Fashion house, officially founded in 1906 by Mariano FORTUNY, son of the artist of the same name and Cecilia de Madrazo y Garreta, inherited his father's passion for painting, but it was in the applied arts that his many talents were manifested. After a childhood marked by the premature death of his father and spent between Paris, Biarritz and Madrid, he settled permanently in Venice, at the Palazzo Martinengo, with his mother and his sister Luisa. It was between 1898 and 1906 that he came into possession of the Palazzo Pesaro degli Orfei in San Beneto. He lived on the top floor of the palace with Henriette NEGRIN, his wife and then muse met in Paris in 1902. This is where his adventure in the textile industry began. Henriette shared the same passions and aesthetic canons of her husband. She carried out the first experiments in printing with wooden dies to create the Knossos shawl. As indicated by an autographed side note written on the patent, FORTUNY himself recognized her as the true designer of the Delphos dress, inspired by the Ionic chiton of the Charioteer. Palazzo Orfei became their workshop, a place where revolutionary creations were born, cornerstones of the history of design and fashion, and where friends and customers met. Mariano FORTUNY died in 1949. Left alone and unable to run the factory on the island of Giudecca, where cotton textiles were printed with a machine designed by Mariano, Henriette sold it, along with the trademark rights relating to cottons and wallpapers. However, she kept to herself all rights to the processing of velvets and silks made inside her workshop at Palazzo Orfei, where she continued production for a few years with her employees.