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Modernità MinoicaL'Arte Egea e l'Art Nouveau: il Caso di Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo

  • Ilaria Caloi,

The sensational discovery in the early twentieth century of the prehistoric civilisation of Crete, named Minoan after the mythical king Minos, and the contemporary birth of Modern Art in Europe has led many scholars to discern analogies between Minoan art and Art Nouveau. This work analyses the entity and significance of Minoan art in the textile productions that made the name of the artist Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo. The famous "Knossos shawls", created by Fortuny from 1906 on in his Venetian studio in Palazzo Pesaro Orfei, which has now become the Fortuny museum, feature decorative motifs taken from the decorations visible on vases and frescoes in the famous Minoan centres of Crete, such as Knossòs and Festòs, dating to the second millennium BC. Understanding his way of representing the past and the exotic – in particular the Minoan civilisation of Crete – and bringing it back to life, allows us to penetrate the expectations and the demands of European society between the 19th and the 20th centuries. The reference to a culture such as the Minoan, which precisely at the beginning of the 20th century was dubbed by the academic world as a "modern" civilisation and defined as quintessentially the first "European" civilisation, contributed to render the Knossos shawls inspired by it the very height of fashion.

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Ilaria Caloi

Ca' Foscari University of Venice, Italy - ORCID: 0000-0002-4342-2161

Ilaria Caloi is a temporary researcher in Aegean prehistory at the Ca' Foscari University of Venice. Since 2000 she has been conducting research into the Bronze Age in Crete, in collaboration with the Ca' Foscari University and under the aegis of the Italian Archaeology School of Athens. She has devoted numerous articles to the Minoan settlement of Festòs, addressing both the ceramic production and the evolution of the palatial site in the course of the Middle Bronze Age. She has dealt with the funerary evidence from southern Crete, and her doctoral thesis at the University of Florence was on the necropolis of Kamilari. Since the discovery of the "Minoan inspiration" of Mariano Fortuny she has also begun to take a particular interest in the reception of the Minoan culture in the twentieth century.
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  • Publication Year: 2011
  • Pages: 280

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  • Publication Year: 2011
  • Pages: 280

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  • Publication Year: 2011

Bibliographic Information

Book Title

Modernità MinoicaL'Arte Egea e l'Art Nouveau: il Caso di Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo

Authors

Ilaria Caloi

Peer Reviewed

Number of Pages

280

Publication Year

2011

Copyright Information

© 2011 Author(s)

Content License

CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 IT

Metadata License

CC0 1.0

Publisher Name

Firenze University Press

DOI

10.36253/978-88-6655-078-5

ISBN Print

978-88-6655-074-7

eISBN (pdf)

978-88-6655-078-5

eISBN (xml)

978-88-9273-670-2

Series Title

Strumenti per la didattica e la ricerca

Series ISSN

2704-6249

Series E-ISSN

2704-5870

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