Born in Granada in 1871, Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo grew up in a highly cultivated artistic environment shaped by his father, the celebrated painter Mariano Fortuny y Marsal. After his father’s early death, the family settled in Paris before moving to Venice in 1889, where Fortuny developed a lifelong fascination with the art, craftsmanship, and theatricality of the past. Influenced by the intellectual and artistic circles surrounding his mother, as well as by the discovery of Wagner’s universe in Bayreuth, he embraced the ideal of the Gesamtkunstwerk — the total work of art — uniting multiple disciplines within a single creative vision.