Mariano Fortuny: A talent that was ahead of his time
Since Goya there has not been a Spanish painter with greater international projection than the one achieved by Mariano Fortuny in his short career. Within a generation of extraordinary painters who raised Spanish art of the 19th century to its maximum power, Fortuny led an absolute renewal of the plastic arts that marked not only his closest friends but also a whole generation of European painters.
After showing a precocious fondness for the arts, the young Fortuny began his academic training at the La Llotja school where he won the scholarship that would take him to Rome for the first time in 1858. In the Italian capital, Fortuny developed a fundamental part of his career that would deeply mark his personality and artistic projection . In this sense, the multiple trips that Fortuny made throughout his life, supposed a constant evolution in his painting, managing to abstract from them a learning that, with an extraordinary instinct, led him towards a completely innovative plastic conception, promoting his painting beyond academic conventions.