Italian
From the home and factory of Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo and Henriette Nigrin, born within the walls of Palazzo Pesaro Orfei, a point of reference for the culture of the city of Venice: the Fortuny Museum celebrates 50 years.
VENICE (VE). On Tuesday, June 10th, the Fortuny Museum became the pulsating heart of Venetian cultural life with an extraordinary opening, free admission, and many surprises inside and outside the museum: objects, fashion stories, and inventions part of the permanent exhibition, along with unpublished videos and musical moments that enriched the entire day.
HALF A CENTURY OF OPENING TO THE PUBLIC, MANY LIVES, A STORY YET TO BE WRITTEN, A CELEBRATION FOR THE CITY AND FOR EVERYONE
Fifty years ago, in 1975 Palazzo Pesaro Orfei opened its doors to the public as the Fortuny Museum: from a cosmopolitan production center, symbol of the disruptive creativity of the Spanish artist Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo, the palace became a cultural place in Venice. The city where Mariano chose to live, work, create, together with his wife Henriette Nigrin: muse, work companion, co-creator with her husband of the great creative enterprise of the Fortuny atelier, to whose generosity and vision we owe the donation to the city of the palace and its collections.
Fifty years after its opening as a museum, Venice is preparing to celebrate this anniversary with a special day, designed not only to remember, but to rediscover and experience the museum as a place of creativity, experimentation, and dialogue between the arts. On Tuesday, June 10, the museum will be open to everyone for free, with a path enriched with unpublished works, archive projections, and in the afternoon, live music in the square, in front of the palace, to turn memory into a collective celebration.
A birthday that is also an opportunity to reflect on the deeper meaning of this place in the mission of Civic Museums Foundation. The Fortuny Museum is not just a place of worship and a house-museum but, yesterday as today, it is a living organism: where history and modernity meet, where research coexists with visionary impulse. It is a place that tells the extraordinary story of a couple – Fortuny and Nigrin – who more than anyone else have been able to transform creativity into business, research into a style, the workshop into poetry.
“This is one of the museums that I love most in the world, a museum that tells the story of craftsmanship and the genius of an artist and entrepreneur, capable of envisioning the future and making it happen, in his own way. Donating one’s home to the city means that we can now celebrate their genius with gratitude, forever. Yesterday’s factories are today’s museums, today’s museums are yesterday’s factories. The Fortuny Museum is a concrete example of this. My wish is that it serves as inspiration for future generations of entrepreneurs and creatives”, said Mariacristina Gribaudi, President of the Civic Museums Foundation of Venice.
Giorgia Pea, delegate councilor for Cultural Activities, Cinema and Theater of the Municipality of Venice, thanked the organization: “Thanks to all those who made this party possible, which opens the doors of the museum house to enthusiasts, to the city, and to all visitors. This is a different way of perceiving a museum because it is no longer considered as a place for the few custodians of culture but a place to feel at home, and no place is better than the Fortuny Museum. This place is a continuous work in progress; for me, it has been a point of refuge, and I hope it is also for many citizens and visitors passing by Mariano and Henriette’s house to enjoy the constantly evolving collections,” said the councilor.
“Mariano Fortuny is the “Leonardo Da Vinci of the Twentieth Century”; his imagination and interests have flowed into a thousand streams and subjects, even profoundly different from each other. It’s amazing to think that today, after 50 years since the museum opened, we still have elements to study, admire, and discover about this genius,” explained Elisabetta Barisoni, head of Museums Area / Ca’ Pesaro – International Gallery of Modern Art and Fortuny Museum. “Mariano and Henriette donated this palace to the city of Venice to be a center of culture. We are proud to safeguard this museum for the city which, along with Ca’ Pesaro, is also a testament to the value of women – like Henriette – who have given part of their history and wealth to our city, allowing us to enjoy this gem. The museum has evolved and grown: in the 1990s it became part of the circuit of Civic Museums, establishing a new connection with contemporary art in a continuous dialogue between factory and laboratory, allowing us to enjoy a continuous and renewed surprise,” Barisoni concluded.
“We have done a great job of exposition and storytelling, through materials and new elements that testify to a complete production process of Mariano Fortuny, from design to textile manufacturing to finished product,” explained Cristina Da Roit, curator of the Fortuny Museum. “We wanted to make Fortuny’s modus operandi clear, his sources of inspiration, and his imaginative heritage, with the possibility of seeing the contents of his personal library: decorative motifs are translated into a modern and timeless language. It should not be mistakenly thought that the versatile Fortuny simply reproduced ancient ornamental motifs – rich and three-dimensional – but his work is more complex, drawing inspiration from nature and observation, making fabrics a true encyclopedia of art history and the world,” the curator explained.
AN UNCHARTED PATH: FASHION, INSPIRATIONS, THE INVENTION OF MADE IN ITALY, AND A NEW CYCLE OF STORIES ABOUT THE WORK OF MARIANO AND HENRIETTE
Among the activities scheduled for the day of June 10th, films in Pathé Baby format, both professional and amateur, shot by Mariano and Henriette themselves and belonging to the museum’s collection, will be screened. These films have been brought back to light thanks to the digital transfer carried out by the La Camera Ottica laboratory of the University of Udine and the RI-PRESE Archive, as part of the Ininfiammabile project promoted by Fondazione di Venezia, Fondazione M9, and Fondazione Iuav.
Throughout the day, the films from the collection will be screened in a loop. An extraordinary collection that reveals a lesser-known aspect of Fortuny’s diverse interests, once again highlighting the boundless versatility of this artist as he delved into art, nature, and science The Fortuny collection consists of films depicting cultures and traditions from other countries, from Cambodian dances to Islamic rituals, from Bedouins in the desert to Native Americans, ethnographic documentaries, as well as botanical and naturalistic studies on terrestrial and marine fauna and flora, microscopic investigations, films showcasing European and Oriental cities and architectures, such as Bruges, Granada, Algeria, India, films featuring artistic personalities of the era, like actress Sarah Bernhardt or dancer Loïe Fuller, and even animated cartoons, starring the adventures of Felix the Cat, the first global star of animated cinema.
In the afternoon, the audience will also have the opportunity to participate in three dedicated moments featuring screenings of auteur films, accompanied by live sound improvisations by Sofia Pozdniakova and Emanuele Wiltsch Barberio. These precious documents will transport visitors to the heart of their journeys through the 1920s and 1930s. Through the viewing of landscapes, architectures, and daily life scenes, we start from Venice, travel through Andalusia, and reach Morocco with its magical atmospheres.
For this occasion, the exhibition route on the first and second floor will be enriched with objects and archive documents that, due to their fragility and delicacy, are not generally exhibited permanently and, for the very first time, some recently acquired artifacts that are returning home, to the place where they were created, pieces previously known only through photographic documentation. In addition to preparatory drawings, sketches, printing plates and proofs, samples, photographs, posters, and advertising brochures, the significant sales records, ancient prints from the Mariano collection, including the album of Capricci by Goya, engravings by Rembrandt, Tiepolo, Canaletto, precious wall silks, printed silk fabrics and velvets find space. Furthermore, on display are the specimens from the collection that have created Mariano’s visual and imaginative heritage; in the Fortuny fabric drawings, Coptic, Persian, Turkish, Cretan, and Minoan motifs are revived, as well as Gothic architecture and medieval codes, Middle-Eastern art, Hispano-Moorish motifs, Islamic architectural geometries and dynamics, Arabic calligraphy, Italian and Spanish Renaissance, ancient lace and embroideries, Baroque, Rococo, and Neoclassicism, zoomorphic figures, Japanese art, 19th-century decorative arts, and Art Deco influences. As evidence of the research and experiments carried out by Fortuny for the design of production processes and patterns, the public will have the opportunity to admire some katagami, Japanese stencils made with finely cut Washi paper, volumes on ancient printing techniques, and recipe books from his private library.
Crucial for the history of fashion, the five anastatic copies of patents that reveal Fortuny’s innovation in the textile field. Among these, the patent for the pleating of silk and a particular type of women’s dress, at the core of the Delphos dress, the iconic pleated silk tunic inspired by Hellenistic statuary and its variation, the Peplos.
It is precisely the immortal Delphos that is the keystone to tell the revolutionary contribution of the Fortuny in fashion: a timeless and sizeless dress, born to free the body and adapt to any shape, loved by personalities from the cinema and pop culture to this day, worn by Geraldine Chaplin to Barbara Streisand, an absolute protagonist in the nineties in the movie The Wings of the Dove, up to the series Downtown Abbey. A dress that literally invents and patents the “made in Italy”: a wording never seen before that appears on the label of the dress, decades before the birth of this concept in the fifties of the twentieth century.
A dress that is a symbol and that, at the same time, restores, the centrality in the artistic, creative, and entrepreneurial adventure of Henriette Nigrin: not only Mariano’s muse but a key figure in the history of the business and the Museum itself. Along with the fiftieth anniversary of the museum’s opening, sixty years have passed since the death of Henriette Nigrin and Fondazione Musei Civici intends to narrate and retrace the greatness of her personality. From her fundamental contribution in the invention and creation of dresses, including the Delphos itself, to the management of the factory, personnel, and sales. A general manager and, at the same time, a creative.
The lectures will be dedicated to the couple, Eternity and impermanence. Sign, trace and archetype in the work of Mariano and Henriette Fortuny scheduled from autumn 2025 to spring 2026, presented during the morning.
A MUSEUM, MANY LIVES
The task of Fondazione Musei Civici over the years has been to collect, preserve, and tell the incredible artistic story of Mariano Fortuny, with his immense heritage spanning across all disciplines – painting, sculpture, photography, printmaking, theater, set design, lighting, design, fashion, textiles, and even inventions, trademarks, and patents – keeping this flame alive, opening up to contaminations between ancient and contemporary, to the narration of applied arts and to aesthetic investigation as a living subject, bridging the gap between ancient Venice and the world of innovation. Bringing into the contemporary era a world where ideas, influences, materials, stories of artistic relationships, study, and research have mixed.
The celebration on June 10th was the occasion to retrace the multiple, extraordinary museum experiences born and lived within the walls of Palazzo Pesaro Orfei; starting with the transition from a house to a museum after Mariano Fortuny’s death (1949) and Henriette’s donation to the Municipality of Venice in 1956, with the purpose of transforming it into a cultural center dedicated to the arts; the museum-laboratory when in 1969 the International University of Art (UIA) settled here, born after the 1966 flood, an open laboratory to the world, a place of experimentation between art, restoration, and visual design; the documentation center, a workshop for photography, video, graphics, design, and applied arts established in 1979 with Venice ’79 photography, one of the largest photography events held in Italy.
A center that hosted workshops, exhibitions, and seminars with leading figures from the international scene; and still in the 1990s, when the chapter of the civic museum and Palazzo Pesaro Orfei becomes part of the Museums of Venice, hosting in this capacity memorable events in the international artistic and cultural scene such as the exhibition Watching Water, a spatial and multisensory exploration by Peter Greenaway. In 2007, the successful cycle of exhibitions organized on the occasion of the Venice Biennale begins, including Artempo, Infinitum, Tra.The Edge of Becoming, Tapiès. The artist’s gaze. Among the themes investigated are photography, 20th-century painting, female figures, and the world of Fortuny.
Leave a mark in 2019 with the serious damages caused by high water that lead to long restoration works, completed in 2022 with the reopening to the public and MUVE’s commitment to keep the museum permanently open throughout the year. A story yet to be written, featuring Fortuny and his time / Our time and Fortuny and future projects dedicated to dialogue with Mariano and Henriette’s contemporaries and the languages of modernity. A museum, a unique and powerful voice, center of invention and vision: a place that reminds us how culture can also arise from contamination, daily work, and the daring to imagine new forms. That is why, now more than ever, it is important to open its doors, experience it, and make it known.
And June 10th was the perfect occasion to do so: a day of celebration open to the whole city – and to everyone – to celebrate not only an anniversary, but a legacy still alive and a part of history still to be written.
