Peacock & Vine: On William Morris and Mariano Fortuny

by A. S. Byatt

  There was also an alternative story of a matriarchal civilisation. In 1861 Johann Jakob Bachofen, a Swiss antiquarian, jurist and anthropologist, published Das Mutterrecht, in which he described a cultural history in four phases: Hetairism, the Mutterrecht, the Dionysian and the Apollonian. Hetairism was an early nomadic phase, ‘communistic and polyamorous.’ Its god was an early earthy Aphrodite. This was followed by the Mutterrecht, a matriarchal society, dominated by a version of Demeter the earth goddess, in which Bachofen discerned chthonic mystery cults and the emergence of law. This was followed by the Dionysian and the emergence of patriarchy, which was in turn followed by the modern Apollonian (and masculine) civilisation.

  These ideas, and other similar ones, influenced another mythmaker and archaeologist, the British Arthur Evans, who excavated Minoan Crete. Evans shared Schliemann’s enthusiasm, creativity and propensity to alter and even to fake the archaeological evidence. He made his own ferrous concrete structure of the palace of Knossos, obscuring much evidence forever. But the myths he invented were more sympathetic than Schliemann’s. His Minos was not an evil king with a dreadful minotaur hidden in a labyrinth – he was a wise and just ruler of a peaceful and prosperous nation. Cathy Gere tells us that in the beginning Evans was obsessed with Ariadne, she who had held the thread which led out of the labyrinth. Gere writes:

  His first gesture was to place her on the throne of the palace, suggesting that Crete had been one of the last outposts of a once-universal, matriarchal stage of human cultural evolution. She didn’t last too long as the ruler of Knossos, but Evans compensated for her loss of temporal power by anointing her the queen of the Minoan heaven, the Great Mother Goddess of an ecstatic nature religion practiced on the mountaintops and in the sacred groves of the island. Above all it was her legendary ‘dancing floor’ that he would return to as a symbolic location that united the deep past with his fondest hopes for the present and future of Crete.

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  Evans returned again and again to the dancing girls and those who were bull-leapers. He compared them to modern women – in one wall painting he described them as like beauties painted by Toulouse-Lautrec, ‘fresh from the coiffeur’s hand with hair frisé and curled about the head and shoulders’. Evans quoted the Iliad’s description of Achilles’ shield, ‘a dancing floor like the one Daedalus made at Knossos for Ariadne’ ‘where beautiful young men and girls are circling, touching each other’s hands, the girls in garlands of flowers and soft linens, the men sporting gold-hilted daggers’.

  Another theorist of feminist culture in Knossos was the British scholar Jane Harrison, a Fellow of Newnham College in Cambridge, who visited Evans, worked on the excavations and wrote about the Minoan civilisation. In her most famous book, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (1903), there is a chapter called ‘The Making of a Goddess’ in which, Gere says, ‘hundreds of coded references to the traumatic transition from matriarchy to patriarchy could be detected in legend, ritual, relief and vase painting’. The story was a bitter one. ‘Woman who was the inspirer, becomes the temptress; she who made all things, god and mortals alike, is become their plaything, their slave, dowered only with physical beauty, and with a slave’s tricks and blandishments.’ Harrison returned to the theme in Themis (1912), in which she describes the sacrifice of a bull to Dionysus, painted on the sides of a Minoan sarcophagus. ‘In the centre we have the sacrifice of a bull…He is dying not dead; his tail is still alive and his pathetic eyes wide open, but the flute player is playing and the blood flows from the bull’s neck…’

  Mariano Fortuny read Arthur Evans’s The Prehistoric Tombs of Knossos in 1906. He made notes on this book and wrote: ‘In 1907 some printed fragments of cloth found in Greece encouraged me to conduct research on printing procedures from the past, after which my wife and I started a workshop in Palazzo Pesaro Orfei to put into practice the methods we had discovered’. Ilaria Caloi has written a very interesting article, ‘The reception of the Minoans in the modern art of Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo’, in which she explains that Fortuny’s interest in Minoan art – as opposed to Aegean – is specific and unusual. Fortuny also read Angelo Mosso, the Italian archaeologist, who wrote Escursioni nel Mediterraneo. Caloi has studied Fortuny’s papers collected in the Museo Fortuny and quotes him on Knossos.

  Quando tornai a Venezia fui indotto a ricercare gli antichi metodi della stampa su stoffe. Le scoperti fatte da Angelo Mosso su Creta furono di grande incentivo a tentare alcune prove. E il primo saggio fu una sciarpa dipinta, una sciarpa lunga, che chiamai appunto Knossòs dai motivi di fiore e alghe che corrono intorno agli antichissimi vasi ritrovati nell’isola di Candia.

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  When I returned to Venice, I was prompted to research the ancient methods of textile printing. Angelo Mosso’s findings on Crete were a great incentive to attempt some pieces. And the first experiment was a painted scarf, a long scarf, which I named Knossos after the flower and seaweed patterns that run around the very ancient vases uncovered on the island of Candia.

  Fortuny went twice to Greece but never to Crete. The first Knossos scarf was made in 1907. There are splendid photographs of Henriette wrapped in one. The scarves had a coin-shaped stamp on one corner depicting a labyrinth. He used, Caloi tells us, ‘Minoan themes such as landscapes with plants and flowers, marine environments with seaweeds and animals, like octopuses, argonauts and murex shells’. He used an ancient Cretan image of lilies, surprisingly modern even today. The scarves were hugely successful, and in 1909 Fortuny patented his other great success, the pleated Delphos, based on the robes seen on male and female Greek statues such as the Kore of Euthydikos, the Kore of Samos and the Charioteer of Delphi. He worked initially with a drawing of the charioteer Henriette had made on an earlier Greek journey. The Delphos was – to quote the description given to register the trademark in Paris – a ‘sheath open at both ends, gathered at the top in such a way as to form a neck opening at the centre; with two openings for the arms on either side, two openings with hems tightened by laces along the arms, and slanting draw hems for adjusting the sleeves’. The sheaths could have long, short or no sleeves. These simple, complex and wonderful garments were held together with Venetian Murano glass beads, the only part of the dresses – apart from the original silk – that was not made in the Fortuny palazzo and later dye-works. There was also the Peplos, named for the uneven-hemmed overgarment worn by the Kore of Samos, and a great variety of overgarments, transparent or made of rich brocades and velvets.

  Fortuny applied for a patent for this new ‘invention’ at the Office National de la Propriété Industrielle in Paris in 1909. The dresses were made of fine silk which was imported from Japan and China. When, later, Mussolini declared that only Italian resources were to be used, Fortuny had to ask for help from the American Elsie McNeill, who became Elsie Lee, and later still the Contessa Gozzi. Lee helped him with the sales and distribution of his work in the States and elsewhere. She was able to purvey the silk to him by circuitous methods. Writers on Fortuny say that the method used to produce the permanent pleats is still a mystery. There were hundreds of pleats around each dress and they were all made by hand. Guillermo de Osma gives us a description.

  The method needed a lot of manual work, since the folds are all different and irregular. They were probably put into the material when it was wet, perhaps still under water, with heat being applied later to ensure that they remained permanent. During the latter process it is possible that a piece of thread may have been passed through each group of pleats in order to tighten them for a time.

  The patent included a method of undulating the material horizontally once it had been pleated. To undulate the silk he designed a system of horizontally placed copper or porcelain tubes that could be heated from within. The pleated piece of silk, still wet, would be placed between these tubes, and the permanently undulating effect created by the heat.

  Fortuny searched widely for his dyes – like Morris returning to ancient and subtl
e vegetable dyes. His dye-works can still be visited on the Giudecca, like Morris’s in Merton Abbey. He was inventive with the ways he printed his designs. He studied printing on fabrics, substituting the wooden blocks used to print dyes on silk in the early days of the Knossos with ones made of metal that allowed him to overlap several colours on a single decorative motif. He also collected Japanese katagami stencils and studied their methods and use. Henriette worked with him on all these operations. Indeed, one source says that the original idea for the form of the Delphos was hers – after her drawing of the Charioteer of Delphos. They made velvet coats and cloaks, and simple, elegant handbags to go with the pocketless dresses. The gowns were sold wound into spirals in specially designed boxes.

  Mary Lydon, in her book Skirting the Issue, has a very interesting discussion of Proust’s study of Fortuny and what Fortuny meant to him. Fortuny is first mentioned in À la recherche by Elstir, the painter, and Lydon develops Proust’s image of the artist as couturier. This connects to the alternative images of the novel as a dress, and the novel as a cathedral, studied by Butor. Lydon forms a theory – supported by good evidence – that Proust thought of his own writing as something made with pleats – folds, plis. She has her own take on the idea of the Fortuny gown as a liberation of the female body. She points out tartly that although Fortuny’s garments were said to be designed to free women from the constrictions of whalebone, they in fact restricted women’s movements in another way, by insisting that the hemlines should extend for four to six inches beyond the toes of the wearer, impeding her walking and making her appear ‘rooted to the spot’.

  Fortuny’s work excited other artists, including writers. D’Annunzio, in a novel begun in 1908 (Forse che sì, forse che no), was already describing the Knossos worn by his heroine.

  She was wrapped in one of those very long scarves of oriental gauze that the alchemist dyer Mariano Fortuny steeps in the mysterious recesses of his vats, which are stirred with a wooden spear, now by a sylph, now by a hobgoblin, and he draws them out coloured with strange dreamlike shades, and then he prints on them with a thousand blows of his burnishing tool new generations of stars, plants and animals. Surely with Isabella Inghirani’s scarf he must have suffused the dye with a small amount of the pink stolen by his sylph from a rising moon.

  There are other literary accounts of Fortuny’s garments which immediately were understood as modern (timeless) works of art and exhibited in galleries and museums as such. I found an interesting attitude to Fortuny’s work in a ‘fashion memoir’ (in a series of memoirs about great figures of fashion) by Delphine Desvaux. She herself is not wholly enthusiastic about Fortuny – she finds him not to be a couturier and asserts that literature has treated Fortuny harshly, which is clearly not the case. She cites D’Annunzio’s novel – not the ecstatic description of the dress but the moment when its wearer ‘overcome by misery, later abandons one of her dresses in her flight; it is left hanging on the end of her bed, a pathetic sloughed skin’. Desvaux also describes a scene in Proust where the narrator sees Oriane de Guermantes ‘wrapped in a Fortuny-type kimono dressing-gown, the colour of a butterfly’s wing…she certainly looks very beautiful.’ But the narrator does not find her desirable and pointedly refers to the unpleasant smell of her dress (caused by the Chinese crystallised egg-white used as a fixative by Fortuny).

  Fortuny’s dresses can be seen in the wider context of the reform of women’s dress at the turn of the century. In late Victorian times the movement for ‘rational dress’ set out to liberate women from constricting corsets, innumerable buttons, tight waists and gripping brassieres. The simple dresses worn by Janey Morris were an aspect of this way of seeing things. The paintings of Frederic Leighton, Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Albert Moore and John William Godward showed women in Greek classical flowing gowns, and were exhibited in Venice at the Biennale where they were seen by Fortuny, who also knew the aesthetic tea gowns sold by Liberty in London. Fortuny’s dresses were exhibited in New York in 1914, and in 1916 Belle Armstrong Whitney used his gowns as an example of ‘ideal dress’ in What to Wear: A Book for Women, saying she believed Fortuny’s gowns fulfilled all her conditions for the ideal dress, which should be above fashion and change: ‘efficiency, simplicity, personality, quality materials and a high standard of workmanship and artistry’. Fortuny’s early gowns were designed to be worn without underwear, and the wearers were expected to wear them in private as tea gowns, or a kind of negligee. But they made their way into the larger world and were worn by women of fashion in many countries and most particularly by dancers and actresses.

  Perhaps the commercial and aesthetic success of Fortuny’s clothes came more from his work as a theatrical designer than from any close connection to haute couture. The American dancer Ruth St Denis wore Fortuny’s Knossos scarf for performances of ‘Indian’ dances in Berlin in 1907. Both Isadora Duncan and Eleanora Duse wore Fortuny dresses to dance. Cathy Gere tells an arresting tale of a visit by Isadora Duncan to Knossos in 1910: ‘upon sighting the four completed flights of the grand staircase’ she ‘could not contain herself and threw herself into one of her impromptu dances for which she was so well known. Up and down the steps she danced, her dress flowing around her.’ Gere records that the site supervisor was shocked and goes on:

  What the notoriously woman-shy Mackenzie failed to appreciate was how fashionably appropriate Duncan’s anachronisms were. As she whirled up and down the grand staircase with her bare toes and her wispy garb – her dancing amply supported by the strength of ferro-concrete – she perfectly embodied the Dionysian significance of the reconstructions. Here was a place where the most outlandish expressions of post-Nietzschean enthusiasm for the modernity of the Greek spirit could find expression, and where liberated femininity (clad in the folds and pleats of Duncan’s completely un-Minoan ‘Greek’ costume) could insinuate itself into the new tragic age.

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  A silk scarf was also the occasion of Duncan’s own tragic death, as it floated from her neck, in an open car, and tangled itself irretrievably in the hub of a wheel. This scarf was not a Knossos but was a painted silk scarf by the Russian-born artist Roman Chatov.

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  * Mariano Fortuny. Viaggio in Egitto. Appunti fotografici d’artista. Venice, Palazzo Fortuny/Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia, 2004.

  FABRICS, DESIGNS & LIGHT

  When I began to write this essay I had a very simplified concept of the contrast of the designs of the two artists. My favourite images by Morris are his Honeysuckle and his Willow Boughs, both of which show how accurately Morris had observed the growing forms of the plants at Kelmscott. I remember being overcome with delight when I first realised how rigorously the geometry of plants worked among the apparently accidental forms of particular flowers or leaves. There are plants which grow according to the Fibonacci spiral – 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, etc. – which always seemed to me a peculiarly human construction – each number being the sum of the previous two numbers – and not a growth pattern at all. In the Honeysuckle and the Willow Boughs the feeling of free growth is contained in the geometrical repetitions. (We have the Morris willow leaves in our living room – they are surprisingly happy with modern paintings.) Morris said that images of plants should strive upwards and onwards, towards spaces beyond the painting or cloth.

  I saw Fortuny equally simply, as an artist who made intricate designs of all shapes and sizes but without Morris’s belief in movement and ‘drive’. His imagery derived from all sorts of ancient and medieval designs, in the buildings of Venice, on the splendid fabrics in his mother’s chest. He was working with, and adding to, and changing, a long history of human images of growing things – vines, acanthus leaves, pomegranates – which had symbolic meanings in the Christian religion. Reading Fortuny and Morris together made me think very hard, and with great pleasure, about the need to make representations of the outside world, and about the need to hand these on and change them.

  I have made many discoverie
s during the writing of this essay, which began with my instinctive closing of my eyes on the dark inside of Fortuny’s palace, and on a world of waterways and stone, in order to see, with my inner eye, the green and flowery world of Kelmscott, near its own unostentatious river. Following this apparently haphazard contrast has led to all sorts of surprising juxtapositions of the two men and the two worlds, and to unexpected new understanding. Most of all, perhaps, in the things they made – and of these, most of all in the textiles.

  Where to begin? Looking at Fortuny’s designs and comparing them to Morris’s makes me see just how much Morris was ill at ease, with the human certainly, but also with the animal in general. His sense of failure when he painted Janey’s portrait – ‘I cannot paint you but I love you’ – was already part of him. As a boy he wasn’t interested in art – he was interested in woods and water and wild flowers and the shapes of stones and currents. He not only couldn’t draw men and women, he couldn’t draw animals, from lions to rabbits. Images I had thought were his – in tapestries and printed cloths – were in fact done cooperatively by Philip Webb or by Burne-Jones. At some point in his history as an artist, as far as I can see, he set himself to learn how to draw animals and birds, though not human beings – his work begins to be more frequently attributed to him – though The Firm continued to work together. And his representative work – even in highly stylised repetitive forms in wallpapers or carpets – seems, compared to other artists, as though the first impulse was to record something seen or noted. As he grew cleverer he elaborated the forms of flowers, and mixed one size of floret or bud with something incompatibly huger or smaller that is nevertheless part of the same design. He mixed one kind of trailing vegetable with a bunch of rounded petals and made us see both differently.