Greetings all!
Today’s pictures come from the Fortuny Museum, which was not a museum I’d even heard about, but enjoyed anyway. Mariano Fortuny (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariano_Fortuny_(designer)) was a pretty interesting guy.
As you can see from the link is known as a designer, but that’s really not fair. He was a true polymath who was fascinated by light so he learned lighting, architecture, set design, and other aspects of creating plays.
He was a sculptor. A photographer. A painter. Did etching. Filed 20 different invention patents. We went to the museum because of the textile aspect, it was a quilt-themed tour after all, and there are some amazing fabrics and outfits as well, but wow, there was just a lot of different things.
The Museo Fortuny sits in the Palazzo Pesaro Orfei, a palace built by the Pesaro family in the 1400s that Fortuny lived in for much of his life, buying bits and pieces of it until he bought it all for his studio and factory. It’s pretty cool in its own right.
Anyway, on to my pics!
Yes, I took pictures of the ceiling. In general, the ceilings in Italy were incredible, especially in Italy. So many were these old wood beams. Simple, yet gorgeous.
Note the red signs. I took a bunch of pictures of signs so we could all read about what I saw. They’re mostly readable if you click on them.
Note the gorgeous fabric in bottom right.
Note also the D20 light in middle right! Yeah, I’m a geek. Film at eleven.
Lots of great fabrics here! Check out the green dress top right. Expand the top middle to really see the cool lion passant. It’s the fabric in bottom middle too. I tried to get closeups of some of the fabric since I know my friends.
There’s some photography stuff bottom left, and we start to get into his office on the rest of the bottom row. I probably couldn’t read any of his books, but many there have to be some treasures there.
More of his office with a closeup of the woodworking in bottom right.
Starting to see some of his other stuff, including etching and photography.
Adding sculpture and painting. Note the amazing tapestry bottom right. I suspect it was designed as a rug, but either way, it’s gorgeous. And with heraldry! Closeup of the heraldic device top left below.
I think he designed the couches in middle left and right, but I didn’t see a sign. They wouldn’t let us sit on them (which honestly, we could’ve used by that point of the day).
The woodworking in top left is astounding. More of his sculptures and various tidbits and then we get to another amazing heraldic tapestry in bottom middle.
More tapestries and curtains. Bottom right is a picture of the building from an interesting open air section. Not big enough to be a courtyard, it is this weird void that makes me curious. The windows were lovely, though.
The dresses were lovely and my pics don’t do them justice. The fabric in the middle row left and middle wasn’t heraldic, per se, but you can see the use of heraldic elements.
Along the way, Fortuny started collecting stuff. I really wanted that bench in middle right and bottom middle.
And there we go with the Fortuny Museum pics!
Wait, not really. We’ll actually get more when I do the Arms & Armor page because he collected some of that too.
Yes, I’m going to have an Arms & Armor page because of course I am, but that’s for another day.
On to the Palazzo Ducale tomorrow! That will be a big set.