Mariano Fortuny was born May 11, 1871, to an artistic family in Granada, Spain. His father, a genre painter, died when Fortuny was three years old and his mother, daughter of another famous painter, Raimundo de Madrazo y Garreta, moved the family to Paris, France. It became apparent at a young age that Fortuny was a talented artist, as he, too, showed a talent for painting as well as a passion for textiles. During his childhood he was introduced to many different textiles and fabrics, which greatly imprinted upon his creativity. His parents were very passionate for materials and had their own collections of textiles from various shops they had visited in Europe. His father even collected metalwork and armor from previous ages as a hobby. As a young child he was fascinated with all of these textiles and would even dye pieces of material for amusement.It was this exposure that led him to grow up and begin designing and producing his own textiles and dresses. The family moved again in 1889 to Venice, Italy. As a young man, Fortuny traveled throughout Europe seeking out artists he admired, among them the German composer Richard Wagner. Fortuny became quite varied in his talents, some of them including inventing, painting, photography, sculpting, architecture, etching and even theatrical stage lighting. In 1897, he met the woman he would marry, Henriette Negrin, in Paris. While in Paris, using all of his creative talents,Fortuny registered and patented more than twenty inventions between 1901 and 1934.
In 1892, after seeing some of Richard Wagner’s work in Paris, Fortuny traveled to Bayreuth, Germany where Wagner had built a theater specifically designed to put on his operas. He was mesmerized by Wagner’s work and began to paint scenes for his operas when he returned to Venice. In Wagnerian drama, painting, architecture, song, dance, and poetry all worked together towards a common goal. This affected Fortuny’s outlook and was the inspiration for a brand new type of theater design where the designer and the technician would work together on a project from idea to realization. Fortuny and other followers of this concept believed that one can only improve the quality of a product by having a good knowledge of something’s raw materials and the process of its construction. He also thought that the best type of design was created when the artist knew how to realize the design and controlled all of the steps in the creative process.
Through his experiences with Wagner and the theatre, Fortuny became a lighting engineer, architect, inventor, director, and set designer. As a set designer, he wanted to create a more seamless way of transitioning from one scene to another other than flying out a backdrop and bringing in a new one. He began experimenting with light and different ways to do this in the attic of his palazzo in Italy. With his experimentation, he found that reflecting light off of different surfaces could change the color, intensity and other properties of light. He used indirect lighting techniques in his new invention, the Fortuny cyclorama dome, a quarter dome shaped structure of plaster or cloth. The shape created the look of a more extensive sky and Fortuny could create any type of sky he wanted by reflecting light onto it in a certain way. He could even reflect clouds on the backdrop by painting different things on the mirrors that reflected light onto the dome. Fortuny stated that, “Theatrical scenery will be able to transform itself in tune with music, within the latter’s domain, that is to say in ‘time’, whereas hitherto it has only been able to develop in ‘space’”. All that had to be done to change the scenery was that a stagehand had to change the controls for different effects and color mixing. Not only was this design very influential for the theatre world, but also it was also cost effective. Financially, Fortuny’s dome proved to be a very efficient invention. Instead of having to paint multiple backdrops for each new scene, Fortuny could use his dome to achieve the illusion needed for each scene. Also, “fewer stage hands were needed, while the fact that less scenery was involved meant less storage space and less danger of fire. During the 1920s Fortuny’s contribution to the theatre gained widespread recognition. After studying and perfecting his dome, its use was becoming more popular in many theatres in Europe. He was soon contracted to install his dome in the famous opera house, La Scala of Milan. However, for this project he was required to make some adaptations for the dome to be used at its maximum potential. The theatre was much larger than his original dome so he increased the size so that he could allow the dome to fill the space of the stage completely. He also made it so that the dome was “electrically controlled and could fold and unfold like a giant accordion in the space of 90 seconds. Even more impressively, he invented a suction fan, specifically for this project, which forced out the air so as to keep the structure taught. From the audience’s point of view this helped the backdrop’s depth to seem almost infinite as if you were looking at a night sky that never ended.