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A. S. Byatt - Peacock & Vine: On William Morris and Mariano Fortuny

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Peacock & Vine: On William Morris and Mariano Fortuny: summary, description and annotation

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From the winner of the Booker Prize: A ravishing book that opens a window into the lives, designs, and passions of Mariano Fortuny and William Morris, two remarkable artists who themselves are passions of the writer A. S. Byatt.

Born a generation apart in the mid-1800s, Fortuny and Morris were seeming opposites: Fortuny a Spanish aristocrat thrilled by the sun-baked cultures of Crete and Knossos; Morris a member of the British bourgeoisie, enthralled by Nordic myths. Through their revolutionary inventions and textiles, both men inspired a new variety of art that is as striking today as when it was first conceived. In this elegant meditation, Byatt traces their genius right to the source.

Fortunys Palazzo Pesaro Orfei in Venice is a warren of dark spaces imbued with the rich hues of Asia. In his attic workshop, Fortuny created intricate designs from glowing silks and velvets; in the palazzo he found happiness in a glittering cavern alongside the French model who became his wife and collaborator, including on the famous Delphos dressa flowing, pleated gown that evoked the era of classical Greece.

Morriss Red House outside London, with its Gothic turrets and secret gardens, helped inspire his stunning floral and geometric patterns; it likewise represented a coming together of life and art. But it was a sweet simple old place called Kelmscott Manor in the countryside that he loved besteven when it became the setting for his wifes love affair with the artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

Generously illustrated with the artists beautiful designspomegranates and acanthus, peacock and vineamong other aspects of their worlds, this marvel-filled book brings the visions and ideas of Fortuny and Morris to vivid life.

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Contents
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A KNOPF Copyright 2016 by A S Byat - photo 1
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A KNOPF Copyright 2016 by A S - photo 2THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A KNOPF Copyright 2016 by A S - photo 3

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright 2016 by A. S. Byatt

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus, an imprint of Vintage Publishing, a division of Penguin Random House Ltd., London, in 2016.

www.aaknopf.com

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Byatt, A. S. (Antonia Susan), [date] author.
Title: Peacock & vine : on William Morris and Mariano Fortuny / A.S. Byatt.
Other titles: Peacock and vine : on William Morris and Mariano Fortuny Description: First American edition. | New York : Knopf, 2016.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016008946 (print) | LCCN 2016013039 (ebook) | ISBN 9781101947470 (hardback) | ISBN 9781101947487 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Morris, William, 18341896Criticism and interpretation. | Fortuny, Mariano, 18711949Criticism and interpretation. | BISAC:
BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Artists, Architects, Photographers. | DESIGN / Textile & Costume. | DESIGN / History & Criticism.
Classification: LCC NK942.M8 B93 2016 (print) | LCC NK942.M8 (ebook) | DDC 700.92dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016008946

eBook ISBN9781101947487

Cover Peacock and Vine, by Philip Webb and William Morris. Private Collection. Photo The Fine Art Society, London, UK / Bridgeman Images

Cover design by Carol Devine Carson

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ALSO BY A. S. BYATT

FICTION

The Childrens Book

Little Black Book of Stories

A Whistling Woman

The Biographers Tale

Elementals

Babel Tower

The Djinn in the Nightingales Eye

The Matisse Stories

Angels & Insects

Possession: A Romance

Sugar and Other Stories

Still Life

The Virgin in the Garden

The Game

The Shadow of the Sun

CRITICISM

Memory: An Anthology (ed. with Harriet Harvey Wood)

Portraits in Fiction

On Histories and Stories: Selected Essays

Imagining Characters (with Igns Sodr)

Passions of the Mind: Selected Writings

Unruly Times: Wordsworth and Coleridge

Degrees of Freedom: The Novels of Iris Murdoch

FOR GILL MARSDEN

CONTENTS - photo 4CONTENTS FORTUNY MORRIS - photo 5
CONTENTS
FORTUNY MORRIS - photo 6FORTUNY MORRIS W e were in Venice in April and I was - photo 7
FORTUNY & MORRIS
W e were in Venice in April and I was drunk on aquamarine light It is an airy - photo 8W e were in Venice in April and I was drunk on aquamarine light It is an airy - photo 9

W e were in Venice in April and I was drunk on aquamarine light. It is an airy light, playing with the moving dark surfaces of the canals, shining on stone and marble, bringing both together in changing ways, always aquamarine. I found that an odd thing was happening to me. Every time I closed my eyes which I increasingly did deliberately I saw a very English green, a much more yellow green, composed of the light glittering on shaved lawns, and the dense green light in English woods, light vanishing into gnarled tree trunks, flickering on shadows on the layers of summer leaves. We were there to visit the civic museums, and I was very interested in the Palazzo Fortuny, the home of an artist of whom I had known almost nothing beyond the fact that he is the only living artist named by Proust in la recherche du temps perdu. I grow more and more interested in polymaths in the arts and I have always admired those whose lives and arts are indistinguishable from each other. And as I grow older I become more and more interested in craftsmen glass-blowers, potters, makers of textiles. My own ancestors were potters in the English pottery towns the Five Towns in Staffordshire.

As I grow older, also, I have come to understand that my writing fiction and thinking starts with a moment of sudden realisation that two things I have been thinking about separately are parts of the same thought, the same work. I think, fancifully perhaps, that the excitement is the excitement of the neurones in the brain, pushing out synapses connecting the web of dendrites, two movements becoming one. Every time I thought about Fortuny in the aquamarine clarity, I found I was also thinking about the Englishman William Morris. I was using Morris, whom I did know, to understand Fortuny. I was using Fortuny to reimagine Morris. Aquamarine, gold green. English meadows, Venetian canals. When I came back to England and started thinking about Morris, visiting the museums that were the houses where he had lived and worked, I closed my eyes and found my head full of aquamarine light, water flowing in canals, the dark of the Palazzo Pesaro Orfei.

Peacock Vine On William Morris and Mariano Fortuny - photo 10They were both men of genius and extraordinary energy They created their own - photo 11
They were both men of genius and extraordinary energy They created their own - photo 12They were both men of genius and extraordinary energy They created their own - photo 13

They were both men of genius and extraordinary energy. They created their own surroundings, changed the visual world around them, studied the forms of the past and made them parts of new forms. In many ways they were opposites. Morris was an English bourgeois whose father had made an unexpected fortune in tin mining. He became a convinced and passionate socialist. Fortuny came from an aristocratic Spanish family of painters and artists and lived in an elegant aristocratic world. Fortunys imaginative roots were Mediterranean North Africa, Crete and Delphos. Morris was obsessed by the North and the Nordic the Icelandic sagas, Iceland itself, the North Sea.

Mariano Fortuny was born in Granada in 1871. His father, Mariano Fortuny y Marsal, was a distinguished painter, and his mother, Cecilia de Madrazo, came also from a family of artists, architects and critics. Fortuny y Marsal died of malaria when he was only thirty-six years old his collections of pottery, armour, textiles and carpets, as well as his paintings and etchings were an essential part of Fortunys life and work. After his fathers death his mother moved to Paris, where her brother Raimundo was a celebrated portrait painter: the family moved in a world of artists and writers. In 1889 the family moved to Venice partly, at least, because Fortuny was allergic to horses, and suffered from asthma and hay fever. There they lived in the Palazzo Martinengo on the Grand Canal until Fortuny bought the Palazzo Pesaro Orfei in 1899. The move was partly because his mother did not approve of his companion, a French divorcee, Henriette Negrin, whom he met in Paris and who joined him in Venice in 1902, and whom he married in 1924.

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