artists, and 211 albums of photographs and reproductions of artworks that he personally organized for study. These albums provide a glimpse into Fortuny’s visual lexicon: a catalogue of influences.

This talk will examine Fortuny’s design methods: how he emulated historic fashion by studying works from the history of art.

Wendy Ligon Smith completed her doctoral dissertation “Reviving Fortuny's Phantasmagorias” (2015) at The University of Manchester (England) where she taught undergraduate and MA students in Art History and Visual Studies.

Wendy has given papers on Fortuny’s fashion designs, photography, transnational identity, and Wagnerian theatre inventions at the Courtauld Institute, Oxford University, Cambridge University, the University of Bayreuth (Germany), and for the annual meetings of the Renaissance Society of America and the Nineteenth Century Studies Association. Wendy also organized an interdisciplinary international conference on Walter Benjamin’s and Roland Barthes’s writings on fashion held in June 2013. She has been awarded several grants for research in Venice on Mariano Fortuny and has produced a short film of Fortuny’s Wagnerian theatre lighting model at Palazzo Fortuny.

Wendy is currently based in Boston (USA) and continues to publish her research on Mariano Fortuny, Marcel Proust, Richard Wagner, revivalism, and Venice. Her most recent publication, “Conjuring Venetian Costume: The Influence of Cinquecento Paintings in Mariano Fortuny’s Dress Designs” is featured in The Enduring Legacy of the Venetian Renaissance (Routledge, 2016). Based on her doctoral research, Wendy is also working on a monograph on Fortuny and his work in fashion, photography, collecting, theatre lighting, and painting.

www.wendyligonsmith.com