Vintage Publishing Peacock And Vine : Fortuny And Morris In Life And At Work

This ravishing book opens a window onto the lives, designs, and passions of two charismatic artists.Born a generation apart, they were seeming opposites: Mariano Fortuny, a Spanish aristocrat thrilled by the sun-baked cultures of Crete and Knossos; William Morris, a British craftsman, in thrall to the myths of the North.Yet through their revolutionary inventions and textiles, both men inspired a new variety of art, as vibrant today as when it was first conceived.Acclaimed writer A.S. Byatt traces their genius right to the source. The Palazzo Pesaro Orfei in Venice is a warren of dark spaces leading to a workshop where Fortuny created his designs for pleated silks and shining velvets.Here he worked alongside the French model who became his wife and collaborator, including on the ‘Delphos’ dress – a flowing gown evoking classical Greece. Morris’s Red House, outside London, with its Gothic turrets and secret gardens, helped inspire his stunning floral and geometric patterns; it also represented a coming together of life and art.But it was Kelmscott Manor in the English countryside that he loved best – even when it became the setting for his wife’s love affair with Dante Gabriel Rossetti.Generously illustrated with the artists’ beautiful designs – pomegranates and acanthus, peacock and vine – A.S.Byatt brings the visions and ideas of Fortuny and Morris dazzlingly to life.