Fortuny, Mariano y Madrazo

Mariano Fortuny was born into a family of renowned artists in Granada, Spain 1871. Altough he quickly proved talented as a painter, it soon became clear that painting was only one of his many artistic gifts. In the late nineties of the nineteenth century he developed a revolutionary system for illuminating the stage trying to create a complete fusion between the last music significant and the theatrical painting. He modernized stage lighting and set design by engineerring the Fortuny Dome, which employed his theories in indirect and diffused light and brought him to created one of the first dimmer switches. Constant curiosity made the industrious Fortuny a multidisciplinar artist, first a painter, then a photographer, an architect and inventor. He was truly a Reinaissence man who made his own photographic paper, bound his own books, and designed his own lamps. His influence on modern life are often unrecognized, but no less immeasurable.